In the genre of science fiction, particularly those works that feature interstellar transactions, translation frequently appears as a significant motif to explore the complex relationships informed by disparate languages or modes of communication. Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1974 novel, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia, is not an exception as it features two planets, Urras and Anarres, that have two distinct cultures and political systems. Urras is an old, capitalistic world with clear class and gender hierarchies, while Anarres is a world created by the revolutionaries who left Urras and attempted to build an anarchist community that centers on the principle of sharing resources without accumulating private wealth. The novel’s protagonist is named Shevek, a theoretical physicist of Anarres, who travels to Urras after 170 years of the settlement’s foundation. With him as a central perspective, the novel enables us to explore not only the contrast between the two worlds but also how an individual navigates and negotiates through the social structures of the respective communities. Accordingly, critics have pointed out that the novel pursues potentials of different political concepts, like utopianism, anarchist communism, anti-consumerism, “permanent revolution,”1 and so on. Yet, such a critical focus on political ideologies tends to marginalize the motif of translation. The settlers of Anarres invented a language called Pravic, instead of using the old language of Urras, including Iotic, the language of the major nation called A-Io. Although several critics have pointed out the importance of multilingualism in Le Guin’s works, including The Dispossessed, the specific process of translation—the attempt to bridge the distinct languages—has not been examined closely. I believe that it is worth emphasizing that The Dispossessed utilizes the motif of translation sparingly but effectively to expand our understanding of space, time, identity, belonging, and eventually, the political modality of “revolution.” The novel features various iterations of multilingualism, that is, distinct languages that cause impossibility of translation or challenges of understanding across the linguistic and cultural gaps. My paper argues that these instances culminate to the final scene of “perfect translation.” Translation in the novel serves as a spatiotemporal and interpersonal concept that complicates the seeming binary of the two worlds and thereby envisions an alternative mode of relationality that realizes the political structure of revolution.
As the title of the novel foregrounds, the concept of “possession” is the key word to characterize the distinction of the two planets. It is notable that this key word emerges in the novel initially as the impossibility to translate, since the language coined in Anarres does not share the same political structure with Urras. In an early chapter, children on Anarres take a history course and watch a documentary about the sister planet. It emphasizes the class and gender hierarchies of Urras at once by zooming in on the scene on the beaches: “‘On the beaches of Tius . . . women kept for the sexual use of male members of the propertied class (the Iotic words were used, as there was no equivalent for either word in Pravic) lie on the sand all day until dinner is served to them by people of the unpropertied class’” (The Dispossessed 40). When children are taught the social structure of Urras, it is represented with “property” and “class,” neither of which have equivalent words in the language invented by settlers to Anarres. Similarly, the sense of height does not exist as a metaphor of superiority in Pravic: “they [the Urrasti] often used the word ‘higher’ as a synonym for ‘better’ in their writings, where an Anarresti would use ‘more central’” (14). As Chris Ferns points out, the invented language of Anarres is “specifically designed to reinforce the break with past habits of thought and perception, and to minimize the importance of both possession and hierarchy” (251). The Dispossessed thus introduces the creation of a new world and political structure as spearheaded by the creation of a new language. Yet, this prospect of creating a world without “property” and “class” does not hold up easily, as the impossibility of translating the words (visually signaled in italics) symbolizes. Ferns, in the same context, immediately points out that being “more central” still implies hierarchical relationships, which I believe is the essential point the novel makes about the inevitability of centralized social structures and the unsustainability of the binary between possession and non-possession.
In fact, Anarres cannot be fully free from the state of ownership, no matter how its coined language attempts to be: the idea of “possession” exceeds material ownership and seeps into interpersonal relationships even in the new world. This fact is emphasized by the use of the pronoun on Anarres. People do not use possessive pronouns, like “my” or “his,” and simply say “the.” Children learn to say “the mother,” instead of “my mother,” while one says, “the hand hurts me,” instead of “my hand hurts” (The Dispossessed 54). Yet, Shevek is told by his teacher that once he starts to work with a renowned physicist, he would be “his man” (55). It turns out to be true. When Shevek starts to work for Sabul, an established physicist, it is Sabul who controls the publication of Shevek’s work, even though Sabul himself does not produce any meaningful work. The novel defines their working relationship in blunt terms of exploitation and profiting:
So they had bargained, he and Sabul, bargained like profiteers. It had not been a battle, but a sale. You give me this and I’ll give you that. Refuse me and I’ll refuse you. Sold? Sold! Shevek’s career, like the existence of his society, depended on the continuance of a fundamental, unadmitted profit contract. Not a relationship of mutual aid and solidarity, but an exploitative relationship; not organic, but mechanical. Can true function arise from basic dysfunction? (111)
The dysfunction of the contractual relationship leads to Shevek publishing his work under Sabul’s name. What these iterations of the word “possession” and its relational implication suggest is that the presence of the two languages and their artificial gap—the omission of “property” and “class”—only emphasizes the expansiveness of these notions that flow into different aspects of interpersonal relationships in the invented community, though “unadmitted.”
When the class hierarchy is explicitly translated into the distinction between “propertied” and “unpropertied,” the words enable the readers to make an easy association between the class hierarchy with that of gender, only to expand the connotations of the term “possession” even further. In the same chapter where we see the documentary about Urras, young Shevek and his friends discuss gender distinction, which lies on the very concept of “property.” One friend says, “‘Women think they own you. . . . most women, their only relationship to a man is having. Either owning or being owned’” (The Dispossessed 49). Shevek moderately disagrees, contemplating his relationship with another woman and the fact that the Pravic does not have “any proprietary idioms for the sexual act” (50). Yet his friend insists: “‘It’s the kids,’ he said. ‘Having babes. Makes ‘em propertarians. They won’t let go.’ He sighed. ‘Touch and go, brother, that’s the rule. Don’t ever let yourself be owned’” (51). The young boy’s view on women defines them mainly as the possessor, but the novel introduces various women who complicate such a notion. Shevek’s partner, Takver, shares her opinion about the gender hierarchy in the old world from the perspective of a mother: “Why did the women let them [use them as property]? Because they were pregnant all the time—because they were already possessed, enslaved!” (309). Women in these two conversations are defined both as the possessor and the possessed, displacing the relationships surrounding a woman (wife-husband, mother-child) from the simple dichotomy of the ownership. In fact, the definition of womanhood and motherhood keeps proliferating throughout the novel. Takver’s remark defines pregnancy as “the most primitive kind of sacrifice impulse” and thus anti-community, anti-social in the above-mentioned conversation (309), but such a view is also countered by Shevek and also contrasted to his mother who practically abandons him and dedicates herself to the communal work, as shown later in the novel. Instead of a single message that determines womanhood and motherhood with pregnancy, the novel features the intersectional implications of “possession,” and its subversive potential that destabilizes the positions of the owner and owned through the multiple characters and narratives.
As the gap between the two languages questions the supposed separation between the two worlds of possession and non-possession, and by extension the binary of the possessor and possessed, the protagonist struggles with the navigation between the two worlds’ languages and structures. Shevek’s struggle, in other words, embodies the complexity of the ideological separation formed by the languages. When he arrives on Urras as a famed guest, he has a servant named Efor. Efor usually speaks “clear Iotic,” but once Shevek expresses his interest in talking with him, Efor uses “the staccato of the city dialect” as if he “did not want to be understood by outsiders” (The Dispossessed 182). Shevek tries to break through this wall, but he realizes that he sounds condescending and receives Efor’s contemptuous look. Later, when Shevek falls ill and Efor looks after him, the latter starts to talk about his life, the horrible conditions of the hospital for lower-class people and the loss of his daughter. The dialogue briefly shows that Efor switches between informal, non-standard syntax and formal syntax. Shevek asks, “You have other children?” and Efor answers, “Not living. Three born. Hard on the old sow. But now she say, ‘Oh well, don’t have to be heartbreaking over ‘em, just as well after all!’ Is there anything else I can do for you, sir?” (264). While Efor is depicted as a character who navigates between different syntaxes, Shevek struggles with understanding what Efor shares: “The conversation went on. It was difficult for Shevek to follow, both in language and in substance. He was being told about things he had no experience of at all” (265). The encounter with the low-class people’s life further demonstrates the disparity of languages, not just Pravic and Iotic, local and outsider, or high and low class but also the meaning of Shevek’s theory of temporal physics. Once he leaves the university on Urras where he was isolated as a “guest,” he joins the revolutionary movement by lower class people. In the hideout, Shevek pulls out the General Temporal Theory, which he completes in a previous scene, but he cannot “read” the notes and equations (277). Shevek’s journey to Urras in this sense is characterized by the difficulty of transgressing the multiple boundaries to the extent that he loses the ability to read his own language of physics.
The theme of multilingualism and the difficulty of understanding each other across different cultures is not exclusive to The Dispossessed among Le Guin’s work. As critics have already noted, her novels and short stories consistently engage with these motifs to the extent that linguistic differences and cultural or political differences are interconnected with each other thoroughly. As a result, critics tend to focus on an expansive sense of “translation,” that is, cross-cultural understanding. Kristine J. Anderson summarizes the motif of the “translation problem” as a “cultural shock” among Le Guin’s novels, including The Dispossessed and Always Coming Home (1985): because of the challenges depicted in cross-cultural understanding in Le Guin’s worlds, translation also tends to appear as a “problem” in the texts. Some critics highlight the political function of translation, as Ria Cheyne, examining multilingualism in Le Guin’s works, writes, “To translate is to affirm that there is more than one way of speaking the world; it is to insist upon the validity of multiple languages. Translation has the potential, then, to destabilize the dominant language and the dominant culture; it goes against the very idea that there should be a single, dominant discourse” (466). Although her essay focuses on this political function of translation to subvert a dominant discourse, her close reading in fact draws more attention to the open-ended question about the effectiveness of such a function and negative motifs surrounding translation. For example, in The Word for World is Forest (1972), the cultural gap is impossible to close, and the translator-creator figures end up paying personal costs with their deaths and irredeemable change (Cheyne 468). These critics’ readings mostly foreground how multilingualism appears as an analytical lens into the issue of oppressive monolingualism and colonialism: in this context, the concept of translation is the medium of envisioning multiplicity with rather distressing effects.
The critical focus on the challenges within multilingualism, though crucial, can reduce the scope of Le Guin’s fictional work on the function of translation in two ways. First, the entanglement of language and culture/political structure in her work can overshadow the former within the critics’ argument. Even though the attention to colonial power within the treatment of language is significant in critiquing oppressive discourses, the expansive understanding of “translation” as cultural and political can reduce the function of linguistic translation by treating linguistic difference as “a metaphor for a different mindset” (Cheyne 462).2 Secondly, the shift of emphasis from linguistic diversity to cultural/political diversity also ends up emphasizing the “problem” found in the imbalance of power relationships between the two languages. Yet, it should be noted that The Dispossessed provides an instance of translation where language not just serves as a metaphor or the sign of the existing problem within multilingualism: in the final scene of the novel, translation between two languages marks the moment of creating a new relationality, a hopeful potential that realizes the movement of “revolution” against the oppressive systems. So far, this paper has also highlighted the impossibility of translation or the difficulty of navigating different cultures and languages, but it is crucial to point out that the novel’s work is not only dismantling the simple binary and subverting the expected interpersonal relationality: it also provides us with a new possibility to construct our relationships and political structure, and translation in the literal sense plays a role of signaling the prospect in the end.3
A potent moment of translation emerges on the ship returning to Anarres, when Shevek talks with Ketho, the first mate of the spaceship who is from a different world called Hain. Ketho shows interest in visiting Anarres to see its anarchist community, while Shevek warns it may be dangerous for both of them to set afoot on Anarres, because the settlement forbids any people from Urras and there is substantial objection to Shevek’s journey in the first place. In response, Ketho explains: “My race is very old. . . . We have been civilized for a thousand millennia. We have histories of hundreds of those millennia. We have tried everything. Anarchism, with the rest. But I have not tried it. They say there is nothing new under any sun. But if each life is not new, each single life, then why are we born?” (The Dispossessed 359). This question about the meaning of singularity in “histories” that allegedly exhausted all possibilities leads to the moment when translation creates a harmony between two languages: “‘We are the children of time,’ Shevek said, in Pravic. The younger man looked at him a moment, and then repeated the words in Iotic: ‘We are the children of time’” (359). As a reader, we do not know to what extent Ketho is fluent in Pravic, Shevek’s mother tongue. All we are told is that Shevek and Ketho have been talking in Iotic up to this moment, though it is not a native language for either of them. Instead of introducing Iotic as the meeting ground for these characters, the novel decides to use Pravic and Iotic to produce what I regard as the “perfect translation,” that is, the identical sentences signaling the moment of agreement: in the following passage, Shevek laughs, calls Ketho “ammar” meaning a “brother/sister” in Pravic, and agrees to bring Ketho with him off the ship on Anarres.
As Valentina Salvatierra points out, the fictive term “ammar” appears in the novel as “attempts to establish true bonds of brotherhood with the Urrasti” (9). It is notable that the first introduction of the term occurs in a similar situation as the one quoted in the previous paragraph—Shevek speaking to a person from a different world on a spaceship—but with a contrasting interaction. In the beginning of the journey, Shevek constantly talks with a Urrasti doctor Kimoe, to understand the cultural distinction between their worlds, including the definition of “religion” and gender hierarchy. The conversations seem to be the means of closing the gap between the two cultures, but the process is not simple: all their conversations are “exhausting to the doctor and unsatisfying to Shevek” (The Dispossessed 14). Although both of them still find the conversations “intensely interesting,” Shevek eventually decides to experience the foreign culture himself when he lands on Urras later (14). The deep separation between the two men is signaled by the failure of translation in their parting moment. When Kimoe tries to express his gratitude and respect to Shevek with the anticipation that they will part the way for good, Shevek shakes his companion’s hand and says, “Then let’s meet again, brother!” (18). The following passage shows Kimoe’s “nervous shake” and Shevek’s realization that he used the word “ammar” and thus Kimoe did not understand it. Salvatierra regards this scene as the moment when “[t]he linguistic gap created between brother and ammar mirrors the ideological gap” that appears during the rest of Shevek’s journey (9). In this context, the final scene between Shevek and Ketho reclaims the word in a bond between the two men from different worlds. Shevek says to Ketho, “All right, ammar!” as the text clearly inscribes the use of the Pravic term (The Dispossessed 359). Preceded by the identical sentences of “We are the children of time,” the use of “ammar” gains more weight in its meaning by sealing the bonding of Shevek and Ketho as siblings in the vast sense of histories.
The implicative moment of identical translation and interracial bonding suggests an alternative relationality to a mere binary of possession/non-possession. It is significant as the agreement between Shevek and Ketho happens in the former’s return voyage, since the key movement in the novel is the action of “returning.” In the novel, the General Temporal Theory’s challenge is described by Shevek as the seeming incompatibility of two temporalities: sequence and simultaneity. Shevek uses a book as an example: “The book is all there, all at once, between its covers. But if you want to read the story and understand it, you must begin with the first page, and go forward, always in order” (The Dispossessed 208). Without either of the two different understandings of time, we cannot explain our experience: sequential temporality explains changes, evolution, and creation, while simultaneous temporality explains endurance, or the cyclical mode of time, like the orbit of a planet (209-210). What reconciles these two temporal modes is the action of “return” in the novel, since “returning” does not mean you start in one place and come back to the exact same place. This concept appears most explicitly when Shevek travels around Anarres for job postings and contemplates on the importance of “home” for him:
He would always be one for whom the return was as important as the voyage out. To go was not enough for him, only half enough; he must come back. . . . You shall not go down twice to the same river, nor can you go home again. That he knew; indeed it was the basis of his view of the world. Yet from that acceptance of transience he evolved his vast theory, wherein what is most changeable is shown to be fullest of eternity, and your relationship to the river, and the river’s relationship to you and to itself, turns out to be at once more complex and more reassuring than a mere lack of identity. You can go home again, the General Temporal Theory asserts, so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been. (51)
In this passage, to return becomes a spatiotemporal concept that merges endurance and change and thereby fundamentally redefines the meaning of “home”: it is the “relationship,” not just mutual but also autonomous, (“your relationship to the river, and the river’s relationship to you and to itself”) that realizes the “home” in this movement of returning without the status of being identical.
In this context, the previously mentioned scene of the agreement between Shevek and Ketho signals the important association between translation and temporalities of “returning.” When the characters’ agreement in two distinct languages is presented in identical words through their translation to English, the invented language’s attempt to distinguish the world of possession and non-possession is replaced with an alternative movement of returning. Shevek returns to Anarres with no change on the surface: it is emphasized that he leaves and comes back to Anarres with empty hands, “as they had always been” (The Dispossessed 361). Yet, the presence of Ketho, someone who visits Anarres from outside for the first time, embodies a new direction for the community. It has rich implications to me that this “return” with a new orientation is signaled by the rare instance of two languages perfectly agreeing with each other through translation. Translating languages implies transversal direction, or sequential process of understanding one language with the other, which inevitably highlights the gap between the cultures and ideologies. Yet at the same time, translation can also inscribe the presence of both languages, original and target, simultaneously. In this way, translation encompasses temporalities that can be at once sequential and simultaneous. Therefore, it is natural in the novel that the moment of Shevek’s “return” concurs with the agreement between him and Ketho signaled by the translation.
Even though the perfect translation in the “return” journey of Shevek seems minimal and does not attract critics’ attention, the relational force of translation and its “returning” temporalities appear significant also in Le Guin’s own translation practice. She translated various works, including Angélica Gorodischer’s Kalpa Imperial (2003), Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching (2009), and poems by Gabriela Mistral. What we find in Le Guin’s translations is that she combines translation with her own creative work, represented by her collaboration with Diana Bellessi on The Twins, The Dream/Las Gemelas, El Sueño: Two Voices/ Dos Voces (1996), a collection of the two authors’ poems translated by each other. It seems that translation for Le Guin is not about “mastering” the language or producing “faithful” word-to-word correspondence: translation is to build a relationship with another writer through languages. Especially when she dedicates one of her own poems to Mistral, titled “For Gabriela Mistral,” and poeticizes her translation of the Chilean poet’s works, we witness Le Guin’s personal conversation with another poet center on the theme of “home.” Le Guin in the poem makes Mistral say,
As Bhavya Tiwari emphasizes, this poem imagines the translation of Mistral’s work as the invitation to come her “home” and learn her language there: Le Guin “must now make a journey across time and space to reach the deceased poet’s valley, to know her and speak her language” (228-229). As the concluding line of the poem signals—“And I will speak your language”—the relationship with Mistral for Le Guin is very much language-centered and envisioned as the meeting with the speaker at their “home” (Collected Poems 324). The image of the journey home interestingly resonates with the concept of home in The Dispossessed (“You can go home again, the General Temporal Theory asserts, so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been” [51]). Based on her poem and novel, translation to Le Guin then can be this journey to “home” whose definition is expanded beyond the possessive pronoun: you can go home again, so long as you understand that home is someone else’s home where you have never been. What The Dispossessed shows with its final scene, then, is the moment when Shevek invites Ketho to his “home” in Pravic, his own language, as Mistral does in Le Guin’s poem. Yet, what complicates the scene in the novel is that Ketho does not literally speak Shevek’s language: by repeating the same sentence in Iotic, the foreign language for both characters, the translation of the sentence is imagined as the repetition of the message, at once identical and different. If Le Guin’s works envision translation as a process of coming “home” and speaking the other’s “language,” the point of meeting does not necessarily hinge on the identical location or language: it is translation that offers the identical message by preserving two distinct languages.
The resonance between Le Guin’s fictional work and translation thus highlights how “translation” deeply serves as a mode of relationality to fill gaps. Yet, the image of “filling gaps” also needs clarification to avoid simplistic expectations of translation as a seamless or transparent process of switching languages. In the foreword to The Birthday of the World and Other Stories (2002), a collection of short stories, Le Guin writes that her creation of worlds and planets hinges on the presence of gaps: “Space, after all, is essentially gap. Inhabited worlds are a long, long way apart” (vii). Then, her motive of writing fiction is to close these gaps: “First to create difference—to establish strangeness—then to let the fiery arc of human emotion leap and close the gap: this acrobatics of the imagination fascinates and satisfies me as almost no other” (xii). The “fiery arc” and the “acrobatics” suggest the modes of connection that preserve the gap, so to “close the gap” is also complexly metaphorical as the “closure” is amorphous and non-tangible: it is the leap, walking on a tightrope, the motion in the air, that “closes the gap.” Salvatierra uses the “fiery arc” as an image to understand how Le Guin’s fiction closes the gap between a colonist and the Other by resorting to multilingualism as the means of political resistance (8). It is fitting then that Salvatierra switches Le Guin’s metaphor from “the fiery arc of human emotion” to the “‘fiery arc’ of language” as the title of her essay shows. Translation is the “leap” that shines light on to the tautological spatiality, which is at once a “gap” and its closing, at once identity and difference. By connecting this spatiality with temporalities of sequence and simultaneity, The Dispossessed creates the vision of political revolution beyond the teleological expectations of sequential shift from one system to another: instead, the “revolution” is the creation of the new “home” free from possession and identity, embracing divergence and opening. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed in this way expands our understanding of translation as the mid-air movement that allows us to reexamine not only our sense of time but also how we connect with each other at the intersection of change and eternity, difference and identity, being “the dispossessed” of defining binaries, all being at “home.”