The Untranslated

The Translator's Silence

Chapter 22: The Untranslated

The courtroom was full of things Amara did not translate.

She translated the words. The words were her domain, her territory, the specific portion of the courtroom's output that the protocol assigned to her — the spoken language, the verbal testimony, the questions and answers and legal formulations that the proceedings produced and that the interpreters converted from one language to another, the conversion the work, the work the bridge, the bridge the thing the court required. She translated the words with fidelity and accuracy and the particular neutrality the booth demanded. The words crossed the bridge. The words arrived in the headphones. The words became the record.

But the courtroom was not only words. The courtroom was also the things that happened around the words, beside the words, beneath the words, the things that accompanied the speaking the way a river's current accompanied the water's surface — invisible from above but constitutive, fundamental, the current the force that moved the water even when the surface appeared still. The courtroom was full of these currents, these non-verbal events, these phenomena that existed in the space between the linguistic and the physical, the space that the microphone could not capture and the headphones could not deliver and the interpreter did not translate because the interpreter's domain was words, and these things were not words.

The witness's posture. Amara saw the posture through the glass — the particular way each witness sat in the witness box, the body's arrangement a language of its own, the language not spoken but displayed, not audible but visible, the visibility the body's testimony, the testimony that the transcript did not record. Witness 247 sat small — the body compressed, the shoulders drawn in, the spine curved slightly forward, the posture of a person who had made herself small to survive and who had not yet un-made the smallness, the smallness permanent, the smallness the body's memory of the ditch, of the pressing-flat, of the forty minutes in the mud when the body's smallness was the difference between living and dying. The posture was testimony. The posture said: I learned to be small and the learning has not left me. The posture said this without words, said it in the language of the body, the body's language older than any of Amara's seven languages, the body's language the first language, the pre-linguistic, the thing that communicated before mouths learned to form syllables.

Amara did not translate the posture. The protocol required that she note significant non-verbal events — "the witness is crying," "the witness has paused," "the witness is looking at the accused" — but the posture was not an event, was not a discrete occurrence, was not something that began and ended. The posture was a condition, a continuous state, the body's sustained arrangement throughout the testimony, the arrangement not changing because the arrangement was not a response to a specific moment but a response to a history, the history the attack, the attack eight years ago, the history living in the body's architecture the way the architecture of a building carried the history of its construction, the materials and methods and intentions visible in the walls and the roof and the particular angle at which the building met the ground.

The posture was untranslated. The posture existed in the courtroom's visual field, visible to the judges and the lawyers and the gallery and, through the one-way glass, to Amara. But the posture was not in the record. The record contained the words. The record did not contain the way the body held itself while the words were spoken, the way the shoulders curved and the spine bent and the hands interlaced and the feet pressed flat against the floor, the pressing the body's anchor, the anchor the thing that kept the body in the chair while the mouth described the things the body had experienced.

The defendant's expression. Mukiza's face was an untranslated text. The face sat in the dock behind headphones and arranged itself in the particular composure that Mukiza maintained throughout the trial, the composure a performance, or a discipline, or a refusal, the composure the face's silence, the face saying nothing while the mouth could have said everything, the face withheld, reserved, the reservation a form of control, the control the one thing the accused retained in a courtroom where everything else had been taken — the freedom taken by the detention, the narrative taken by the prosecution, the defense conducted by the lawyer rather than the accused. The face was the accused's territory, the one territory the court could not administer, could not translate, could not enter.

Amara watched the face through the glass. She watched it during the testimony of the fourteen witnesses, watched for the change that the testimony might produce — the flinch, the contraction, the involuntary movement of the muscles that would indicate that the words entering the headphones were reaching the interior, were penetrating the composure, were touching the thing behind the face. She watched and the face did not change and the not-changing was its own language, the language of the controlled surface, the surface maintained against the pressure of the testimony, the testimony pressing against the composure the way water pressed against a dike, the dike holding, the holding visible in the stillness, the stillness the evidence of the pressure.

The face was untranslated. The record did not contain the face. The record contained what Mukiza said — his plea of not guilty, his brief statements to the court, his instructions to his lawyer during sidebars — but the record did not contain the composure, the control, the arranged neutrality that the face maintained while the witnesses described the things his forces had done. The face was a silence of its own, the defendant's silence, a silence different from the translator's silence but parallel to it, the two silences occupying the same courtroom, the translator silent behind the glass and the defendant silent behind the composure, both silences full, both silences containing what they did not express.

The gallery's grief. The grief was visible — visible in the bodies of the family members who sat in the gallery rows with headphones on their heads and their hands in their laps or gripping the armrests or reaching for each other, the reaching the body's response to the testimony, the body seeking contact while the ears received the words that described the destruction of the body's world. The grief was visible in the woman in the green dress — visible in the stillness of her posture, which was different from Witness 247's stillness, the witness's stillness the stillness of compression and the gallery woman's stillness the stillness of reception, the body receiving the testimony through the headphones and holding the testimony in the body's interior and the holding producing the stillness, the stillness the body's way of making space for the enormity of what the ears were receiving.

The gallery's grief was a collective phenomenon — not one grief but many, the many griefs coexisting in the gallery rows, each grief individual, each grief specific to its bearer, each grief connected to a specific person lost or a specific village destroyed or a specific night survived, the specificity the thing that made each grief different from every other grief and the sharing of the space the thing that made the griefs collective, the gallery a community of grief, the community formed not by choice but by circumstance, the circumstance the trial, the trial the thing that brought the grievers together in the same room and gave them headphones and asked them to listen.

Amara did not translate the gallery's grief. The protocol required that she note when the gallery reacted audibly — "the gallery is reacting emotionally" — but the grief she observed was not audible, was not a sound, was not a verbal or vocal event. The grief was visual, was somatic, was the particular quality of stillness or movement that the family members' bodies exhibited while the testimony played in their headphones. The grief was in the reaching hands and the bowed heads and the occasional trembling of shoulders that might have been weeping or might have been the body's response to cold or to the particular tension of sustained listening, the trembling ambiguous, the ambiguity the untranslated's condition, the untranslated always ambiguous because the untranslated was not converted into the clarity of language, the clarity that translation provided and that the untranslated lacked.

The judge's patience. Judge Okonjo's patience was a physical phenomenon — visible in the way he held his body during the pauses, during the five-minute silence and the nine-second pauses and the three-second pauses and all the other pauses that the testimony produced, the pauses the testimony's breathing, the testimony breathing in and breathing out and the pauses the spaces between the breaths. During the pauses, Judge Okonjo waited. His waiting was the court's waiting — the institution waiting for the witness to continue, the waiting the court's acknowledgment that the testimony required time, that the speaking of the unspeakable required pauses, that the pauses were not failures but necessities.

But the patience was more than the institution's patience. The patience was a man's patience — the patience of a Nigerian judge who had spent nine years on the ICC's bench and who had heard hundreds of witnesses and who had developed, through the hearing, a particular quality of attention, the attention total, comprehensive, the attention the thing that the witness needed from the court, the attention the court's promise made visible in the judge's posture, in the judge's eyes, in the angle at which the judge's head inclined toward the witness during the pauses, the inclination small, the inclination the body's expression of listening, the body saying what the mouth did not say: I am here, I am hearing you, I will wait.

The patience was untranslated. The record noted the pauses — "the witness has paused" — but the record did not note the patience, the judge's inclination, the quality of the waiting. The record was verbal. The patience was physical. The two existed in different registers, the verbal register and the physical register, the two registers simultaneous in the courtroom and separated in the record, the record capturing only the verbal, the physical lost, the physical the untranslated.

The sounds. The courtroom was full of sounds that were not words — the creak of chairs when bodies shifted, the shuffle of papers on the lawyers' tables, the click of laptop keys, the cough that someone suppressed and the cough that someone did not suppress, the rustle of clothing when a person in the gallery adjusted their position, the hum of the ventilation system that maintained the courtroom's temperature, the faint electronic tone that the audio system produced when a microphone was activated, the tone audible only in the headphones, the tone the technology's announcement of itself, the technology saying: I am here, I am carrying the words.

These sounds were the courtroom's texture, the auditory environment in which the testimony occurred, the environment not neutral but specific — specific to this courtroom, specific to this trial, specific to the particular combination of bodies and furniture and technology that this proceeding had assembled. The sounds were the courtroom's own language, the language that was not translated because the language was not spoken, was not intentional, was not produced by a person addressing the court but produced by the courtroom itself, the courtroom speaking through its materials, through its furniture, through the air that moved through its ventilation system, the courtroom an instrument that produced sound continuously, the sound the accompaniment to the testimony, the accompaniment untranslated.

And the breathing. The breathing was the most intimate of the untranslated sounds. Amara heard breathing in her headphones — not always, not loudly, but sometimes, when the witness leaned close to the microphone or when the courtroom was very quiet, the breathing audible, the breathing the sound of the body's most basic function, the function that continued while the mouth formed words and the mind retrieved memories and the testimony traveled from the body's interior to the microphone's receiver. The breathing was the witness's life — the literal fact of living, the air entering and exiting the lungs, the exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide that sustained the body that sat in the witness box and that had survived the attack and that had traveled to The Hague and that was now breathing into a microphone while describing the worst thing that had ever happened to it.

The breathing was untranslated. The breathing was not words. The breathing was the space between the words, the pause within the sentences, the non-linguistic event that accompanied every linguistic event, the breathing the body's continuous commentary on the act of speaking, the commentary untranslated, unrecorded, present in the courtroom and absent from the record.

Amara sat in the booth and she thought about all the untranslated things. She thought about them during a recess — the courtroom empty, the microphone off, the headphones on their hooks, the booth quiet, the quiet the space in which she could think about the things she did not translate, the things that existed in the courtroom alongside the words and that were not carried across the bridge because the bridge carried words and the things she was thinking about were not words.

She thought about what the untranslated things had in common. They were physical. They were bodily. They were the events of bodies in space — bodies sitting, bodies waiting, bodies grieving, bodies breathing, bodies producing the continuous non-verbal output that accompanied the verbal output of the testimony. The untranslated things were the body's testimony, the testimony that the body gave without being asked, the testimony involuntary, continuous, the body testifying through its posture and its expression and its grief and its patience and its sounds and its breathing, the body testifying always, the body unable to stop testifying because the body was always present, always producing, always communicating through the channels that were not the microphone's channel and not the headphones' channel but the channel of physical presence, of visible existence in a shared space.

And much of the truth lived there. The thought arrived in Amara's mind with the particular clarity of a thought that had been forming for a long time and that crystallized suddenly, the crystallization the thought's completion, the thought complete: much of the truth lived in the untranslated.

The truth of the witness's experience was not only in the words the witness spoke. The truth was also in the way the witness's body carried the experience — in the smallness, in the compressed posture, in the hands that gripped or trembled or went still. The truth of the defendant's response to the testimony was not in the defendant's words — the defendant said almost nothing during the trial — but in the face, in the composure, in the controlled surface that resisted the testimony's pressure. The truth of the gallery's presence was not in the gallery's sound but in the gallery's bodies, in the reaching and the stillness and the headphones on the heads and the grief in the posture.

The truth lived in the untranslated because the truth was not only linguistic. The truth was also physical, somatic, bodily, the truth residing in the bodies that populated the courtroom and that produced, through their presence and their posture and their breathing, a continuous stream of non-verbal communication that the trial's procedures did not capture and that the interpreter did not translate and that the record did not preserve.

And Amara, sitting in the booth, watching through the glass, was the witness to the untranslated. She was the one person in the courtroom who saw the untranslated most completely — who saw it through the one-way glass that gave her a view of the entire courtroom, the panoramic view, the view that the judges did not have because the judges faced the witness box and the dock, and the lawyers did not have because the lawyers faced the bench and the witness box, and the gallery did not have because the gallery faced forward. Amara, in the booth above, saw everything — saw the witness and the defendant and the judges and the lawyers and the gallery simultaneously, saw the whole courtroom at once, the way a conductor saw the whole orchestra at once, and the seeing was the seeing of the untranslated, the untranslated visible to the person who sat above the proceedings and who watched through glass.

She saw the untranslated and she did not translate it. She did not translate it because the protocol did not require it and because the words for the untranslated did not exist in any of her seven languages and because the untranslated was, by definition, the thing that could not be translated, the thing that existed only in its own medium, the medium of the body, the medium of the physical, the medium that the booth's glass and microphone and headphones could not carry.

But she carried it. The untranslated entered her through the glass the way the testimony entered her through the headphones — through the eyes rather than the ears, through the seeing rather than the hearing, the entering different in modality but identical in effect, the effect the absorption, the sponge absorbing what the eyes saw the way the sponge absorbed what the ears heard, the sponge not distinguishing between the visual and the auditory, the sponge absorbing all of it, the translated and the untranslated, the words and the posture and the expression and the grief and the patience and the sounds and the breathing.

The sponge held the untranslated alongside the translated. The sponge did not sort, did not categorize, did not separate the things that crossed the bridge from the things that did not cross the bridge. The sponge held everything. The sponge was the repository of the courtroom's total output — verbal and non-verbal, translated and untranslated, the words and the world the words inhabited.

And in the silence — in the translator's silence, in the space between the languages, in the between that was Amara's home — the untranslated lived beside the translated, the two coexisting, the coexistence the actual condition of the interpreter's interior, the interior not only linguistic but also physical, not only the seven languages but also the bodies she had watched through the glass, the postures and the expressions and the griefs and the sounds and the breathings of the courtroom's population.

The trial was not only language. The trial was also the things that happened around language, beside language, beneath language. The things that the words rested on the way a building rested on its foundation, the foundation invisible, the foundation bearing the weight that the visible structure could not bear alone.

The untranslated was the foundation. The untranslated bore the weight that the translated could not bear. The untranslated was where much of the truth lived — the truth of the body, the truth of the physical, the truth that language approached but could not reach, the truth that the booth contained but did not transmit, the truth that the interpreter saw and absorbed and carried and did not speak.

The untranslated. The posture. The expression. The grief. The patience. The sounds. The breathing.

The things Amara did not translate. The things Amara carried.

The silence held them all.