Translation is a mystery, both service and craft. We put our faith in it, as we put our faith in diplomacy. While translators go about their work with invisible care, jokes about translation gone wrong plug the odd spots of newspapers and magazines. After Babel, we readily believe that all translation is ‘lost in translation’, but in everyday life we accept the utilitarian compromise, whether at the humble level of instruction manuals for appliance installation or at the most exalted in the simultaneous interpretation of United Nations bureaucracy. In literature too, we take what we receive in translation - in the Bible, in Homer and Tolstoy, in Aboriginal story-making, in the guiding words of our yoga teacher - as if it somehow works.

The idea of translation allows us to acknowledge something beyond the words, of which what we have is only a sign. What we enjoy in translation may be less the work itself but the window it opens on a sensibility, a literature, a culture, a world valued as much for its difference as for what we discover to be common ground. Translation is a joining art, at once pragmatic and utopian. It provides access to the unknown, in hope of revealing an ever-expansive universality. But its project remains incomplete and provisional. Someone else can always come along with a new translation. The linguistic choices that are made can be substituted by other choices in an open-ended process that is reasonable yet polyvalent to the point of randomness. Against the immutable uniqueness of the original, the translator can produce a variety of versions, revealing the work as prismatic in its meanings. In that way translation reaches beyond limits, clearing a space for the follower. In the modern period the displacement of people, the occupation of one culture by another and the overlay of borrowed tongues on mother tongues, has made translation a lived experience, and a necessity.

Samuel Beckett is the limit example, the master of paradox, the self-translator whose writing pushes to the ends of language and back again to its beginnings. The critic Christopher Ricks argues that Beckett’s English versions improve on his French, although both are authorial. In his mother tongue, Ricks shows, Beckett touches an additional, deeper layer of language. The critic notes that in Beckett’s art, ‘there is a phosphorescence or even a putrescence active in his very words.’ The language is compost. But how can the boundless, generative compost of the mother tongue be there in a language at one remove? What kind of recycling is possible?

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Rosemary Dobson concludes her poem ‘Translations Under the Trees’ with the lines:
Poems blow away like pollen,
Find distant destinations,
Can seed new songs
In another language.

Her image recognizes the unpredictable fertility of poetic creativity, not as endless self-composting within a tradition, but as transplantation from one habitat in space and time to another. Her sequence, ‘The Continuance of Poetry’, celebrates the cross-pollinating inspiration of the Chinese poets Li Po and Wang Wei that she shared in translation with a poet-friend.  Together they experienced the feeding of creativity in a transmission between poets living and dead, as between readers, taking place between one language and another in intimate and diffuse ways, where words and images become host to new and different life forms, new ways of perceiving and being. In the spare, rhapsodic self-effacement of classical Chinese poetry, Rosemary Dobson finds a language of her own for apprehending the landscape around Canberra that she inhabits with Campbell. She invests that environment with a borrowed Chinese vision, so that the landscape itself becomes a translation into a language of images: ‘Will this be your poem, or mine?’
The poet’s receptiveness is a way of acknowledging how creativity takes place within that continuance, along its energizing contours and channels.

At best and worst, Australian culture carries translated cultures within a larger culture of displacement, including when Indigenous hybridizes with imported. It is, in this sense, an eclectic, outlandish, eccentric culture. Perhaps we Australians are more comfortable with an impure mixture of shuffled clothes, parodies and plural selves. Mimics and translators, after all.

The great Mexican poet Octavio Paz, a liberal and a patriot, was appalled by the crisis that occurred in his country in 1968 when the government ordered the army to slaughter demonstrating students in Mexico City. He was dismayed by the barbaric futility of trying to stop democratic ferment by force. In the shadow of those events he wrote about the way writers must be open to their own diverse impulses:

If a writer kills the other writers that live within him and who contradict him, he is guilty of something worse than murder. When we repress plurality and contradiction within ourselves, we also repress it outside; we suppress the others, we commit violence against reality… In literature there are no simple truths and each work contains its own contradiction, its critique… That plurality corresponds to the plurality of beings each of us is and to the complexity of reality. Literature should express that plurality.

Paz’s remarks point in the direction of translation as an imperfect but enabling power. The plurality within ourselves as writers encompasses not only our inner voices of dissent, but also the outside pressures of different traditions, cultures and frames of reference. As writers, we must let them in. Write what you know: yes, but also engage with the unknown. Find more than one voice and let those diverse voices jostle. Paz sees a direct relationship between repressing plurality in our literary work and repressing it in the world around us. If our creativity closes itself to multiple energies, a subtle form of censorship and constriction operates. Openness to contested and provisional interpretations of reality, especially in mixed societies such as in Latin America or Australia, calls for a literary pluralism that can sometimes be quite baroque.

Language recognizes distance and relationship, and the possibility of the mind’s movement from one point to somewhere else. Writing and printing, too, have developed in conjunction with movement, with translocation as part of the meaning. The last sentence of my novel The Red Thread was originally written in Chinese in Suzhou in 1808 in a manuscript that was published, incomplete, seventy years later, after the author’s death. That sentence was first translated into English by Lin Yutang for publication in a periodical in Shanghai in 1935 in a version that has long been out of print. It appears again, tweaked a little, in my transformation of the original story into a late twentieth century context, appearing on my computer screen in Sydney and then, in red type, in the published novel in 2000. Once again I am thrown into life’s mad turmoil, a floating dream from which I do not know when I shall wake up. How that sentence has travelled. The novel is set in Shanghai, evoked in a language that evolved as I wrote. More than one person has asked if I wrote it in Chinese and then translated it, as if the language is invested with the difference of place and culture. Some of it is translation – by Lin Yutang, edited by myself – most of it is not. But I wanted the reader to have the sensation of moving between translation and non-translation without stopping at the border.

That is a reflection, to my mind, of the moving worlds in which literature can live. Writer and reader share the capacity to move imaginatively across boundaries, to enter regions beyond, to create experiences that come into being only with the words that embody them. That is the pluralistic freedom of language – to invent, to trespass, to reach out, to subvert, to change – and translation is one of its essential forms. 
  An earlier version of this paper appeared under the title ‘Compost and Pollination’ in Translations, Southerly, 1 (2003).