No One Will Manifest Our Power on Our Behalf

No One Will Manifest Our Power on Our Behalf David Gramling To prepare for this short but appreciative response, I read four calls-toaction ranging across time, genre, and profession, in order to consider their relation to one another beyond their apparent kinship in form. Specifically, I read the 2023 PEN America Manifesto on Literary Translation, the 1969 American Center of PEN Manifesto on Translation, the 30,000-signatory Open Letter on Pausing Giant AI Experiments from 2023, and the American Literary Translators Association's recent Guidelines for Evaluating Literary Translation in Hiring and Promotion Decisions. The genres these various authors chose as most germane and effective for advancing their aims intrigued me—as did the kind of respondents and consequential actions foreseen in each document. Anything calling itself a manifesto (versus an open letter or a guidelines document) reconjures a historical genre and mode of address that activate particular presumptions about whose agency and engagement matter the most at a given time, and about how these actions are to be effectively brought into motion and then to fruition. From the Black Panther Party Platform of 1966 to the Dene Manifesto of 1975, manifestoes clarify and test what exactly their issuers and constituents are ready to take pains to enact on their own, when institutions and other authorities have painfully failed (with impunity) to cough up a long-needed and obvious set of remedies. It is with this awareness that I write today—as an academic Department Chair in the multilingual humanities who is finally, after decades, in a position to see to it that the measures spelled out in the 2023 PEN Manifesto's "Translation in the Academy" section are realized. I will reflect as honestly as I can [End Page 1559] about my own responsibilities in this regard, after a quick detour back through the decades. "The time has come for translators to come out into the open and agree on a common course of action." So begins the 1969 American Center of P.E.N. Manifesto on Translation. "Our culture, and indeed all cultures, are thoroughly rooted in translation, and the translator is the unacknowledged vehicle by which civilizations are brought about." This 1969 text was posed as a grand, panoramic manifesto on translation in general, not a manifesto on literary translation alone. It carried a majoritizing call, with translators cast as the impoverished, proletarian subject at the core and base of all cultural production. Literature was powerfully viewed within it as the primary means by which the various nations (Russia, Indonesia, China, Vietnam, Nepal, and "the emerging African nations") could debut politically in more influential planetary ways. Writing for the committee, Robert Payne thumped hard for "Professorships of Translation," "crash program(s) for translation," a "translation journal for every country," and an Index of Works Yet to be Translated. (Have we done that yet, I asked myself?) "Translators are faced with a choice," he barked, in a tough-love tone, "the time has come to set the projects in order and to learn what can and cannot be done." Where the 1969 manifesto described translators as "grotesquely underpaid," the 2023 PEN Manifesto on Literary Translation reiterates in dismaying parallel that "the practice of literary translation itself remains perversely marginalized"—despite Translation Studies' many proud successes at becoming a stable, vivid part of the university curricular landscape (mostly outside the United States; see, for a baseline, Pym 1998). While there isn't a single plank in the 2023 PEN manifesto that is not substantively desirable and important, what worries me a bit is the document's overall hortatory stance about what the academy (and other institutions) must do. To this extent, the 2023 manifesto gives away, I think, some of the bold and existential footing that the manifesto genre properly claims for its issuers and constituents. Rather than listing our expectations of how institutions and authorities must finally treat us favorably on our obvious merits (when there exists no evidence that they intend to do so) manifestoes seize from deep within our historical consciousness the will and obligation to do the necessary work ourselves yet again—on our own collective, enduring terms. I would of course love

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