Read Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Online
Authors: David Bellos
Is That a Fish in Your Ear? (44 page)
Is the effect “equivalent,” after all that work? I’m not aware that my simulation of the game Perec played has had any effect on readers at all. Or else the fan mail is twenty years late.
An even more obvious trouble with the idea of an equivalent effect is that there’s no scale available for measuring equivalence. “Effects,” especially holistic impressions left by extended works, can’t be extracted from people and measured against one another. Nor can any one reader give an independent measure of the effects made on her by two language versions of the same text. That’s because a reading of a text always happens in a language—not in between. The distinction between language A and language B is problematic enough, but one thing is sure: there is no linguistic no-man’s-land in the middle, just as there is no midpoint between Dover and Calais where you can stand on the water and look on French and English from the outside at the same time.
A bilingual reader may have a perfectly trustworthy judgment of whether a translation communicates the same meaning as its source. But can such a person, however smart and subtle, ever reasonably say that this “Baudelaire in German translation” has on her an effect equivalent to the effect that that “Baudelaire poem in French” has? Such an assertion would be radically unverifiable—and in my view it is also a meaningless string of words. “Baudelaire in French” has a whole range of different effects on me at different times, and it surely has an even wider range of effects on the community of readers as a whole. Of which one does the “effect” of a translation aim to be the equivalent?
The truth of literary translation is that translated works are incommensurable with their source, just as literary works are incommensurable with one another, just as individual readings of novels and poems and plays can be “measured” only in discussion with other readers. What translators do is find matches, not equivalences, for the units of which a work is made, in the hope and expectation that their sum will produce a new work that can serve overall as a substitute for the source.
That’s why Douglas Hofstadter’s version of the poem by Clément Marot
given here
of this book is a translation of it. It matches many (but not all) of the semantic, stylistic, and formal features of the source. You may not like it—that’s your affair. But you cannot claim that it is not a translation on the grounds that its overall effect, or one of its subunits, or some specific feature, is not “equivalent” to the source.
given here
of this book is a translation of it. It matches many (but not all) of the semantic, stylistic, and formal features of the source. You may not like it—that’s your affair. But you cannot claim that it is not a translation on the grounds that its overall effect, or one of its subunits, or some specific feature, is not “equivalent” to the source.
A match may be found through all or any of the means that we have for rephrasing something in our own or any other tongue.
What counts as a satisfactory match is a judgment call, and is never fixed. The only certainty is that a match cannot be the same as the thing that it matches.
If you want the same thing, that’s quite all right. You can read the original.
Beating the Bounds: What Translation Is Not
What translators do includes all the things that speakers normally do when speaking their own tongues. But just because translation involves everything of that kind, not everything of that kind is usefully thought of as translation. Beyond its ability to call on all and any among the resources of natural languages, translation has features that are specific to it. What they are and what they have been is what this book tries to say.
Like language itself, translation has no rigidly fixed limits, and similarly fuzzy borderlines can be found in many other arts. A violinist may add his own cadenza, or modify a cadenza written by someone else, and still without question be the performer of Mendelssohn’s Concerto in E. An actor may modify the lines of his role on some occasions and not others and still be performing the same part. In translation, likewise, the point where a reformulation ceases to count as a match for the source is open to negotiation within frameworks that vary widely among different traditions and genres.
In India, where average West European ideas about translation have no roots, stories, myths, legends, and religious texts have moved for millennia between different languages—under the guise of adaptations or retellings of the source. In the West, poets have frequently taken possession of a source by using it as a springboard for a new creation in the same or another tongue. The lyrics Raymond Queneau wrote for a song that was sung by Juliette Gréco—
“Si tu crois, fillette, fillette …”
—have a source in a poem by Pierre de Ronsard and could count as a translation from French into French, just as Robert Lowell’s
Imitations
, explicitly modeled on poems in other tongues, can count as translations, too, without ceasing to be genuinely new things.
“Si tu crois, fillette, fillette …”
—have a source in a poem by Pierre de Ronsard and could count as a translation from French into French, just as Robert Lowell’s
Imitations
, explicitly modeled on poems in other tongues, can count as translations, too, without ceasing to be genuinely new things.
To ask whether what Queneau did with Ronsard is a translation or something else is to ask a question about the meaning of words—specifically, the meaning of the word
translation
. That’s an inquiry that can lead us down many quaint historical, linguistic, and cultural back alleys. In medieval times, for example, a “translation” occurred when the relics of a saint were taken from one shrine to another (the Russian word
retains the same sense). In the ocean, a translation wave is one that transmits forward movement, and in law translation is the transfer of property. No end of other entertaining contexts for the word can be found: the way a ceiling crab walks (
translation latérale
, in French), direct passage from earth to heaven (the translation of Enoch), and so forth. Roman Jakobson, a linguist of great renown, tried to sort out the field by dividing it into three. He distinguished translation between media (“transposition”) from translation between different states of the same language (“intralingual translation”), and both of those from “translation proper”—translation between languages. Jakobson’s attempt at clarification actually introduced a great muddle that has to be tackled before the end of this book.
translation
. That’s an inquiry that can lead us down many quaint historical, linguistic, and cultural back alleys. In medieval times, for example, a “translation” occurred when the relics of a saint were taken from one shrine to another (the Russian word
retains the same sense). In the ocean, a translation wave is one that transmits forward movement, and in law translation is the transfer of property. No end of other entertaining contexts for the word can be found: the way a ceiling crab walks (translation latérale
, in French), direct passage from earth to heaven (the translation of Enoch), and so forth. Roman Jakobson, a linguist of great renown, tried to sort out the field by dividing it into three. He distinguished translation between media (“transposition”) from translation between different states of the same language (“intralingual translation”), and both of those from “translation proper”—translation between languages. Jakobson’s attempt at clarification actually introduced a great muddle that has to be tackled before the end of this book.
Many cultural practices have a broad structure that can be described, like translation, as consisting essentially of “before” and “after.” Knitting, cooking, and the production of automobiles are processes that start with some source material (a ball of wool, edible ingredients, or a range of separately manufactured parts) and end up with something that is radically different (a sweater, a meal, or a car). English is flexible enough to allow us to say without risk of being seriously misunderstood that our partner has translated a few dozen tubes of dried durum wheat into a plate of spaghetti—or to say that by putting on a tuxedo I have translated myself into a swell—but users of English are wise enough to know that such statements have no relevance to translation itself.
In like manner, what a playwright does when he adapts a narrative text for performance onstage has no more relevance to translation than knitting does. Jakobson’s proposal to regard switching media as a form of translation is a red herring, and it’s not clear to me why he should ever have come up with it. But his many readers over the past decades have swallowed the bait and treat stage and film adaptation of novels and other prose as particular instances of translation itself.
Making a movie calls on numerous skills and resources that have no connection with any of the things translators do or use. To call David Lean’s
Doctor Zhivago
a translation of Pasternak’s novel is not only to disregard the specificity of film art but to make such woolly use of the word
translation
as to fit it to refer to any kind of transformation at all. Knitting included.
Doctor Zhivago
a translation of Pasternak’s novel is not only to disregard the specificity of film art but to make such woolly use of the word
translation
as to fit it to refer to any kind of transformation at all. Knitting included.
The popularity of the idea that everything is translation is no doubt a contemporary reflection of an ancient tradition of thought—in fact, an ancient tradition of thought about thought. It was obvious even to the Greeks that if words began as the proper names of things, then the many words that do not name things that can be seen in the world must be the names of mental states. Call them
ideas
. In fact, even for things that can be seen, the word does not name any one of them but only that which allows all of them to be seen as instances of an idea. Thus
tree
is not the proper name of this oak or that aspen, it names the idea of a tree—a mental representation of treeness that allows all actual trees to be recognized as such. In this way of thinking, all linguistic expressions are the external form of thoughts. What we do when we speak to each other is to transmit mental images through a process of translation, thus:
ideas
. In fact, even for things that can be seen, the word does not name any one of them but only that which allows all of them to be seen as instances of an idea. Thus
tree
is not the proper name of this oak or that aspen, it names the idea of a tree—a mental representation of treeness that allows all actual trees to be recognized as such. In this way of thinking, all linguistic expressions are the external form of thoughts. What we do when we speak to each other is to transmit mental images through a process of translation, thus:
This diagram of “telementation,” or thought transmission, is actually taken from Ferdinand de Saussure’s
Course in General Linguistics
, which, despite its profound innovations, firmly maintained the long tradition of treating language as the dress of thought.
Course in General Linguistics
, which, despite its profound innovations, firmly maintained the long tradition of treating language as the dress of thought.
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