The Joy of Translation.
In everyone’s life there are moments when the need for translation is inevitable. Translation has to do with the complexities of understanding[1], interpretation and mainly with explaining ourselves to ourselves and to others. In this paper I shall limit the discussion to “text” translations, where one undertakes the role of being his (her) own translator.
From the various nuances given to the word “translation” I choose to concentrate on the aspect of translation as a challenge for increasing the extent of addressees exposed to a written text. Although the word text refers to everything articulated by any specific language (such as a film, a folklore story or an item in the news), I shall deal with translated written materials only.
The act of self-translating can be seen as a vital urge for being heard and understood. It is a manifestation of the essential human desire for recognition[2]. The subtleties of translation weave together intricacies of interpretation, hermeneutics and semiology. As such, translation detects the most enigmatic problem where self-referential messages are addressed between (at least) two systems of linguistic signs. If translation is an endless journey within the maze of language, where diverse signifiers are striving to tackle an elusive signified, then self-translation is an even tougher mission.
In her inspiring book “Lost in Translation” [3] Eva Hoffman describes “translation” as a project of “explaining myself to myself — back to the beginning, and from the beginning onward.” The moment the signified seems to be captured, it turns into another signifier. But despite all that, the act of translation should not be seen as an agony, but rather as a gratifying activity of the human scene. The journey of translation is not an affliction but a creative transfiguration of becoming. The translation of my own writing into another language is where pleasure and pain are ecstatically intermingled. If jouissance occurs when pleasure and pain are twisted, then the character of jouissance is revealed with joy, as my own (translated) written text becomes a source of pleasure.
This text deals with the issue of writers in self-imposed exile, those who choose to translate (or shift) their writing to a host language. I shall not venture beyond this subject to deal with theoretical attitudes to literary translations. But between the view that regards the translator as a competent mediator who attempts to match two signifiers to arrive at an equivalent signified, and the theory of the translator as an inventor of signifieds in a move, I shall opt for the second stance. This is predicated on the view that literary translation is not merely a mediation between cultures represented in texts, but rather an hermeneutic act of “thinking the between”. In line with this view, the translator is a hermeneutic messenger between cultures rather than a passive agent between source and target texts. Choosing a word is an intentional act that produces the content. Thus, the translator of his own written text is privileged to modify his own translated messages. Just as Hermes, as the Gods’ messenger, interpreted any message according to its addressees, so the translator is allowed to play the part of Hermes. Hence, revision of the signifier/signified interrelation, while crisscrossing the boundaries of two languages, is fully justified.
In keeping with the Heideggerian idea of “Language as the home of Being”, language defines what the human subject is able to know about the world and about himself. As human beings we are shaped by language. That’s what Wittgenstein means by a “Language Game.” According to Wittgenstein “an interpretation is something that is given in signs”, so that no interpretation can be understood without a rider. Our native sign systems keep the rider in control. The rider navigates our images and “free associations.” The rider controls our native tongue so that the crosscutting between cultures becomes restricted by principle.[4]
Contrary to science where signs operate as signals, in a narrative the sign expands beyond itself — it means more than it says. Right from the beginning our capability to interact with others and to exchange ideas depends on an acquired linguistic competence. Hence, the more we are acquainted with our mother tongue the more we are able to carnivalize language subversively. The reality of being exiled or displaced from a primary bonding confronts people with the inability to juggle metaphors adroitly. It is where the sense of estrangement, of being muted, intermingles with loss of identity and nostalgia. In Kojeve’s articulation “it is only by being ‘recognized’ by another, by many others, or — in the extreme — by all others, that a human being is really human, for himself, as well as for others. For only in this case can one reveal a reality in speech” [5]. The nightmare of not being heard and understood is a fundamental threat to the self as “the discourse of the other” (Lacan). Being displaced from a native tongue is a dreadful threat to one’s human existentiality. In Eva Hoffman’s words: it is that the signifier has become severed from the signified. The words I learn now do not stand for things in the same unquestioned way they did in my native tongue. Hence, the worst is the loss of an inner language, the lack of interior images, where the path to assimilate the external world is blurred. But the metaphor of “getting lost” in translation might be misleading. Being the translator of my own writings is a route for turning the necessity for translation into a virtue, turning the torture of moving between languages into a gratifying enterprise. The cure of writing emerges when from the strong comes the forth sweetness, where the power of imagination takes over the tendency for representation.
The more we internalize the idea that all interpretations are a kind of a game, shaped by the meanings in use, the more the gateway to other languages is widened. The flexibility of translation is dependent upon feeling at home with our native language. Feeling at home in a language is bound to the basic condition of human existence, namely: recognition. Lack of recognition means despair. The radical disjoining between word and thing “is a desiccating alchemy.” It is the loss of a living connection. Therefore, the topic of “being my own translator” takes us beyond language into the realms of nostalgia, loss of identity, rootlessness, floating and being unseen.
Although each of these topics needs further elaboration, I shall concentrate upon those aspects of translation where translation operates as a talking cure. When the writer’s urge to be heard and understood by an audience in a new location manifests nonstop frenzied attempts to transform distant meanings into the articulation of genuine inner expressions; it becomes an endless endeavor to bridge the word that lies on the tip of the tongue with a deferred foreign meaning. This heuristic progression is where panic, stress and desire become entwined into a joyful scene. At the moment the intangible insight flickers into view there is joyful relief. As if the writer reaches his own Eden, where words are shaped in new collages, created as a patchwork quilt by overlapping different realities, one upon the other. In a mysterious indefinable way, the seeds of these vigorous, insightful expressions infiltrate the host language. Signs are transfigured into hybridized meanings. Thus languages evolve in an evolutionary process of change. The profound contribution of exiled writers to their host language has always been greater than acknowledged. Assuming that the center is defined by its margins, it is marginality that re-constructs its canonic textualities.
Evolution and change are carried out by a tendency for preservation (Epigenesis) and mutation (leaping, inconsistent skipping). Preservation functions to duplicate what is in existence — that which “remembers itself.” Preservation and repetition are nailed in a contract of shared meaning that can be seen as constructive negations, a driving force for new mutation. The mutation is created not via the replacement of something with something else but rather via overcoming the given for what does not yet exist[6]. Writers and poets are creative generators of linguistic mutations. The minutes of silence trigger a plunge into the abyss of the inexpressible — namely, the kingdom of the aesthetic act, the origins of new mutations.
The concept of the Double Bind[7] may assist in understanding the paradoxical dynamic oscillation between consonance governed by repetition and dissonance created by unpredictable singularity[8]. Human beings are doomed to be trapped in the paradoxical oscillation between preservation and mutation. The DB is an essential condition of human beings. The more we encounter this paradoxical state the more human we are, thereby approaching the Heideggerian notion of “Being in the world.” Poets and writers are mostly immersed in an immanent yearning for an authentic voice while submitting to the communal, public linguistic diktat. The inescapable DB oscillation that constructs realities through the invention of words elevates human being to the heights of the sublime. Exiled writers’ fiction transforms particular primordial experiences, located in time and space, into allegories and abstract symbols of deconstructed existence.[9]
For the exiled writer transplanted into a new language, the burden of the DB is doubled. And so, the self-translator/writer constructs a new reality by deconstructing both source and target language, celebrating slang, archaisms, and jargon. Thus, the DB swings from singularity towards generalization and abstractness, all the while getting closer and closer to its peak. The exiled writer is blessed by the phantasy of starting to dream in a foreign language. Some things get lost in the passage between the source and the targeted language and this lack of precision takes the writer into the realm of the inexpressible — the space where new metaphors are generated in pursuit of the inner voice. It is in translation that the DB oscillation is revealed in its full intensive sway, when one’s own writing becomes subversive, not because of the rule, but in spite of the rule.
Our generation has produced more refugees, migrants and displaced people than ever before. A huge mass of people is confronted with a loss of identity. Attaining a hybrid identity is a shocking experience. Only very few are able to transform “the thinking between” into a constructive process. Edward Said describes this floating in the abyss between languages as a crossing of boundaries (Said)[10], where life in a new language means telling my stories of the past in an estranged foreign language. There is no chance of help coming from the new surroundings. In Eva Hoffman’s words: “you have to invent yourself every day by your own means. Nobody knows your past so you have to convince people who you are, and you want them to believe you… and this is a re-build of an identity, it is a re-imaging the self every new day.” [3]
However even working between cultures and languages the exiled writer cannot escape the need for negotiation despite the awareness of cultural incommensurability. To clarify this point I shall use Homi Bhabha’s concept of hybridization[11], whereby two cultures retain their distinct characteristics and yet form something new. Bhabha introduces the role of anxiety; where anxiety can be perceived as a sign of danger, but it can also indicate that something new is emerging. It is another hint from the psychoanalytic aspect of viewing translation as gratifying joy rather than misery.
Being bi-cultural does not mean to feel at home in two cultures. Quite the contrary, it means not to feel at home in the two cultures. It is drifting from particular experiences in the past to wishes and hopes located in the future, and the timeless vocabulary of temporality. When alterity is crystallized in the form of the host language’s generalized meanings it implies the feeling of rootlessness, where rootlessness alludes to the joy of being released from the oppressive, gravitational force that likens human beings to trees. It is the nationalist, biblical metaphor of viewing human beings as rooted plants that sends so many of us to search for their roots. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak says: “If there’s one thing I totally distrust, in fact more than distrust, despise and have contempt for, it is people looking for roots.”[12] The joy of translation emerges when one imagines oneself as a singing bird (Hanoch Levin). Self-translation can be seen as an enchanting glide, crossing boundaries in a ceaseless game between metaphors and metonymies. The translator gets engaged in the navigation process through two aspects of language, namely: selection from the code that corresponds to metaphors[13], and combination, where a word is used in a specific context to stand for the whole. The interweaving of the axis of metaphorical selection with the axis of the metonymical combination is in itself a work of art, where the pleasure of self-translation is amplified.
Another aspect of the DB, related to the complication of bridging between languages, refers to the fundamental categories of continuity and discontinuity. Discontinuity corresponds to the digital coding which is atomic and discrete[14]. Continuity refers to the analogue coding, which is compact and indefinable.[15] Languages are digital systems of symbolic signs, where the gaps are significant as the organizing syntax of those systems. The combination of the discrete digits is a whole — termed analog. The analog is always extended beyond the sum of the single parts as it includes the editing code. There is always an excess of meaning created despite the rigid syntactic rules.
Oscillation between the analogue perception and its privatized, digitalized articulation is a DB issue. We swing to and fro between the inexpressible analogue perception of dreams and phantasies, and the necessity to communicate by contractual digital signs. It is much more difficult to describe a pain than to feature the boiling point of water. If we imagine metaphorically the signifiers which are available for expression as flashes of light appearing in our consciousness, and the gaps as areas of darkness, then each particular set of combination and selection gives an illusory sense of a continuously enlightened screen — namely, reality. Actually, each discourse lights up and leaves behind dark spaces. Thus, every language is distinguished by the wealth of certain words, and the poverty or shortage of others. The implications are that what is left dim are those parts of experience which are repressed, censored or forgotten. These darkened spaces confront us with the inexpressible. Writers and poets are those who dive into the dark recesses of language, illuminating those hidden gray zones by means of metaphorical substitutions and allegorical devices. These are forms of human transaction for the sake of self-expression. The art of translation has to mind two systems of gaps. Thus it is the DB in its extremity. Translation entails the logic of difference while being punctuated by the imperatives of equivalence and sameness.
All writing is imposed by silence, the listening to our inner voice. “Minding the gaps” of language means awareness of the twilight zone, which cannot be expressed within linguistic signs[16]. It is the moment we are seeking, the proper selection-combination on the metaphor-metonymy axis to produce an eloquent speech act.
The act of self-translation is the work of art where the writer is projected beyond the void of thinking — “the between” — within the boundaries of his native language, into the abyss of a foreign un-promised land. But the pain of translation might reward those who are courageous enough to face the glare of language with the gift of Dasein.[17]
I shall conclude by pointing to writers in self-imposed exile, who shift their writings into a more widely spoken language (such as English, German or French), in protest against their own people. These writers refuse to share their ideas with the majority of people in their homeland. It is not simply being exiled, but the shift to another language which is essentially part of the protest. This is a way to turn regressive drives of anger and frustration into constructive creativity. When exile stops being conceived as a dead end of nostalgia and regression, the shift to another language brings about a new identity in becoming. For the exiled writer there is nothing like a “promised land” — the only clear issue is the promise of rootlessness.
For the exiled writer who chooses to translate his (her) writings into a foreign language, it is not merely leaving a homeland and the familiarity of one’s native tongue. Rather it is a declaration of rejection and condemnation, an act of disapproval. This desertion of a homeland does not ensure a welcome in the new location. In self-translation, the DB is revealed. In order to get closer to the articulation of concrete, private time-located experiences, the writer has to single out meanings from another common language. This is what Heidegger describes as a striving for temporality. It is when the personal is elevated beyond chronology and locations. This art of exiled self-translation faces the ultimate barrier of using a host language to speak out against the political, cultural or ideological state of affairs in the homeland.
I shall end this paper with the odyssey of Hebrew as both target and source language, wandering from the Diaspora to Palestine and then back to Exile. I shall refer to the question of whether Hebrew is a Jewish or an Israeli language.
The renaissance of Hebrew from a formerly holy language into a lively, spoken tongue was an enchanting process accompanied by the frenzied invention of neologisms. Oddly enough, as a fluent spoken language, Hebrew has lost its primary multiversity[18] and become a poor vernacular loaded with slang and saturated with vulgar jargons. The pioneer writers of the 19th century, who translated themselves from European languages into Hebrew, had to deal with a rich but archaic language that was definitely Jewish. The act of translation was a fascinating enterprise of originality and creativity accomplished by inventive minds that carried in their cultural baggage the plenitude of the languages they were born into. Zionism proclaimed Israel as the national home of the Jewish people and hijacked Hebrew, making it into the Israeli national language. Thus Hebrew became the hallmark of the Israeli collective identity; it turned into a symbol of unification replacing the ancient Jewish religious tradition. The perception of Hebrew as an Israeli language creates some ethical problems for an anti-Zionist writer. Now we trace the route of Jewish writers’ rootlessness, but this time it is from Palestine back to Exile. So Israeli Jewish anti-Zionist writers who desert the Hebrew language do so in protest against the atrocities of Zionism.
We learn from history that there is a reciprocal, mutual relationship between nationalism and imperialism. Being a self-imposed exiled writer, leaving behind national identity can be seen as a declaration against nationalism, imperialism, racism or colonialism. Since Zionism is labeled all four, anti-Zionist writers have no choice but to prefer exile. The Zionist polemic which refers to Israel as a Jewish state accepted by the majority of the Israeli population, should be exposed to the world as a racist, nationalistic and colonialist attitude. The only way to do this is in a widely spoken foreign language. The above leads to the suggestion that literature and poetry are preferable to academic or journalistic disputes. Abandoning political, polemic rituals by employing literature and poetry written in foreign languages is a way to open the eyes and ears of the broad and engaged public to an awareness of the open wounds of our era.
[References]
[1] Steiner G. (1975), After Babel, (Oxford University Press)
[2] Kojeve, A. (1993). Introduction to the Reading of Hegel. (London: Cornell Univ. Press)
[3] Eva Hoffman, (1991), Lost in Translation: Life in a New Language, (London: Minerva)
[4] The rider predetermines the kind of relationships and the type of communication we are bound to. In the context of communication, the information imported by a particular linguistic sign is dependent not upon the degree of information it carries, but on what is rejected as noise.
[5] Kojeve, p.9
[6] Kojeve, pp.206–220
[7] The D.B. is a linchpin of Hegelian dialectical logic applying to two logical operators of exclusion and implication. While the subject is condemned to oscillate permanently between an “either” and an “or”. G. Bateson’s theory of the “Double Bind” appears as the inability to transcend either logically, or existentially, the paradoxical injunction the subject receives from his familial and social environment. See: Anthony Wilden, System and Structure, (Tavistock publications, 1984), p.3.
[8] In Hegel’s words the DB can be referred to the irreconcilable dilemma of self-conscious subjectivity, reflecting upon its own subjectivity while being caught up in the dialectic of intersubjectivity.
[9] Ramdin Ron., (1977) Homelessness and the Novel, The Cardiff Lecture (Random House: UK) p.26
[10] Said E., (1988) Nationalism, Colonialism and Literature. In Said’s view the word boundary signifies something different than the word border.
[11] Homi Bhabha., (1983), “Difference, Discrimination and the Discourse of Colonialism” in Francis Barker et al (eds) The Politics of Theory (Colchester University Press)
[12] Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues, ed. Sarah Harasym (London: Routledge 1990) p.93
[13] where cultural images stand for another cultural image
[14] Wilden A., (1987) The Rules are No Games, (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul) p.222
[15] We arbitrarily break continuous analog perceptions such as time and space into digital symbols in order to describe the moment of change. In the digital system, the fragments are distinguished one from the other in distinct gaps such as between the line and dot in Morse code.
[16] The “sublime” points to what Kant defines as “beyond any qualification or comparison.” Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgment (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986) p.94/25
[17] The Heideggerian Dasein which means Being in the world.
[18] Leibnitz referred to Hebrew, Greek and Latin as primary languages.