Title & author
Rivermouth: A Chronicle of Language, Faith, and Migration by Alejandra Oliva
Synopsis
Translation benefits society, such as by enabling intimate conversations or spreading stories and art from around the world. But what about when translation is wielded as a tool for power, the recipient manipulating the meaning behind a passage or verbal statement to uphold ingrained beliefs or political goals? In Rivermouth, author and translator Alejandra Oliva addresses this and more. Translation is not simply about communication; in our modern world, it’s a political weapon, a personal history, and a call to action.
Who should read this book
Fans of The Man Who Could Move Clouds and The Sex Lives of African Women
What we’re thinking about
The connection between translation and growth, whether personal, societal, or political
Trigger warning(s)
Incarceration, off-screen physical violence, racism, sexism, classism, xenophobia, and homophobia
When we think about the act of translating, we may recall the ever-present phrase “lost in translation.” The connotation here is that even when we translate a text into a different language, that new passage will not hold the same exact meaning; translation does not always do a text justice. Translation benefits society, such as by enabling intimate conversations or spreading stories and art from around the world. But what about when translation is wielded as a tool for power, the recipient manipulating the meaning behind a passage or verbal statement to uphold ingrained beliefs or political goals? And how does that translation impact not just the original speaker or writer, but everyone who hears or reads these translated words? In Rivermouth, author and translator Alejandra Oliva addresses this and more (Astra House, 2023). “This book is about immigration, but it’s also about reading and rereading—going over passages in your life, poring over someone else’s words until you find your own life irrevocably altered” (Oliva, 274). Translation is not simply about communication; in our modern world, it’s a political weapon, a personal history, and a call to action.
A Mexican-American translator and immigrant justice activist, Oliva has both a personal and professional connection to the border between Texas and Mexico. Growing up, her family would travel back and forth, and after Trump’s election, she began working as a translator for asylum seekers. Within Rivermouth, her experiences lend to a chronicle of not just her own history but a history of asylum and U.S. colonization/imperialism, all through the lens of translating and being translated—particularly with an emphasis on how the States wields translation as a weapon and source of power.
“The power here only moves in one direction,” Oliva writes, “and everything done by asylum seekers, every translation done by them and their allies, serves only the reader: the United States government…These are meant not at all as an expression of the person telling the story and entirely to satisfy the entity processing it” (164). In the asylum process, translation becomes a tool allowing the U.S. to craft narratives that they deem suitable or unacceptable. But “allowing the members of the caravan [a] kind of voice and power before they cross the border violates the idea of migrants as solely a political subject, never acting, always acted upon…acknowledging and magnifying their collective power and agency instead of removing it or ignoring it” (41). Just as the government attempts to mold translation to fit their own interests, hearing translated (and untranslated) stories for what they really are is not only powerful, but political.
Translation deals with both the personal and the impersonal—for those speaking, it’s their story, their amplification, yet after translation the story runs the risk of being co opted, altered, for the listener’s benefit. “You make a personal politics the same way you translate a text, the same way you write a book: You look at the world around you, and there are things that you notice and there are things that you don’t. If you’re lucky, you read the words of other people who have looked out on the world before you, who have caught other things you didn’t, you change your mind, change your actions, start seeing things you [had not noticed] before” (274). Translation challenges us to be better humans, and it’s on all of us to determine whether we will seek the truth in translation or trust those that have only a history of weaponization, a need for power. “This is the way change happens: through the tiny accretion of more and more people who care more and more, and not just about immigration, or language, or stories” (280).
“This book is about immigration, but it’s also about reading and rereading—going over passages in your life, poring over someone else’s words until you find your own life irrevocably altered.”
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Did you find yourself learning anything new from Oliva’s story? If so, what did you learn?
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