Translating Silences

        Translation is not only the act of rendering something from one language to another. It is the act of conveying something in a way that it is comprehensible while realizing the rendition is incomplete. It is a salvaging something as well accepting its loss. It is a work of remembering and a work of mourning. But how does one translate silences—that which is untranslatable to begin with? Since silences are “inherent to the creation of sources and archives” (Trouillot), the act of writing history is taking the position of pastness to tell a story which works with archives and sometimes the “bottomless silences” within archives.

         Subaltern histories too can be seen as translating silences and thereby trying to transform them. To some degree all histories transform silences. Guha tells us of the urge “to work into the torn fabric of the past and restore it to an ideal called the full story”. But what about silenced pasts? For the subjects “do not exceed such a past: they are its contemporaries”.  The silences of the past and the subjects that are contemporaries of that past “accumulate over time to produce a unique mixture”. How does one excavate anything meaningful from this?

         This is why the task of the historian as a translator of the past is complicated and challenging. It is also the point where history as a discipline is limited in the ways in which it engages with and excavates stories from the past. Guha works with this “frustrating insatiable urge” to create “a full story” yet channels it in a way that he works within the limit of the fragment, tells a story through it and does not make any claims for grander representation. Thus, “Chandra’s Death” remembers as well as mourns.

         It is integral to understand that translating silence is not the same as unsilencing. It is also not a recovery, discovery or any such thing: such ideas aim to create the ideal of a full story and through that enact various erasures. But why is so much importance given to silences that exist within the archive or otherwise? There is a banality about silences. They seem commonplace (linked to the question of what is silenced is that of what speaks which confounds us and problematizes things at various levels.) Silences can be frustrating. 

       They make people react is various ways. The privileged young black woman remembers the slaves who jumped off slave ships. Another young black woman asks for stories of black millionaires.