Description
While Resilience is widely regarded as the ability to recover from trauma, and a capacity to persist or sustain health and psychological well-being in the face of continuing adversity (Olsson et al. 2015), for Larson (2013), as an ecologist, it operates as a “feedback metaphor”, which come from everyday parlance, are applied in science, and then feed back into society again, to describe and explain complex processes and systems dynamics including their expected, or even desired, outcomes. Through this conceptual lens, In this paper we are going to discuss how it is possible to account for resilience as a Translation in broader sense of conceptualization? Or the other way around. To meet this goal, The award-winning debut book of the Kurdish-Iranian journalist, writer, poet, and director Behrouz Boochani and his collaborators is explored as a case study. Boochani is subject to Australia’s offshore detention regime, detained on Manus Island, Papua New Guinea where he started to write No friends but mountains, the story of domination, oppression and submission of the displaced translating into a a paradoxically poetic language. The book was compiled over time, translated from Farsi, and smuggled out of Manus Island from thousands of text messages thumbed out on a mobile phone. This article will explore the emergent resilience discourse that has been emerged from Translation. It should be noted that in this study, translation invokes three different, yet related, metaphors as displacement, disclosure and discursive resilience.
Keywords: Resilience, Translation, feedback metaphor, Boochani, refugee literature
