Translation

You can hear Hindi, Punjabi, Portuguese, Nepali, Thai, Chinese, Urdu, English, Bangla in the streets and fields. The Alentejo is the ground for all these languages and accents. Communication makes curves and counter-curves in attempts to understand. There were always parallel conversations among the participants, dynamics unreadable to us. Students spoke in Hindi, men from Bangladesh and Punjab fought through their languages amongst each other. Rajendra Shiwakoti worked alongside us as a translator and mediator. One evening, at the São Teotónio Parish Council, Madalena explained the performance's purpose to a group of 20 men, and Rajendra translated the words into Hindi. While Madalena was saying short sentences, Rajendra's translations were never-ending. His eyes were shining; he was gesturing. We didn't know exactly what he was saying, only that almost all these men joined the project. There were numerous misunderstandings. On a visit to an intensive farming greenhouse, a man from Nepal asked Inês what her caste was. She understood he was asking her if her surname was Castro and replied, "Me? No! I'm Sousa!". Sousa became, for him, the name of a caste in Portugal. With Daniel Wang, we communicated through Google Translator. Once we started using this tool, Daniel began to write elaborate sentences full of poetry and unusual thoughts. In São Teotónio, there was a house with only Sikh men between 40 and 80 years old. None of them spoke Portuguese or English, and the translator who accompanied them didn't really speak, either. Our communication was based on an exchange of gifts. They offered us 'chai', and we offered them blazers and white shirts. They offered 'rotis', and we offered them very nice group pictures. The relationship grew until the performance in which these men would climb to the roof of their house and appear to the audience. The communication was always hard to achieve. Until the final moment, none of us understood one another. We reminded them daily to be ready with their blazers, shirts, and turbans at 7:30 pm to go up to the roof as the audience passed by. Every evening, with the audience on its way, we would knock on the Sikh's door, and they would open it still in their robes. We had translators in our WhatsApp groups. Rajendra would change our messages into Hindi and soon receive replies while we crossed our fingers that everyone understood and showed up at rehearsals at the agreed time. Translation is also a performance art. During the sessions, we often noticed the buzz of multiple translations spreading among the participants as they distributed our words amongst themselves. The time of translation, that suspension in which we hear the exact words in another language, is a time to let the beauty of an incomprehensible language enter our ears. In BOWING BACK, translation was included as a performative device. On the top floor of the 'New SEF' building, there were four rooms where young migrants told stories. Manuel and Milan played a game of translation between Portuguese and Nepali. In Daniel Wang's room, inside a closet, a story was heard in four languages simultaneously. In Laxmi's room, she told a story in Portuguese and, at the end, said, "Now, I will tell this story in Nepali, and you will understand."