Nedra Rodrigo - What the Pandemic Made Visible: Translating Tamil Difference
Translation is a field that remains largely invisible, much like the translator themselves, most valued when the work is deemed “like a pane of glass,” so transparent as to not seem to be translated and only noticed “when there are little imperfections like scratches or bubbles” (Shapiro). Paul Venuti has highlighted two phenomena that are traditionally taken for granted that contribute to the translator’s invisibility: one being the translator’s fluency, or capacity to reflect the source author’s intention in an uninterrupted sort of way; the other being the way readers and critics respond most appreciatively to the text that reads fluently – uninterrupted by the translator. Drawing from my own experiences, I will speak to how colonization, patriarchal structures and state-legitimized violence impact the lives of women/femme translators as they perform this invisible labour, even as they render visible the “poetics of planetary difference” (Jazeel).
As a Tamil femme translator born in Lanka, I am driven to translate Eelam and Lankan Tamil authors, as a means of archiving aspects of Tamil culture that are under threat of erasure under Sinhala Buddhist fundamentalism and colonization in traditionally Tamil areas. I will share excerpts from my translation of Rashmy’s ‘Songs in a Time of Confinement’ as an example of such an archive, triggered by the isolation of the pandemic. Immersed in a period of deep remembering during lockdown, Rashmy performs a cartography of his internal landscape that draws from the land he was forced to leave behind, redolent with cultural referents and ancestral weight. This mapping forces a comparison with the landscapes of exile, where he is unable to pass on ancestral land memory to his children. Conversely, as he maps the horrors of war and atrocity, he weaves threads connecting them to the pandemic, thereby rendering visible oppressive state practices that deem some lives more disposable than others. My talk will conclude with an acknowledgment of the nuanced critical practices of fellow translators, like Jeremy Tiang and Kairani Barokka who have opened up lateral spaces of visibility in the work of translation.
About the Speaker
Nedra Rodrigo founded the Tamil Studies Symposium (York University), as well as the bilingual, intergenerational queer-positive event series, the Tam Fam Lit Jam. Her prose translations include In the Shadow of the Sword (SAGE Yoda, 2020) and Prison of Dreams (Tamil Literary Garden’s Translation award 2025). Her translations of poetry have featured in Words and Worlds, Jaggery Lit, Still We Sing: Voices on Violence Against Women, Human Rights and the Arts in Global Asia, and Out of Sri Lanka. She co-edited the anthology Tamil Terrains (trace, 2025) with Geetha Sukumaran. Her essays have appeared in Briarpatch, C Magazine, Studies in Canadian Literature, river in an ocean, and Human Rights and the Arts: Essays on Global Asia. She is a recipient of the English PEN Translates SALT award for 2025, for her forthcoming translation from Tamil of Rashmy’s collection of poems Songs in a Time of Confinement with trace press.