Lost in Translation: A bridge to stand on

Group analysis in Spanish, special issue of Contexts

This project started with the Barcelona Symposium. Peter Zelaskowski talked to me about the idea of a special issue on Barcelona, ahead of the symposium, to encourage those who were going to participate to know a little more about Barcelona from the people who lived there or had visited the city at one point or another. When Barcelona was cancelled, the idea of doing a special Spanish issue of Contexts stayed in my mind.

The 1st online symposium (maintaining the original idea from the Barcelona symposium), was the first multilingual GASi event. There had been other events with translation into English of the keynote speakers, but there had never been three official languages (English, Spanish and Catalan) nor simultaneous interpreting in the large group, although there had been consecutive interpreting in the winter workshop in St Petersburg, 2019.

The experience of being in a large group where people were able to understand others who spoke a different language was unprecedented in this GASi world. It brought difficulties and inevitable complaints, but in general it worked well and bridges started to be built.

I am able to understand Spanish, English and enough Catalan to not need a translation, but at times I switched on the translation in order to hear what it would be like to listen to other voices interpreting the words of the one who was speaking. I decided to speak Spanish in the large group. Some of my friends and colleagues, to whom I normally speak English didn’t like listening to the interpreter’s voice instead of mine and sometimes I asked the interpreters to stop translating my words and I would translate myself. The balance between understanding the words and listening to the voices (and maybe the feelings which that transports) was difficult to get. The experience made me think even more about levels of communication in groups and specially in large groups, where, when we meet in person, it is difficult to hear each other, even when we seem to be speaking the same language.

When I met Joan Coll in Lisbon during the GASi symposium in 2014, he encouraged me to visit Mallorca and the first opportunity that came to go to a conference there I took it. This was the first time, at the group analytic symposium in Mallorca, that I had an experience of lacking the language to express myself in a large group. The Balearic Islands have two official languages (Catalan and Spanish) and a number of dialects (Mallorquí, spoken on Mallorca, Menorquí on Menorca and Eivissenc on Ibiza and Formentera), but the official language of the symposium was Spanish. I was born in Spain; Spanish is my first language but for more than 30 years I have lived in London (UK). I have done my Group Analytic training in English and I was unaware  that Spain had a large number of GA trainings and group analysts. I found that I had been very disconnected from that world.

The experience of meeting Spanish group analysts was really nice, I felt at home. The problem arose in the large group when I tried to speak about my experience of being in the group and to make some comments about the lecture we had just heard. I tried to say something, but the words came in English. I needed to think hard, looking for the right word to express what I wanted to say. There were English words that I had to ask others to translate for me. I felt very uncomfortable. Had I lost my ability to speak my mother tongue or was this Spanish group analytic language one that I needed to learn?

A year later, in 2016, another opportunity arose to attend a Symposium in Mallorca. This time Joan had asked me to translate Farhad Dalal’s keynote lecture, ‘Lost in Translation: The Music of the Emotions’. I was glad to be asked; this would give me a fresh opportunity to learn this new language. The task was not easy. I managed to get a copy of one of Foulkes’ books in translation and used it as a dictionary of group analytic terms. I was happy with the result. On the day of Farhad’s lecture, he suggested that it would be better if he read a paragraph and I read the translation after him. The lecture seemed a success even though the method made it a bit lengthy. The large group which followed in the evening brought feelings I never had before in a large group. The large group included members who couldn’t understand or speak Spanish, who made contributions which someone translated into Spanish for the rest of the group. I started translating some of the English utterances and would translate some of the Spanish comments to English speakers next to me, but I started to feel increasingly uncomfortable. I felt I was standing on a very weak bridge which could collapse at any point. There was a moment when I couldn’t breathe. I felt I was having a panic attack and I stopped listening. I was not able to help with translations and I felt frozen.

After the large group we were going to have a final gathering at a bar near the sea. It was a lovely evening, but I was still feeling uncomfortable. I was able to speak to some of the participants over a drink and talked to them about my experience in the large group. They told me about their sense, during Dalal’s lecture, of being treated as if they couldn’t understand English and needed a translator to make sense of his words. We spoke about the power of the English language, the shame of many Spaniards at not speaking other languages well enough to participate in international events (many British people feel the same), as well as the imposition of a lecture in English in a Spanish event. I realised that my translation had also felt like an imposition. Whether you were able to understand Dalal or not, you had to be subject to someone translating for you. The way we presented the lecture did not allow anyone to choose whether they wanted the translation or not.

Reading Rohr’s article in this special issue of Contexts makes me think of what happened in that large group and how I needed to stop understanding, listening, feel frozen in order to be part of the world of not understanding, instead of ‘imposing my knowledge’, coming from a English-speaking world. I am trying to learn the Spanish group-analytic language, which is still new to me, which makes this special issue of Contexts very special. Every article is published in both languages so everyone can decide whether to read it in one or the other or both. I have learned a lot about the group-analytic worlds in Spanish. I hope this way of presenting the group-analytic thinking will be a bridge to stand on.

Dr Maria-José Blanco
Group-Analyst and academic. She works as a psychotherapist and group-analyst in private practice. Her academic interests lie in therapeutic writing, life-writing and autobiography. She teaches at King’s College London. She has co-edited amongst others: The Power of Death: Reflections on Death in Western Society (Berghahn, 2014 and 2017); Feminine Singular: Women Growing Up Through Life-Writing in the Luso-Hispanic World (Peter Lang, 2017), Women in Transition: Crossing Boundaries, Crossing Borders (Routledge, 2021).
mjblanco.psychotherapy@gmail.com