Hello, and welcome. I'm Esther Allen, a professor at City University of New York, and my co-host today is Samantha Schnee, who many of you will recognize from our Week 9 program on what the future has brought to 21st century translation. Samantha is a prize-winning translator from the Spanish and founding editor of the indispensable web magazine, Words Without Borders. She's also a co-organizer of Translating the Future, the conference you are now attending. The humanitarian crisis in Venezuela is one of the worst on earth, made even more dire by the global pandemic. But it's been going on for so long, it barely makes the news. Venezuelans are slowly starving to death, with 90% of the country living below the poverty line, perilously short of food and losing weight. About 4.5 million Venezuelans out of a population of 32 million have fled, leading to a massive refugee crisis in neighboring countries. A situation as dire and prolonged as this one can lead to a phenomenon known as compassion exhaustion, in which the crisis itself is gradually accepted as a kind of norm. Doctors Without Borders has longed unvaluable work both inside Venezuela where they have recently established a COVID-19 clinic in Caracas and among Venezuelan refugees outside the country. One effective way to take action on behalf of Venezuela's desperate and beleaguered people is to support the work Doctors Without Borders is doing there. Words Without Borders, the website I helped to found, published a special issue on Venezuela in 2014 when the situation there was already catastrophic. In that issue, you'll find Standing Stones, a haunting poem by Maria Auxiliadora Alvarez, translated by Catherine Hammond. It begins, everything I want to tell you son is that you should go through suffering. If you come to its shore, if its shore comes to you, enter its night and let yourself sink. Its gulp may drink you down, its foam overwhelm you, let go, let yourself go. Everything I want to tell you son, on the other side of suffering another shore lies. You can read the rest of the poem and more wonderful work from Venezuela, including an interview with today's guest, Maria Jose Jimenez on Words Without Borders.org. Today's conversation in the 15th week of Translating the Future is the third and final installment in our mini series, Motherless Tongues, Multiple Belongings. We welcome writer and translator Janet Hong, who's joining us from Vancouver, Canada. Poet and translator Pierre Joïs, whose collection of the earlier poetry of Paul Celan will be published next month by Ferrara Strauss Giroux, and Maria Jose Jimenez, a writer and translator who is the current poet laureate of East Hampton, Massachusetts. You can find out more about these three wonderful people and their illustrious achievements on the Center for the Humanities website. As usual, a Q&A session will follow today's conversation. Please email your questions for Janet, Pierre, and Maria Jose to translatingthefuture2020atgmail.com. We'll keep questions anonymous unless you note in your email that you would like us to read your name. Translating the Future will continue in its current form through September. During the conference's originally planned dates in late September, several larger-scale events will happen. We'll be here every Tuesday until then, with the week's hour-long conversation. Please join us next Tuesday, August 25th, for Language as Polis with Latasha Diggs, Marianne Newman, and Madeline Cohen, and keep checking the Center for the Humanities site for future events. 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 in 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 is unable to join us for the live stream today, a recording will be available afterward on the HowlRound and Center for the Humanities sites. Before we turn it over to Janet Pierre and Maria Jose, 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 New York Public Library, and Penn America, and especially to the Masters of Dark Zoom Magic at HowlRound, who make this live stream possible. And now, Pierre, Janet, and Maria Jose, over to you. Thank you, Esther or Samantha, for that introduction. Thank you to everyone who's here today, and thank you especially to Pierre and Maria Jose. Really, I'm so honored to be in conversation with you. Since our topic is Motherless Tongues, I thought it'd be good to start by discussing how we've arrived at the languages that we live and work in, or as I'd like to say, how we've come into our linguistic baggage. In the spirit of transparency, when Allison Mark and Powell first invited me to be part of this round table, I was torn. Though I was super grateful for the invitation, I also felt incredibly uncomfortable talking about this topic because it surfaced so many anxieties for me around translation as an immigrant heritage translator and a person of color. All this to say, I'm actually very thankful for this opportunity because it forced me to do a lot of digging and inner work that I've been putting off for a long time. But before getting into the discomfort that I have to work through, that I'm currently working through, I'll begin by talking about my own linguistic baggage. I was born in Incheon, Korea, which is a city that borders Seoul, which makes Korean my mother tongue. When I was four, our family moved to Seattle and then to Vancouver, Canada, where I attended kindergarten. We moved back to Korea and I finished up kindergarten. I started attending elementary school there and at the age of seven, we immigrated to Canada for good. At the time of immigration, Korean was still my dominant language. I had not yet acquired English, which meant that I had to go through ESL and all that. But I very quickly assimilated. I lost my accent, became a Canadian citizen, and English became my dominant language. I continued to speak Korean at home, but I had stopped working at it by that point. I had stopped reading Korean books. So Korean basically stayed at a second grade level for me and it was sort of relegated to the language of childhood. In English though, it was my language of instruction. I could articulate more complicated thoughts in English. And though I'd always liked reading and I was always around books, it was actually in English that I fell in love with the active reading. I think the world of books became a haven for me. And it was also in English that I dreamed of becoming a writer one day. So I studied English in college. I started taking some creative writing courses. And I think it was maybe in my third year of college that I had this major realization that I didn't know anything about Korean literature or Korea's literary history. And that being part of my heritage, I felt like I needed to find out. So I took an elective Korean language course. And it was this course that actually changed the trajectory of my life. For the end of term project, we had to take a Korean short story and translate it into English. This was a project. My mom at the time, she was reading a collection of short stories newly published from Korea. And she loved it. And she recommended that I translate, I tried translating the title story of that collection. And it was through working on that story, translating that first story, that I realized I could combine two deeply personal things about my identity. The fact that I wanted to pursue creative writing and the fact that I was from elsewhere from Korea. So I finished that project. I submitted it. And my professor actually encouraged me to submit it to the Korea Times Modern Korean Literature Translation Contest. That's a mouthful. But I did. And to our utter shock, I ended up receiving the grand prize for that translation. And I have sort of been in translation ever since. So that's my journey in a nutshell. And just from our email exchanges alone, it seems our stories and experiences of our mother tongue and our stepmother tongues are quite different. So Pierre, would you like to go next? Sure. I am born by mistake in France. But 10 days later, I wound up in Luxembourg, the country I was raised in and my parents are from, which means that my mum, my mother tongue is Luxembourgish, which is a spoken language given as a dialect by most people. Education in Luxembourg is in French and in German. You learn German, your alphabet in German, your ABCs come in German. And then French comes in in a second school year as a foreign language. By the time sixth grade things switch around, everything has been in German content wise up till then. And this switches now and everything turns into French. Except at high school graduation, you write one essay on German literature in German. Meanwhile, I picked up Latin, of course. I had tried to learn Latin by learning the math by heart at seven when I didn't understand the word a bit to be a math boy, you know, to do that. An uncle brought me to Spain during the holidays always. So I began learning Spanish and took Spanish lessons also in high school. So I was really very confused in that sense of the multitude of languages. When I thought I wanted to become a poet, a writer, this becomes a very complex story for Luxembourg. You have to choose either German or French. Now the cultural history there is interesting and important in that depending on who were the last invaders, we tend to go with the other language. So the 19th century was mainly French invaders, so German was a favorite language. First World War and Second World War, we were invaded by the Germans. So French was more like language. At the same time, there is a class thing going on. People who went just to primary school and dropped out in high school, so if you want the working class, are much more familiar and easy with German because Luxembourgish as a language is a low German descendant. The bourgeoisie, the more literary, the upper classes is much more Francophile, goes to their holidays to France, they also go to Germany. We went to universities to different places of that order too. So there was really a complex language structure. When I thought of wanting to write, it became very complex because the first language I wrote in were actually little when I was a kid. I copied foreign language bits out of Kalmae, the German 19th century story writer, and they were in Mescalero, Apache, in Carmanchi, in Persian, everything. I made a secret language with this. What happens then, and I've written a fair amount of essays on this, is that the Mazatang was unwriteable. I never learned to write in Luxembourgish. It's only after World War II that to begin to standardize the code dialect made the dictionary. Now I get emails from friends in Luxembourgish, which I can't answer because I can't spell the language. I can read them, but I can't answer them. I haven't learned the spelling. So Mazatang problem immediately. And I written about this later on and said, well, why do we have, what is that Mazatang and Fatherland? Do we have to be in that Freudian mummy, daddy triangle, right? Isn't there a way out of that? Well, when I was 15, I went to England for the first time and fell in love with an English girl. So the M of Mazatang dropped off. It became other tongue, and then it became lover's tongue. And I said, why can't I write in the language to which I address myself, the person, the, you know, and so on. So to me, Mazatang became the lover's tongue rather. And I went to Paris to study bourgeois upbringing, French school, right? To do medicine, but I dropped out to become a poet because I had discovered American literature, American culture. My grandmother had a movie house and we saw all the movies in English because they were Belgian distributors and Belgium has two languages. They are Flemish and French. They couldn't dub the two sets of films. So what they did was they left it in the original language, but put two subtitles on in those two languages. But so I learned my American from John Wayne, which is very easy because he doesn't use many words. And high school. My town is also called Pattentown because General Patton was the one who liberated it during the Ringstatt offensive in the Second World. At the same time, he burned down my grandparents' house. So all the papers and books and my grandfather burned. So I learned some odd little thing. But we are very close friends to the American soldiers. My first trade in high school was buying used playboy copies from the soldiers and reselling them in high school, right? So we were continuously in this cultural match, listening to the radio, listening to the AFN American Field Network station, which gave American rock and jazz. So there was a very complex cultural situation. In Paris, I finally decided that, yes, I did not want to write in French or German. I didn't think the writing that I was reading at that time was that interesting. But what really had interested me because I found Ginsburg and Kerouac and the Beats was American literature. And then I found Ezra Pound. When I opened the contours, it said, oh, wow, if I want to be a poet, then I really have, I can't do that on weekends, as my father suggested, be a doctor and do this, you know, and said, so I dropped out, decided to write in English, came to America to go to college. The translating thing happens at the same time. The person who brought me to poetry in high school was Paul Céline. Somebody read the famous tortoise bouquet. When I moved to New York, I thought maybe I'll drop out. So I had three books, De la Grammatologie by Derridaire, that had come out that year, Foucault's Les Moïles shows and the latest Céline volume. In New York, I sent, I sent 10 pages of translation of the Foucault and the Derridaire to New York publishers. I'm still waiting to hear. But the next year, when I had to do a dissertation at Bard College, I translated the Céline. And that got me going so that Céline's word of translator is Fergen-dienst, fairy work, to fairy it over. And I felt that I brought Céline over. And as Esther was saying earlier, the last book is coming out next month. So it's 55 years that I have been translating them. While of course writing it, we can talk later. I think with Janet, we talked that the question of poetry being a poet and a translator and how those interact, how those work. But let me hand it over now to Maria Jose. Thank you, Pierre. Thank you, Janet. I think our journeys are very different, but I see some parallels, some finding out as you're describing your linguistic baggage.  And yeah, so my story is that I was born and raised in Venezuela and left 16 to study in the United States. And so English became this place that I was basically plunged into. I grew up very much in a monolingual culture. Not for the most part, but where I grew up. It was monolingual Spanish, but I always had an interest in languages. So I was always doing courses like self-taught courses in German and English and a little bit of French. And so I just had a natural interest and was also really good at it. But when I moved to the United States, I learned really quickly that I didn't speak English. I had a grammar base, but no ability to understand what people were saying in different accents and even less to speak it and feel comfortable in it. So I went through the whole ESL sequence of courses and then went to college and went into modern languages. So I studied French formally, French literature and Francophone literature and cultures and then ended up immigrating to Canada. And I landed on the West Coast in Vancouver and Victoria. And I began working as a translator, helping someone who was a translator and needed help. And all of a sudden I am helping to edit other people's translations. And very quickly I realized that my Spanish had stayed behind. My English being my language of instruction, I had, my Spanish had stayed, it was very solid, but it had stayed at high school level. And so I decided to go back to school and just take some courses in Spanish. By then I had decided to move to Montreal and all of a sudden began living in French for the first time as well. And also got to speak Spanish quite a bit, not just in class, but Montreal is very much a trilingual city where people speak English, French and something else. So Arabic and Spanish are the most common ones. And so I all of a sudden was functioning, living and functioning in all three languages and very much plunged into literary translation very quickly, because I met Hugh Hazleton, who became my mentor. And he's a poet and translator.  And all of a sudden this entire world opened up to get to know the community of Latino-Canadian writers, who I then, you know, became part of as I started actually sharing my work, thanks to one of the authors I met through one of my classes. And that completely changed everything, just living in a trilingual place, first of all. For the first time, I hadn't even lived in a bilingual place, because Western Canada's was mainly English. And here I was exploring all three languages. And they all sort of evened out. You know, Janet, you mentioned how English was your dominant language. And I felt very much that way throughout my entire adulthood, until recently, because I've been spending a lot of time in the Canaries, where the variety of Spanish I've spoken that is very similar or a lot closer to Venezuelan Spanish than Peninsula Spanish might be. And so I felt very much at home in the last couple of years, just being immersed in the language that I grew up with, with a very familiar feeling. And I also began writing a lot more in Spanish. I've been writing in English and Spanish and a little bit in French for many years, but especially since I've been spending time in the Canaries, it just concedes to open up and it's been very enjoyable. And in terms of translation, I translate between English and Spanish, and from the French into the other two. And let's see, what have I missed? I feel like language and writing and therefore translation have become as an immigrant or as a migrant, because I feel like I continue to go to new places and make myself at home or they make me feel at home. I feel like migration doesn't ever end when once you've left your motherland or your homeland. And so I feel like at least for me, I carry a deep sense of loss, but at the same time, I'm an incredible opportunity to gain from interacting with texts by other authors who I gravitate towards because they explore themes that are themes that also come up in my writing or things that I like to read about. Marie Jose, thank you for sharing your story. You know, what you just said about that sense of otherness that you carry, I think that's something that deeply resonates with me. And I've kind of been thinking about being a heritage translator, a person of color, being an immigrant, what kind of concerns of my experience and my bringing into translation. And maybe it's kind of related to the anxieties that surface for me when this subject first came to me. And I just want to actually read a quote that I've been sort of meditating on. And it's by Madhu Khaza from Kitchen Table Transition, which has really become my Bible. But she talks about the same anxieties that surface for her, how the discomfort with her discomfort with translation was connected to the trauma of integration. And I'll just read it here. Something went quiet in me when I was brought to the US from India as a child. Although I assimilated and lost my accent, a vital part of me got stopped at the border. My inner life remained untranslated. As an immigrant child, I felt an aura of illegitimacy about my claim to be an American. At times I lived with radical and insecurity. As an adult, when I translated from Telugu, my first language, which I'd learned to read in college, I experienced a repetition of the loss I felt as a child. And you kind of touched upon that, Maria Jose. And this is something I think about a lot. And I think Jean-Palier Heery in a New Yorker essay that she wrote about learning Italian, she wrote how her mother tongue is Bengali and living in a country where her language is considered foreign. She felt a continuous sense of estrangement her whole life. And in another essay she refers to she uses a word trespass, that she had this feeling of trespassing whenever she would read English books as a child. So I've been sort of thinking about, you know, what makes me unique as a translator of color? And I think it's kind of, it's like what you said, it's a strength and also a weakness. My sense, my abiding sense of otherness, which I haven't really been able to shake off. Like even my initial move to the U.S. and Canada, obviously, because I couldn't speak English at the time. But even when I was so young, my earliest memories actually reinforced the sense of otherness that I felt. And even when I moved back to Korea, even though there was no language barrier, I lived with the sense of otherness, of being different, being exposed to maybe a different culture, a different country at a young age. And then obviously the immigration back to Canada, going to ESL, even though I worked very hard at assimilation. It's that sense of otherness I haven't been able to shake throughout the years. And like I said, it's both bad and good. Bad because it makes me sometimes super insecure about English. And it makes me second guess myself all the time. I doubt myself. It kind of feeds into my almost obsessive perfectionist tendencies. I have to check everything to make sure I have this mastery over the language. But the good thing is that it gives me sort of a unique perspective that wouldn't have been available to me had I been an insider who just kind of takes the world as it is. But I feel like my position as like an outsider, it enables me to see certain things I wouldn't have seen. And also informs my selection of things to translate as well. Because of this abiding sense of otherness, I gravitate towards narratives that feature marginalized, the marginalized, the disenfranchised, broken and perfect people, the unremarkable, the odd even. This short story that I translated that always sticks with me. There's this features this female gymnast who can't perform her sport anymore because she goes through this major growth spurt, you know, these odd, odd characters. And I love stories like that where and I love authors who write about these kind of characters rather than characters who are accustomed to privilege and power. So yeah, even Pierre, you were talking about how you when you first moved to England, you dropped the M from your mother tongue and it became the other. So I see that even in your story, there's this preoccupation with otherness. Do you want to kind of talk about how that has informed your writing or your practice? Sure, I think for a long time, I have been completely involved early on probably with some anxieties and I'll read you a short poem about language anxieties because those anxieties enter the writing as much as anything else. But then I have a book of essays called the Nomad Poetics. And the nomadicity is not just traveling as we all have done and as we can do, but it's also that nomadicity of languages. And I have theorized the notion of betweenness that we are always between. One of my books is called Parzakh, which is the Arabic term for the afterlife for the betweenness as we travel through. And I think when we look closely at any given language, there is no such thing as a language that is, I know your anxiety, Janet, the purity, you want to learn that language perfectly. In fact, all languages are impure and the greatness of language is that it is alive as long as it can be enriched and is continuously being enriched by what writers do, what translators do, what the people, the kids on the block do, inventing the new languages. My Arabic translator sent me an email an hour ago saying, I absolutely have no idea what you're talking about in that expression that I'm using.  And it is of course, untranslatable into Arabic because it is a kind of New York abbreviation of something that's not there. So, to me the multitude of languages and the traveling is a great delight. Now, I may also say probably that as a white male, I have a certain prerogative in terms of the way I've been able to move around the world, you know, relatively easily, but they're wonderful situations. I wind up one of my first gigs was in England, I was teaching English as a second language to American Latino officers at the Air Force Base at the American Air Force Base hired by the University of Maryland to do that. Who is I as a Luxembourg, I was the weirdness to wind up teaching, you know, the things. So, but I've always loved those, the craziness of those situations. All languages are also colonized. There is no pure language. Over the years, one has learned that there is no such a thing as a pure clean language. Languages are all mixtures, are all mestizo in a profound way. And that is what gives their richness, you know, American language is any number of languages spoken differently, used differently. And that is the pleasure of it. One would not want to hear some kind of standardized, pasteurized language, though as people who came into a foreign language, as you said, Janet, we are, our tendency would be to be careful. We don't want to be caught saying something wrongly in that given language. Let me read you that short little poem called Anguish, A Riddle, that all the languages are borrowed. But how then do I count them that do not belong to me? In the first one, I think. In the second one, I sink. The third is my rhetoric and the fourth, my west, and wagon its wheel at least traces these steps in harmonies of the tragic modalities before and after I sink. So, the think and the think is that old thing that you can still hear in my speech, THs in English after more than 50 years, I still mess up some times. So, that poem is about the THs. I am so fascinated noticing. Just hearing you both speak of, in a way, we come up with strategies, right, to exist in this in-betweenness that is speaking and other tongue. And I relate to both of your strategies or where you've come to. I was really, when you said, Janet, about the characters that you're drawn to in the work that you choose to translate. I actually, I share that, but I think I tend to gravitate towards work that is very rooted and embodied and uses language to explore this in-betweenness, but in a sense, looking at people and places deeply and creating a sense of intimacy with the world and with the body that is sort of inescapable. And that's been a bit my strategy as a writer and as a translator and just basically inhabiting this world where I'm always moving around and moving between language, like different linguistic spaces and different combinations of languages. And in a way, I have created or have chosen to see language and writing since I was little as a place of escape and as a place of where I could retreat to as a refuge. And I was always an avid reader. And I've noticed that even in my own writing, it's sort of this place that I can carry with me. It's a place that I can enter whenever and wherever I am. And the authors that I feel drawn to, especially the authors that I feel compelled to translate, often address the problem of displacement, the problem of being marginalized or being left out. And one of the ways that at least I sense them or I receive them exploring these issues is through actually creating more connections with specific things like the body or the land or plants or animals and going into these worlds and recreating something. And in a way, for me, my writing as part of my translation practice, because now they're really inseparable, has become a place of reconnection where for a long time I was translating other people's work as a way to avoid writing my own work because it felt like this impulse that once I started, I wasn't going to be able to stop. And that's actually what's happened, that I'm basically spending all my time either writing or translating. And I really can't stop. It's a problem. But one of the beautiful things that's happened is that now I'm translating my own work and not only translating my own work, which I wasn't able to do for a long time, is that now a lot of the poems come out in both languages at the same time. And I'm trying to catch up and writing as quickly as I can because I feel the other language, whether it's Spanish or English, I feel it as I'm writing coming out at the same time. And it's really frustrating sometimes. But you have to make it two poems. Can't you put both into one poem and make both languages mix up? I do that. I do that a little bit. Yeah. Sometimes a line will only want to be in one language or the other. But you know, I can read you an example, a recent example of a poem that came out in Spanish. This is maybe from a couple of months ago where I was in I was in Gran Canaria. And again, very, very rooted in the land and in the yes, very rooted in the land and in what was in front of me, the plants that I was touching, the dirt. And I'll read a little bit of the poem in Spanish. And then I'll read the whole poem in English. Oh, and this is this is part of a series that has become like all of my poems fall into this translation or prayer series now. And they always have a subtitle. This one is Traducción u Horación para la memoria. Hoy recordando un nuevo amigo cuyas ramas perfumaron mi tarde, mis manos, mi cabello. Me lanzé una nueva búsqueda. Le pregunté a mi madre la mejor manera de pegar palitos de un romero que quise propagar para olvidar, para compensar mi no saber. El haber fallado en tantas cosas. I'll read the English. I wrote this poem soon after George Floyd was killed. And this was a way that I found to to root my my anger and rage and sadness being so far away from what was happening here. So translation or prayer for remembrance. Today reminiscing about a new friend whose branches perfumed my afternoon, my hands, my hair. I launched into a new search. I asked my mother for the best way to root cuttings from a rosemary bush. I wanted to propagate to forget to make up for my unknowing all my failings. For example, attempting to root a tip from a fig tree I cut on a morning walk. I didn't know it's best to take a cane ripe with tender buds in another season on another moon. I don't think this cutting will survive. I don't think this cutting will survive the present crisis of fires, tremors and death. But knowing that in my absence, its hundred year old mother will still guard the gulch that young and old shrubs will watch over the sleeping grape vines, almond trees and tunas will no doubt lengthen my years. I will wax gracefully my memory swollen with new tongues, sweet with droplets, sirens and roots. With the fresh air, we breathed without a knee to the neck. Thank you. Thank you. Beautiful. Yeah, so that's just one example of a poem that felt really urgent and just came out in both languages. And I do think the authors I translate for inspire me in encouraging me to inhabit this in-betweenness. And I wonder if especially you, Janet, but both of you, whoever wants to go there, where your writing and translation meet and how you see that. And I know we could be here all day, but for sure. Well, something that you said, Maria Jose, about how even when you're writing now, or your transition practice and your writing practice, they're both sort of wanting your attention. They're both kind of, you feel their pressure. Like how did you get to that point where they're both there? Because I feel like I need some of that to like summon my writing because I feel like for me, when I'm working on doing a lot of translation, my writing is sort of it's hindered or it's almost damaging. It almost harms my writing if I'm doing a lot of translation. And I haven't been able to find that balance. So if you guys could speak to that, that would be amazing. I don't know. I was thinking in terms of what Maria Jose said in the relation between translation and writing and how we feel about it. I think what I have done or tried to do over the years is to annul the difference. And one way of that I could think I could come through it in a thinking way is to realize that all language is translation. That is, there is something before language, and whatever comes into language is translated from somewhere so that all language is translation, which means that all writing is translation. And that means that the kind of literary translation we're doing is only a sort of special unique case that you can also treat that way. Then, for example, if you're going into translation studies and you look, say, at how Uli Po translates, or an example of something I did, I translated Unica Zürn's poems, which are based, she takes a line by Henri Michaud, takes all the letters in the French line, and writes a German line out of those letters. So that's a poem. How do you translate that? I can doubly. I translate her line, and then I go and I take Michaud's line and use her method, using all the French letters in and make an English poem out of it. So then you have to. Now, there are 100 ways that Uli Po invented such matters. An old friend passed by now, but that Canadian, you may know, BP Nickel, BP wrote a lot around translation, did a lot of work in those areas. So I think an ongoing practice of transformative writing is always translation and always comes in that way. And that's what kind of permitted me to some extent to, to if not come to peace with the question of poet translator, you know, what comes first or so. No, they're both there continuously and they feed each other. The one good thing about translation is that if you don't have anything to write or the poem doesn't come, you can always translate. And I'll answer very quickly. For me, I remember a sort of before and after I was translating some work by a Montreal author, his name is Alejandro Saravia. I was translating his novel, and it was really painful. There was very heavy content, political violence, and I found it excruciating. And it was also very challenging. It's a multilingual novel. And, and I remember before that time, I tried to translate my own poems and I, it literally made me nauseous. And so I wrote and just put my stuff away. And, and then while I was translating this, this work, I felt like I really had an impulse to pay attention to what was coming out. That was my own, like my own thoughts, my own ideas that were not necessarily related to what I was, what I was translating, but something was calling for my attention. And I gave it space. So I always had a notebook next to me. And I would just jot down notes. And I also felt compelled to write to the characters in the novel. And then I started doing this thing where I would either write a poem or write a short prose piece addressing the characters in the pieces that I was translating. And that has been going on for a while. And a lot of new workouts come out that way. And it felt like at the beginning it felt more like a, like a cleanse, like a, like a space that I was creating to calm my nervous system down from, you know, both the intensity of the deadlines and of the content that I was, that I was treating. And, and then it just sort of became a, you know, second nature that I'm, I'm always giving my writing space. And now it's sort of unavoidable. I can't, I can't look away. So maybe that, that, that might work just, just, just opening a little bit of space and then just seeing what happens. Thank you. That's, this has been an incredible conversation. And I'm sorry that we're interrupting now. This extremely beautiful exchange between the three of you. But we do have some questions. And the first one is from Samantha herself. I wanted to ask each of you, if you think you have different personalities or perhaps identities in different languages, either as a writer or in your daily lives. And if so, do those differences reflect the personalities of the languages that you're living and working in? Do we have another hour? That's a great question. I feel that as a question for novelists, as a poet, that, that, that sense is, is relatively strange to me, or I don't have it, or I'm in the language in such a way where I don't think of a personality of my personality, where I'm more looking at the language. Does that make sense to Samantha?  Ladies, pick it up. For me, I would say it's not so much an issue of identity or personality.  I am more directly in touch with my emotions. And I think not always better able to express by better able to access the impressions that something left that I, that are calling me to write. And in English, I get carried away playing with sound and rhythm and playing with the language itself. Whereas in Spanish, I might be more driven to pay attention to images and impressions and feeling and how the language, not so much how it feels in my mouth, but more the effect it's going to have or that I think I want it to have, even if I fail at it. And Janet? For me, I think because, as I mentioned before, my Korean state at a second grade level. And I never actually studied Korean after that. So when I, when I speak Korean, when I'm working with Korean, in some ways, I still feel like a child. And I take in the words and the sounds of the words almost like a child, it's kind of, it feels different at whereas English is my language of education of instruction. So I feel like I could articulate, you know, I could talk about literature, whereas in Korean, I mean, this is so funny as a translator that I can't talk about literature in Korean, but, but I think it sort of plays into even my translation and writing practice as well. As when I translate, I am in awe of the author's skills. And I get so absorbed and sort of pulled into that language. And there is a part of me that feels like I can never live up to, to what they're doing. So there is that that tension that is always at play. Maybe I will take Maria Jose's advice and go study some Korean finally, so that we can sort of the two languages kind of be dominant or to match. But, but yeah. We have another question that came in via Gmail. It's sort of a double barreled question. The first part is just for Janet, but I think it would be interesting to ask it of all three of you. The question is after winning the translation contest, Janet, how did you go about improving your translation skills? Did you take any classes or were you more self taught? And then the second part of the question is for all three of you. And that is how do you keep your finger on the pulse of the literary scene in all of your languages? So after I won that contest, I was sort of my professor was shocked. We were both in shock and I was sort of thrown into translation. I took some graduate seminars, but they were workshops in translation. So I didn't really formally study literary translation or translation studies. So I was in a few workshops. But I have to say it's sort of been my approach to translation has been kind of homespun. If I have questions about the texts, I often go to my mother and I ask her, what does this mean? I ask a lot of my Korean friends. I didn't mention this in my brief introduction, but I did do an MFA in creative writing. So I feel like as I worked and studied other people's writing, other writers that I admire, I think it sort of informs also my my transition practice and and kind of lets me see the possibilities of language. And what about the other two of you? Did you study translation formally? I did study later on. After after graduating from Bard, I got jobs translating into French, Perouac and others, but that was to make a living. Then when I was set up in London, in order to get some money from my father, I went back to the university and I did an MFA in translation studies, but on work that I had already translated. And 15, 20 years later, I did a doctorate at SUNY Binghamton on my Céline translations. I had already done the translation. I just added a volume to it. So it was always a mixture. Early on it was like trying to make a living. That was my early crazy idea that it could make a living as a literary translator, but I only wanted to translate poetry. I liked no way paying the rent that way. So, you know, so it came in that way. And I learned about it. I learned the theory a bit when I started teaching at the university at UAlbany and I offered the graduate course in translation. That's when I began looking more seriously at what had been written about it. But I had already worked with Jerry Waffenberg. We did those anthologies, the poems from Millennium Anthologies, or we were doing those at the same time. So the complexity of thinking about learning about and teaching it and doing it all were there simultaneously, really. And you, Marie-Jo? Yeah, for me. So when I went back to school, I went to Concordia University in Montreal. I took a couple of workshops. Well, one was more of introductory class, Introduction to Translation with Hugh Hazelton. That's where I met Hugh. And then I think there were maybe a couple of other workshops. And I just went right into it. I started doing independent studies. And then my projects for the classes would be translating short stories or poetry. And it was very natural for me. And Hugh said that I was very good at it. And so I just kept doing it. And then I did some formal studies in more professional translation at McGill. But that included some stylistic a couple of classes that had style that looked at style and stylistic differences between the languages that also helped me in my literary translation. And then I started an MA in translation studies at UMass Amherst when I moved here to Massachusetts. And but it was more focused on in theory. Or I, you know, I dropped out. I'm a proud grad school dropout. But the first courses, the first core courses that I took were born in theory. And I just wanted to translate. So I dropped out and just kept translating. So it's definitely like a lot more self taught. But I've had plenty of opportunity to confirm my, you know, where I'm going, either by people that I that I work with and definitely more recently, the last few years, I've been co-translating with a colleague and friend Anna Rosamund. And I feel like I'm becoming a worst translator now, because she's so good. You know, we're a really good team. But I because we have each other, I I'm basically like, I'm not completing my work. So but I'm learning a lot there too, as working with with a co-translator. And how about the other part of the question about keeping your finger on the pulse of all of these various different literary cultures that you're all inhabiting? My answer is very short. I don't. Anybody else? I tried to stay in touch with some of the people. I did a lot of work from North African literature because I've done there. I lived in Algeria for a number of years, translated. This to me was also a wonderful discovery because the French that I was translating from was a multi-language thing, you know, that had Arabic and Bill going through it. And I keep in touch with the friends there and so on and try to stay there to wear something that there's a problem, not so much for the translator, but for the people who read the translation. When we drop a beautiful poem or novel from a culture that nobody knows anything about, it falls into a strange place because we can't bring along all the necessary information to make it readable inside of a wider culture. And that's a very frustrating thing. One keeps reading. One keeps, I try to keep connected with the culture I'm translating from, but that is very difficult to carry over beyond the very limited specific text that I'm translating. Does that make sense? Yes. You have experiences of that order of, I want to bring Korean knowledge about this methods over, cross it and, you know, film, you know. As for me, I actually try to foster really good relationships with Korean publishers and also my Korean, the writers that I translate. And they sometimes tell me about a new book that's come out. And then they'll, I'll be the first one to know before anybody because they are in that scene. And sometimes publishers will also, I will just kind of follow their Instagram or their Twitter feeds and see what new books are coming out. And that's how I sort of stay connected. Okay. Do we have time for one more question? Last one. And this is also from Gmail. I wonder whether there isn't a new canon emerging of works based on the in between languages principles you three have been discussing. I know Janet mentioned Madukaza's anthology kitchen table translation. Are there other works you think of as key texts and inspirations that you would recommend? Read my Nomad Poetics and a couple, about three volumes of essays on translation I have. All my unpublished poetry. And I guess you also mentioned Junpa Lahiri. Yeah. And there was another writer that you brought up in our earlier conversations in addition to Junpa. I think it was from an anthology. It was the bilingual. I forget the title. It's about creativity. But I mean, there are so many writers who kind of work with different languages. Junpa Lahiri, whom I love. But there's also Yi and Li. She says wonderful things about translation and working in writing in her second language. You can find a lot of her essays online in the New Yorker. But you just have to do a search. And there are so many, so many texts. I would like to add Jerome Rothenberg's notion of total translation and his anthologies from Native American materials and so on are still, to me, very, very interesting. His translation of Navajo Hosong's, all that material, all that thinking through the richness of cultural traditions is very useful still to date. And that gives us a chance to close out this whole sort of mini-series of Beyond the Mother Tongue with the mention of the UCLA Professor Yasmin Gildiz, whose book literally called Beyond the Mother Tongue was the inspiration for Bruna Dante Slovato's panel, which has then in turn inspired our three talks of which, alas, this is the last because there's so much more to say on this subject.  But alas, we've run out of time, so we have to say goodbye. Before we do, I'd like to thank our partners, again, HowlRound, Penn America, the Center for the Humanities, the Graduate Center CUNY, the Coleman Center for Scholars and Writers of the New York Public Library, the Martin E. Siegel Theater Center, and today, especially, we have to thank LTI Korea, which has provided some special support for today's program. And most of all, many thanks to my Joe Pierre and Janet for sharing this wonderful moment with us. Thanks very much. Thank you. Thank you for having me.


فشرف بالاشتغالي بالعلم ولا تبغي به ما عشت يا دادا دادا وياله من شراف عظيمي when the person realizes that they've misunderstood the texture evidence it will give them the humility and the humbleness to know that from now onwards evidences have to be based on the understanding of who سلاف الصالح ونعلماء الله سبحانه وتعالى قرنام بعد قرنة جنرية and then a person does the guile of his way to look at the delil and the ayah and say this is what ayah understood from it ابنو تيما used to say everybody who wants to use a proof two things is what's required from him what is it that's required from him it's required from him that what he's using is authentic and the second thing that is needed from you is the way you've extracted the ruling has to be correct and none of us here can extract a ruling from an evidence نحنوا الاسلام من أهل العلم الراسخون في العلم we're not grounded we're not scholars the scholars that which they know is more than that which they don't know أمن إحالة طويل الله to encompass everything for Allah what we know is little compared to what we don't know المصوص they explain each other you're looking at one ayah this ayah has been explained somewhere else how would you know if this is a general text that there's a specific there this is ambiguous explaining what is it somewhere else how would you connect those dots unless you started from the front and you finished it to the end you took it from the أهل العلم and that inshallah to Allah we're speaking about it in the part where I speak about the نصائح so what we were saying is ليس كل خلاف إن شاء المعتبراء not every khilaf that comes is given consideration except the khilaf that has what الله حظه من النظر it deserves to be looked at bring it forward let's look at this some things we just dismiss it وجوده كعادمه his presence is like his absence the fact that you said it to us and we've heard it from you we'll say that we didn't hear anything from you لقيمة له we don't take it from more than we don't take it from that gathering and take it somewhere else to explain on to it because it's a khilaf كافي are you with me و لذلك كتب حديث كتب فق some خلافات اندردت it died out no one spoke about it no one gave importance we'll show you my beloved brothers and sisters the person who uses the argument every single issue there's the khilaf in this issue when there comes a khilaf is that a deal is that a proof some people use it as a proof it's a khilaf rather than the opposite is what take it to the textual evidence الله says وَمَخْتَ لَفْتُمْ فِيهِ مِنْ شَيْئِنْ فَحُكُمُهُ إِنَ اللَّهِ you have not differed amongst yourself in a matter except the ruling is with who الله فَإِنْ تَلَهِزَعْتُمْ فِيهِ شَيْئِنْ فَرُدُّهُ إِنَ اللَّهِ وَالْرَّسُولِ كُنتُمْ تُؤْمِرُونَ بِاللَّهِ وَاليَوْمِ الْأَخْلِ we've been told to take it back to who the Kitab and that the Sunnah we're not allowed to be sticking to the khilafs there we found a khilaf ok or else every single thing a khilaf can be built I can say for instance today for the sake of argument I don't consider Sunnah and Tirmini to be any value why? ابن حزم said what is this who is Tirmini ابن حزم الله رحمه الله he said what is Sunnah and Tirmini who is he أبو عيسة at Tirmini أبو عيسة ابن صورة at Tirmini who is this man مشهول لا يعرف بل دعو لما they said it became a harm for him ابن حزم nothing went towards Tirmini it became a criticism for ابن حزم the fact that he didn't know Tirmini who took this khilaf and considered it and said ابن حزم is on one side saying Tirmini you see except a person's heart is sick a person who's heart is sick who just looks for issues that have khilaf and says this is a khilaf let's give the khilaf a consideration this statement of let's give khilaf a consideration it justifies the رافضة the جهمية the مرتزيلة why are you stopping at a point you can let it open the door افتح الباب على مصرعي open the wave and the tide so the sub-Othman and Abu Bakr and Omar it's a khilaf what's a khilaf to you difference of opinion it's a difference of opinion there's a whole state that believes that it consists of millions of population rather than some of the thickly issues the khilaf that are in it are so minute compared to what the رافضة it's a big khilaf so why do you give them consideration are you with me so as we said my beloved brothers the khilaf is not given consideration it's only the khilaf that has it has it has bases it has what it's got bases but I ask those people a question for sake of argument if you guys say it's an ht-hadi issue what did you say it's an ht-hadi issue and the person who opposes you they should not be scolded why do you scold us for why do you belittle us for why do you see us as backward people when we say elections are haram and we bring our opinion forward why do we get a sub-washat from you if it's to you لا ينكروا على المخالف and the one who opposes you should not be scolded for why are you calling us names سلفي تلفي خل why are you giving us those names if it's to you is what if it's an ht-hadi issue يا إخوة the truth of the matter is الكي لبي مكيالين و الوزن لبي ميزانين are double standards that's what it is use a fancy word and it will get somewhere throw something in as a discussion in the dialogue is going like when you sit down and you look at it you realise that they are talking from ignorance and lack of understanding and the next issue that they bring is is a مصلاحة and it is مصلاحة من المصالحة المرسلة مصلاحة from the مصالحة المرسلة so we enter the chapter of مصلاحة من المصالحة المرسلة the response is as follows two points point number one مصلاحة المرسلة المصالحة المرسلة it is not an asan it is not a fundamental evidence that we implement rather it means whenever the conditions are present we implement it whenever the conditions are absent we don't implement it second point the definition of المصلاحة المرسلة is anything no textual evidence has come specifically this thing at hand this thing at hand specifically no textual evidence has come prohibiting it neither making it obligatory it only falls under general generic foundations now I'll ask you what is this what is this what is this what do I ask you did the sharia not come and prohibit us from legislating other than thatásبحاله وتعالى سيدان أم لهم شركاء شرع له من الدين ما لم يأدم به الله إتخذوا أحبارهم رهبانهم أربابا من دون الله ألم ترأي للدين أم ترأي للدين أم ترأي للدين أنهم أؤمنوا بما Yinzila kiss you وما Yinzila من قبلك و كان أمير أن يكفروا به و يريد الشيطان أن يضل لهم ضلالا بعيدا الله يقول لي لا يقول لذلك وما يكفروا بالطاوات و يؤمن بالله فقد استمسك بالأولوات الوثقة لم فيصعم لها و لدينا تقشو أفرص ذلك لأحرام لذلك أخبرني أن مصالح المرسلاء is either one of two reasons لن أعرف ما مصالح مرسلاء is and you're ignorant about المصالح المرسلاء and you don't know what it is or you do know and you're lying and you're deceiving the people and as the poet said if you knew that and you knew what you were speaking was not the way it was then that is a problem he said if you didn't know that is a problem so you didn't know that's a problem and you gave a ruling like that and you didn't even know what مصالح مرسلاء was and if you knew and if you knew and you deliberately deceived the people you lied it's greater now it's greater so we say to those people you either didn't know which is very bad or you didn't know which is even worse which is even worse because it's more of the conditions of المصالح that is implemented if time is left and we get it we'll mention the conditions for it if we don't insha'Allah تعالى you go and look for the conditions of مصالح now the next شبهة which they bring is that they say these elections and also these and and and they say to you ما أردنا إلا الخير we have not intended except except خير we only wanted good that was our intention we say to them how many people wanted good but never got it how many people wanted good and never attained it and never gained it and what is known what is known out of necessity is nothing is accepted by Allah تعالى unless two conditions are met it has to be based on sincerity which is what you claim you have and the second one is that it's in accordance to the the prophetic tradition it's in accordance to the prophet's guidance so what you've what you've come with and we'll take it from you we're not going to we're not going to accuse you of not having sincerity we'll say to you إن شاء الله تعالى yes you have sincerity and you are doing for the sake of Allah but what you're doing is not in accordance to the prophet's guidance it is not he didn't do it ولا أبو بكر ولا أعمر ولا أثمن none of them did it and you're claiming you're getting closer to Allah by doing this without having the sunnah of the prophet صلى الله عليه وسلم this in the sharia is known as what بيدع this is known as what بيدع is an innovation and all of you know the Hadith of the prophet من أحدثه في أمرين هذا ما ليس منه فوردن and the prophet said من عاملا ليس عليه أمرنا فوردن and as you can see the word man is from the word عموم it's from the words that show generalization it means anyone and it says عملن action so whoever comes with any action wherever the action may be it's rejected in your face and it is not accepted from you rather the messenger صلى الله عليه وسلم had told us إن الله حجب التوبة has blocked repentance from who أن كل صاحب بيدع every innovator حتى يدع when he leaves his innovation they have generated this عضية المقدس they have generated this من حليف ألس برمالك and you know what this means you know what this means that whenever he repents are you with me the repentance is being destroyed by the innovations following it again so he is striving to repent but it is what but that's not that's not the best interpretation the best explanation is as follows are you with me repentance is a what it's action righteous deed right yeah and what did the prophet say فهو رد because you've done when you are repenting your repentance is only based on sincerity you're an innovator the part which was following the prophet is missing from you so this righteous action of repentance is rejected at you so even though you're repenting مردود على صاحبه it is rejected in his face لأنه قد يتوب because he may repent okay in a way that the prophet didn't repent صحيح so that's what the understanding that scholars took from this حديث and how it should be understood did the prophet ever accept from the companions والله I only intended good my intention was good did he ever accept that what did he say to usama when he killed the man was usama trying to destroy islam was usama trying to be harmful to the religion what was usama's intention لتقول كلمة الله كلمة الله he was doing it for the well of Allah to be what hi the prophet said to him افق اقتلت بعد انقال الليلة الله did he kill him after he said الله he said يا رسول الله this man he never kind of a withen he was only running away from the وعد is in a battle fighting to destroy كفر from the kufar he's in the middle of a righteous deed some of the people today would have come to the prophet يا رسول الله he left his home he left his family he took a ride in the east he got to the battle and he went into heat he fought for this religion he put everything and he got a holiday for one little mistake one little mistake and the prophet said عليه الصلاة والسلام اشققت على قلبه have you opened his chest فكيف تصنع بلايلة الله what would you do with لايلة الله إذا جأت يوم القيام if he comes to the day of judgment the prophet was repeating it فلم يزل يكررها the prophet was repeating it and he was repeating it until this noble companion اسلامة what did he say حتى تمنيت until I wished أنني لم أكن اسلامة إلا يوم إيلة الله that I didn't take Islam before that day that's how much the prophet made him feel عليه الصلاة والسلام are you with me brothers and recently a girl comes up and she insults the hijab she insults by saying I find the hijab I had this sub no doubt the hijab I find it to be something what's sad is that those who observed her video and were looking at it what did they say they looked at her sensitivity خلص الله أكبر if the Messenger of Allah عليه الصلاة والسلام was alive it was alive and it was been provided for today عليه الصلاة والسلام والله he would have been in the list of extremists for the Muslims before the disbelievers the prophet said اللهم إني أبرأوا إليك من ما صلاع خاليدا or Allah I free myself from what Khalid did Khalid went and killed the people the prophet said اللهم إني or Allah إني أبرأوا إليك I free myself from what Khalid is doing nothing to do with it usama didn't intend he said اللهم صلاة الدين he only wanted what مع ذلك the prophet عليه الصلاة والسلام held him account for this the fact that he just observed his sincerity and that the person says أني مخلص أني سنسي we look at that هذه من الويلات يا إخوة it's from the way that Allah says in the Quran تبارك الذي بيده الملك وعلى كل شيء كدير الذي خلق الموت الله created death والحياة and life why did he created ليبلوكم أيوكم أحسن وعملاء which of you is what أحسن وعملاء he didn't say أكتركم عملاء أحسن means what the best of action not the most of actions why? it's about quality quality it's how you do it حوذي فربي الله I'm sorry man praying and he said to him كن كنت تصلي هكذا how many years were you praying like this he said أربع ون عامة 40 years I was praying like this he said لو مط على هادة if you died on the way you're praying here لمط على هادة you would have died on a religion other than the religion of Abu Al-Qasim if you died in the way you're praying right now لمط you would have died on a religion other than the religion of Abu Al-Qasim where did he take that from the man who came to the messenger عليه الصلاة والسلام and he said السلام عليكم السلام عليكم the prophet said إرجع فصلي فإنك لم تصلي the prophet considered he's praying or what نلافويد it didn't exist some would have said that the prophet is looking for people's mistakes the prophet is looking for what he's only checking out the people's mistakes why couldn't he see that the man said السلام عليكم he came to the messenger he wanted to pray why would he say that to him yeah the next point that they bring is that they say we're trying to take a break and they say what they bring is that they say we're trying to establish an Islamic government we're trying to bring about an Islamic government this now this Shubha is not something that they all bring okay this is not something they all bring no no no no this is only brought by who some some others they believe no we're not even gonna like the one who said that the Turkish leader Erdogan doesn't even have to judge by the Quran and the Sunnah he has to stick to the promise that he made and judge the people by the constitution عوذو بلاه من الشيطان الرجيل I seek refuge from Allah the cursed Shaytan الله ما يقوله هذا no one says this حتى I don't believe الله اي مبتدي a beginner student of knowledge would say that let alone من يدع العلم some people of knowledge ان الدراية والفهم والله I wouldn't say that a beginner wouldn't say that لكن الله سيزن القرآن ومن يريد الله فتنده فلا انتبلك لهم من الله شيء أولئك الذين لم يريد الله ويطهر قلوبهم لهم في الدنيا خيزهم ولاه فلاك it's a people who Allah wanted to try anyone who Allah wants to try him الله تبارك وتعالى wants to test him there's nothing you can do for them أولئك الذين يريد الله الله didn't want to purify their hearts لهم في الدنيا خيزهم and for them the day of judgment is a severe punishment they fall under the vassal of Allah قل هل نبقكم بالأخسرين اعمالة الذين ظل سعيهم في الحياة الدنيا وهم يحسبون انهم يحصينون سلعة shall we tell you shall we inform you or Muhammad قل هل نبقكم بالأخسرين اعمالة the people who are lost in their actions الذين ظل سعيهم there are people who've spent their lives doing things وهم but they assume انهم يحصينون سلعة that they were doing good that they were doing good they thought they were doing good as Allah said بالبدالهم Allah says سبحانه وتعالى وبدالهم من الله ما لم يكونوا يحتسبون it will become clear to them in front of Allah that which they didn't assume will come forward that which they that which they didn't assume and think that would be replaced in front of them but those who say that we want to establish an Islamic government through this the first question that you're asked is if you are trying to establish an Islamic government and you're trying to bring it about why don't you start by rejecting election and democracy first of all start by that and they will accept the notion and the argument that you are trying to establish an Islamic government unless you have the circular opinion which is that the religion is exclusive to the masajid now if you see I say has no entering into politics Islam has nothing to do with politics وَهَدَ أَلَانَا قُولُهُ وَيْدَوْهُ وَيْدَوْهُ unless you believe that then of course to you it would mean that I'm establishing an Islamic government would mean that democracy can be used and let that be وَهَدِهِ this is a dooran it brings you back to what you've found it brings you back to the issue of democracy itself which is a circular system this my beloved brothers and sisters is really something that the person who is saying it doesn't really understand the textual evidence the reason is because Allah told the messenger عليه الصلاة والسلام this person what is he saying this individual what is he saying he's saying let me say I'll accept the election from them this is called what surrendering partial surrendering صح and then let me go into the system and we've never seen except they surrender more and more and more and nothing's left as Allah says يا يلدينا منولا تتبعو خط don't accept the first step from shaitan forget the third and fourth تتبعو خطوات الشيطان don't accept these footsteps they put you through فاينو يا أمرو بالفحشاء also Allah said to the prophet وَإِنْكَادُوا لِيَا كُلُّس وَإِنْكَادُوا لَيَفْتِرُولا كَعَنِ اللَّذِ أُحَيْنَا يَلَيكِ to test you Muhammad and try you in what in the revelations that we sent on to you they want to do it bit by bit do you think the kufar want to change you all once or they want to do it bit by bit have you asked this question oh they want to do it gradually they want to do it slowly they want to do it bit by bit by bit Allah tells us وَأَنِحْكُمْ بَيْلَهُمْ بِمَأَنْزَلَ اللَّهِ judge the people by that which Allah has sent you وَحَذَرُهُمْ بِكَوْشِزَ of them اَيَفْتِرُوكَ عَمْ بَعْضِي be cautious for them to what to test you and to get you and slide take you away عَمْ بَعْضِي some of that which I've sent you on so they'll start with some leave this issue of come on let's hold hands let women sit come on stop being too extreme and as you let go one after the other and you let go after one after the other you see yourself in a mist of oceans and that's the reality


Peace out you guys, I'll go back to another one. If you're new to the channel, I am GoPanning, I do new car truck SUV reviews on YouTube. And today, we're in the brand new 2024 Toyota Corolla Hybrid, courtesy of younger Toyota and Hagerstown, Maryland, for more information on their inventory. Please feel free to check out the link in the description box below. So today we're in this one because the Corolla Hybrid is actually capable of 50 plus MPGs. That's insane. Then on top of that, you also have the incredible reliability of Toyota, specifically the Corolla. You also get two years or 25,000 miles of complimentary maintenance.  So ultimately in this video, we will be testing out and going over everything about this one, from acceleration to braking, steering fuel, ride quality, sound system, exhaust clip, all that fun stuff. So having said all of that, what do you guys say? Let's just go ahead and jump right into it. And as always, let's start with pricing. As you can imagine, there are several different trim levels for the 2024 Corolla Hybrid. First one being the LE, starting at $23,300. SE for $25,740. The Nightshade for $28,140. And lastly, the XLE for $27,050. And so for those first three trim levels, front wheel drive comes standard with the XLE all-wheel drive comes standard. But you can add all-wheel drive to those first three trim levels. If you wanted to do that, simply add $1,400 then to any of those prices. But said that regardless of trim level that you go with, the power plant on the Corolla Hybrid is going to be the same. Powering the beast is a 1.8 liter naturally aspirated four-cylinder with two electric motors. Putting out 138 horsepower combined, 105 pound-feet of torque. Power sent to the front wheels or all-wheels through a continuously variable transmission. Zero to 60 time coming in at approximately nine seconds. Flat with MPG numbers coming in at up to 53 in the city, 46 on the highway. It is going to depend on the configuration whether you go with front-wheel drive or all-wheel drive, all that fun stuff. So in our SE all-wheel drive that we have today, this one comes in at 47 in the city, 41 on the highway. So it's still plenty respectable for an all-wheel drive car taking regular unleaded fuel. So before we do any kind of fun acceleration tests here in the Corolla Hybrid, wouldn't it mention you guys the drive modes? There's plenty of them.  A toggle switch will give you normal sport, eco and EV mode. And by the way, this only applies to the SE and nightshade trim levels but essentially adjusting things like the shift points and the throttle response. So now having got all of that out of the way, let's go ahead and find a straightaway. Let's put the Corolla Hybrid here to the test. Gotta love, I'm in EV mode right now by the way because I am stuck behind some kind of construction and the car is essentially not operating on gas at all. So this is saving me all kinds of MPGs right now. So you gotta love that for stop and go traffic. But anyways, let's find that straightaway. Let's put the acceleration to the test and let's see how quickly we can get this one here up to speed. All right, in three, two, one, go. That instant acceleration because of the two electric motors is nice. Let me start by saying that it actually doesn't feel that bad. So not the quickest thing in the world but it doesn't feel as bad as the numbers 0 to 69 seconds leads you to believe it's actually pretty quick. And I think I'm feeling that way because of the two electric motors gives you that instant acceleration. So there's no delay whatsoever. Like you traditionally will get with the turbo charge or even naturally aspirated engines give you a little bit of a delay but because it has those two electric motors it is that instant punch which I absolutely love. So yeah, acceleration should be plenty fine. You're not gonna have any issues there. And I wasn't in sport driving mode as well by the way in case anybody was curious. So I don't have any issues with that acceleration but to go along with that acceleration as always braking is equally important. So upfront you will find 10.8 inch ventilated front discs in the back 10.2 inch solid rear discs. As far as that braking feel goes let's just hit it real quick. It's not bad. It's certainly on the firmer side of things which I can definitely appreciate not a soft braking feel whatsoever. So it does bring you to a pretty nice stop without a doubt that touching on suspension and handling upfront you're gonna get an independent McPherson strut front suspension. In the back independent multi-link rear suspension front stabilizer bar as well. As far as ride quality goes it's been perfectly fine in my short little test drive here today. These are some pretty darn smooth roads. I will say that but like I said I've had no issues whatsoever when it comes to ride quality and that's something the Corolla typically does pretty darn well in its class. It does give you a little bit of ride quality when you compare it to the competition like the Civic or like the Sentra things like that. Those are nice in their own right but in terms of ride quality in my opinion at least after driving nearly 900 cars the Corolla is the smoothest in terms of its class. So I do like that. As far as steering feel goes it's okay. It actually feels a little bit heavier than the non hybrid Corolla. So I do like that. It's definitely heavier than the non hybrid Corolla. I'll say that. So I do like the steering feel in this thing. No issues there. As far as cabin noise goes really the only thing I'm getting a little bit of wind noise not so much road noise and a good bit of engine noise. That's the one that's really pronounced but if you're a car guy or girl the engine noise shouldn't bother you so I personally don't have any issues there. And touching on visibility taking a look out of my rear view mirror here I can see perfectly fine out the back. Rear visibility is 100% on point because of the shape of the Corolla of course. So that about rounds out the performance segment of this review guys. Let's not go ahead and take a look at the exterior of our brand new 2024 Toyota Corolla Hybrid. All right, so here she is you guys. The new 2024 Toyota Corolla Hybrid finished in classic silver metallic. In case you were curious of our exact exterior color name that we had on this one. However, did want to first start by mentioning there is a new trim for 2024 in case you didn't notice that at the beginning that is gonna be the Nightshade Edition trim. So that is gonna add essentially dark badging and bronze wheels. So it's kind of an appearance package for the SE trim level that we have today more or less. But first let me start by actually saying the MPGs that I got in my short little 10 to 15 mile drive was 72 miles per gallon. So that was mostly highway driving but that just goes to show if you purposefully try to drive economically I guess you could call it it is very possible that you can absolutely crush the MPG numbers that are listed on this particular car. So 72 MPGs is what I ended up getting in my short little 10 to 15 mile drive. So that was mostly highway driving but that's pretty darn good. But as always let's go ahead and start with where this one is made. Take a look at the VIN. First character is the letter J indicating that the new Corolla Hybrid is built and assembled still in Japan as it should be in my opinion. But let's go ahead and start up front. Fun face of course will differ between the LE and the SE trim levels. The SE trims are gonna give you more gloss black accents more of an aggressive appearance up front. LE trim is gonna give you more of a subdued appearance. I guess you could say it still looks good though of my personal opinion. To the sides, LED headlights do come standard with LED daytime running lights for all trim levels. Do you get the automatic feature as well meaning when it starts to get dark in at night the headlights will turn on automatically for you there. Also get automatic high beams for all trim levels. So if you have your high beams on at night and it senses a vehicle coming in the opposite direction it's gonna automatically dim them back to low beams and when that vehicle is gone it's gonna automatically bounce back up the high beams. So very convenient feature there. I love that one. LED accent lighting coming on the SE and the nightshade trims. You guys can see that down below kind of as an extension to the front grill there. And you will of course find the blue Toyota badge since Toyota does that with all of their hybrids. You guys can see that up front. The non-hybrid trims of course are just gonna be finished in black but Toyota does add a blue kind of hue to it for the hybrids. But that pretty much rounds out the front end of the Corolla here. Let's now go ahead and make our way to the side. All right, so now since we are around to the side of this one black windows surrounds do come standard. Body colored power adjustable side mirrors coming standard on all trim levels but the nightshade because of course the nightshade trim is gonna give you gloss black side mirrors. Then take a look down at the wheel setup 16 inch steel wheels with covers coming with the LE 16 inch alloys for the XLE 18 inch graphite colored alloys for our SE trim. That's what you guys are looking at. An 18 inch bronze alloys like I said for the nightshade. By the way, there's bronze alloys. They look dang good on this thing. Also love that the all wheel drive badging is found on the rear doors there since we have the all wheel drive setup. So gotta love that for the cold wintery months in the mountains here in Western Maryland but that pretty much rounds out the side profile. Let's now go ahead and make our way to the back. All right, so now since we are around to the back of this one all the way to the top you will find a body colored shark fin antenna just underneath of that gloss black rear spoiler for the nightshade but then body colored rear spoiler for our SE trim that we have with us here today. Can find some trim level badging found on the rear trunk there. LED tail lights do come standard on every trim level so you gotta love that as well. I personally love the gloss black rear diffuser towards the bottom there that's gonna come on the SE and the nightshade trims. It's not gonna come however on the LE trim level so I wanted to emphasize that. Then just below and all you will find a single exhaust outlet but with dual chrome tips for the SE and nightshade trim levels only. So having said that, not sure if this is gonna work cause we got a hybrid here but as always let's give this a shot here is that exhaust clip. All right, so now since we are around to the back of the Corolla when it comes to opening that rear trunk there of course is a button on the key fob but there is a button on the trunk itself as well but once opened up car capacity comes in at 13.1 cubic feet. If that was not enough space of course there is a 60-40 split meaning the rear seats do fold down for quite a bit of extra space then if you needed it.  So then making our way up to the relegroom that comes in at 34.8 inches for reference I mean even six feet tall. This is how much space I have back there. Rear center armrest with cup holders does actually come standard on all trim levels across the board. Dual rear USB charging ports though also coming standard on all trim levels across the board. That isn't always the case. So love seeing that back there. Then make our way up to the front seats manual adjustable claw seats coming with the LE trim level. Sport fabric inserts coming with the SE that we have today and the nightshade. XLE then is going to add to that an eight way power adjustable driver's seat heated front seats and a soft text upholstery finish as well. Overall as far as seat comfort goes Toyota and Lexus always do an amazing job with their seat comfort and there's certainly no exception here. Excellent seat comfort when it comes to the Corolla but then take a look at the steering wheel there's tilt and telescoping and it's going to be leather wrapped then for the SE trim level end up. So love that we had that. Then make our way to the startup. Let me start by showing you guys the key here. You got your Toyota logo on the one side of course lock and unlock on the other side of the key. And of course the button to pop the rear trunk there but it is all keyless entry with a push button start for the SE trim level and up. However you will get that traditional turn key start for the LE trim level. But having said that, all I am going to do here is simply put my foot in the brake and press that engine start button located just kind of by the driver's right knee. And so once started up seven inch full digital gauge cluster will come on the XLE trim level but for all other trims like the one we have today you're going to get some basic animal gauges with a 4.2 inch center screen. I say basic because there really isn't a whole heck of a lot of design to these gauges. I remember back in 2022 on the Corolla there was a nice design to it. They put some silver plastic it actually looked okay but with this one they almost went backwards with the gauge cluster. So I wouldn't have minded if they added a little bit of a design to it if you're going to keep it analog at least. But anyways, tachometer on the left speedometer is on your right and there is that digital screen it gives you things like outside temperature how many miles you have left until you hit empty basically everything you could want on the digital portion of the gauges but then making our way to overall interior quality power moon roof coming on the XLE trim level it is going to be optional though in the other trims. Red contrast stitching founded the doors I liked that for our SE trim level at least just in front of the shifter you're going to find a little bit of storage just behind the shifter you got dual cup holders along with the electromechanical parking brake and there is a little bit of storage within the center armrest but the cool thing about that center armrest is you actually have a USB charging port and a 12 volt power outlet in there as well that doesn't always come standard so I like that. Homelink controls we actually have those on our Corolla here today there's are actually optional though so I do like them though and LED interior lighting I love the design to it it's reminiscent of what Mercedes does with their LED interior lighting it's almost the exact same design and I think it looks pretty darn good nice design element there so overall I personally don't have any issues with the interior quality in this thing then taking a look at the infotainment screen 8 inch color touch screen display is going to come standard across the board Bluetooth and audio streaming but one of my favorite parts wireless Android Auto and Apple CarPlay for every single trim level so gotta love that new pesky wires can of course check out your car statistics up on that screen as well along with your radio information so when it comes to the sound system 6 speakers is going to be the standard sound system for all trim levels across the board however there is an optional sound system for the XLE that is going to be a 9 speaker JBL sound system with an external amp and a subwoofer but of course that's not the one we have today we do have the 6 speaker one of course so having said that what you guys say let's go ahead and turn on the radio see what we got playing today and let's test out the clarity of this one. That's actually pretty good it's nothing crazy and it's not like an upgraded sound system or anything fancy but for it not being an upgraded sound system that's pretty good the bass was alright nothing crazy again clarity was pretty darn good as well so personally for me I don't have any issues with that sound system so the last thing I want to mention you guys on the infotainment screen is when you do put the Corolla in reverse you will find your rear view camera coming standard across the board letting you know who or what is behind you which is always is going to lead us into safety so to start IHHS Top Safety Pick so heck of a start right there front side side curtain airbags do come standard driver's knee airbag a front passenger seat cushion airbag and rear seat mounted side airbags that last one is like a $600-$700 option with Mercedes and BMW I know so you gotta love that latch of course in the back as well aka lower anchors to tethers for children for the rear car seats rear child door locks temperature monitoring system but also coming standard Toyota Safety Sense 3.0 that gives you a pre-collision system with pedestrian detection proactive driving assist lane departure alert with steering assist road sign assist dynamic radar cruise control then as well so overall when it comes to my final thoughts here of the Corolla Hybrid Toyota hybrids are actually known for incredible reliability I knew some people question it when they're not familiar with Toyota hybrids but you just take a look at the Toyota Prius it's one of the most reliable cars ever built you constantly see those with over 300,000 miles so don't worry about the battery don't worry about the engine Toyotas are known for reliability and especially their hybrids are known for reliability I remember reading an article about a Highlander hybrid that went over a million miles so they just crush it but crazy good MPGs in this thing as well 72.4 MPGs at least on my short little 10 to 15 mile drive that I had in this one so that's pretty crazy but good ride quality for a compact as well I always say that at least when you compare it to the competition it's a lot smoother than a lot of them nice styling on the SE trims especially like the rear diffuser in the back all wheel drive availability that is something that Toyota didn't use to have for the Corolla but now does so I absolutely love that because it does snow where I'm at so that's pretty cool as far as room for improvement goes the Corolla hybrid is a little bit on the slower side of things but having said that it didn't feel that slow to me but that kind of leads me into my next point if you're considering getting a Corolla hybrid in the Nightshader XL E trims personally for me I would just go with the Prius because it's almost a performance car at this point the new model at least it's incredible handling it's a heck of a lot quicker than this car I personally think it looks better and it gets better MPGs so same price point you might as well get the Prius at least if you can find one they are hard to find and so that is about it for this one you guys thank you so much for watching feel free to follow me on social media at the bottom of the screen if you want to see what's coming next on the channel before it gets to YouTube be sure to hit the subscribe and the bell notification button if you're into new car reviews because that is what we do here on this channel after all do appreciate you guys watching more than you know and I will see you guys all in the next video stay gold