reflexivity in cross cultural poetic interpretation Archives

Here’s a question for you:

“How is it, that different people translate the very same text in so many different ways?”

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Interpretive Plurality

This is a core issue in both cross-cultural and translation studies—where a single source text, such as a contemporary Mongolian doha, gives rise to multiple interpretations across languages. This situation can be understood through the lenses of interpretive plurality, cultural mediation, and the partial untranslatability of certain culturally embedded worldviews.

In the broadest sense, there is a tendency for ‘translations’ of the same text—whether into different languages or within the same language—to result in different interpretations. The fact that an original text rooted in a specific cultural and linguistic world gives rise to multiple, often divergent interpretations, is particularly relevant to cross-cultural translation, religious studies, and anthropology. Far from being neutral transmissions of meaning, these secondary textual artefacts—including my own—are shaped not only by linguistic complexity, but also by the conceptual frameworks, disciplinary assumptions, positionality, and cultural sensibilities of the scholars engaged in such interpretation (cf. Venuti 2012).

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A Situated Interpretation

Many years ago, reading Walter Benjamin’s work, The Task of the Translator (1968), offered me a foundational rethinking of what a ‘text’ is and how it means. Rather than treating texts as containers of fixed content, Benjamin approached them as living constellations of expression: forms that gesture toward something beyond themselves.

He proposed that translation is not merely the substitution of words, but the uncovering of relational correspondences between languages and modes of meaning. In this view, texts are not closed systems but fields of resonance, shaped as much by their afterlives as by their origins. His thoughts open the way for a deeper understanding of poetic forms such as contemporary Mongolian doha—not only as static literary artefacts, but as dynamic sites of encounter, always situated (in one context or another), always in motion.

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A Bridge, Not a Filter: On Interpreting Mongolian Texts into English

To be a bridge, means to accept that something will always remain untranslated, but not necessarily lost. It means understanding that meaning moves best not when forced into the shape of another language, but when given form appropriate to its depth.

The bridge does not choose what crosses, it simply lets through what the traveller brings. In this way, the interpreter becomes a participant in the original’s life, not a gatekeeper, but as a keeper of passage. In this approach, the Mongolian world is not filtered for clarity, it is offered in a way that honours its integrity and trusts the reader’s capacity. Thus, to surrender focusing solely on transliteration and formal equivalence translation, is not to surrender the text, but to honour its purpose — to reach across.

To interpret across languages is never a neutral act. Every choice — lexical, grammatical, rhythmic — reveals something about the interpreter’s stance (cf. positionality). In working with Mongolian Buddhist texts such as doha, questions arise not only about what I am translating, but how I could allow the superbly precise and eloquent source language to be heard, felt, and respected within another linguistic world.

The image of the interpreter as a bridge, not a filter, offers a vital metaphor here. A filter implies control — what passes through is shaped, reduced, perhaps even distorted? to suit the logic of the receiving language or culture. A bridge, by contrast, offers passage — it does not alter what crosses it, but holds the space through which meaning may move, with all its weight and context.

In interpreting a Mongolian doha such as Ачир Их Хангарид, this distinction becomes ethically and aesthetically urgent. The goal is not to render the Mongolian into something more English, more accessible, or more familiar. Rather, it is to hold open a space where Mongolian philosophical, poetic, and cosmological thought can remain intact, while still speaking intelligibly to English readers. This I feel is not merely fidelity to words, it is fidelity to the lifeworlds of others.

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Surrendering Transliteration to Communicate Meaning

Transliteration, preserving the original word phonetically (e.g. yaldr-aa, achir, Khangarid), can carry beauty, rhythm, even aura. But there are moments when transliteration can obstructs understanding.

In such moments, the interpreter may choose to surrender transliteration, not as a betrayal of the original, but as an act of service to meaning. For example, rather than insert exotic forms that remain opaque (even reverentially), ялдраа is translated not as yaldr-aa, but as ‘noble burden‘, or more subtly, ‘inner labour‘ or ‘sacred effort‘. We translate ачир not just as ochir or vajra, but as ‘immutable‘, ‘pure‘, or ‘indestructible clarity‘ — each term carrying more conceptual clarity in its destination language than its phonetic cousin. In this modality of cross-cultural linguistic interpretation, doing so is understood as an act of ethical interpretation. We are not erasing the Mongolian, but deciding to communicate its resonance, not just its syllables.

The idea that transliteration can be judiciously surrendered as an act of service to the art of communicating meaning is another valence embedded in the phrase, “translation is always an interpretation into another culture”— a refrain that accompanies every interpretation of a Mongolian doha by Zava Damdin (b. 1976) featured on this site (CPinMongolia.com).

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Preparing the Interpretation: The Imaginary Audience

To prepare an interpretation of a Mongolian doha in English is to also enter into quiet dialogue with an imaginary audience—not simply a reader, but a listener whose presence shapes the unfolding of the text. At one end of a continuum is the author of the original (ZDR) and the main judge of an interpretation’s integrity etc. At the other, the imagined listener, someone who is not fully fluent in the symbolic terrain of Mongolian Buddhist poetics, but attentive and open. They come with questions, spoken or unspoken, and their listening becomes part of the interpretive field. This recalls Mikhail Bakhtin’s insight that all utterances are addressed, and that meaning arises not in isolation but in response to the presence of another (Bakhtin 1986). Interpretation, then, is never solitary.

The original text speaks forward into the space where a listener might receive it, and the interpreter must listen not only to the source, but to the conversation it might begin.

The imaginary audience is not an abstraction. It is a form of ethical orientation—a reminder that each word chosen carries the burden of representing a world to someone who does not yet know it. Interpretation becomes not the delivery of information, but the shaping of a relationship: between languages, between selves, between ways of knowing.

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Situated Interpretation: A Personal Note

Since 2004, my home turf has been anthropology, alongside my role as a practitioner-participant-observer within a single community of Buddhist practice in Mongolia. Understandably, I aspire to embody the responsibilities and privileges in ways that are both respectful and reflective—always mindful of the ethics of positionality.
In terms of context-awareness, I strive to honour the Mongolian cultural-linguistic world—both in the texts I produce and in those with which I engage. I am not Mongolian, nor am I a linguist in the traditional academic sense of the word.

My interpretations of written words inevitably merge with the echoes in my heart and mind of participant-observation and lived experience in the field, within my Mongolian community of practice. In anthropological terms, I inhabit the “liminal space” between two cultures.

These impressions carry their own weight in the creative process of writing across cultures, and deserve to be honoured.
In interpreting Zava Damdin Rinpoche’s beautiful doha, I strive to avoid automatic or dominant framings—such as Tibetan or Western poetic conventions—and instead stay attuned to the Mongolian cultural weight of phrases like сүмбэр уул, арвист цагаан арслан, үйлдэлгүй үйлийн хүч and others.
When it comes to interpretive agency, I rarely accept first-cut translations without question, either my own or those of others. As much as I can, I resist the flattening of culturally sophisticated and philosophically embedded meanings. The same applies to overly ornamental choices—I tend to set them aside as well. In my interpretations, I aim to balance poetic tone with doctrinal precision. On this trajectory, there’s so much to learn, so little time…
Within Western academic frameworks of critical humility, situated interpreters tend to resist producing definitive readings. Instead, we test and refine translations (and participant-observation commentary), repeatedly interrogating every word and phrase—a process I would like to think of as interpretive integrity, not indecision.
To communicate meaning across cultures with reflexivity and care requires a broad and nuanced skillset—not merely to produce English-language texts about another culture (which risks veering into cultural voyeurism), but to bring lifeworlds into meaningful dialogue. This is the performative art I strive toward.

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Acknowledgements

From the depths of my heart, I thank the Mongolian scholar-poet Zava Damdin (b.1976) for giving me permission to work with his beautiful texts. And to Assoc Prof Mark Stevenson (Dept. of Anthropology, Chinese University of Hong Kong), I extend a hand of gratitude for getting me started on this particular anthropological road more than two decades ago.

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CP in Mongolia

Catherine Pleteshner, Independent Scholar and Musician

Tag Archives: reflexivity in cross cultural poetic interpretation

Letter from Mongolia 09: Situated Interpretation