Hello, and welcome to this event entitled Libyan General Elections 2021, a discussion series with Libyan leaders. This event is offered in both English and Arabic. On the event page, please choose the player that works best for you. The event is also being live streamed and recorded. I am Michael Yaffe. I am the Vice President of the Middle East North Africa Center here at the United States Institute of Peace, USIP. For those of you who attended prior USIP events, let me welcome you back. And for those of you who are new to USIP, welcome and permit me to say a few words about the Institute. USIP was created by an act of Congress, the US Congress in 1984 to serve as an independent nonpartisan institution dedicated to peace building, particularly the prevention mitigation and resolution of violent conflict. We conduct research training and convening and working conflict zones around the world with a presence in 16 countries. USIP has been working in Libya since 2012, where we conduct research for informing policymakers and practitioners about conflict related issues, and to help build a local peace infrastructure by strengthening the capacity of key stakeholders, including women and youth and institutions like the Ministry of Justice. USIP recently began a project with funding for the United States State Department to increase election security by working with the Ministry of Interior to strengthen the police's ability to partner and problem solve with local communities. In light of the upcoming elections set to begin later this month. Today's event is a timely conversation with Mr. Abdul Majid Saeed Anasir. This event is the fourth in a series of moderate discussions USIP is hosting to provide a neutral platform for Libyans seeking to play a critical role, including potentially higher office in a future permanent government recordings of the previous interviews with Mr. Abdul Majid Bashaga, Fidel Wameen, and Arif Ali Naid, excuse me, are available at the USIP website. The elections scheduled for the end of December are not just any elections. They will provide Libyans with an opportunity to have their say in representative government, including the first elected president in Libya. The elections are fair and safe will be very important. For those of you who are interested in learning more about preventing election violence. We would like to invite you to take a one of USIP online courses on the subject. It's available through the online global campus at www.usipglobalcampus.org. Funding election violence, full length and microcourses are available in English and are free. An Arabic version will be coming online very soon. And anyone who is interested in having that course in Arabic now should reach out to us at academy at usip.org. To address the beginning of the journey to set Libyans on a path to deal with complex issues of governance and sovereignty. Issues like the presence of mercenaries in the country. Foreign medley, institutional disunity, minority inclusion, transitional justice, and other matters are to be decided by a representative government. In the spirit of fostering dialogue, each speaker we host in this series is given several minutes to provide opening remarks where they can address some of these issues, after which I will ask them questions in order to explicate their positions and views. I would try to ask the same questions to all the speakers, so people can hear and compare their unique responses. After that, I will turn to the audience members for their questions. To the audience watching online, we encourage you to send questions to Mr. Anasar through the chat box, and we will try to get as many questions as possible. Now, I am pleased to introduce Mr. Abdul Majid Saeed Anasar. Mr. Abdul Majid was born in Sabah in 1957. He is one of Libya's most prominent politicians from the Awad Sula Sula main tribe, one of the largest tribes in the south. Mr. Abdul Majid is a former member of the National Transition Council and served as Libya's ambassador to the Kingdom of Morocco between 2014 and 2018. He was recently endorsed by Libya's House of Representatives as ambassador extraordinary and both plenary to the Kingdom of Morocco and the Maghreb region. And with that, let me turn the floor over to Mr. Abdul Majid and we look forward to your opening remarks, sir. Thank you very much. And I thank USIP and for the organizers and for the project manager for this invitation. I am Abdul Majid Saeed Anasar. This is just to clarify the name. And I would like to thank USIP for their interest in Libya and for their support to provide or to reach a peaceful solution to Libya and to put an end to violent conflicts. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Well, you know, why don't we begin the first set of questions which actually I wanted to raise about the elections themselves. What is your assessment from whether the elections will happen on time or not on time, noting that there are presidential elections at the end of this month, and hopefully soon thereafter will be parliamentary elections. First of all, everyone in Libya wants to see elections organized and happening as planned by the House of Representatives and by the Election Commission. But what is obvious is that there are certain shortcomings, certain challenges that are undermining the process and that will maybe lead to conflicts and I think everyone needs to accept elections. We don't need elections that lead to division or lead to disruption following these results. So we need elections that lead to stability and peace and we see that the commission is taking a lot of time to issue the lists. And we would like or we wish that they can speed up the process and issue the electoral lists so that we can move to the electoral campaigning and ensure that the elections take place on the right time. We ultimately hope that these elections will be held without blood, without division, and we wish that we ensure a rotation of power and that's what Libyans wanted and called for back in February 2011. So we wish that the objectives and goals of the February Revolution be achieved and to hold free and fair elections and pray to God that he shows us the right path towards the right and free and fair elections. Well, great. Thank you. Well, as I mentioned in my opening remarks and you just referenced now, obviously there's a lot of concern about potential for violence around the upcoming election cycle. I was wondering if you could kind of explain or your views on what do you think are the drivers of potential violence. And then what are the measures that can be taken to ensure a peaceful election cycle. Yes, in order to have, or to ensure free and fair elections, we need to have Libyans who are keen on the interests of Libya, and we need to have people who have, who have been militants before the February Revolution. We need, we don't need, and Libya does not need controversial people. We want also the House of Representatives to amend the law in order to have things back on track. And what is very important also is that everyone accepts the results of elections. I think getting into elections while there are skepticism and there are concerns about the acceptance of the election results would not lead us to a good, to good process and to a fair and free elections But continuing, you know, again, you know, do you see, what do you see as the drivers that could potentially cause this to be a violent election. And again, what things could be done to make sure that those things are being handled in the right way. I want to start with a mutual different question if you will. So, obviously, sorry. The elections, I think we should not look at them. But elections should open our path for the future. We should not look to the past. Libyans will not accept to go back to the past. We have given hundreds of martyrs to create a new system of governance. But the problem is that we have people now who are trying to revive the old regime and the old political system. The people who run for these elections should be convinced of the February revolution and our youth have sacrificed themselves for this moment. I should not betray them and we should not change our skin in favor of controversial people who are trying to revive the past and revive the old regime. We are seeing them now in Libya to trying to revive the old flag and the old governance system. But this will not take place and people have sacrificed their lives to reach this moment and we cannot allow for Libyans or Libya to go back to the past. There is a voice cut from the source. We can't hear the speaker. Well, okay, we're having a little technical issue here, so we'll see if we can... Mr. Abdu, can you hear me now? Mr. Abdu, can you hear me? Sorry, sir, can you hear me now? Mr. Abdu, can you hear me? Mr. Abdu, can you hear me now? Yes, now. But I did not complete the answer for the first question. He's saying that he did not finish responding to the first question. Yes, so he can please continue. It looks like our technical problem has been solved. As I said, in order to ensure free and fair elections, we have to ensure sound basis, sound grounds for elections. We should not look to the past, try to revive the old regime. We should work on implementing what has been the aspiration of Libyans and Libyan Martyrs to reach this moment. And I think the end of the interim phase and the inauguration of a new system of democratic governance in Libya is a success for the revolution. Thank you. I apologize for the technical problems we're having. I hope we can keep moving on. So, sir, let me be quite bold here and just ask you, are you running for presidency? Are you running to be Libya's first elected president? No. Yes, yes. So, so let me carry that forward, that being forward. So if you become Libya's first elected president, what is your general vision for Libya? How do you foresee your role as a leader in the country? Do you have a general philosophy with regard to leadership in general? First of all, if God allows me to become the president of free and united Libya, I will work on social and national reconciliation. How can that be achieved through amnesty, through reparation and through restoration of stability in Libya? Libya is a tribal community, but a very strong and united community, so we have to go back and revive that unity, that harmony between tribes and also gather or take arms that are scattered all over the country now and get them under the control of the state. Also, get rid of the mercenaries and armed groups that infiltrated Libya, so these troops and these forces should be deported and should be repatriated to their countries and the control and the security of the country should be under the control of the state, and nothing but the state. Also, to take care of those who led the revolution, the revolutionaries, thanks to whom the revolution succeeded and these revolutionaries were responsible for the inception of the revolution. It was not the NATO as people are claiming, but they were true Libyans and the cities that were under the tyranny of Gaddafi were suffering and that's why other countries intervened to continue with the revolutionary path. However, these countries that also interfered in Libya should also leave Libya to take its security under its control and also, as I said, collection of weapons and arms with the establishment of a strong police and strong military in Libya that are loyal to Libya and not to people or to individuals and these revolutionaries are ready now to enroll in state institutions and the police and the military and some countries and some individuals are trying to put an end to this revolutionary path but they will not succeed ultimately. Thank you. Thank you. You actually anticipate some of my questions with regard to what you would do with regard to the mercenaries and to the foreign fighters. But let me return back to this issue of reconciliation that you first started to get and ask you particularly about questions related to transitional justice. There is a real lack of clarity in the direction of transitional justice in in Libya right now. Some people say that they should be a general amnesty, so that Libyans can move forward to that. Let me clarify. Maybe I'll try to anticipate the question. What cannot be the president of Libya that is divided or that is supported by foreign forces or foreign countries and foreign mercenaries Libyans should be in charge and should be responsible for the peace and stability of the country. And this is why I anticipated the question. This is primordial. This is very essential. Please, if you may continue with your question. Thank you. Thank you for that clarification. I was talking about transitional justice and the notion of that some people are in favor of a general amnesty for Libyans so they can move forward without relitigating the past. And others advocate for a truth and justice center kind of approach where perpetrators of human rights abuses are held accountable and victims feel that justice has been served. What is the path for transitional justice in Libya in your view. Reconciliation and transitional justice are closely related to each other, along with reparation when we say reconciliation we need to focus on amnesty, reparation, and to give favor to victims because by doing so we will have a unified Libya. So our reparation and the giving back of grievances to people. This can lead to total reconciliation. Of course this should be monitored by the next Libyan government should proctor should monitor this entire reconciliation and the justice process. If we just focus on the past grievances that we will not move forward as you said sir. That's why we need to forgive. We need to be indulgent to be tolerant. We need to forgive each other, not forgive colonizer or people who have vandalized or destroyed Libya, Libyans between each other can forgive each other. We have been many political conflicts and social conflicts, and in order for a new Libyan fight Libya we need to put the past site and move forward. Thank you. In your responses so far you talk a lot about unity, unity of the Libyan people. I'm wondering what are the things that you would put into place as the first elected president that in terms of building a culture of unity the symbols of unity to increase a national order and national unity amongst the various parts of Libya. First of all, on the countries that entered Libya legally with legitimacy and without legitimacy should leave Libya. Secondly, all missionaries who are assigned in Libya in this proxy war should also leave Libya. We need to sit together only Libyans because we are siblings, we are members of the same family. However, there are many external forces trying for Libya destabilization and they agree upon this stability outside of Libya. They have good commercial relationships, but once they enter Libya they start conflicting with each other, but once they leave it they have a commerce between each other, they speak to each other, they sign agreements. That's why we need to, for all of these forces to leave Libya and to let Libyans take care of their own businesses by themselves. I think anyone who enters Libya will be of course excluded from any future agreement, from any future dialogue. These external forces used Libyans, they paid money and they used Libyans just to destroy Libya, mainly the revolutionaries of February. Many people distorted the good image of the Arabs being distorted, the image of February. That's why they need to leave Libya. We don't want to have the Egyptian maybe or the Tunisian example. We didn't have police or military or the army to protect Libya as the other neighboring countries. We were alone just in the forefront with these external forces, but God willing and with the help of the new independent and the free president of Libya will unify again Libyans. Thank you and to follow that up, I'm wondering what your view is on with regard to previous agreements that were signed by the GNU, the GNA with foreign governments, including things like the Maritime Boundary Treaty. Would you continue to honor those or would you seek to renegotiate or how would you handle those previous agreements? Of course, all agreements all over the world are signed by the president or by the prime minister, but should be, should gain the approval of the House of Representatives of the parliament. However, Libya, we had two governments, two prime ministers and they disagree. So every government or every parliament in the past asked the help of one external force. So all these external forces that entered Libya, we need to ask them, why did you come to Libya to give us medicine, to give us drugs, to give us food to help Libya, or to just to sell weapons or to nurture sedition in Libya. That's why all the agreements that were signed for the destruction of Libya should not be continued. But when it comes to the support or assistance from some countries who really intended to help Libya, of course, we need to respect these agreements and we can ask for reconciliation. So instead of bringing investments to Libya, they brought ammunition and weapons. There is now a victorious party over the other parties. There is one unified and independent Libya. Okay, thank you. I want to return to the theme of unity. We got a question from our audience already and I'm going to incorporate that into my own question with regard to how will you basically help to unify the government in particularly taking control of the National Army militia and what would be your approach to bringing unity amongst those types of elements of the government and non-government entities. So let me ask the question. We don't have militias in Libya or gangs. We have revolutionaries and without them we would have returned to their first stage. We have revolutionaries and mercenaries. We have revolutionaries who protected Libya in the difficult moments, but Libya witnessed it in Tripoli, in Sabha, in the Benghazi, and without their help would have had the restoration of the former regime of Gaddafi regime. Our army and these revolutionaries curbed the spread of mercenaries. However, when it comes to mercenaries, once we have a unified army in the south, in the north and in the east, they will leave and will be expelled from Libya in just one month. And I say one month and all the countries that came to Libya as France, but France to bring weapons and ammo will be expelled as well. However, the other countries who brought investments will be maintained and supported by Libya. And the countries that supported or helped the destruction of Libya in the future, we will deal with them as equal countries. If we have commercials, we will not favor them. We will consider them as just commercial or trade rivals as equal to equal countries. For example, Europe is full of different countries and the Africans who fled Africa or Libya to Europe, we need to provide them with stability in Libya and in other African countries so that we can bring them back from Europe and they can restore their former lives. Thank you. Thank you. And then, in sticking with this issue of how to bring unity to Libya, I'm wondering how you would approach this idea of inclusiveness of minorities, particularly some of the tribes that are reflective minorities, not just an and also marginalized communities that have been traditionally marginalized in parts of the country. How would you bring all these people together, what is it that you will do as president to unite them. First of all, this, this is the policy of the former, of the former respective governments that they didn't take care of the different marginalized groups or the different groups or tribes in the past. And now we should no longer talk about minorities or marginalized communities that should be highly respected by the government we have at work and the table, they participate, participate into a February Revolution and during the former regime and they should be highly marginalized. And the non Libyan, the non Libyans and like Libyan tribes, like Amazon, like table like to work, this is their land, and they are equal to other Libyans and should be highly respected and maybe as a president I will give more respect to get more respect to minorities than the majority. I think by the week so we will have a stable Libya, Libya, Tripoli, Libya, Fadzan, Libya, all of these areas should, should coexist with each other, and it is amongst the main triggers the main drivers towards the unification of Libya. As I said, again, Libya should be unified. But of course, Libya without missionaries, without the countries that intend to bring destruction to Libya. We are working under the surveillance and the assistance of the United Nations and the other super power countries, and you are not living in an isolated island we live in the world and we should always work together. Thank you. As you talked about bringing together all the various parts of Libya I wonder though, as has generally been a common theme where power gets very centralized in Tripoli. And I wonder how you view the issue of centralization of power versus decentralization, how to distribute power throughout the country. And how would you do that in terms of making sure that to minimize the marginalization of areas that are previously been feeling marginalized, particularly like in the south. So our main symbol or a credo is no centralization, no fragmented Libya, just one Libya. So it is easier to defeat the centralization through municipalities, municipal councils, where you give them power or we work on the devolution of power from the center to the local. And also the ministries should, should have representatives in all Libyan areas, offices of every ministry in every Libyan area, in order to take care of all the problems and the specificity of every area. Moreover, these municipal councils should have their own independent budgets and their budgets should not come solely from Benghazi or Sabha or Tripoli and they should have their own independent budget they can make decisions on their own. So we need to have a technique of globalization in Libya. So the citizen who are living in remote areas can have his salary dispersed every month appropriately and normally and they should have all the public facilities and all the services delivered in this remote area. So when it comes to universities, the big university of the most important ones like med schools should be in all or in the main areas of Libya by doing so, we can have a unified Libya. Also, when it comes to schools, we need to have schools in all areas. Also, I have an idea is that, for example, in one area, will you create or establish a big med school or big primary or school where all Libyans can come there and study and meet with each other under the control of the representative of the government and by doing so all Libyans can come together can communicate. Great. Thank you. You mentioned a little bit before about relations, particularly with countries south of Libya and that raises a question about migration. And of course a number of arrests of migrants in Tripoli area, and has with human rights organizations have accused authorities of human right violations of the new government with regard to migration, and including how that is handled in areas where there has been political and economic marginalization, such as in the Fizan region. Migration has been a big problem in Libya, and Libya was not able to manage migration flows that brought many problems, many was very negative to our youth also countries did not help Libya manage migration. This migration also had bad repercussions on Europe and neighboring countries. So regarding migration, border guards should be empowered to work in the border areas should not be located or centralized in Tripoli or big cities. And those who are now helping the migration issues are the revolutionaries. They are managing migration if you go to the south, for example, you will see that revolutionaries from taboo from Twerg and some Arabs are managing migration and the state is not helping them. So our plan here is to have strong border guards presence in the border regions with a strong budget to manage and to counter a regular migration, a regular migration has put Libya in a very bad place. And they are migration is bringing people to fight Libyans. So they have, we have to get rid of those who are thriving on regular migration, and also, as I said, the bigger picture working on the bigger picture like developing the sub-Saharan countries and African countries so that people would like to stay in these countries. And in Libya, once united, we will counter and manage migration by Libyans themselves, by Libyan citizens and not the military or the police. And it's very rare to see military or Libyan military or Libyan army managing migration or dealing with migration. It's the revolutionaries that are very courageously dealing with the regular migration. The head of the border guards in the south are understaffed, are under equipped, but they are doing a great job thanks to the revolutionaries. So I think what I need to say here is that we have to devote, we have to consider managing migration as a priority in Libya because it will help us restructure and rebuild the nation. Mike, please. We have a thank you for your answer. We have a question from the audience with regard to foreign affairs. I'll read it to you. It says Libyan needs international support for stability and development. From your point of view, which are the countries you would like to collaborate with and why. I am Libyan, free man, and I'm interested in the Libya and the interests of Libya. So we are ready to cooperate with all countries with all countries in favor of building Libya back so everyone who wants to help for the stability of Libya is welcomed. So we are going to collaborate with them like the United States, for example, which did not intervene in Libya in a bad way or with weapons. It interfered or it intervened in Libya for the interest for the best interest of Libya and many Arab countries also did the same. And those who took sides, either the east or the west have now the opportunity to get back to the right track because Libya does not need weapons does not need conflicts but needs development stability and so on and so forth. So we can see that thousands of Libyans have died from 2011. Some who are not interested in the stability of Libya will be countered and will be defeated because here we are only interested in Libya and we will be brothers to our brothers and friends to our true friends without discrimination and who are elected by Libyans will represent Libyans and we will handle other countries and other states as friends and as brothers and sisters. If these countries will choose side on against another side of course Libyans will counter them. So follow up you mentioned particularly the United States in that case but I'm curious to see if there are other countries that you would also be looking to specifically for assistance and development help. I have two categories of countries, there are countries which did not intervene in a negative way in the conflict in Libya but the countries that supported the conflict and provided weapons and personalities will have a different treatment and we will talk to them. We will ask them instead of weapons instead of fueling the conflict we want them to invest in commerce and business and in development. That's the way we will deal with countries so for the countries that did not intervene actively in the conflict and helped Libyans in the crisis that's easy to deal with them and for those which provided weapons we will tell them enough with that enough with the conflict and with the weapons but we will welcome them if they want to invest in education, in development, in the training of the military or the police or the rehabilitation of revolutionaries and thus everyone will benefit. Libya is a rich country and we are ready to collaborate with everyone, that's our policy good willing and we hope that even if other presidents are elected they will have the same policy and they will be interested in the stability on Libya. Libya is not ready for more destruction and if a country is trying to choose that camp or that orientation they will ultimately fail. Thank you, thank you. I wanted to return to the question that you talked about with regard to revolutionaries as you called them and the role that they have played in Libya's past. I wonder though how you would you have the relationship with those revolutionaries going forward in terms of, would you incorporate them into the police, would you incorporate them into the army. How would you handle that that type of development going forward. Marhaba. More technical problems here. We repeat the question and he will be answering now. Okay, great, thank you. Revolutionaries, as I said, have played an important role to lead the revolution of February and they played a significant role in this process and they will be treated very well. For those who want to enroll or to integrate the police and the army, they will help with that. And if, of course it depends on their credentials and their qualifications, you know, there are doctors and there are engineers. And they are part of the revolutionaries, and they have sacrificed a lot. So these doctors and engineers, if they want to have scholarships, scholarships to study abroad, we will help with that also. Some merchants or traders also, our business people, we will help them to build their businesses or to further develop their work. And those who want to, to rest, maybe they don't want to work in the police or the military, they will have a pension or like what what's provided for the ex veterans or for the last year combatant. So that's what we will do. But ultimately, we need to collect the weapons and to ensure the stability of Libya that no conflicts or no violence will erupt. And that's key, actually, to ensure also even the peaceful rotation and transfer of power. You know, also that some of them have lost their limbs, some lost their arms or legs, and their families are displaced. So we will focus on these people and we will establish an authority department that will take care of these people. And also the families of the martyrs. And even those who died while on the side of the former regime will take care of them. And they are all Libyans, ultimately, there is another important point that I wanted you to ask me to ask about which is the return of migrants, Libyan migrants abroad. And we have a plan for that we have a plan to ensure the return of Libyans who are imprisoned abroad, or Libyans who are fled their country, and we will promise that they can return to Libya safely and if they are serving sentences they can continue their sentences in Libya. Otherwise, they will be welcomed back to Libya. And for even for those who have have committed crimes that we can ensure and we will ensure that they will have a fair trial. But ultimately what I want to say, and my message is that Libya is a land of forgiveness, and it will welcome all its children, wherever they are. The February Revolution is a revolution of mercy, and the heroes of the revolution will accept and forgive others. So we will not, so we will continue with the same path in order to ensure a safe and free and independent Libya. Great thank you and thank you for approaching the subject of expat Libyans and their return. We only have a few minutes left but I wanted to go back to a question I had asked you in the beginning. And let me rephrase it just a slightly different which is about, if you become the first president. I wondered if you could give us some insight into the way you think about leadership in general, perhaps people that you admire who leaders in other circumstances. What are the, what are the things that influence you as a leader and build your philosophy as a leader. Are the existing leaders or the former leaders or past leaders. I'm just talking about people that have influenced you and influenced your thinking about leadership in general. Who do you admire. I think Idris, he was a great man, he worked under Bashir al-Sadawi who sacrificed his life for the independence of Libya and so Hamad bin Nasser, Omar al-Mukhtar and Saeed Latiyush. And also Gaddafi, we should not forget Gaddafi, not all that he did was drunk. Many of what he did Gaddafi was good. But the problem with Gaddafi is with his consultants, many of them were corrupt people. Also, we should never forget Mustafa Abdul Jalil who assumed the responsibility on February 17th, where now Libyan could fight for Libya at that moment and Mustafa Abdul Jalil assumed the responsibility and worked on the peaceful rotation of power. Now that February ended up in forming the National Congress where the revolutionaries and all Libyans from during the monarchy until February gave the power to the National Congress. So we should never forget the former Prime Minister who assumed the responsibility from February until present. Sorry, the sound is cut. Mr. Abdul Majid, can you hear me? I'm asking him if he can continue. So do you want me to give you examples of Arab leaders or international leaders or just Libyan ones? Well, I'm just asking about the people you most admire and how they influence your thinking. As I said, many Libyans, Mr. Aguila also was the speaker of the House of Representatives, Mr. Khalifa Hafter, of course they have directs and they have qualities. They are different members of the State Council, all Libyans who assumed the responsibility and hopefully they do not have any foreign agenda and they have loyalty just to God and Libya. And those who worked in the GNU and GNA in the Arab world, Sheikh Zayed maybe, and we need to salute him. We are working of Saudi Arabia. Also, we should never forget the role of Qatar who helped Libya tremendously. We should not also forget the role played by the United States, by Italy, Germany and many other European countries and I think the problem is not with mostly with these external countries but with Libyans themselves, whether Qatar or Saudi Arabia or Egypt or whatever. I can think Libyans themselves who had malicious intentions, malicious plans, not these countries, but any Libyan who served his country who supported Libya should be saluted, whether a Libyan leader or international leader. Thank you. Well, thank you. Thank you for providing the answers to so many questions today. I wonder if you had just, we only have a minute left. I was wondering if you had any last thoughts you wanted to convey right now. First of all, I would like to thank you for this opportunity and I'm asking God to support us and no one can deny the support and the role of the United States. I hope you provide peace not only to Libya but all the countries. Also, we should not forget to mention the role or responsibility assumed by revolutionaries. Libya is a generation of appraisings and all of these appraisings were led by Libyans, revolutionaries and since 2011 till today many people have given a lot to Libya. Unfortunately, not unfortunately, but I think it is a good thing. Libya is a country of the new thing, the new generations and new, new spirits and we hope to have in the near future spirits or new spirits and new generation of stability of peace of justice hopefully we're each to unify the Libya and their independent authority and power. Thank you so much. Thank you so much, sir for spending the time with us today. I'd like to thank a few people before we close out here for helping to organize today's event, particularly US IP's country director, Nate Wilson, Ezra El Bakush. This is Ali Ansari who helped to actually organize the actual timing for this event, and as well to the interpreters and to the AB staff for pulling this event together. As I mentioned, this is the fourth of our in our series of interviews with Libyan leaders. We look forward to holding future events in the near future with regard to further interviews with leaders from Libya. Thank you everybody for joining us, and wish you all a very good day.


Hello and welcome. I'm Esther Allen, a professor at City University of New York, and I'm here with Allison Mark and Powell, who translates Japanese literature, works with the Penn translation committee, and has been a driving force organizing translating the future, the conference that you are now attending. This year's celebration of Juneteenth seemed to resonate further and wider than ever before.  On their website, some of the signatories also proclaim what form these imaginings will take. Mitchell S. Jackson, recent Coleman Center fellow and author of Survival Math writes, Black freedom is the space to imagine. It's a space to make mistakes and not have them define the rest of you. It's a sense of solidarity with the diaspora. It's a sense of belonging. It's a place of empowerment. Freedom is rarely given, it must be seized. Thank you Allison, and thank all of you for joining us for the seventh installment of our weekly program. Motherless Tongues, multiple belongings. In this first conversation, part of a mini series that will explore and explode the notion of the mother tongue. We'll hear from Monica de la Torre, Jeffrey Angles and Bruna Dantas Lobato. Monica works with and between languages. Jeffrey is a poet translator and professor whose poetry written in Japanese won the Yomi Uri Prize for literature in Japan. And Bruna is a Brazilian writer and translator whose panel, we're very grateful to her for this, at the 2019 altar conference served as inspiration for this mini series. This series of weekly one hour conversations is the form that transiting the future will continue to take throughout the summer and into the fall. 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 conversations about the past, present and future of literary translation and its place in the world where we find ourselves. And Bruna's next Tuesday at 130 for queer literature, queer legacies, looking forward toward the future of LGBTQ translation, a conversation between Achio Bejas and Sean by moderated by Elizabeth Rose and check the Center for the Humanities site for future events. Translating the future is convened by Pan 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-Lackman and Larissa Kaiser. For more information, look for translation resources at pen.org. Today's conversation will be followed by a Q&A. Please email your questions for Monica de la Torre, Jeffrey Angles, and Bruna Dantes Lobato to translatingthefuture2020atgmail.com. We'll keep your questions anonymous unless you note in your email that you would like us to read your name. And if you know anyone who is unable to join us for the live stream, a recording will be available afterward on the HowlRound and Center for the Humanities site. Before we turn it over to Monica, Jeffrey, and Bruna, we'd like to offer our sincere gratitude to our partners at the Center for the Humanities at the CUNY Graduate Center, the Martin E. Segal Theater Center, the Coleman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, and Pan America, and also to the Masters of Dark Zoom Magic at HowlRound, who are making this live stream possible. And now over to you guys. Thank you, Esther and Allison, for that introduction. And thanks to everyone for tuning in today. This topic is very dear to my heart, especially as someone who's come to English and eventually to translation as an immigrant. And there's often this assumption that one can only have one true language, which is the mother tongue and it's tied to a nation state, right, and it's where your citizenship might come from. But of course, that's often not true, especially as, you know, with global forces, colonialism, I mean, there's so much at play. Our bodies are, they're constantly in movement and our relationships are ever changing. So I would love to begin by hearing a little bit about your relationships to your languages and how you've arrived at the languages you have in that translation. So, Monica, if you could please begin. Thank you for your question, Bruna. And thank you, Allison, Esther, and everyone for being here. Well, it's interesting because I didn't tell my mother this was happening today. Because if I did, she'd be like, What do you mean motherless tongue? Because my mother actually is from is from whom I learned English. So my mother tongue is officially English. Although I did not grow up using my mother tongue, because my mother emigrated to Mexico to study Spanish actually fell in love with my father had me and my family, and got progressively more comfortable with Spanish as we were growing up. So even though maybe when I was born, she did speak English with me because she had just been there for a few years and wasn't that comfortable with it. We gradually kind of boycotted English at home in Mexico City, because we really did not like being seen in public speaking English with my mom and just spoke back in Spanish to her. Technically that is my mother tongue. I was schooled in a bilingual school in Mexico City where, you know, a lot of literature classes happen in English. It was a very good school in terms of its bilinguality and I would visit my mother's family often and had a kind of uncomfortable relationship with English but if I stayed here long enough I would progressively feel a little more comfortable with it but I never imagined I'd be writing an English. It only happened. It was an accident of life that I ended up coming to get an MFA. Not knowing it wasn't my plan. I was going to do something else but the opportunity arose and I came here and I thought, well, what do I do? Do I transit myself every week for workshop? Or do I just give it a try and see what happens? And I started working in English and hence reclaiming my mother tongue. Yeah. Wow, that's fascinating to hear. Yeah, but first of all before I answer the question I want to echo Monica's thanks to everybody here, to Esther, to Allison, to Pen, to Cooney, to the New York Public Library, howl around and everybody else. It's a real honor to be included in this series. So yeah, my interaction with Japanese started when I was 15 years old. I went to Japan as a high school exchange student. I was a boy that had really never been outside of the American Midwest. I think I had seen the ocean twice. I had only seen mountains once or twice in my life. And then suddenly I went to southern Japan in a town that was at the very, very, very end of the big island of Honshu. So it was surrounded on three sides by water. Mountains rising right out of the sea in these wonderful dramatic fashions. And so, like, I felt like I was really seeing the world for the first time. It was this huge jolt outside of my, my ordinary kind of mode of existence that that made me determined, okay, I'm going to learn this language and this is going to be, you know, my second language of expression. And, you know, for a long time I was one of these kind of nerdy, quiet kids that like to sit alone and read poetry and that sort of thing. I began to work on Japanese and eventually went to graduate school in Japanese. You know, I had been writing poetry of my own up until that point in English. But once I encountered graduate school I stopped because I discovered there was, I had naively assumed that that many of the great works that many of the great writers were being translated into English. However, as soon as I began to kind of really dive deeply into Japanese literature, I realized that if this is the field of Japanese literature, this tiny corner is how much we have in translation. You know, just the overwhelming majority of the writing that's happening is not being translated. And recently for an article that it was writing I did. I did a look through through 3% database to see you know how many things are being translated and I found out that there were five books of translation of poetry from Japanese translated in the best year that they have on record. So, you know, I mean that five books in a year that's that's hardly anything. When you consider that there are 14,000 books being published every month in Japan, 14,000. So, so it just, I just was so overwhelmed by how much literature there was that I began to turn to translations to pour all of my love for writing, all of my desire for that into translation. I did that for a number of years. And it was really in 2009 to 2011 when I was when I was living and working in Japan full time that that really I felt that, you know, and I was thinking in Japanese all the time. Everything was in Japanese that it really made sense to kind of sit down and start writing in Japanese again, or start writing in Japanese for the first time I done academic articles and so on in Japanese all along, all along the way but I hadn't actually done that kind of creative writing. But you know one of the wonderful things about doing translation is that it's a really kind of intense form of reading. Right. It's about the closest form of reading that you can possibly have. And so, and so it was in the course of like reading Japanese poets over the course of years that that you know I really felt like I was studying very intensely what people were doing with language, the silences that were in the language, the, you know, the particular modes of expression the choices of language and so on. And that very special form of reading, I think, naturally, sort of lends itself to writing if you're kind of a writerly personality. I pulled something off my wall that I wanted to show you.  There's a little space up there that's now blank. And I pulled this off. This is a this is something that with the writer Takahashi Mutsuo had written some years ago when he was giving a lecture at the Kennedy Center and I was translating for him. He just wrote this as a little diagram, but he wrote the word Yomu, which in Japanese means to read. And then he also wrote the classical Japanese word for to compose poetry, which is also Yomu. The point was that is that, you know, these two words, even though they're, you know, different words they share an etymology in the classical Japanese language. You know, reading is a form of kind of composition, you know, within our minds within our own experiences and translation I think you know it's like one of the most beautiful places where we can see that. But you know it was really from that sort of equation of reading and composing that that led me one step further to actually writing in Japanese. Wow. I love that you'll call Japanese your second language of expression. I think my adopt that, you know, in thinking I definitely think about my languages that way too, especially as it's blurry which one is dominant my dominant language at this point they're both pretty close. But do you think that your relationship to these languages, maybe the proximity you have to them at this point and the sincere loyalty affects how you select the text you translate or what kinds of decisions you make on the page. I really like the fact that you use the word loyalty. It's something that we could spend a lot of time talking about like one's loyalty to a language right, because maybe I'm not going to be I will answer your question but before I answer I just want to say that what it makes me think about is this sense of a possible betrayal when you choose not to write in the language you were expected to write in right so in my case I would have been expected to write in Spanish and I did, and I still do but not to the degree of commitment that I, that I, that I bring to English. And so I think, I think that kind of tension is really productive. And it can't be easily forgotten. Right, like sometimes we, yeah, like what what choices are we making say when we choose to adopt the conventions like Jeffrey was talking about academic writing in Japanese right that is producing a body of knowledge that will be available to a readership and not to another readership or what kinds of imbalances might that produce or what kind of, yeah what what are the, what are the questions that accessibility and the lack of accessibility bring up are really interesting to me and that's something that I wrestle with. Now, your question about what to translate, I think, in terms of loyalties I think is really pertinent as well because what it conjures for me is an opportunity the opportunity that translation gives one to establish a lineage between once creative practice. And the body of work that you choose to read so closely and be so intimate with when we translate. So, one of the things that I was trying to do when I began translating a very long time ago, also out of the sense of like, what, how can it be that American poets and I'm encountering it and then my MFA program and everything have basically three frames of reference for poetry written in Spanish. It's either Octavio Paz, Federico García Lorca, Neruda and some like the really sophisticated people who read outside of that had also read Vallejo, and that was it. And so it was like, I need to do something about it so perhaps it was a bit hubristic you know to try to go like I'm going to rectify this and I'm going to translate all these women poets contemporary women poets will not be translated. I undertook another project that was actually really hubristic, and it was this neo baroque Mexican Spanish refugee poet, head out of the nice who at the time was incredibly difficult to translate, because all the work is super hyper referential like one call might have illusions that back in the pre Internet days will take you a really long time to figure out in order to translate but that's that's what I did that's what I did and I wanted to bring some of the richness of other forms of expression that were resistant to translation precisely because of their complexity. It was that particular type of neo baroque poetry that I thought needed to be brought into English, because precisely the fact that it was so complex was the thing that was making it not appealing to translator so doesn't translate well that was the issue. Wow, that's great. Yeah, I think about loyalty a ton because one of like a complete trader in more than one direction. Another one is because my relationship to the Portuguese language in my case is never going to be national. Right like I'm not tied to the entirety of the country, especially when the country so large and there are so many forms of existence that have nothing to do with me. So in many ways my ties to Portuguese are pretty regional. So I have like a little corner of the country that I'm interested in. And I don't know what kind of translator I would be if you know I had a completely different path. I think my curation process is now completely personal for some people maybe even contaminated which I love like I love a good unsanitized approach to this because now it's it's personal it's full of biases and interest and agendas. Jeffrey I'm sure you have a lot to say about this. I love the fact that almost as soon as we begin to talk about loyalty we begin to talk about betrayal that's something that's really lovely. You know, I think we spend so much time as what when we're kind of in translation mode, thinking about fidelity thinking about this kind of you know, sort of old tired notions that we thought through, you know a million times we're moving forward and forward in a lot of different ways. And of course like the desire to betray becomes stronger and stronger. I think that there is there is something to Monica's statement, you know that by by by you know kind of going out there and choosing particular texts, we are sort of betraying expectations, you know, I really am. One of the reasons that I that I'm interested in writing in Japanese and it's been so much fun is that is that it has betrayed expectations. Um, you know, when I was sitting down to write this book, the, the one that was mentioned in the introduction, but he's okay hand go sound. Um, I, you know, I specifically tried to think about you know what Japanese poets were doing, and try to figure out a kind of twist on that you know to try to figure out some sort of way to do what was happening differently. So, you know, in a way I'm sort of betraying expectations that would write in English, but I'm also trying to betray some of the expectations that exist in the Japanese language in order to open up a new space. You know, when, when I sat down, you know, I'm fascinated with people that sort of betray their own language and, and the wonderful things that happen.   You know, nowadays we've got Ilya Kaminsky, Don Mice, you know, who are working in English, and, and, and bringing in I think some of the resonances and sounds of their particular language. Yoku Tawada, like who writes both in Japanese and German is like my hero. And I love the fact that she's, you know, she's able to do such quirky things in both of the languages in which she's working.  But there's also, you know, at the same time that we're like we're constantly betraying things I think you know there's also certain kinds of loyalties that are formed in translation I totally agree with you Bruno like you're, I don't feel connected to every writer in Japan by any means. There are certain writers that I love certain writers with whom I feel connected and I want to bring those into English.  We can live in their skin, we can adopt their voice we can, we can, we can be shamans to transfer their, their voices into into a new, into a new world into a new form. So I love these kind of this kind of dual and often sort of conflicting betrayals and loyalties that are constantly at play. I mean, yeah, most households in the world are multilingual. And it is interesting to think about that there aren't enough people for multi legal households coming to translation. There is still I think a lot of pressure one to be to have a relationship with language that's one directional right you have one language and then you learn another versus. I mean I didn't necessarily I didn't choose to betray my mother tongue for example it was a global landscape that pushed me in a certain direction. So, and I think that's fairly common. So, I don't quite know if it is, you know, there's all this phenomenon of people writing in second languages versus it is the natural state for people to write in second languages. And this idea that you only work with one language is actually artificial. I could be luxury for a bit. Thank you. Yeah, because I'm thinking about how modern cultural populations and monolingual populations were engineered right they don't naturally exist. So they're socially engineered for example and like post Holocaust Germany or 18th century France, this desire to have a population be homogeneous is just focus. And I come from a multilingual family though I don't speak their languages. So there's that pressure to there's the constant loss so. Yeah, so I don't know maybe the natural state is already this cross pollination this constant. I like the word contamination because I guess it goes against the purism that sometimes I find in academia for translation being like this pristine thing. Yeah, and also I think a lot about how it is so common to for people's language of instruction, not to be the same as the language they speak at home, either because of colonialism or because like Latin or France, safe French in Russia or something those things are fairly common. And yet, I find that in the United States at least where I live, people are kind of shocked that I work with a second language, as if they've never heard of like this entire past. So how has it been like for you, you know as you're navigating these many currents. How has it been to make the choices you make both on the page but also about the taxi select, and then fight for what you're doing. I feel that you have to defend your allegiances or that it's natural to people accept it fully or not. Is this some kind of push and pull that you have to engage in. I'm just curious about. Yeah, I guess if how well received it is. Okay, we'll follow the order we've established. One of the things you said before you post a question which is this notion of imperialism colonialism doesn't it seem disingenuous that especially in terms of American imperialism right pushing English everywhere right consume pop music consume films consume media but don't speak our language.  Well, I have grown up in Mexico where it is impossible not to hear English on a daily basis everywhere right. It's on, it's on cable TV it's on the radio everywhere. So that that just seems a bit disingenuous and I also think of something that David bellows writes about in. Is that a fish in your ear, and this notion that American or English speaking not necessarily American English speaking monolinguals are a tiny minority compared to people who speak English globally. So amongst all of us who speak English, yes the majority of us are bilingual, if not more, and the tiny bit of monolinguals, they are the ones resisting our use of English as a language for our expression, etc. So that's particularly interesting. One thing that informed the book that I use a lot of translation self translation on repetition 19. One of the things that informed it is varying approaches to translation I have, when I started off it was in the 90s, and people would really frown upon my translating into English. I was like, no, no, no, you can't translate into English translating to Spanish you can't what regardless of the mother tongue complication. The assumption was that it wasn't my mother tongue and even if it was, I grew up in Mexico I was schooled in Spanish, and therefore I should not translate into English. That I feel is changing dramatically. But another thing that I heard, and I would be very curious to hear if you've ever had any pushback in this regard, was that when I showed my translations to some people early on, they would say, Well, you know, there's, there's too many Latin words in this. It does it, it does it, you really want to produce a translation that should try to pass as the original. So whenever there's something that points that indicates to the reader that this might be a translation, get rid of it, avoid it.  And it was like, okay, I sort of believed it at the time because I was just like learning, I was learning translation, I was learning to write, I was learning so many things. And that turns out to be completely ideological, right. Where did that come from? I mean there was a time in which Anglo-Saxon like translations of the Bible were seen as vulgar. And Latinates were considered much more elegant and sophisticated. So, yeah, that's my take on your question. Wow, I love that. Would you read a few poems for us? Well, it's relevant to the whole conversation. Okay, so actually, yeah, so one of the sections of the book has 25 different translations of the same poem that I wrote in Spanish when I had just moved to the US. And the poem is called Equivalencias. So maybe I'll read the Spanish and then I'll read you one translation and then we'll go to Jeffrey and maybe you can circle around. So, Equivalencias. So for one of the translations, this was my political translation. I mean, a lot of them are political, but this one was in response to what was going on the summer I was embarking on this project. It was 2018. And that was when Trump implemented his zero tolerance policy that ended up producing children and cages, right? That's when it all began because of the status of the minors who ended up being separated from their families. And I was in Montalvo at a residency that, as it turns out, was founded by some was it had been the estate of a man who's senatorial reelection campaign in San Francisco. The motto for it was keep California white. So that says everything. I mean, he was involved with the Chinese Exclusion Act and Japanese, et cetera. So I was like, I felt very compelled to response and my response to that was to frame a translation as a one that would be obedient and only include Anglo-Saxon words with Anglo-Saxon roots to all the Latinates in this translation are eliminated. A beautiful wall is another translation. One, no din, a flash, a sip of a hot drink made from roasted and ground seeds found bitter after swallowing. A bottomless pit. Two fold roads, one path and shut eyes, I'm awake. Two looking glasses are how many. Two children have three. Three is oath is stillness, a chum, a foe. Three truths, three lives. Four times the speakers had nothing. Four and two are the same. Having asked five times why she'd stayed there. She set the bed on fire and left letting it burn. So the words that are eliminated are coffee, silence, peace, fire. Wow, very telling. I love that. Great. Wow, thank you. It's lovely to hear that. I've been reading, I've been reading your book Monica on the page. It's really nice to have a voice associated with it. Why don't I read a poem that's called on translation since it's so obviously about these kind of gaps between languages. I wrote it in Japanese, but then later on I did an English translation because so many people asked me what was in this book. Combined the two for reasons I hope are obvious. 真実に入るとそこにもう一人の私を見つけるその私は近発ではなくその私には黒紙がある. Going into the bedroom, I find another me already there, that me is not blonde, that me has black hair. 私がどうしてここにと聞くとその私はただ早く入れというずっと私を待ってたと生まれた瞬間から今まで. He asked me why I'm here. He simply tells me to get in that he has been waiting for me since the moment we were born. 私たちの使う言語は違うがなんとなくつじ合うらしい私は洋服を拭いでよくになると子供の頃について話し始める. We use different languages but somehow we communicate. I take off my clothes, lie down, tell them about my childhood. アイスクリームを通して泣いたとき靴を奥行きでなくして叱られたときおじいさんと枕投げをしたとき. 彼は頭を割り落として歩きがし、と日本語を語った後逃げとは良くなった。 私は見えない。 でも私は思い出を語ると違う人の記憶に聞こえてしまう。 私は僕たちの記憶が今まで嘘を考えた。 The bed I remember becomes a futon. The lakes I remember become seas. Sandals become zori. Lunchboxes become bento. Lunchboxes become bento. Our conversations slip by one another, never quite meeting in between. The two of me let out a silence and the room returns a silence. Fidgeting beneath the sheets, I take the hand of that other me and stare at the ceiling for some time. Yagatte, dakiai, eventually we embrace. Akanotanri no you ni aibu shiao ikko no kansenu jinkaku ni nareru you ni. Eventually we embrace, caressing like two strangers in the hopes of turning into one person, complete. Wow, Jeffrey, and have you experienced any pushback in your, you know, many experiences everywhere? Um, that's an interesting question. So when I, first of all, I should say that when I was writing the poems that went into this book, I was serializing them in a small Japanese journal. I had very nice responses from people who were reading the journal. Sometimes people would contact me on Twitter or whatever. But I didn't really think much about, like, sort of the political ramifications, you know, that, like, the sort of ramifications of me coming in from sort of English and a sort of imperial language and making a choice to write into Japanese. However, when this book was published, and much to my surprise, it won a huge literary prize in Japan. I couldn't believe it, you know. Suddenly then it did seem like the tenor of the conversation changed.  And so, you know, perhaps the judges wanted to give it to him for that reason. And so there was some resistance. I'll never forget one person who wrote on Twitter, you know, the kind of quirky oddness of his language, which I find completely unacceptable. This is a Japanese poetry. And that made me feel accomplished. I wanted to try to figure out a way to my own twist on Japanese. But I think overall, I should say that this response has been overwhelmingly positive so far. Good. Yeah, I mean, this idea that a text in translation shouldn't remind the reader of its foreignness is always bugging me. But I think it's pretty common in some countries have more tolerance towards foreigners than others. So you both, both of you have written about this multiplicity, this the experience of being in between. Tell me a little bit about the process of thinking through all of that and maybe some things you've discovered through the writing. Maybe Jeffrey can start now, because yeah, maybe Jeffrey, in an email you said that one of the things you were trying to do in Japanese is really explore the possibilities of Japanese and do things that you couldn't do in English. That would be, I'm super interested in that. Yeah, definitely. So what are those things? So my apologies if I seem to be stuttering here. There are a number of things that you can do because Japanese has three scripts. It has characters that are borrowed from China, Kanji. It has Hiragana, which is kind of like a cursive script for writing Japanese words. Takana, a script for writing foreign words. There's all sorts of possibility of bringing these three different types of scripts to exactly the same thing, but you can say it in different ways. Also too, there's a great richness in the history of the Japanese language. There's classical Japanese, Japanese of 100 years ago. There's Japanese of 1,000 years ago. There's all sorts of Japanese that Japanese is that can kind of be brought into play with one another. Something that I think domestic readers wouldn't expect the foreigner to be doing. It was interesting to play with those things. One more thing that's very interesting. In Japanese, it's possible to write a word using characters and then to put the reading beside it. In other words, you can give the meaning and you can give the pronunciation of the word separately, but simultaneously. I really enjoyed that fact. There's something we can't do in English. At least, I can't think of a clever way to do it. I like kind of the zure, the mismatch of sometimes when you would put a pronunciation on a word that you typically wouldn't see. I wrote a poem about the rivers in Ohio where I grew up and about how I lived in a place that was ostensibly monolingual. However, I was surrounded by place names in languages that had existed there far longer before the white people ever showed up. In the poem, I wrote the meanings of this place names and then the pronunciation of the place names right beside each other. When you see the word to refer to the river that runs through central Ohio, you could understand what that meant in the original language. There were fun things that were possible in Japanese that I couldn't really think about how to do in English. That was one of the things I really enjoyed exploring. What about you, Monika? Your experimentations in this book with multiple translations of this particular poem were incredibly fascinating to me. I just happened to read the New York Times review that picked and talked about your book, I think yesterday. Oh, it didn't. Well, it's just mentioned, but it doesn't really go into it. It doesn't go into it, but the fact that it took dimensions, you know, kind of multiplicity and sort of the spilling over of languages, kind of one of the characteristics of the book. Yeah, actually really interesting. Okay, we won't go into that, but it's like, no, no, no, because it relates to something that Bruno was saying. I mean, I think in that review, which is not, it reviews three books, Don Michae, Joiella Mazzuini, and Jenny Zhang. And it was really interesting because the writer is a, yeah, the critic is trying to reclaim messiness as something really cool. But I think when you're writing about people who are so expressly dealing with colonialism and Korea, I mean, to use those metaphors, I think they were used in a way that was kind of problematic, but I did appreciate the shout out. What can I say? So, well, one of the things I love about English that Spanish doesn't really offer is prepositional phrases. They blow my mind. I mean, what you can do, you can completely transform a verb with the preposition that comes next to it, right?  That's impossible in Spanish. I also love a concession. I like how technical it can be and what happens when you bring in languages from all these different fields of knowledge and exclusive practices and collage them all together in English. Something happens that I feel is a little harder to replicate in Spanish because Spanish already is kind of, I feel Spanish, even though most people think it's a very emotional language, I also find it kind of bureaucratic. It's a very bureaucratic language, very official. So when you bring things that are official sounding into literary discourse, they don't contrast as much, I think. But maybe if I can swerve the question a little bit. I love your poem on translation because it's really open-ended and it addresses both self-translation and translation. And if we focus on self-translation only, this idea that you might develop another persona in the other language is really beautiful. I would love to hear a little bit more about that and also Bruna. It's kind of like a cliche. People talk about it. It's the first, oh, do you feel like a different person when you speak another language? But something does transform us. I remember the experience of listening to my mother speak in English with her sisters when I was growing up.  A ghost had taken over her and she became unrecognizable to me because this history that I didn't share with her was being spoken through the language. And so I just wonder what both of you think about this topic. Jeffrey, you can go first. Yeah, I specifically left that poem open-ended. The idea of the two selves sort of embracing one another, holding one another, being physically in proximity to one another, without that kind of contradiction ever being resolved. Thank you for picking up on that. You're my ideal reader, Monica. And I agree with you 100%. It does seem like there is some way in which we are transformed by a second language, even if we don't necessarily feel it from day to day. I don't feel like a different person when I'm speaking Japanese. I still feel like the same Jeffrey that's here speaking English with you right now. However, I realized that to the rest of the world outside, it doesn't necessarily look the same. I had a psychologist friend of mine come and visit me when I was in Japan one time. And I think she was the second day I was there. I got a telephone call or something, and I picked up the telephone and I started speaking Japanese. And she just pulled back physically. And she said afterward, I'm like, what was that reaction about?  Your body language changes. You're bowing into the telephone, and you're doing things that are Japanese. You don't look like the same person. I'm like, I don't. That was such a shock to me. And it made me think a lot. I mean, that was in my mind when I wrote this, that there is this kind of apparent slippage. Whether or not the person themselves feels it is a different question, I think. And certainly that's something relevant to translation as well. People are obsessed with the question of fidelity. And even though the places where we're not being faithful to a text are sometimes the most interesting, sometimes the most productive, sometimes the most creative, sometimes the most strikingly original. Yeah, I wanted to kind of problematize that sort of idea of fidelity and realize that the translation, potentially the other voice does sometimes have its own semi quasi-independence in life outside of the original. And that's what's really fascinating to me. I love the writer Yoko Tawada because she's written about that a lot, a lot. She's a German book called Accent Frei, Accent Free, which talks about how terrible it would be if nobody spoke languages without accents, how accents, how the inflections of other languages into a second language enrich massively the language. It's a wonderful essay. I think Susan Bernofsky might have translated it. But yeah, it's wonderful. Bruno, Monica? Yeah, that's such a tough question. I, of course, I am the same person, but I do feel different. I think because the language of my instruction was English, like all my higher education was in English, I feel smarter in English. I feel like I can speak more eloquently about stuff I care about. And then when I'm talking to my mom about feminism or something, I'm constantly grasping for language. I'm like, I don't, I didn't, I've never had this conversation in this context. But there's also, I think, something, I guess I take different risks in different languages for this reason. In English, I can take syntactical risks, risks with my diction. I can be the kind of person who is like spewing out academicisms. And in Portuguese, I take risks with my sense of humor, my sense of intimacy with people. I test boundaries maybe a little more. I can be a little bit more inappropriate, more freely. But yeah, like I also write about this idea that people perceive me differently in either language. And I think the fact that people perceive me differently, that changes me. In English, people see me as a foreigner. And that's always going to make me want to prove myself in a certain way. That's always going to want me to be, I don't know, to present myself in a certain light. And in Brazil, I am just a kid. I'm just me, like walking around. So it's a different kind of need that comes out of the language. And then I also write about some of the things that you've mentioned, Jeffrey, like my mother doesn't recognize me in English. And that's a particular kind of pain, a particular kind of situation. I write it about it all the time. That she's like, I, this is not the daughter I birthed. Like, who is this? What are these clothes? And yeah, I think it is, you know, so it is just a matter of being code switching all the time. And when you switch audiences, you have to switch the speech, whether you like it or not. Well, maybe now it's actually a good time to take some questions.  Thank you. Just such a wonderful conversation. And we do have some questions. But since you've been talking about her, Jeffrey, this is a, as good a time as any to mention that we have arranged for later this in this conference, we will be speaking with Yoko Tawada and both of her translators, Margaret Mitzutani and Susan Bernofsky, as well as her editors and others who have helped bring her to English reading audiences. So we're very excited about that. Stay tuned. That will be posted on the Center for the Humanities site. But just a little teaser first. So one of the first questions that came in is you've all spoken about betraying languages, canons, expectations. Have you ever felt that your language has betrayed you? Here is she here from you? Monica, you want to go first? Well, I'm not sure. I don't think this question is going that. Yeah, I don't think it's about this in particular, but has, I think language betrays one sometimes when there's a lack of awareness of the history of certain terms. And as so, as playful as we want to be, right? And as experimental as we want to be, sometimes we also need to know what certain terms bring up in other people's minds, what histories, what they might be saying about certain privileges, what they might be saying about status, about class, etc. That it's not the language betrayed you is that you weren't aware of what you were actually saying. In other words, I am, I do firmly believe that it is highly possible that what you think you're doing is not what the language is doing, which is exactly what happened in the review in the New York Times that Jeffrey was talking about. You know, I think the author is saying one thing, but the language is saying something completely different. Even the illustration for that review is highly problematic, because it's, it's, it's, it's, it's China than tigers and stuff. And then like very abrasive language that have a history. And unfortunately, language is not just yours. So we're fortunately actually quite, yeah, it's fortunate that we can all actually use this tool to communicate with each other and, and, and, and supplement all these gaps in our, in our knowledge and experience. So yeah, not sure that's where the question wanted me to go, but that's what came to mind right now. Yeah, I that's a really complicated question to answer and a good one. I often feel like when I'm working in translation, some sense of betrayal, like that I'm disappointed that things don't work in English as well as I can possibly, you know, as they work in the original in Japanese. I do feel like sometimes my own language here that I'm using English as lets me down often. And also part of that actually is not actually the language letting me down part of it is sometimes reader expectations or editors expectations, you know, about how, how experimental I can be, how many Japanese language, how much Japanese words I can throw in to give one example. And I don't shamelessly self plug. The, I translated a book called The Book of the Dead, which was, which is a novel written by a, by a poet. And it's set in the year, it's set in the late 700s in old Japan. And it's written in a combination of, of this very experimental modernist Japanese, but with tons of classical Japanese vocabulary from 1200 years ago thrown in. How do you how like that kind of like multi layering of language, you know, within the original text, it was really difficult to figure out how to reproduce in English, where, you know, the English language has, of course, obviously the English language has a long history as well. But if I were to go back and try to find, you know, the, the earliest old English equivalents of words and throw them in where the, where the, where the, you know, the text was, where it was in the original, it would be completely unreadable text. You know, so like the things that I felt like I could do with English were so different than what I was seeing happening in the text that I didn't know what to do with it. And I struggled. This is actually the hardest thing that I've ever done this particular translation. So yeah, so part of that has to do with like the contours and, and also to how far I can push your ears. Yeah, I've definitely experienced both of these. I do have another instance of struggling with my language. I've even felt angry in my language, Portuguese, which is that I'm from, from a part of Brazil, the Northeast, which is, it is the poorest part of the country for colonialism reasons. If you, I love being a little preachy, I'm sorry, but this is my chance to push my agenda. If you read like open veins of Latin America, you will see how sugarcane plantations devastated that part of the country. And then, so now it's very poor. So the population is more uneducated, et cetera, for, because of circumstances. And it is known in Brazil, it's very low class. There's a lot of prejudice against that, a lot of xenophobia. If you go to the metropolis like São Paulo in Rio, if you sound like you're from the Northeast, there are a series of dialects that people from those places can have. I speak like that. I don't know any other Portuguese. I mean, I've studied other Portuguese's, but that's the way I speak. So whenever I meet Brazilians in the US or abroad in general, they're like, what do you talk like that? That's so funny. I've never heard anyone speak Portuguese that way. Whoa, it's real. So even with Brazilians, I suppose my compatriots, that kinship that I could have with languages lost, I sound like I have a thick accent, which I do. And I also have an accent in English.    How did you learn it? You taught me. I didn't really have much of a say. So now like that ship has sailed, literally. Yeah. So it doesn't feel like I own any of my languages. None of us own any of our languages, but I do think some people get to feel like they do. And I don't. I'm a little jealous. So can I ask you something real quick? Just Matt, and Clarice and the specters are of the star, right? So Macabre is also from the Northeast, right? Do you recognize, is Clarice and the specter writing her Portuguese in a way that you understand as your own? Oh, yeah, totally. No, I really, she really does. And I feel for Macabre so much, there's a line in that book I love, which is like, oh, you know, the dreams she has, only a poor girl from the Northeast think she could get these things. She really can't. And I'm like, yes, I know Macabre. Macabre is my soul, right? I am Macabre. Yeah. We have one more question from the audience. This one comes in from Germany. And I'll ask three of you. It's about your experiences with self translation. And the question is, could self translation be a solution to the problem of accessibility, which was discussed earlier? Self translation. Yeah. First of all, the fact that you've mentioned self translation, I just have to say that like, I've translated a lot of people along the way. And when I sat down to actually translate myself for the first time, it was the most disorienting, kind of upsetting experience that I've ever experienced in translation. I wasn't expecting that because after all, I sort of know what the author was thinking when he wrote it, right? You know, I thought it should be super easy. However, there was also I was confronted by the fact that like, well, like I didn't when I when the English came out, I didn't like it. And I'm like, well, hold on a second, I think I know the author, maybe I can ask him to change it, you know, like, you know, what the slippage between what is the original and the translation is so great that that I didn't know where when to stop editing. And and that was that that's never happened before. Like with the translation, I kind of reached a certain point where I feel like, oh, I've refined it as well as I can do, you know, and within certain boundaries. But it was like having the guardrail taken off of a really dangerous winding road. Like, do you know what I mean? Like I could I could drive right off the road if I wanted to. And that was that was something that was very strange for me. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, although it's certainly I mean, one thing about translation, it does make the the text available in another language in a kind of a way that seems authoritative, I guess. So since the same person did it, whether or not that's a good thing or not, I don't know. I have to say, though, that like some other people when they translated my work into English, I love seeing it. It's fascinating to me. It's I love having the mirror kind of held up to me to to to to see to to show me what other people see in it. So I absolutely I completely agree with you. That mirror that that is the most beautiful thing, right? When you go like, oh, wow, it could be read this way. That's what I tried to do with myself, like have this poem and reflect it through all these different mirrors and see what I could learn about this poem. That I thought I knew everything about because it's not a difficult poem. I chose a deliberate deliberately very simple poem that still remains kind of mysterious to me as to how it came about or where it was going. But those 25 different translations say something totally different about it. I have never translated myself into Spanish, or maybe I did once one tiny little text. I'd never have done it. Maybe one day I would do it. But it feels like I already exhausted the the impetus to learn to circle around something that I did. So I it's like it just feels a little too solipsistic. And one of the things I love about translation is getting into the mind of someone else. And there's just so much to learn when when doing that. So I don't think I will self translate myself into Spanish. I do regret that I do not have a body of work in Spanish. That choice I made had repercussions. And so now I feel like I'm not really considered a Mexican poet, even though I am, because my body of work is primarily in English. But yeah, just the other thing that always plays out here is once you begin once you say, okay, maybe I'm going to try this and then you try it and then you realize, oh, I don't need to follow the choices I made two years ago or 10 years ago when I wrote this thing. What if I take it in a different direction? And then that for me always prevails. And then that thing that began as a self translation experiment then becomes a new work. And that's the energy that I prefer tapping into. So now I'm kind of, yeah. Just as one very quick follow up, I mean, I love the fact that sort of the dualism of original and copy, you know, gets gets completely distorted in the active self translation. I mean, I think that actually self translation teaches us a lot about the artificiality of those kind of kind of power relations that exist within the active translation, or that I should say the power relations that we constantly assume exist within the within the active translation. Wow. Unfortunately, we are out of time, but this has been such a wonderful conversation. And this is we are going to continue a form of this conversation in the coming months. So please come back. Thank you all for your participation today. And once again, we'd like to thank our partners HoweRound and 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. Siegel Theater Center. Thank you. And we hope to see you next week.


Zero Accounting Software 2023, reversing entry related to loan payable breaking out the short-term and long-term portions.  First, a word from our sponsor. Well, actually these are just items that we picked from the YouTube Shopping Affiliate Program, but that's actually good for you. Because these aren't things that were just given to us from some large corporation which we don't even use in exchange for us selling them to you. These are things that we actually researched, purchased and used ourselves. Here we have a Western Digital WD Elements 20TB USB 3.0 Desktop External Hard Drive. We use as part of our backup system, noting that if you lower the number of terabytes of storage, the price will lower dramatically as well. When you're thinking about a backup system, you usually think about an online system or an external hard drive system like this, or ideally some combination between the two, giving you some redundancy. 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If you would like a commercial free experience, consider subscribing to our website at accountinginstruction.com or accountinginstruction.thinkific.com where we have many different courses. You can purchase one at a time or have a subscription model, giving you access to all the courses. Courses which are well organized have other resources like Excel files and PDF files to download and no commercials. Here we are in our custom zero home page going into the company file. We started up in a prior presentation, get great guitars, duplicating some tabs to put those reports in like we do every time. Right-click on the tab up top so we can duplicate it. We're going to right-click the tab up top again and again, duplicate. Back to the tab to the middle, Accounting drop-down balance sheet report. This is a comparative balance sheet. If you don't have that one, you can open the standard one. Tab into the right same thing, Accounting drop-down income statement. It being a comparative one, which if you don't have, you open the standard. Back to the middle tab, the balance sheet noting that we're doing adjusting entries, which are entries as of the end of the period, either month or year to make the financial statements correct as of that time frame in accordance to whatever kind of accounting system being used. In our case, that being the accrual accounting system, our cutoff date is February 28. Now, last time we did an adjusting entry related to the loan payable, breaking out the short-term and long-term portion of the loan payable, which note is not exactly like the classic adjusting entry because the classic adjusting entry has a timing element to it, typically having a balance sheet account and an income statement account. But this is an adjusting entry in the sense that from the bookkeeping side of things, it makes sense to put everything in one account so that we can then track that account as we make payments, tying it out to the amortization table with each payment that we make. And then periodically at the end of the year or the end of the month, we break out the short-term and long-term portion for external reporting needs so that we can comply with whatever reporting needs we need so that we can use the financial statements for our own internal purposes because note that the reason this is important obviously for external, maybe not so obvious, but for external reporting is that we want to be able to compare our short-term liabilities to our short-term assets to make sure that we have enough current assets in order to be paying off the current liabilities. So you could end up in situations like companies that have a lot of loans or a lot of equipment like a construction company, for example, often look good if you look at them from a total asset versus liability standpoint. However, they could still have cash flow problems because all of their assets are in fixed assets. The classic example of this is like a farm. If you look at some forms, you could say, well, they look great because their equity looks good, their assets are a lot higher than their liabilities, but they've got all of their assets in the form clearly so that they can help to generate revenue because that's the things that are generating the revenue. So you could still have cash flow kind of problems. That's why you want to be breaking out short-term and long-term so you can see if you have the short-term capacity to pay off the current liabilities that are coming due within the next year. And that's the concept of it. So from a bookkeeping standpoint, we break that out periodically so that we can use it in that case. Now, you also, first of all, business might be doing this just for taxes. And for taxes, remember that you might not need to break out the short-term and long-term portion if you're sole proprietorship in the United States because you just really need the income statement for tax reporting purposes. But if you're an S corporation, corporation LLC, you might need to enter the balance sheet and break out the short-term and long-term portion possibly for the tax needs as well. So now that we've broken it out, what we want to do is put it back together again in a reversing entry because if we did not do that, it would cause problems because going forward, what's going to happen? We broke out according to our amortization table. This is what we did last time. We said, this is where we stand. We broke out the short-term portion, which is this amount, and the long-term portion, which is where we would be after another year's worth of payments. If I continue making another payment right here, then I'm not going to basically be able to tie my balance out to the one account related to my loan payable. If I'm trying to tie everything out to the amortization table. So what I'd like to do is reverse this so I can put it back together in one account and not mess up the accounting process so they can continue to make their loan payments and have one account matching the amortization table. So last time we did an adjusting entry like this, let's go ahead and find that adjusting entry and then we'll just reverse it. So if I go into, let's just go into the Chase account here and we should be able to find the adjustment that we made scrolling down. Here's our manual adjusting entry. Let's go into that and there it is. We debited the loan payable on the short-term for the 56 and we credited the long-term for the 56. So now we're just going to reverse that as of the first day following the adjusting entry March 1st.  Look at the reports. We want to be opening up the journal report. Journal report. Poor Favor, if you please. And we're going to then say we want to add a new journal and I'm going to say it's just going to be a reversing entry. It's going to be as of the first day after the cutoff. So we're going to say this is going to be Feb 28 was the cutoff March 1st, the day after, noting that in practice, if we knew we were going to reverse it, we could use the reversing option here, which should generate the reversing entry automatically for us, but here we want to kind of talk through why we would do the reversing entry. So the reversing entry will simply do the opposite of what we did before. So last time, so let's take the 56, 7, 69, 59. Let me see if I can memorize that first of all. 56, 759.69, 56, 7, 6, 9, 5, 9, 5, 6. There's a lot of 5, 6, 7, 6, 9, 5, 9, 5, 6, 7, 6, 9, 5, 9. Oh my goodness. This is a dyslexifying number. I'm telling you, they made this number on purpose just to confuse me. 56, 7, 6, 9, 5, 9, 5, 6, 7, 6, 9. That's it. That's it. Okay, so then we're going to say that this is going to be going to the long term is going to be the debit. Now notice the easiest way to think about this is obviously to look at what we did last time and reverse it and not necessarily put the debit on top and the credit on the bottom. I'm doing that. I'm reversing it. I'm putting the debit on top and the credit on the bottom because there's only two accounts that are affected. But just remember as a general rule when you do the reversing entries because they're oftentimes kind of backwards in nature. The easiest thing to do is just look at what you did with the adjusting entry and then keep the accounts from top to bottom and just reverse the debits and credits. But here we go. Chase, this is the short term and there's the credit. So there's the debit. There's the credit. I think I went the right way on it. If I went the wrong way, I'll be able to figure it out and find it. So let's go ahead and save it. And then that looks good. Let's go into our balance sheet and update the big balance sheet. Scrolling down, rolling, rolling, rolling. And so now we have the breakout of the 1310854 as of the cutoff and then we put it back to where it was the 6987813, which is the full amount according to our amortization table so that the accountant department or us when we're doing our normal transactions going forward can easily just break out the interest in principle and tie into that loan balance without having to try to break out the balance every time going forward. If I drill down on that, we should see our journal entry, the manual journal. And so there it is. Here it is. Right there, scrolling back up and then the long term portion should be gone. It should be gone. Oh man, what happened? Let's go back into my balance sheet. I went back too far or something. K-PASO man, what happened? Let's go back in here and then scrolling down, rolling, rolling, rolling. And the long term is there for the cutoff and then it's gone as of March because we put it back into the short, to the one account. All right, so there it is. Let's go to the next tab to the right and nothing happened to the income statement because this is not exactly an adjusting entry. We don't have that same kind of timing difference. We typically have. It's all two balance sheet accounts, but still has that adjusting concept that we're doing it as of the end of the period. Let's hit the dropdown. Let's open up our reports and let's take a look at, I'm just going to run the report as of the whole year so it includes our reversing entries. So I'm going to say this will be trial balance and open that up, dropping it down, dropping down the base beat. 2023 into the year update. So this is where we stand at this time. So if you tied out last time, but you're off this time and notice I'm running, I'm including the reversing entries here because I'm just running the whole year. If you were on last time and you're off this time, then we put the the only change we made is we now put the loan back together again just like they couldn't do it with Humpty Dumpty because but we did it with a loan. We put it back together again and it didn't take all the King's men. We did it ourselves. So in any case, there it is.