The Living and the Dead: Translational Identities in Wilson Harris’s The Tree of the Sun

Résumé 0

For Harris, all entities and identities are translational in the sense that they undergo constant transformation, and for human beings this necessarily involves processes of interpretation and expression. The translational nature of existence and human identity takes artistic form in narratives, or stories; folklore and myth, which bear witness to the past yet at the same time treat universal, timeless themes and evoke the perennial presences of the natural world, can function as translational vehicles that facilitate a movement across the gulf separating the past from the present and future. In Harris’s fiction the living regularly encounter the dead, who haunt the present in the form of traces, consequences, or ‘ghosts, ’ with which the contemporary generation must come to terms. The verbs translate, transform, and their variants occur repeatedly in Harris, and this essay turns to concepts of translation to analyze his visionary project, focusing on a lesser-known work that illustrates well his innovative splicing of New World and Old World folklore and myth. Translations between the living and the dead support a larger idea that his novels poetically reach toward: the interrelatedness of being and the obligation for each contemporary generation to come to terms with the past in order to continue the always unfinished making of the world.