The Translator as Mediator of Cultures (Studies in World Language Problems)

The Translator as Mediator of Cultures

Studies in World Language Problems Studies in World Language Problems (WLP) focuses on political, sociological, and economic aspects of language and language use. It is especially concerned with relationships between and among language communities, particularly in international contexts, and in the adaptation, manipulation, and standardization of language for international use. It aims to publish monographs and edited volumes that deal with language policy, language management, and language use in international organizations, multinational enterprises, etc., and theoretical studies on global communication, language interaction, and language conflict. Published in cooperation with the Centre for Research and Documentation on World Language Problems.

General Editor Humphrey Tonkin University of Hartford

Editorial Board E. Annamalai

François Grin

Central Institute of Indian Languages & Yale University

University of Geneva

Richard B. Baldauf, Jr.

Kimura Goro

University of Queensland

Sophia University, Tokyo

Ina Druviete

Timothy Reagan

University of Latvia

Central Connecticut State University

Mark Fettes

Simon Fraser University, Vancouver

Volume 3 The Translator as Mediator of Cultures Edited by Humphrey Tonkin and Maria Esposito Frank

The Translator as Mediator of Cultures Edited by

Humphrey Tonkin Maria Esposito Frank University of Hartford

John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam / Philadelphia

8

TM

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The translator as mediator of cultures / edited by Humphrey Tonkin, Maria Esposito Frank. p. cm. (Studies in World Language Problems, issn 1572-1183 ; v. 3) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Translating and interpreting--Social aspects. 2. Intercultural communication. 3. Language and culture. 4. Multiculturalism. I. Tonkin, Humphrey. II. Frank, Maria Esposito. P306.97.S63.T73   2010 418’.02--dc22 2010013265 isbn 978 90 272 2834 5 (Hb ; alk. paper) isbn 978 90 272 8805 9 (Eb)

© 2010 – John Benjamins B.V. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. John Benjamins Publishing Co. · P.O. Box 36224 · 1020 me Amsterdam · The Netherlands John Benjamins North America · P.O. Box 27519 · Philadelphia pa 19118-0519 · usa

Table of contents Preface introduction Between temples and templates: History’s claims on the translator Probal Dasgupta

vii

1

part 1.  Translation and reconciliation chapter 1 Translation as reconciliation: A conversation about politics, translation, and multilingualism in South Africa Antjie Krog, Rosalind C. Morris, and Humphrey Tonkin chapter 2 Interpreting at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY): Linguistic and cultural challenges Nancy Schweda Nicholson

17

37

chapter 3 Translating and interpreting sign language: Mediating the DEAF-WORLD 53 Timothy Reagan chapter 4 Translators in a global community Jonathan Pool

73

part 2.  Translation and negotiation chapter 5 The treason of translation? Bilingualism, linguistic borders and identity John Edwards

89



The Translator as Mediator of Cultures

chapter 6 The poetics of experience: Toward a pragmatic understanding of experience, practice, and translation Vincent Colapietro

107

part 3.  Translation and the interpretation of texts chapter 7 Translation and the rediscovery of the multinational Central European Thomas Cooper chapter 8 Transcriação / Transcreation: The Brazilian concrete poets and translation K. David Jackson chapter 9 Expression and translation of philosophy: Giorgio Colli, a master of time Marie-José Tramuta

127

139

161

chapter 10 The semantics of invention: Translation into Esperanto Humphrey Tonkin

169

Contributors

191

Index

195

Preface What Abram de Swaan (2001) has famously called the world language system has grown increasingly complex in recent years as everyday contacts between people across the world have grown ever more intense. The second half of the twentieth century was characterized by the decline of empire, as the process of decolonization changed the face of international relations fundamentally, bringing new populations to the international negotiating table, creating (or coinciding with) massive movement of people from country to country, changing the shape and intensity of local conflicts, and, in a final paroxysm, bringing the east-west division between the forces of capitalism and those of socialism to an end. The world was freed for what we have come to call globalization, in which economic networks increasingly crossed borders, aided by advances in technology, and conventional indicators of political power seemed to apply less and less. Even as these changes were occurring, assumptions about the nature of the disciplines were changing too. Culturally-based fields like comparative literature, history and anthropology were forced to reinvent themselves to take into account a world no longer centered on Europe, no longer focused on the printed text, and no longer capable – in the midst of massive consumption, increasing cultural homogenization, and huge rises in population – of holding its parts in isolation from one another. As for theories and practices of translation, a plethora of publications attests to an intensified interest and a nuanced understanding of the field today. This current boom signals a shift comparable in import, one could say, to the one Renaissance culture produced thanks to an acute philological sensitivity and historical perspective that led to, among other things, the end of the ad verbum method and the introduction of ad sententia methods of rendering Greek texts into Latin, and Latin texts into the vernacular. This momentous change presupposed, as James Hankins (2003) has pointed out, a more general shift in the underlying conception of language itself, which reveals a newly achieved awareness of the historicity of language. Indeed, a modern approach to language, no longer seen as an isolated, natural or atemporal phenomenon, undergirds the first Renaissance treatise on translation theory, Leonardo Bruni’s De recta interpretatione (1424–26), Valla’s politically and religiously consequential application of textual and historical criticism, and Erasmus’ biblical retranslations. As Richard Waswo (1987) sees it, among the greatest discoveries of the Age of the Renaissance was an intellectual one: the

 The Translator as Mediator of Cultures

discovery of the constitutive nature of language. For the most insightful humanists of the time language did not simply describe or reflect the world but expanded and explained it. Indeed, the actual world these humanists were living in was itself expanding (backwards in time to the rediscovery and re-appropriation of a multifarious Graeco-Roman legacy, and outwards as Europe discovered and appropriated a larger world), thereby engendering a sort of cosmopolitanism, which, at least culturally, contained the seeds of our contemporary global outlook. In today’s world, translation studies and their rapid recent expansion can be seen as a product of work in cultural studies and literary theory, but also in policy studies and political theory. They have taken on a certain priority because the matter of language, locally, nationally, globally, has assumed a new urgency. Holding this world together, or keeping it apart, is language. At the boundaries of languages are the translators – mediators of cultures, enablers, but also gatekeepers. They are what we might call professional or committed bilinguals. Behind them stand what Milton and Bandia (2009) call the “agents” of translation – those individuals and organizations who set the terms of the processes of translation and in some sense determine the forms that linguistic traffic will take. While English may be growing in strength and authority as a world lingua franca, and while the demise of smaller languages has reached epidemic proportions, the number of written languages in the world is steady or growing, and the number of languages with some official standing at the national or regional level has expanded enormously over the past fifty years as a result of decolonization and also of the emergence of an era of cheap internet connections and new electronic publishing opportunities. Their very variety may contribute to their decline as they compete with more powerful international idioms. Indeed, the question that language policy makers must face today is above all the management of this vast array of competing linguistic channels. If the management of world affairs demands communication, the maintenance of human identities demands variety. How can we give the cultures of the world enough room to breathe, while working together to deal with the world’s problems? How can we preserve linguistic difference without hindering linguistic communication? Is it even possible? While the present volume is not intended to be prescriptive, but rather descriptive, it is questions such as these that lie behind it. In it the reader will find specific, but by no means confined, instances of translating challenges and potentialities. Its genesis was a conference held at the University of Hartford in 2006 entitled “The Translator as Mediator” where translation issues concerning postcolonial and “post-missionary” language attitudes and policies, border identity, transcreation, betweenness, technological mediations and futuristic renditions, international crime and law, and literary translation were discussed in an interdisciplinary context.



Preface 

Several of the papers began as contributions to the conference, though most have undergone significant changes since then; others, including the extended conversation with Antjie Krog, have been added to supplement and expand them. Some (Cooper, Jackson, Tramuta, Tonkin) deal directly with the textual exchange of cultural values and ideas through literature and philosophy; others (Edwards, Colapietro) examine the complexities and pitfalls of the translation process while Dasgupta provides us in his introduction with a historical “template” for thinking about the nature of translation itself. Still others deal with the practical processes of interpretation and translation (Nicholson, Reagan), while Pool imagines a posttechnologist world fundamentally different from the here-and-now. Krog confronts the direct realities of living in a multilingual and linguistically highly competitive environment, in which the relative standing of languages is undergoing rapid shift. In truth, the South African situation, with its processes of linguistic inclusion and exclusion, is a microcosm of the worldwide linguistic contest. Increasingly, translators seem to be the guardians and arbiters of many of these linguistic interactions – essential figures in the preservation of multilingualism, and also (as Venuti 1995 describes them) the invisible conveyors of cultural values from language to language. Our first section deals with the practicalities of translation in the world of today and tomorrow. We begin the section with Antjie Krog’s conversation with Rosalind Morris and Humphrey Tonkin both because of its scope and because it provides us with a unifying theme – that of reconciliation. Our second section, which contains the volume’s most wide-ranging essays on the theory of translation, considers the role of the translator as negotiator. The final section addresses the interpretation and exchange of texts. The three – reconciliation, negotiation, textual exchange – together sum up the mediating role that the translator must strive to provide in today’s fractured and fractious world. We are grateful to the many people who had a share in bringing this volume to completion. We are particularly grateful to Marcia Moen, of the University of Hartford, who helped organize the conference, and to the Esperantic Studies Foundation, which helped fund it. Maria Esposito Frank Humphrey Tonkin



The Translator as Mediator of Cultures

References de Swaan, Abram. 2001. Words of the World: The Global Language System. Cambridge: Polity Press. Hankins, James. 2003. Humanism and Platonism in the Italian Renaissance. Vol. 1. Roma: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura. Milton, John & Paul Bandia, ed. 2009. Agents of Translation. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Venuti, Lawrence. 2008. The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation. 2nd edition. London & New York: Routledge. Waswo, Richard. 1987. Language and Meaning in the Renaissance. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

introduction

Between temples and templates History’s claims on the translator Probal Dasgupta The present articulation of history’s claims on translation theory is built around four propositions: (a) The sacred temple, in the ancient first wave of the activity, set up one broadly identifiable type of translation enterprise; (b) The scientific template, in the modern second wave, associated itself with a second type; (c) These enterprises have a missionary element in common that should elicit resistance on our part; (d) The legacy of these missionary enterprises themselves can be recycled, in a swords-to-plowshares transformation, if we post-missionary translators agree to play these enterprises off against each other as we reconfigure the field. The present exposition elaborates these propositions in terms drawn from the substantivist research program in linguistics and cognitive science.

As translation comes of age, history catches up with it, whereupon self-conscious translators begin to respond to history’s claims on them. This is not to say that a single consensual take on translation theory can be expected to emerge from such a process. The present articulation of history’s claims on translation theory is built around four propositions: (a) The sacred temple, in the ancient first wave of the activity, set up one broadly identifiable type of translation enterprise; (b) The scientific template, in the modern second wave, associated itself with a second type; (c) These enterprises have a missionary element in common that should elicit resistance on our part; (d) The legacy of these missionary enterprises themselves can be recycled, in a swords-to-plowshares transformation, if we post-missionary translators agree to play these enterprises off against each other as we reconfigure the field. The present exposition elaborates these propositions in terms drawn from the substantivist research program in linguistics and cognitive science. When substantivism was first introduced – in a translation-theoretical context – it came with



Probal Dasgupta

a practical unpacking attached, a passage that we may wish to revisit first to get clued in. What I then wrote, twenty years ago, was: It is important to see that no translator can hope to passively ‘consume’ a supposed ‘technique’ of substantivist translation. Substantivism is a mode of self-consciousness about the nature of the task. The simplest way to understand what we are suggesting for the practice of translation is to return to the counter-image of the Bible translator whose practice, with its sophisticated successors, embodies [the default version of the traditional formalistic approach to translation]. We have argued that the typical missionary translates the Bible with the hope of conveying the same original divine message in simply another mortal medium; the outcome is that he deifies, and reifies, certain properties of the source language text which become wooden and parodic in his target language output. This reflects the fact that he believes languages are equidistant from the divine Logos and that, consequently, he thinks he can translate without registering in the product itself the problematicity of the act of translating. Against the background of this counterimage, we are trying to see, and to live by, a new image of the non-converting translator. This missionless worker is not trying to convert the heathens to some true faith by forcing the forms of their language into the ideally determinate text of some already valorized Word, but is instead trying out – without submission to alien imposition but also without that sanctimonious ‘resistance’ whose violence merely codifies another passive response to an alien initiative – viable options in the uncharted area where the target language can represent to itself, reflexively and critically, the impressions that the source language text formally appears to make on the ideal source-language-listener figures that the text throws up and lets drop as it wends its polyglossic way. At one level, this can mean that our ideal translator produces work that emphasizes its lack of innocence, stresses the unavailability of pure or transparent equivalences; but that mode of work, the heroic or violent/ workaholic enterprise of modernism and its “post”-continuations, is only one of the options; quieter methods are possible which keep the traces of heroic problematicity hidden in the new text, while leaving them visible to the complicit, critical reader. (Dasgupta 1989: 39–40)

Since 1989, it has proved possible to elaborate substantivism as a research program in linguistics and cognitive science (the following exemplify this program: Abel 1998; Dasgupta 1993; Dasgupta, Ford & Singh 2000; Dasgupta & R. Ghosh 2007; S. Ghosh 2002; Ravanam 2002). What distinguishes substantivist analysis from the formalist mainstream in linguistics may be summarized as follows. The prevalent formalist approach focuses on grammatical rules as the primes of rigorous characterization of language. Formalism maximizes the economy of grammatical rule formulations. All other methodological decisions flow from the primacy of the rule of grammar. Formalist methodology aggregates rules to establish as unitary a system as possible.



Between temples and templates

In contrast, the substantivist approach regards the cycle from sentence composition through speaking, hearing, and understanding to fresh composition as the rich substantive domain of grammatical inquiry embedded in the context of discourse. It seeks a maximally transparent and economical account of this cycle within which rules of grammar and other descriptive devices are to be seriously conceptualized, going beyond abbreviations that may work at a first approximation level but are not sustainable. Substantivist methodology appeals to cross-system translation and seeks to associate each formal object with several semiotic systems. While contemporary elaborations of substantivism have launched a relatively new enterprise, the twin imperatives – the formalist imperative of writing a tight grammar and the substantivist imperative of providing a coherent account of discourse – were noticed when serious characterizations of language phenomena were formulated for the first time, in ancient India. Around the time that Panini’s grammar of Sanskrit was codified, Vyadi (a.k.a. Dakshayana) wrote a major commentary on it – the Samgraha. This text has not come down to us, but references to it allow us to reconstruct its scope (Subrahmanyam 1999: 21). Bhartrihari’s much later work Vaakyapadiiya rearticulates and codifies the project initiated in Dakshayana’s early substantivist supplement to Panini’s formalistic grammar statements. The role of Bhartrihari’s work as the classical basis for substantivism was stressed in Dasgupta 1989. In the context of the generative re-run and amplification of the ancient Indian grammatical research program in our times, kickstarting substantivist research today involves bridge-building between grammatical theory and the study of the use of language. We can find resources for such bridgebuilding in Bhartrihari’s reconfiguration of Panini’s apparatus – a point elaborated in Dasgupta 2008. In the context of translation studies, what becomes crucial is the multiple contextualization imperative that drives substantivist inquiry. In the present intervention it is argued that we can unsettle the default contextualization of translation in the modern developmentalist missionary enterprise by re-actualizing its classical precursors. Such unsettling serves the cause of cultural and linguistic dehegemonization. Before we work this out more fully, a brief initial elaboration of this comment is called for. We are taking the position that most current approaches to cultural studies (including translation studies) tend to be formalistic, in the sense of accepting default perspectives – dichotomizing the unity-seeking sciences of nature and the diversity-cherishing studies of culture, and tacitly allowing a western cultural default to position a particular view of ‘nature’ as a universal or culture-free view. Formalistic views, we suggest, serve a center-driven socio-economic hegemony. This hegemony projects the default culture as if it were a culture-free center from which other views, taken to be ‘culturally specified,’ diverge – just as male hegemony (still prevalent in so many enterprises even in our supposedly post-sexist





Probal Dasgupta

times) projects itself as the default condition and women as marked. The strategy is to manage diversity by co-opting peripheral actors into such a system. These actors are given the task of agreeing to disagree, and thus to represent difference. The point of departure for substantivism is this initially available formalistic approach. That substantivism becomes possible at all is due to the fortunate fact that formalism is being placed under interrogation – under what we see as in effect substantive interrogation – by dissident actors dissatisfied with the system’s tokenism made available in the standard multiculturalisms of a Canada or an EU. It is becoming increasingly clear that these rainbow menus silently install at the center of the menu an English default that manages perceptions and controls policy and documentation. Such English-centered menus might have made sense, in terms of optimizing traffic flow or whatever, if human nature turned out to have a set of ‘natural defaults’ associated with it that could plausibly be represented in a particular language like English. But dissident actors reject the view that there exist absolute, universal natural human inclinations. They request registered specifications of which preferences x, y, z are natural for which persons p, q, r in what contexts a, b, c. This question of naturalness-for and naturalness-in theoretically and methodologically leads to a strategy of tracking concretely experienced differences as one travels through times, places, and contexts. In political practice, such tracking will have to translate into a serious, non-centered multiculturalism. Note that there are bound to be attempts to smuggle defaults back in – for instance, by installing some a priori method that would try to predigest all that inquirers engaged in real or imaginary cross-boundary travel can possibly encounter. For some comments addressing one version of that ‘baggageless travel’ proposal, see Dasgupta (1998). Substantivism refuses to derive one experience from another and thus abjures the practice of installing defaults and acknowledging centers. Thus, the fundamental maneuver of substantivist inquiry is that of translating across views and systems to match things up and identify alignments that often harbor heterogeneity. Such cross-formal, substantive comments express concretely experienced generalizations. These, unlike abstract and center-focused formalizations of generality, do not theoretically and politically subordinate peripheral cases to principles and exemplars populating a center. The substantivist perspective in translation studies develops a particular take on the interplay between what we shall describe as two major moments in the history of translation. The moment of the temple once established a classical basis for the choice of translatable texts and for the legitimation of what shall count as authentic translations. What the moment of the template has proposed, a proposal coterminous with modernity, is a recasting of rationality in terms of a universal nation-state model.



Between temples and templates

This recasting so completely transforms the nature of written texts that it becomes a serious, urgent, and fraught enterprise to spell out this radical transformation for our self-understanding and to come to terms with where we, where our various subject positions, define and keep redefining our bearings in relation to rationality. We do all this (re)defining precisely in the context of our resistance to some of the forces at work in the trajectory of modernity, a resistance partly scripted into the trajectory itself, but never entirely co-opted. We may usefully focus on certain key phenomena in order to get an initial grip on what is at stake. Our contextualization in terms of these two moments – what we shall call our ‘bicontextual perspective,’ to compress this for future reference – highlights the different positioning of text canonization forces at work within the two dispensations. Note that we are speaking not just of moments in the sense of temporal instants, but of moments in the sense of dynamic impulsions in a constellation of mutually relevant forces. Notice too that the current visualization focuses only on a few concrete instances of a vast volume of traffic and thus resorts to some idealization. There is no exhaustiveness claim embedded in this portrayal; all forms of supplementation and fleshing out are welcome. The moment of the temple finds in the blinding illumination of certain sacred or otherwise majestic texts a compelling basis both for choosing to translate them and for deciding how to evaluate particular translations as authentic. The overwhelmingly significant texts, consecrated at the point of origin of their canonicity, are reconsecrated in the translation. If a translation seems luminous – or numinous – to those most crucially concerned, no independent criteria are invoked to evaluate its legitimacy or authenticity. In sharp contrast – a contrast that one inevitably stylizes and exaggerates in this formulation, if we may repeat our point about the consequences of expository idealization – the moment of the template appeals to critically scrutinized knowledge and systematic accuracy as validation criteria. It does this both at the point of choosing translatable texts and at the level of evaluating translations. A first approximation account of the moment of the template, in contrast to the temple’s vision of translation as reconsecration, can choose to focus on translation as the revalidation – under target language community scrutiny – of textual norms initially established under the source community’s critical gaze. On such a view both communities are assumed to be sites of the circulation of publications enabling critical discourse and appropriate action by civil society. But such a first approximation tends to accept too uncritical a portrait of the putatively open and ubiquitous public space. The same first approximation lets us get away with a hasty description of the onset of modernity in terms of the nationstate. It then sells us the assumption that in this globalized day and age those





Probal Dasgupta

national sovereignties have to move over, and in fact are right now giving way to a new dispensation. If we take that assumption at all seriously, we are obliged to wonder where this leaves translation studies or comparative literature. For surely, we reason, whatever games the quintessential nation-state machine of standard modern vintage was playing with us translators to keep its regime going must have taken some sort of beating when we were not paying attention, right? The same process has befallen everything else that we thought we understood and that we seem to have sleepwalked away from. So, even in our vagueness, we find all this unsurprising, as we surrender to yet another first approximation. The bicontextual perspective does not force such vagueness on us. It certainly does not endorse the slide from the first approximation into a series of semi-reflective responses. A knowledge-oriented moment of the template asks the translator to agree to perform matching operations that appeal to comparable templates – matching the translated text against the formal and conceptual templates of the original; matching the way the new text is circulated among new community readers against the template of the way the first version reached its readership; and so on. These protocols of critical scrutiny, in such a regime of text reproduction across language sovereignty boundaries, imply a telos of text production that envisages export and reproducibility options under the aegis of universalizable generic norms. The potential for template matching becomes a systemic imperative that begins to co-define the textual genres themselves at the site of production of the original texts. This is not to say that the appeal to knowledge indiscriminately makes all texts count as translation-worthy or even translatable. The moment of the template institutes principles of selection that massively realign, but do not replace, the classical moment’s norms of textual excellence and its criteria for deciding what to translate. New and old canonization processes interact, in ways we need to map, and feed into a much expanded translation enterprise. This enterprise not only manages inter-state relations in an era of linguistically distinct nation-states. It also responds to a commercial regime that proliferates documents calling for technical and functional translation driven by utility rather than religious, aesthetic, or intellectual excellence. Somewhere in this high volume traffic, the time scales begin to configure separately and drift apart. The arcade of short-term wares come into a certain forefront that redefines the archives of the state and the industrial-commercial system as a stable, long-term background, on which the arcade’s meanings depend, but whose function as the site of meaning production the arcade begins to displace – in a



Between temples and templates

cultural power struggle whose consequences for translation studies we cannot afford to explore here without getting seriously sidetracked. Our strategy in the present intervention is to note, but to prescind from, the archive/ arcade duality within the moment of the template. We focus on the fact that the moment of the template sets up a translation apparatus as a public service system, as one systemic constituent of the public space. For our immediate purposes we simply take the stand that running such a public system involves both archive level and arcade level activities. To the extent that translation counts as an automatically available service in the public sphere, the moment of the template structurally provides for a universal translibrary of theoretically producible translations of all valid texts. (If any reader can demonstrate that Borges [1970], visualizing his Library of Babel, did not have such a translibrary niched in his vision, we have some further translation problems to surmount.) The template turns serious translation into a revalidation of the text as writable, whereas at the moment of the temple the function of serious translation was to reconsecrate the text as significant. In this formulation we speak of “serious” translation to register a certain continuity between the two moments at the level of identifying texts that are ‘excellent’ and therefore deserve to be translated. What becomes fascinating when we take a closer look is the radical transformation that precisely this continuity renders visible, as a mutation in attributions of excellence. It is not unnatural or inappropriate to begin with the obvious thought that translation was once wedded to faith and later shifted its centre of gravity to ratiocination, the thought encoded in our terms Temple and Template. In order to spare you a redundant guessing exercise, we will cut to the chase and tell you at once that, at the level of that simplified, schematic view of the macroscopic drift, our argument highlights a certain return of the repressed. We take the position that initially the expansion of reason, of science, of technology does imply a universal regime of translation as revalidation of intellectually worthy records. But the focus then shifts from the truth to our ways of establishing and sustaining communities of beholders of sharable truths – in other words, to our cultures, defined in terms of matters of faith and of latter-day reinventions of faith. The skeletal schema of our argument as we have just presented it, however, is neither what we are really proposing, nor a sustainable view, nor even pertinent to translation studies. If you want to get from this abstract headline to a minimally usable concrete characterization of our proposal, what you need to watch is the history of translation’s target languages. Expository compulsions limit the examples we can look at. The moment of the temple translates major texts into big languages – from Greek and Hebrew into Latin, for instance, or from Pali into Tibetan and Chinese. There is some sponsorship even at that moment for a trickle of translation into





Probal Dasgupta

small languages in cases like the Asokan inscriptions, communicating majesty and transmitting his majesty the emperor Asoka’s instructions and exhortations to the local level subject populations. When the wheel of history turns to make popular instruction an important preoccupation, that trickle turns into a flood. At that turn of the wheel, Mediaeval Europe translates the Bible into its protonational vernaculars. Mediaeval India translates the Ramayana and the Mahabharata into its incipient public languages, giving these epics through the same process the status of source texts of Hindu religious practices, whose original Vedic scriptures remain a priestly possession (thematically sidelined, though ritually uncontested, by the popular religious culture built around the newly salient epics). This process empowers the vernaculars as vehicles of religious life but not as sites of consecration. It makes it possible to pose the question to which revalidation is the dominant modern answer. Translation’s target language communities, the incipient modern discursive communities, are the site of this late mediaeval epistemic mutation – a point made at some length in Dasgupta 1993 for the South Asian case of this mutation involving bhakti, Sufism, a musical realignment, and a paradigm shift in logical theorizing in Sanskrit. But it would be an error to conclude that epistemic events in the vernaculars, including serious translation into them, get to call the shots in that late mediaeval process that forms part of the moment of the temple but already begins to set the stage for the moment of the template. Latin in Europe and Sanskrit in India continue to set the terms of systematic intellectual articulation. It is not just a matter of scientific work right up to Newton’s Principia being written in Latin. Even at such a turning point as the late eighteenth century translation of Kalidasa’s play Shakuntala into English by William Jones, Latin serves as the reference language. Jones knew little Sanskrit, and found Kalidasa’s sentences hard to construe. Indian scholars helping him glossed each word for him. On this basis he produced a word for word rendering in Latin, a language for which his skills of construing and parsing were not a problem. This interlinear Latin version literally underwrote the iconic English translation by Jones. That is an example of how crucial Latin remained even in the late eighteenth century. In Asia, Indian scholars continued to produce treatises in their disciplines in Sanskrit and in Arabic well into the eighteenth century. An adequate account needs to take on board not just this fact about Asia, but the role of Latin in western discursive practices. The willingness to call new political formations ‘empires’ was not the only bit of the Roman legacy that drove the western project of ‘modern’ imperialism. Our tentative hypothesis is that the master languages retained control over the codes, while a newly salient category of circulables began to flourish in the subject languages. For a late medieval or early modern European, translating into the master language amounted to connecting a text with the reference discourses and



Between temples and templates

calibrating it with the intellectual systematization. Vernacular European languages, with a flourishing traffic of circulables, had by then arranged an investment of the communities’ attention in these circulables. But the intellectual memory or storage system of the supracommunity stayed wedded to the master language, despite the tattered state of its classical vestments of power. The cathexes of attention and memory had to go through a major realignment when the template’s encyclopedic enterprise took off in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The central thesis of our argument is that today the ground is shifting beneath our feet again, as we reconfigure our dealings with the template – and with the temple. Just how does today’s reconfiguration involve revisiting the major shifts that inaugurated the moment of the template? To approach an answer, one must first itemize those shifts. Our “moment of the template” visualization redescribes the Enlightenment as proposing a transfer of epistemic authority from the temple-sponsored monarch – endowed with powers of a priori divine judgment – to a republic whose citizens judge on the rational basis of a procedure of aggregating facts (where pertinent) and opinions (where facts fail) and running them all through a template. In our conception, this template may look like an innocent surface comparison procedure, but in reality it comes with an encyclopedia attached that supplies its terms of reference. All the fine print of the enlightenment is in this encyclopedia, by which we mean not the work by Diderot that you and I have agreed to not keep republishing and rereading, but the notional encyclopedic foundation of all modern writables – at the level at which serious translation throughout the modern period has amounted to the revalidation of a document as indeed a writable. On our reading, this notional encyclopedia works with a nature-culture bifurcation – from Vico to Rousseau, if one wants a formulaic abbreviation – that has consequences for the design of the conceptual network of encyclopedic knowledge. Natural science entries in the encyclopedia in principle erase the history whereby scientific work arrives at what is taken to be the state of the art on each issue. For the point is to portray nature; and the truth of a portrait is independent of the drafting process that led to the final valid depiction. Cultural entries in principle point up all history, including the history of the reflection that has led to a particular metacultural characterization of a cultural fact. For the point is to portray culture; and culture in its essence is “man-made” and inextricably involves the history of “man” as a design principle. One conceptually and politically striking characteristic of these principles that many observers have noticed is that they build the European expansion project into the epistemic structure of the Enlightenment. For the principles imply that culture is supposed to further bifurcate into the central cultures of the meritorious intellectual masters of the project and the peripheral cultures of the lowly subject





Probal Dasgupta

populations. The latter, on this take, initially get colonized but are later co-opted into the cleaned-up post-imperial act of a putatively inclusive planetary post-enlightenment dispensation. We omit the obvious glosses to these terms, abundantly available in the current literature. Another feature of these principles that seems to have received little attention is the slippage between the simple primes of the scientific axiomatic systems that must underpin the natural entries of the encyclopedia and the easy elementary precepts that the encyclopedia operates with. For the encyclopedia, as a popular pedagogic apparatus, must translate the macro-social memory’s archival writables into the micro-social attention milieu’s arcade of circulables – a translation process that treats the elementary precepts as pedagogic units. In other words, the axiomatic systems sponsor a decomposition of complex concepts into the simple primes on which they are conceptually based; but the pedagogy operates with an unpacking of difficult material for advanced learners into easy units of early learning. Many pedagogic systems work with the attractive notion that simple primes and easy units of learning can converge on a common starting point for pedagogic packages and for axiomatizations. The Enlightenment in its early days depended for its moral and intellectual credibility on this convergence. But we of the late centuries of the Enlightenment know from experience that the simples and the easies diverge fairly quickly as a pedagogy or an axiomatization develops. Thus the populist picture of an enlightenment based on a grass-roots constituency keeping the despotic power of the political or intellectual elite under the constant control of the public is not sustainable. The elite reinvents itself not just through micro-political mechanisms that work in every society, but by way of working out a logical structural imperative of the enlightenment process itself. The point is not just that an intellectual structure emerges in the background, and with it an elite as a social carrier of this structure. Our point here is that a certain conceptual and linguistic centralization takes place that counterpoints the diversification through which the European expansion process plays out. Through this conceptual and linguistic centralization, an English emerges as the background cognitive absolute pulling the templates together and reinstating the Enlightenment’s inaugural logic that once pitted the writables against the circulables. Today’s English, in this fashion, takes the place of what two hundred years ago was called Latin. By the same token, English occupies the polar position of an official intellectual codifying device against whose bureaucracy the expressive specificity of circulables in such newly regionalized languages as a French or a German or an Italian must cast itself in a reinvented role, responding to this demotion from very recent intellectual sovereignty to a state of intellectual disenfranchisement. When we note that translation into, and original literary production in, the reinvented interregional language Esperanto has become, today, a site where we



Between temples and templates

are able to rearticulate subject positions in this rapidly reconfigured cultural space, we initiate one thread of discussion (and of interpretation of actions) that pertains to the bicontextual perspective and is likely to lead to contributions that other perspectives also will find useful. If we broach the thematics of possessive culturalism – a version of possessive individualism writ large – and inquire if a transition towards a non-possessive public space in cultural politics can emerge through an active reconsideration of some elements of the bicontextual articulation of current dynamics, there again a whole range of potential interventions opens up, perhaps in dialogue with substantivist linguistics. We mention that line of inquiry, again, only to point out yet another thematization that the bicontextual perspective makes available. For a formulation extremely close to the present remarks where those leads are pursued, see Dasgupta (2002), where Esperanto was called a “transcode.” The relation between codification and cultural possession, not pursued there, would obviously become the starting point of any serious inquiry on these matters, if we keep the goal of a non-possessive public space in view, as suggested in Dasgupta (2004), apologies for yet another self-reference, an obvious collapse of the serious archive into the advertising arcade. Our point in this intervention is not to rehearse or even to extend those older explorations, but to note the urgent necessity of some theoretical groundwork that helps us make sense of our travails today as translators trying to come to terms with history’s claims on us. As English, in the role of a Latin reincarnated, begins to host an intellectual hijack of the global public space, occupying completely the scientific space in the template, we find that the aesthetic and moral space in the template, where culture had once been niched (recall the discussion, above, of the ahistoricity of the natural and the emphatic historicity of the cultural as these sectors of the enlightenment enterprise were co-defined), stops being available to English. Practices that cultivate a growing realization that this is so gravitate towards a new deployment of the regional languages of the world for the new purpose of reconnecting the social milieux of moral and aesthetic agents. English has come to represent a theoretical, intellectual universality that disconnects, thus creating a counterpoint space for regional languages as reconnectors in this sense. This space becomes politically important as we come to see reconnection as a resource that democracy requires and as we start visualizing ourselves, translators, as providers of this resource. It is of course possible, and rather common, for us to be seen as servants of the bureaucracies, since such a lot of our work falls under the utility rubric. But the translation of creative writing helps serious self-fashioning and sustains those interpersonal milieux in which such matters as the social entitlements of very young children become practically, and politically, relevant. (Perhaps we are taking too much for granted in these remarks; we may need to point out





Probal Dasgupta

explicitly that the recent Indian enterprise of trying to get the republic to deliver educational and health care services to the very young has found it necessary to mobilize public opinion and has been looking for allied arguments in the “cultural” domain so that this mobilization does not depend on commodity economics alone, but continues to expand the reach of the political.) Does any conclusion emerge from this line of reasoning? Substantivism ‘does not give any prizes,’ as Wittgenstein once said about philosophy as a whole. One conclusion – rather than the unattainable ‘the’ conclusion – runs as follows. The languages newly disenfranchised under this global hegemony of English, as well as the iconically powerless Esperanto clearing-house of the traffic of circulables, begin to make better sense on a translation studies map when we ask why books by J. K. Rowling or Dan Brown are translated into Italian or Finnish. The locus of such translation lies in the global system’s inability to choose between the capitalism of comfort, which recognizes one’s emotional and connective entitlements, and the industrial logic of English. To the extent that the customer measures up to the global system’s championship norms and is able to get by effortlessly in English at every level, it would make sense for translations from English into regional languages to stop. Obviously it does not, because in their lighter moments people would rather take the help they can get. It helps when you can get your light reading in a language you are comfortable with, such as your mother tongue, in which you feel connected to your significant others and can make sense of narratives about such mutual significance in microcommunities. Translation is also assistance. At the level at which solidarity and milieu connectedness constitute the context in which mutual aid makes sense, the principles of human cooperation that underwrite the use of language (if we believe the theories of conversation standard in the pragmatics literature) need to redefine their bearings in a politics of help, of sustenance. Such a politics cannot, epistemologically or morally, afford to begin with the thematics of power, the thematics of a sanitized form of oppression that you are willing to tame into a trouble-free object of polite, ‘cooperative’ discourse. We have spent far too much energy asking for theories that will provide sustainability at the level of the biological or multilingual environment but will deliver this in total disconnection from human practices of sustaining vulnerable others. Once we begin to see that, newly disenfranchised, the non-English languages that have an Enlightenment history of scientific and political articulation can perform new labor in the sustenance and reconnection domain, and that translators who deal with these languages must respond in this context to a specifically sustenance-inflected claim of history at every step of their work, our take on rationality begins to change in our practice.



Between temples and templates

In the terms that the present intervention throws up for our attention – once English, playing the part of a Latin reincarnate, takes over the template as completely as it plans to, this development will make space for the use of other languages for the work of an equally completely reinvented temple. I would thus argue that instead of pushing for more use of Norwegian or Slovak or Catalan for primary scientific publication, activists need to let English “do its worst” in the science publication domain, and to maximize the use of regional languages in the enterprise of pedagogy, dissemination, public discussion, and assistance. The goal directing such activism is to build new continuities between translation, pedagogy, and assistance in a context focused on getting communities and other stakeholders to recognize the importance of enforceable human rights and entitlements. Notice how this wild reconfiguration turns everything from the moment of the temple on its head. Back then, the central language Latin was in charge of the temple, and local languages handled the little interpersonal comparisons and transactions in the rational terms of people’s templates. These did not count for much, since faith outweighed empirical levels of reasoning in the classical episteme. Today, English is central because it is in charge of the template, and it is the peripheral languages where a new temple begins to find new homes. What new temple? The temple that has to do with the fundamental human desire to be of service to other humans, heart to heart, that continues an authentic religious impulse entirely independent of choosing to believe in specific cosmogonies or theologies. Systems that proposed to compel people to provide necessary services – based on the state or on big money – have turned out not to know how to provide them. It turns out that compulsion and its currently favored replacement, incentives, do not in fact deliver. People respond to the urgent needs of others only when they feel like responding. The issue therefore is how to elicit the responses of cooperation. Eliciting responses is a literary question, and often one that only the ‘translator’ can deal with – in the broadened sense of ‘translation’ that we are suggesting peripheral language activists today have to work to actualize. We may be on the brink of a period of history that gives translators a dizzying degree of theoretical importance. If this turns out indeed to be so, the best our well-wishers can do is pray that we may find out, before it is too late, how we can all cope with the tasks set for us by history. You will forgive us for this talk of prayer if it offends your secular ear, but of course the discourse of prayer and forgiveness becomes an aesthetic necessity at the close of these remarks, if we are to begin to make sense of the dialectic of the scientific core of the template and the religious core of the temple at the juncture of the template’s cultural commitments.





Probal Dasgupta

References Abel, Rekha. 1998. “Diglossia as a Linguistic Reality”. Yearbook of South Asian Languages and Linguistics 1998 ed. by Rajendra Singh, 83–103. New Delhi, Thousand Oaks & London: Sage. Borges, Jorge Luis. 1970. “The Library of Babel”. Labyrinths, 78–86. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Dasgupta, Probal. 1989. “Outgrowing Quine: Towards Substantivism in the Theory of Translation”. International Journal of Translation 1:2.13–41. Dasgupta, Probal. 1993. The Otherness of English: India’s Auntie Tongue Syndrome. New Delhi, Thousand Oaks & London: Sage. Dasgupta, Probal. 1998. “Turning Baggageless Travel into an Absolute: Some Difficulties”. Studies in World Christianity 4:2.212–227. Dasgupta, Probal. 2002. “Trafficking in Words: Languages, Missionaries and Translators”. The Little Magazine 3:3.28–36. Dasgupta, Probal. 2004. “Language, Public Space and an Educated Imagination”. Economic and Political Weekly 39:21.2169–2173. Dasgupta, Probal. 2008. “Knowledge and Language in Classical Indian Linguistics: Some Observations”. Forms of Knowledge in India: Critical Revaluations ed. by Suresh Raval et al., 89–104. Delhi: Pencraft. Dasgupta, Probal, Alan Ford & Rajendra Singh. 2000. After Etymology: Towards a Substantivist Linguistics. Munich: Lincom Europa. Dasgupta, Probal & Rajat Ghosh. 2007. “The Nominal Left Periphery in Bangla and Asamiya”. Annual Review of South Asian Languages and Linguistics 2007 ed. by Rajendra Singh, 3–29. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Ghosh, Sanjukta. 2002. The Syntax-Pragmatics Interface of Bangla. University of Hyderabad doctoral dissertation. Ravanam, Anita. 2002. “Three Levels of Lexical Codification”. Yearbook of South Asian Languages and Linguistics 2002 ed. by Rajendra Singh, 135–155. New Delhi, Thousand Oaks & London: Sage. Subrahmanyam, Prakya Sreesaila. 1999. Pa:ninian Linguistics. Tokyo: Institute for the Study of Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa.

part 1

Translation and reconciliation

chapter 1

Translation as reconciliation A conversation about politics, translation, and multilingualism in South Africa Antjie Krog, Rosalind C. Morris, and Humphrey Tonkin* South Africa is an example of the urgent need for translation. In moving away from two official languages to eleven, South Africa, limited in resources and unprepared to handle such linguistic complexity at the level of government, has in effect empowered English as the prestige language. The historically compromised Afrikaner population is witnessing the decline of Afrikaans, even though that language is widely used also by the Cape Coloured population. The writer in Afrikaans is having difficulty being heard at times. At the same time English is dominated by received assumptions that exclude indigenous literary forms and the voices that accompany them. In such an environment, translation should be a national priority, not only to make other voices heard but also to broaden the cultural base of English and to include the other cultures and peoples of South Africa in a multilingual discourse. In this sense, translation might mediate among the South African languages – indeed might be seen as a form of reconciliation in which the periphery talks to the center as well as the center to the periphery, and in which all languages are enriched as a result.

Rosalind Morris: Antjie, we asked you to join us for a conversation about the politics of translation in South Africa, in a context of multilingualism where the constitutionally enshrined ambitions for a linguistic utopia are meeting up with the obstacles of funding and mutual competition. Can you tell us about the milieu in which language politics are working themselves out now in South Africa?  Antjie Krog: Translation is not (and never was) on the front burner in South Africa. We come from a past where everybody was forced to speak the two “white” * This conversation between Antjie Krog, Rosalind C. Morris and Humphrey Tonkin took place at the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, Columbia University, on April 29, 2009. Ms. Krog’s presence at Columbia University was supported in part by the Esperantic Studies Foundation.



Antjie Krog, Rosalind C. Morris, and Humphrey Tonkin

languages: Afrikaans and English. Now we live in a situation where eleven languages are official. But this has transformed English into the de facto official language. Everybody desperately tries to learn or to improve their English. Parents who can’t properly speak English insist on speaking English with their children. Or, children are placed in schools where they learn English as a new language, but they don’t speak English at home with their parents. It is only recently that the national government has begun to take on board the suggestion that part of the immense failure of our education system is the absence of mother tongue instruction. In classrooms, the issue is of immediate relevance: What are the indigenous terms in which we can teach subjects appropriate to a contemporary curriculum? We can either have problematic terms or no terms at all. And every term of translation has its ideological freight. In Afrikaans, for example, we grew up with the term volk – which is different from “nation” and rooted in Dutch and German. What kind of baggage entered my education with the privileging of volk over nasie? Feeling part of a volk makes it perhaps difficult to become part of a nation – rainbow or not! Today, I wonder, what is the term in Afrikaans or Xhosa for “subaltern”?  Humphrey Tonkin: Is this so of Afrikaans as well as the various more recently established official languages?  AK: Afrikaans had, up until 1994, a very developed structure for receiving and translating English concepts and terms. It also benefited from the deliberate nurturing of a vocabulary intended to permit it to keep pace with developments in science and technology, which are such an important part of English today. But despite gallant attempts, that is waning. I recently had a very real experience of a sudden “gap” in Afrikaans’ science vocabulary. I was asked to participate in a project where poets were linked with astronomers. My partner was Hans Zinnecker from Berlin, who discovered the birth of a twin star called HH 212. He sent me a postcard and a description of the discovery describing how the “edge-on disk’s accreting might” was sending out “gas jets in the form of tight semi-benign collusions”. What the hell is that in Afrikaans? Not to mention the problem of the term “black hole,” which in a direct Afrikaans translation would be “swartgat” – the famous derogatory term for Black people, meaning black ass, black anus. In the end I found Dutch equivalents and made them Afrikaans.   RM: But there is already an affinity, or at least a history of such traffic between Afrikaans and various European languages, which does not exist in the same way for the African languages.  AK: That’s what I mean. If someone wants to write about landing on Mars, in Xhosa or Zulu, where would the words come from? It is already a problem in Afrikaans, which has that history. It’s even more difficult with indigenous languages.



Chapter 1.  Translation as reconciliation 

Recently, I held a book in my hands in which the key phrases/concepts for school maths, science, energy, commerce and geography are given and explained in English, Afrikaans, Zulu and Xhosa. The person who showed it to me is part of a panel to give prizes to translations. According to him, the translators decided to make new words instead of simply Zulu-ifying the English word. The problem, he says, is that they then used everyday Xhosa and Zulu instead of digging deeper into the more classical vocabulary where many of these concepts are present in different ways. The translators say that nobody knows this kind of classical Zulu/ Xhosa any more.  HT: With regard to Afrikaans, is there no department of astronomy at Stellenbosch, for example, where, since Stellenbosch is primarily Afrikaans-speaking, such things must be dealt with, I would imagine, in Afrikaans? Has English even penetrated the teaching programs in the department of astronomy at Stellenbosch?  AK: Of course there are, and those disciplines are working hard to try and keep up, but disciplines like oenology or forestry and so forth at Afrikaans Stellenbosch may no longer be presented in Afrikaans because that is the only faculty in the country where people can study these subjects. If a student demands to be taught in English, even if the whole class is Afrikaans-speaking, the lecturer is forced to use English. The penetration of English is complete, I would say. Even if you manage to teach your subject in Afrikaans, your contribution to the academic world is only recognized when it is materialized in English, so who cares whether the vocabulary of Derrida’s différance is sorted out in Afrikaans? Professor Jakes Gerwel, head of the President’s office during Mandela’s term, and very, very close to the old man, once suggested that government should get every university to “adopt” one of the indigenous languages, have a chair for that language and a committee to generate lexicons, and other language resources, but government didn’t even respond to it.  HT: That means money, of course.  AK: Yes, that’s true. But the ANC is also scared of ethnicity, of the possibility that ethnicity will be mobilized around a particular language when isolated in that way. I think that, at this stage, government has realized that what you supposedly save through not having translation, you pay through delivering yet another untrainable generation in a country with severe skill shortages.  RM: Is there nothing in South Africa like what one finds in Thailand, where there is a government office whose function is to generate neologisms based on local etymologies, and that uses local language resources to incorporate, in this case by Siamifying or Thaifying, the languages of science? That practice is over a hundred years old in Thailand. It expresses a language politics that wants to keep out all the Anglicisms and all the cultural baggage that is presumptively attached



Antjie Krog, Rosalind C. Morris, and Humphrey Tonkin

to it, even with the apparently (though dubiously) neutral lexicons of geography, astronomy, physics, and so forth. AK: No; and more importantly, in South Africa, people want to be English.  RM: In what ways?  HT: Presumably it’s not politically feasible to favor a relatively developed language like Afrikaans over, for example, Zulu.  AK: Yes, that’s true. But, interestingly, the vociferousness of the Afrikaans debate (the desire to hold on to Afrikaans and to modernize it so that it can keep up with the English of science) is starting to have an influence on the other languages, although it’s not as strong. English offers access to privilege.   HT: But, is the situation significantly different from that in Europe where, for example, Dutch or Danish, which are little used at the graduate level in science, are increasingly inadequate to the task? The problem is greatest where the domains of English intersect with the domains of the local language. It’s becoming increasingly difficult for a high school teacher of physics in Denmark to teach physics in Danish because there is no vocabulary, or at least the teacher is unfamiliar with the vocabulary that exists. English in Europe is doing in many respects exactly what it is doing in South Africa: it’s gobbling up languages.  AK: There are actually two things at play here. You can live a coherent life in Danish or German. You can tell children their stories, you can watch TV, you can speak German to people in the street, in the shop, you can read John Coetzee in German, you can attend a lecture in neuro-physics in German and go home and tell your children to wash between their legs in idiomatic German. This is now only possible for the small English-speaking minority in South Africa. Afrikaans is only now entering what one could call a post-colonial phase by being broken up, you know, ruptured. Fifteen years ago when I moved to Cape Town from the rural areas, I couldn’t speak English. I didn’t need to, because I could function as a highly credible, well-read, award winning poet and intelligent human being in my language; but since 1990 it has begun to break down, until now we only actually speak Afrikaans at home.  RM: But Antjie, when you and I recently traveled in the Western Cape, in the area where the first contact and the oldest experience of both rupture and miscegenation took place, we were constantly addressed in Afrikaans, and the language spoken by Coloured and Black people—in shops, between parents and children, at restaurants—was almost always, at least initially, Afrikaans. How does this square with your representation of Afrikaans as a language on the wane?  AK: It is not waning in breadth of speakers, it is waning in terms of verbalizing an inner life that is complex, intimate and relevant. The Western and Northern Cape consist mainly of Afrikaans speakers and yet the only Afrikaans university (the three others are English) in the area is not allowed to cater only for Afrikaans



Chapter 1.  Translation as reconciliation 

speakers as it is seen as an effort to keep out Black students. The current government is also deeply resentful of Western Cape Coloured politics, which is associated with the fact that the province is the only one in the country to have elected a non-ANC government.   HT: Presumably one could argue that the officialization of the various African languages was more a gesture than anything else. Actually, under apartheid, they had been encouraged, because separation, including linguistic separation, was exactly what was wanted by the apartheid regime.  AK: Yes, and they were a resource that permitted people to function separately. There were different language boards, with different departments, different prescribed books and so on, but this separateness created a desire for intellectuals and artists to speak in a South African voice and not a Zulu voice, or a Xhosa voice.  RM: When you say “A South African voice,” do you mean that non-racialism (the official policy of the ANC) was essentially the ground for English dominance?  AK: I hear how people more and more debate the term non-racialism versus multi-racialism: the stew versus the rainbow. So maybe non-racialism plays a role in opting for English, but it is also a case of English having a ready-made vocabulary in which we could be equals. At the very first Mandela rally I attended, I was body-searched by a Black woman. It took place in a city that was mainly Afrikaansand Sesotho-speaking. As I approached, the woman said: Maak oop jou handsak, miesies (Open your handbag miesies – the latter an Afrikaans word indicating utter subservience.) The moment she said it, she realized it. She pulled herself upright and said: “Open your handsack, comrade.” Both of us were relieved to have access (never mind some grammar mistakes) to a vocabulary on which we could be each others’ equals.  HT: It would seem, then, that the democratization of language use in a country like South Africa runs counter to notions of upward mobility, joining the elite, and so on.  RM: But it seems to me that there are aspects of South Africa’s public sphere today that work a little bit against that conception. On one hand, there’s new access to or the right to use one’s own language in all dimensions, all strata of the public sphere – from the courts to the media – possibilities that weren’t available before. And, in the realm of popular culture, even at the level of television soap operas, the officialization of multiplicity has its counterpart in constant code shifting, so one can hear five or six languages within a single narrative space. There’s a remarkable level of multilingualism. From our perspective, in North America, we speak of the languages of South Africa as minority, or lesser-taught languages, but they form a language sphere that is, in some senses, now dominant.  AK: But I would say that was always there, it was just suppressed and was not so visible. 



Antjie Krog, Rosalind C. Morris, and Humphrey Tonkin

RM: So, are you saying that this multiplicity is as much a continuation of the indigenous language scene, where it is not uncommon for African people to speak three or four languages or more, as it is a function of official language policy?  AK: Yes. What we see now is that South Africans still speak a variety of languages (although the fact that often the children of the Black elite speak only English is being discussed), but, at the same time, we see the privileging of English. Even in the soap operas, the higher up the ladder, the more and the better is the English spoken. The politicians on the news speak English, the programs on science, nature and money are in English. I am pleased, however, that we see and hear many more indigenous languages on television, which is bringing in more local actors, local stories and landscapes. But I am concerned about what indigenous words we use to speak about crucial issues. For example, there are apparently at least five kinds of words indicating forced sex, with only one of them meaning rape. If we talk about rape, what is the term to use? I know of an NGO in India which was asked to look into the indigenous languages of that country to scrutinize the words and terms that are used in indigenous discourses of human rights and democracy. I think it’s a brilliant idea. What words do you use when you talk about human rights and the rights of women, what do you call women, what do you call rights, what do you call freedom, what do you call ownership of your body; what’s the language you use to speak of these things?   HT: The reality is that no new coinage is semantically neutral. When a new word is created its creator attaches to it whatever semantic baggage he or she is carrying around. If that happens on a large enough scale in a language, and the new coinages have barely begun to circulate, common agreement on semantic valency is lacking and the language fails to convey its intended meaning.  AK: A good example is the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The Commission had to look for the word “reconciliation” in Xhosa. We realized, a month into the process, that the word that had been chosen means forgiveness.  RM: So, you are talking about something more than just looking for cognate words. You are talking also about learning to plumb the repertoire of concepts within any language world to find not necessarily equivalence, but words that would do the kind of work that the translated word or phrase does in English or Afrikaans, in Sesotho or Sepedi, or IsiXhosa or IsiZulu, or what have you. Am I right?  AK: Yes. In a country where so many groups lived apart for so long and now have to learn to live together in peace and fairness, we need to hear and understand one another. We cannot wait until we have all acquired good articulate English.  HT: And is the question even linguistic; is it not more cultural than linguistic?  AK: I think that’s the thing, it’s also cultural. But it is at that precise point of translation where you realize that you do not have a precise word to translate this concept – that is the point where “the new” starts to happen, the opening up. But



Chapter 1.  Translation as reconciliation 

that also goes for English, which doesn’t have a word to translate the concept of ubuntu or the Afrikaans word mede-menslikheid (fellow-human-ness). I have also heard that some of the African languages don’t have a mathematical concept for zero. I mean, what exactly do you say when you say “nothing”? If you say: zero plus zero equals zero, is that the same as: nothing plus nothing is nothing?  HT: So, let us take the phrase, ‘nothing will come of nothing.’ When you use an indigenous word for nothing in a mathematical sense, that word is divorced from its meaning, is that the point?  AK: Yes, and in this way, the word is either taken from you, or you import a foreign concept like zero in its English form. Now the teacher has to explain the word zero to the children. What words should she use?  RM: I wonder if we can focus in on what every child has to be brought to learn in order to understand the idea of zero. You know, the entrance of that Arabic concept into Western thought was a cataclysmic event, an epistemologically transformative occurrence. And every child has to learn this thing, which is to say every culture has to relearn it, again and again in and through the material experience of each of its members. I mean, these things (and zero is perhaps an extreme case) don’t become any more natural over time, or like a genetically transmissible knowledge of the body. Every child must learn as though for the first time this fantastic concept, regardless of their background. But you’re suggesting that when such a concept is coming to you from a language not your own, there’s a doubling of that experience of newness. What is the language stake in it?  AK: I would say that it is more a case of displacement. This new word is displacing what I had in myself about nothingness and gradually I find that I am filled with a redundant vocabulary that has to be replaced by the new words, as well as the frameworks they come from. The problem is not just that the words are foreign, it is that there is no indigenous tradition of explaining the origin of words, and of speaking about language itself as the bearer of whole world views.  RM: It sounds as though you’re also talking about a history of pedagogy – a pedagogy that carries itself through a language, that uses a language, that is in fact inseparable from that language. You’re not just talking about the language then.   AK: Or just the vocabulary. RM: Right.  AK: But language carries everything within itself. Every word in a European language carries a history, and even a self-conscious history. People spend hours talking about unhomely and unheimlichkeit.  RM: But the average person on an American street is not talking about unheimlich or unhomely. He uses the word “uncanny,” say, and never gives a moment’s thought to the word at all. 



Antjie Krog, Rosalind C. Morris, and Humphrey Tonkin

HT: But isn’t that part of the point? That for the most part, one doesn’t give a moment’s thought to those terms because they’re ingrained in one.  RM: The “one” you are referring to is the western “one,” of course. And, yes, we are habituated at the most unconscious level, but that is why Freud had to excavate these otherwise unconscious meanings. This is a point that many of today’s philosophers make: that we (Europeans and their descendents) are increasingly conscious of language, increasingly caught in a world of words. But that reflexivity about language is not primordial.  HT: We can see western linguistic and cultural influence as an ever-expanding circle that is at the same time self-reflexive, turned back on itself. Members of the circle look inwards for meaning even as the circle expands, and are quite hostile to the assimilation of concepts from outside. Essentially we have in the West an expansionist system that is much more interested in causing people to conform to it than it is in actually absorbing concepts or ideas that lie outside it.  AK: Earlier, Rosalind and I were speaking about a book by Steven Feld called Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli Expression.  RM: It’s about Kaluli (a people in New Guinea) poetics and forms of mourning, and in it Feld describes a sonic cultural order where weeping takes on aspects of birdsong.  AK: Now, you go and you study, you hear that these people speak what we can only call bird language. So one says to them: we classify birds by their beaks, etc. and allocate them to this species and that genus. How do you classify birds? According to Feld, these people said they distinguish between birds that sing and birds that talk. Now my point is that by merely asking: how do you classify birds, one is already imposing a whole framework. Who says that they are classifying? So trying to understand how this group is living and thinking about birds is like eating a leg of lamb with chopsticks. You can, but half of it will fall on the ground and you will never understand the wonder of a leg of lamb with rice and peas if you don’t eat it with a knife and fork. And yet we eat the rest of the world with sticks.  RM: If the object of learning of other cultures is merely to classify, and to impose the logic of classification everywhere, then we are indeed in trouble. I suppose anthropology has done a great deal of that. But these admittedly asymmetrical encounters can also become something else: a “learning to learn” from others. That’s where the need for deep language knowledge becomes central.  HT: But for the most part we Euro-Americans are simply not equipped to deal with those other ways of looking at the world. And so we don’t. Maybe the poets do. Maybe the poets are the only people who can mediate between world views.  AK: No, because poetry itself is caught up in ideas of what we westerners regard as good poetry, what we regard as the task of poetry. 



Chapter 1.  Translation as reconciliation 

HT: But isn’t one of the tasks of poetry actually to define things that have previously never been defined?  AK: Not in certain parts of Africa. In certain parts of Africa the poet is the bearer of memory, of oral memory. You have to remember how it was done before. In some traditions, the poet doesn’t have the right to change things, to introduce newness.  HT: So I’ve just revealed my biases by essentially describing a Western view of poetry.  AK: In fact this is a very real problem in South Africa when people are trying to judge poetry, and to decide who they want to regard as among the country’s top poets. You have to ask what in their work speaks to you. And what does it mean if you attend a poetry reading and a poet reads and you think “what a lot of shit” but the audience around you is crying and is moved? Do you say, they don’t know what real poetry is?  HT: The fact that you are talking about this and you also write poetry would suggest that this is an issue for you.  AK: It’s a huge issue.  HT: Which would confirm what I was saying earlier, namely that you are trying to tackle other ways of looking at the world.  AK: But I have to. I live in South Africa and want to function in an informed way there.  HT: Yes, so you’re situated linguistically within the circle that I was talking about earlier but are trying to find ways of moving beyond it.  AK: Yes, but I didn’t notice that “beyondness” until 1990 actually. We were so busy saying “apartheid is wrong; we are all the same,” that we refused to look at difference. But now when the majority growing in confidence begins to assert what it believes is good poetry, what is the language and performance style of good poetry, I find it problematic or some of its choices unacceptable.  RM: But, Antjie, this seems to me an extreme assessment. There are performance poetry movements in South Africa, and they are of course identified with populist politics, with the idea of a voice of the people—a huge and complex question in and of itself. That is true in the United States as well. But there is also still a lot of poetry being written, and published, and read—as opposed to being performed. Is it possible that you are representing new trends, even new forms of dominance, as an absolutely destructive or absolutely displacing development?  AK: Oral poetry in the US is the poetry of the minority. We all ‘know’ who the really good poets of the US are: those in the anthologies, those invited to teach at Oxford University. In my case, poetry on paper and the poet who reads from a page have become a deeply resented minority. I have to learn not only to live with it, but to accept it as my country’s truth. 



Antjie Krog, Rosalind C. Morris, and Humphrey Tonkin

HT: But you’re no less engaged in addressing the question of what it means to write poetry.  AK: True, and that is why I am absorbed by trying to translate poetry written or recorded in indigenous languages, because I find there a secret neglect: those poems in the indigenous languages are closer to the kind of poetry that speaks to me: very careful, very precise and nuanced descriptions of events and people. It is in indigenous vocabulary that you find fifty words to describe a way of walking. One word for daybreak literally means: “when the day breaks the dew”; the second phase is described with one word which means “when the hippopotamuses come lie down on the banks of the water”; in Tsonga the word Mahlambandlopfu means “the time of daybreak when the elephants wash themselves”; still later one says: “the time before daybreak which makes the embroiderers faint when they try to work with their needles”; then follows one word meaning “the time when the morning star still has color”; another much used expression is one word meaning “early morning when the sun catches the tips of the oxen’s horns.”  HT: Now that does indeed raise the issue of translation, doesn’t it?  AK: Yes, because if you write in Sesotho or Zulu, in a way you are in a dead end. Almost no one cares what you do in that language. You have to leave that language to find an audience.  HT: Is there any way of capturing that precision you find in some Zulu poetry and putting it into another language?  AK: One way to do it is by encouraging translation. Make English learn the sound and vocabulary of that kind of poetry and I think many poets will follow. But it feels as if there is a restricted oratory, very much fed from the US, being passed from one poet to the other, instead of also using what is and has been done inside the country and its languages. RM: We are talking about a market-driven conception of what would make someone write or work or devote themselves to writing in Zulu and writing in Xhosa…  AK: God yes! But if somebody translates them?  RM: Translating, working in, producing. Think of the work of people like Ngugi wa Thiongo, who decided to write in lesser-read, indigenous languages, languages without a large market, knowing that such work would not likely enter the international circuit. To make that decision, to be faithful to one’s mother tongue when it’s a lesser known language, is to choose not to participate in the global market. That is an aesthetic choice but also a political one.  AK: My issue is not that you make a statement by writing in your mother tongue. My issue is that writing in your mother tongue should not be a dead end. Somebody should translate you. Ngugi should never have had to write in English, but he should be available in English.



Chapter 1.  Translation as reconciliation 

But something else comes into play in South Africa. English has become the language of the South African voice. The first scent we received of a non-ethnic, non-racial South African-ness was within English. All the other languages appear as ethnic. There’s an Afrikaans voice and a Zulu voice, but these cannot claim to be a South African voice. In South Africa, you want to be part of that larger community, you want to respond and you want to be in conversation with the other voices. And English has such a tone. So, the only thing that I would have liked to have seen is a situation where you don’t have to write in English to be South African but where a translated voice could enrich South African English.  HT: Is that a form of contesting the received linguistic repertoire? If there exists a South African English tradition with a particular way of thinking about the world, perhaps it requires some sort of input from the outside in order to expand it, to make it speak in numbers of voices.  AK: I would say that input is coming from inside – inside South Africa. Something very interesting is happening as Black writers publish more and more literature in English. The novel forms some of them are creating are different. Halfway through a book, a main character dies and another continues without explanation or change of tone. Or eight people live in a bachelor flat and, without any external morally judging voice, they sleep and shit on and steal from one another. Those professors trained in European literature started to complain when they read these books, saying things like: “but these books are not properly edited.” What they actually mean is that they are discomfited by the content. They are not comfortable when a character dies in the middle of the novel, or when there is no main character at all. Njabulo Ndebele’s The Cry of Winnie Mandela is an excellent example of a novel not having a main character. If that kind of writing enters into South African English literature, it could fundamentally change the forms that are currently dominant.   HT: So, you have to produce a shift, from a situation in which the dominant figures of literary culture are saying these people are not writing proper English and they don’t properly understand English genres, to a situation in which such variants are welcome. Is that the point? AK: More than welcome, but the norm. The more this happens, the more you can make space for these alternatives, the more confusing it becomes for the dominant language; the dominant forms of writing would be, I think, undermined.  RM: I guess an interesting counter-example would come from a place like India where there’s a long, hundred and fifty year or so, history of education in English for a considerable part of the population, and where the curriculum for the elite is similar to what it is in England and in Australia and in Canada.  HT: Actually it’s pretty much identical with the way it was in England fifty years ago.



Antjie Krog, Rosalind C. Morris, and Humphrey Tonkin

RM: All of us raised in these British settler and colonized countries can cite the same texts. We all read our Norton anthologies, we all get our Wordsworth and daffodils, and the same John Donne, and the same Andrew Marvell, and so forth. Even so, there is an insurgent English within these national traditions—in India, in the Caribbean, in Indo-Canada, and so forth. I think you are suggesting that when other kinds of English enter into the South African English context, they will nonetheless produce a very different formation of English-language literature than one in which there is this long history of instruction in the dominant language through a single curriculum and a single canonical literature. But it would be enormously exciting. Why isn’t there a discourse in South Africa that would accommodate these new kinds of writings, like Njabulo Ndebele’s novels, and recognize them as intentionally disruptive rather than merely failed or aesthetically weak?  HT: So, they’re written off as naïve?  RM: Well, sometimes. Whereas in so many other places, including India, including the English Caribbean or the French Caribbean, there’s a discourse that recognizes and either disavows or embraces these insurgencies, without necessarily dismissing them.  AK: Who’s driving that discourse? Is it indigenous, or is it latecomers?  RM: Well, if we are speaking about the world of Caribbean literary fiction, where writers are incredibly knowing and well versed in the classics of the anglophone or francophone tradition, which is to say the English or French canon, I don’t know what it means to say “indigenous” or “latecomers.” But one could perhaps say that the Indian novel in English has changed the English novel form profoundly. It has made it possible to do new things.  AK: I am not talking about change after you have familiarized yourself with the dominant language and its works. I am talking about a confrontation that derives from the simple fact that you are yourself. RM: Interestingly, the Indian novel that’s changed global English most is probably being produced primarily elsewhere – outside of India.  HT: And you also have a couple of hundred years of continuity in the speaking of English by Indians.  RM: English lives there just as French will ultimately be an African language.  HT: English functions for a particular section of the population. It has elite value, and there’s an established English-speaking Indian elite. I suspect that’s a bit different from the situation in South Africa.  RM: No doubt, although the elite status of English is also a factor in South Africa, despite or perhaps because of its claim to being a national or extra-ethnic language. But let’s also remember the original question, which is why there’s such a limited discourse that can claim these new efforts as part of a transformation of



Chapter 1.  Translation as reconciliation 

the genre and literary conventions of English in South Africa. Why are these new writings by Black South African intellectuals so often read as failures?  AK: They are not necessarily read as failures, but the fundamental challenge that they pose for South African writing is either not noticed or deemed just hot air.  RM: Does that imply that their literariness, their formal ambitions, are negated or displaced in favor perhaps of their anthropological function—their capacity to give story form to other ways of being and thus to give readers access to other worlds?  AK: This is difficult to determine, but I would say that not even the anthropological aspect is properly scrutinized.   RM: What, then, is the nature of the discourse about new writing in indigenous languages?  AK: You know, it seems to me that in South Africa we have a shared discourse about nothing, because we’re so separated. The moment you start talking, there is suspicion and blame. You cannot say this specific novel is a failure. You have to mask what you are saying, and editing is an excellent scapegoat. There’s little honest criticism or engagement, not to mention space for solid book reviews. They’ve only recently introduced a book program but it is nothing but celebrities and the crap they mostly (pretend) to read. I want to emphasize two things: firstly, indigenous languages should enter our literary spaces and for this, translation is key. Secondly, one will have to take a full-bodied re-look at texts by Black writers and recognize that what may seem like problematic elements in the book, may in fact be deeply challenging differences.  RM: What could one do to enable that?  AK: What I don’t understand about the present government’s cultural department is that in a country with eleven languages, it is not obsessed with translation. You don’t have translation in hospitals. We hardly have any Black psychologists working in languages other than English. Thousands of them see patients, but in what language? What do they talk about? What is the id in Sesotho, or schizophrenic? It’s only those who can speak English that have the ears of power or the attention of others. No one wants to study indigenous languages at university because there are no jobs associated with that accomplishment. If you can speak Zulu well, it’s not treated as though you have an extra qualification. As a result, there’s little investment in the study of these languages at a high level. Their literatures are not translated and more widely discussed, and the books written in Zulu are not launched and celebrated. That only accrues to the people who write in English (and Afrikaans). Often mediocre poets in those languages are celebrated, but you can’t even get photographs, you can’t find the birthdates of good poets who write in indigenous languages.  HT: All of this is so deeply politically charged, is it not, in the context of South Africa? 



Antjie Krog, Rosalind C. Morris, and Humphrey Tonkin

AK: But what I don’t understand is, if it’s politically charged, why are indigenous languages not part of it?  HT: But isn’t success for Africans in particular driven in some measure by their competence in English and the relative incompetence of many of the people around them? So the learning of English is essentially the creation of an elite; it creates elite closure (a term invented in South Africa to describe a process whereby elites establish linguistic boundaries to keep other people out). English itself is a hierarchical language. On the one hand, it appears to be democratizing. On the other hand it’s simply broadening the elite somewhat.  AK: Yes, maybe in South Africa there’s not enough confidence yet to assert it from inside. All of our media purvey the basic values of a liberal white establishment, use liberal white measurements.  RM: I’ve certainly heard many poor people speak in the idiom of a zero sum game. No one is assumed to get a position, a job without in some way displacing someone else. No one gets power without displacing someone else. English offers itself as a kind of pure medium for that; but on the other hand, the ANC has eighty years of a different discourse, a non-racialist discourse.  AK: But the ANC is not dominating the discourse. The ANC is not even participating in the discourse. And then you have somebody like Neville Alexander saying the ANC never had a real non-racial ethos, so we cannot simply accept the ANC’s self-representation as non-racialist.  RM: Even if it hasn’t historically realized its stated policy on non-racialism, would it not be appropriate to participate in it now? If the ANC were to invest in transforming the constitution into the basis for a kind of linguistically reformed nation, they would have to say, “now, it’s going to be that policy which dictates investment in translation, requirements for curricula, and grounds the necessity for university degrees to come with training in at least two languages” or something like that.  AK: This hasn’t happened yet.  RM: Can one think of making it an object of desire?  AK: That would be so fantastic.  RM: If we can borrow one of Gayatri Spivak’s expressions, a non-coercive rearrangement of desires, that’s the purpose of education. You want people to desire this linguistically transformed world. How can one do that?  AK: If at least you say, this is what we want, then you create a kind of debate. But, you need enormous confidence if you want to assert yourself against English limiting the way of doing things.  HT: Doesn’t it mean taking the constitution quite literally and maintaining that multilingualism is authentically a good thing? Isn’t that where one starts?  RM: But people have to want it, and want it deeply. 



Chapter 1.  Translation as reconciliation

HT: That can happen if you have resources to change the reward structure, but there are no resources. South Africa doesn’t have a lot of money. For years, the state was looking after rather less than five million whites and now they find they are looking after almost fifty million people of all races.  AK: Yes, but along the way the vision had become a business. In South Africa, you’re no longer a citizen, you’re a stakeholder. You don’t have responsibilities and dreams, you have profit, a deadline, a bottom line.  HT: Can we switch gears slightly and talk a little about Afrikaans specifically? It seems that Afrikaans is caught in a most peculiar situation in South Africa, coming from a stigmatized political history, and now relocating itself in the present context. As an Afrikaans poet, you are attempting presumably to speak to that culture, to speak to that population, which also appears to be politically extremely fragmented. How do you do that?  AK: You see, I don’t. The people I find myself closest to, drawn to, in conversation with, are mostly not Afrikaners. There is, of course, a difference between Afrikaners and Afrikaans-speakers, and sixty percent of Afrikaans-speakers are not white, not Afrikaners. However, the dominant force within Afrikaans was the Afrikaner, and some Afrikaners have fought since 1994 for some semblance of respectability. Nowadays many Afrikaans speakers want an Afrikaans university. They want their children to be taught in that language. They want their children to work in Afrikaans. Now this has been consistently ignored by the government because Afrikaans was considered less as a language than as the basis of the power that still resides within the language – and because the language represented apartheid, so deeply associated was it with the politics of the National Party that came to power in 1948. Afrikaners want to keep their language so that they can keep the power it once enabled. But the most marginalized group at this stage in South Africa is the Coloured group: the majority speakers of Afrikaans. And they have tried in various ways to become English in the Western Cape. But there has been such an influx of elite Blacks, who speak better English than they do (many Coloureds are working class, and have relatively little access to the elite educational institutions). These elite Black English speakers are favored by the current government. As a result, English no longer provides access to cultural power for poor Coloured people. But there have been developments at some of the most prestigious institutions that attempt to intervene in this process. So, for example, four of the five former Afrikaans universities have appointed Coloured rectors. In many fields, Coloured speakers of Afrikaans are emerging as leaders, and bearers of power: in big business, in sports (soccer, for example). These individuals are linking up and they are assisting one another. So in the same way that Afrikaners used Afrikaans to restore Afrikaners to power after the end of the Anglo-Boer War, Coloured speakers of Afrikaans are using the language to make a claim on





Antjie Krog, Rosalind C. Morris, and Humphrey Tonkin

power, and to organize themselves on the basis of language. Stellenbosch University, for example, putting up centers in the rural areas. If you need medical care, legal help, extra classes in math, you go there. They will provide it to you. In that Afrikaans center, even if you want to learn English, they will help you. And they have bursaries to help people who cannot afford these programs otherwise. This is very different from the university where I teach, the University of the Western Cape, which was originally designated for Coloured people. It became English because it wanted to accommodate Black people. At UWC, we are losing Afrikaans-speaking Coloureds to Stellenbosch. And they are creating a Coloured cultural force there. It is not quite feared by government but government is very uncomfortable about it. For them, it’s okay if you have an Afrikaans-speaking group that is poor, but if such a group starts to get access to power, to move, it becomes a threat. Afrikaans literature is changing fast with unbelievably exciting Coloured voices shooting into it, confidently bringing different backgrounds. Yet, these new writers are not part of the South African voice. What I am pleading for is a fund that would support the automatic translation of all good or interesting Afrikaans books into English so that writers can keep their edge within their mother tongues but also become part of the Africa/ South African voice.  HT: So, pushing a notion of bilingualism?  AK: No, it is more a matter of enabling people to function in their mother tongues without isolating them. People could be bilingual, but they should not find themselves split: talking one language at home, but finding themselves forced to write in a language that they don’t know intimately. This is where translation can see to it that a country can become home to all the voices that live in it.  RM: So you’re actually encouraging fidelity to mother tongues, to many mother tongues, to people keeping working within their mother tongues, invigorating mother tongues.  AK: Not a fidelity to mother tongue, but a respect for who speaks and what is being said there. The TRC (Truth and Reconciliation Commission) taught me that. People testified in their mother tongues and the enormous wisdom that was communicated in very specific forms of expression is something that the country has not since heard. When I use the word translation it is in its broadest form to include simultaneous interpretation (SI). SI is the way poor people arrive on the radar screen. The TRC was South Africa’s only attempt to hear at least some of these “unimportant, uneducated, marginalised” voices on a big scale and for two years these indigenous voices, audible below the translation, disrupted and splintered what I call the grand “new” South Africa narrative. If it wasn’t for translation, these voices could not have affected and become part of a national psyche.



Chapter 1.  Translation as reconciliation 

RM: Are you talking about maintaining excellence in the mother tongue and thereby allowing English literature to be enhanced, invigorated by these excellent things produced in other languages which are produced in that quality because they’re written in mother tongues?  AK: Yes. And this literature brings with it an experience and a world that is not necessarily that of those who have already mastered English sufficiently.  HT: So in fact you’re empowering vernaculars.  AK: You’re empowering the people who started in the vernacular.  RM: This is a very interesting model of translation: as supplementing and sustaining mother tongues rather than as the means for everyone to leave their own languages.  HT: So when we think of translation as a mode of mediation, we’re also thinking of translation as a means of preserving linguistic distinctiveness.  AK: The term I would like to use, though it doesn’t really fit in, is translation as reconciliation. It’s a bringing together, a bringing of things to one another so that we understand and access one another from where we come from instead of accepting or forcing people to be “processed” into English before they are acceptable.  HT: Now if one asks somebody from South Africa what the word reconciliation means to them, the answer is more complicated than with anybody else I can think of. Am I right that, for you, reconciliation is above all a coming together from the place where you began?  AK: Every time I hear a rural woman’s word translated I feel privileged. Every bit of translation enables me to live an informed and hopefully more intact life, than ever before. I become part of their world, instead of only accommodating those sounding like myself. HT: And isn’t there something significantly arbitrary about selecting the eleven languages named in the constitution, in that they overlap linguistically in all kinds of ways? We know where English begins and ends because it’s been codified, because it’s been standardized. We know exactly where the boundaries are. If you’re dealing with a language like Zulu or Tswana, that isn’t so.  AK: That isn’t so – but, you actually can also change that codified English, to express where it is coming from. You can make it your English; you can make it a South African English, but then you have to perforate it.  RM: And English is much more perforated and interwoven with other languages than most of us acknowledge most of the time.  HT: A minority of today’s English speakers are in fact native speakers.  RM: And, historically speaking, it’s a fairly young language, compared to many of the languages of Asia and elsewhere. Its roots are complex and multiple, and it’s difficult to separate out the German and the Anglo-Saxon, the Latin and Sanskrit, to mark the point where a pure English would start, if there were such a thing. 



Antjie Krog, Rosalind C. Morris, and Humphrey Tonkin

AK: You know there are three languages that emerged only in the previous century: Afrikaans, Hebrew, and…   RM: Indonesian. Indonesian was a lingua franca, a market language that nobody really could claim as a mother tongue. James Segal has written very beautifully about this, and noted that the moment that one could overcome the very local languages of the Archipelago was exactly the moment when a huge influx of translations from around the world entered and made possible a true change of consciousness and even the emergence of nationalism. Someone like Pramoedya Ananta Toer could only have written what he wrote in Indonesian, not in Javanese.  AK: That’s it exactly. This newness entered the world through translation. So if you can profoundly change English by infusing it with translation, then you can also change the consciousness of English. It needs that.  RM: And this is the impulse in the kind of world literature marketplace to which you are offering an alternative. Are you saying that everyone must stop anticipating what they will sound like in English and what kind of plot is going to sell and what should be the ideal form of the global English novel? You seem to be calling for literature written in the mother tongue to be translated into English, before everyone takes up writing global English.  AK: Yes, that is such an important point you make. I heard a South African publisher say, ‘You get a manuscript, and in the first paragraph you can see that this book is written for the white ear.’ But the moment you have a book that is written in the indigenous language, things are different. Consider, for example, Shaka, a book that was written for the Basotho by Mofolo. He was writing the work to be serialized in the local newspaper, and so it has a kind of confidence that seems to explain or hide nothing. But if he had had to write the story of Shaka in English, things would have been different. HT: And ultimately for a market, of course, a very big market.   RM: I very much like this notion of translation as reconciliation, of translation as an invigorating of mother tongues, rather than as an instrumentalizing movement into English.  AK: And of translation allowing other knowledge systems, other ways of being, entering the world less translated and therefore perhaps less hindered.  RM: What you are advocating, I think, is translation that works against the grain of universalism while enabling communication across difference. What is so compelling about your argument is that it holds out hope for the enlargement and transformation of dominant language worlds in and through the process of translation. I think many people often imagine the recipient language of translation as a mere receptacle into which you can pour the rest of the world, as through a sieve. But you’re talking about change, about making English available to change, while perhaps holding on to its own justice-enabling resources—words and concepts that



Chapter 1.  Translation as reconciliation 

we might not want to do without, such as equality, rights, even though these are frequently abused terms. In the end, of course, what you propose would entail a nearly total overhaul of language policy and language pedagogy in South Africa. It’s daunting, to be sure. And such a process can only unfold over time, and with major institutional support. The question is, I think, not simply a matter of political will, though that’s the idiom in which one typically speaks about the problem of political change; it is about desire, the desire for change and the desire to be changed.

chapter 2

Interpreting at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) Linguistic and cultural challenges* Nancy Schweda Nicholson Interpreting services constitute an integral part of the day-to-day activities at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague. At the opening of this paper, a focus on the differences between Civil and Common Law systems and an overview of court interpreting contribute relevant background information. An historical segment treats the creation of the ICTY and its administrative framework, thus providing the backdrop for a detailed look at the ICTY’s working languages and the use of simultaneous interpreting (SI), relay interpreting (RI) and consecutive interpreting (CI) in the courtrooms, deposition venues and Detention Unit. Inasmuch as the ICTY trials are the result of a vicious, lengthy war and ethnic cleansing activities, interpreter stress plays a significant role, both in the courtrooms and in the field. In order to facilitate the functioning of the ICTY and to orient attorneys to the unique work environment there, several training courses were held in The Hague and Montreal from 2003 to 2006. The ICTY’s legacy lives on as the International Criminal Court (ICC) conducts investigations in Africa and trials in The Hague.

Language planning and the author’s involvement Before proceeding to a detailed examination of the ICTY’s interpreter services, it is important to place the author’s involvement in context. In September 2003, she was contacted by a member of the Association of Defense Counsel (ADC), a New York attorney named Daniel Arshack. He explained that he and other international criminal defense lawyers were preparing a course for attorneys in The Hague in December 2003. Mr. Arshack added that a similar seminar had been offered in * The author wishes to express her gratitude to the Esperantic Studies Foundation and to an International Research Award from the University of Delaware, whose funding supported the research for this chapter.



Nancy Schweda Nicholson

July 2003 (also in The Hague). After the conclusion of the July course, he and the other trainers realized how critically important interpreter services are in this international judicial setting. Arshack and his colleagues decided that, in planning for the December course, they would like to include an interpreter specialist to address the role of interpreting at the ICTY and familiarize the participants with the nuts, bolts and challenges of the process. He asked the author if she would be interested in becoming involved as an interpreter consultant and trainer for the course, which took place in The Hague, December 11–14, 2003, jointly organized and sponsored by the ADC, the ICTY, the T. M. C. Asser Instituut and the Grotius Centre for International Legal Studies at Leiden University. The seminar brought together attorneys from all over the world. The majority of the eighteen participants, however, were from Balkan countries (whose legal frameworks are grounded in Civil Law). The goal of the class was to train lawyers from Civil Law systems in the techniques of direct and cross-examination so that they might effectively represent their clients before the ICTY (whose framework is primarily based on Common Law, although a hybrid of the two). The author’s role was to lecture on interpreting issues and interact with the lawyers in small-group exercises to provide feedback on how best to work with interpreters. She also offered suggestions for improvement in attorneys’ question structure and helped to make them aware of the linguistic, extralinguistic and cultural challenges presented to the interpreters in this very special legal arena. Common law versus civil law Civil Law (which is also widely known as “Continental Law” and/or the “Inquisitorial” system) is in place in much of the world, including both Western and Eastern Europe as well as a large portion of South America, Asia, Africa and the Middle East. Common Law (also frequently referred to as the “Adversarial System”) is primarily found in countries such as the United States, Great Britain (excluding Scotland), much of Canada, New Zealand and Australia, “[w]here English is the language of the law” (Gibbons 2003: 5). Common Law and Civil Law are quite different in their approaches. For example, Civil Law does not proceed from the basic assumption that the defendant is innocent until proven guilty. Emphasis is placed on establishing the truth during the trial. Attorneys are not involved in questioning witnesses. Rather, it is the judge who asks questions and carries out an investigation of the relevant issues. In fact, the role of the judge in the Inquisitorial system can be compared to that of a prosecutor in Common Law. Moreover, witnesses are often questioned outside of the courtroom by an official, and their written statements are subsequently introduced



Chapter 2.  Interpreting at the ICTY 

as evidence. Attorneys may be permitted to submit questions to be used in such an interview, but it is the official in charge of conducting the meeting who decides if he/she will actually ask those questions. If there is a time when witnesses offer testimony in court, the exchange between them and the judge may not be preserved as part of the record. Inasmuch as judges function as investigators as well as decision-makers in this system, the defense’s situation is less powerful. In the Civil Law system, judges frequently decide the case based on written evidence – along with any summary reports proffered by court officials. Common Law begins with the basic premise that the defendant is innocent until proven guilty. Moreover, the burden of proof lies with the prosecution. In order to be successful, guilt must be demonstrated beyond a reasonable doubt. The defense and prosecution present their cases via written evidence, real evidence (like guns and clothing, for example), depositions and in-person testimony. Whereas the judge in a Common Law trial is entitled to ask the witness questions, it is the defense attorney(s) and the prosecutor(s) who pose questions to both their own (friendly) and the other side’s (unfriendly) witnesses. It is called “direct” examination when an attorney solicits testimony from his/her own witness and “cross”-examination when one asks questions of a witness called by the opposing side. Other important aspects of Common Law trials are the presence of a jury and the judge’s frequent reliance on precedent, that is, judgments made in prior cases that involve the same legal issue(s), in reaching a decision. (This summary of the Civil Law and Common Law systems is based on information presented in Gibbons 2003.) The format of the training course demonstrates the contribution of language planning in this situation. Given the importance of the lawyer’s role in structuring questions to elicit information from witnesses in the Common Law system, it is clear that preparation in the strategies and techniques of both direct and crossexamination must be a central component of any course for Civil Law attorneys. Their abilities to formulate questions in the appropriate style clearly have an impact on the interpreters’ work in the courtroom. In this connection, what are the implications of the ICTY’s hybrid Common Law/Civil Law framework for the interpreters who work there? Familiarizing themselves with legal procedures in a blended system is not an easy task. The interpreters all come from home countries with particular legal traditions. Even if they are very knowledgeable about one of the systems, it is a challenge to learn about the other and then to recognize how the hybrid structure functions in practice. Legal systems are also a reflection of a country’s culture. As a result, working at the ICTY is a learning experience on various levels for the interpreters as well. They must understand the meaning and concepts behind the words in order to interpret to the best of their ability.



Nancy Schweda Nicholson

Court interpreting Interpreting in courtrooms and other legal settings has been around as long as people have been committing crimes. Over the years, “interpreters” have sometimes been chosen for the court’s convenience, solely to expedite the proceedings with virtually no attention paid to their suitability for the task. These individuals are often recruited from observers, courtroom personnel, defendants’ families and even co-defendants. The ad hoc nature of their selection is problematic, for the person’s language and interpreting skills are often in question (Schweda Nicholson 1989a, Sherr 2000). Moreover, untrained “interpreters” usually have no knowledge of the ethical principles that define their role. As a result, they may not be aware of the critical need for accuracy and completeness and often unknowingly violate the canons of impartiality, confidentiality, scope of practice and conflict of interest (Benmaman 2000, 1997; Hale 1997a; Hewitt & Lee 1996; Kelly 2004; NAJIT Code of Ethics and Professional Responsibilities [no date]; Schweda Nicholson 1994; Vesler 2004). Interpreters must also be familiar with legal concepts, terminology and procedure in addition to controlling a variety of registers, from street slang to the specialized terminology of expert witnesses to formal, educated language (Hale 1997b, Schweda Nicholson 1989b, Trabing 2005). In fact, it is only in the past thirty years (since 1978, to be exact) that court interpreting has become an organized profession in the United States (de Jongh 1992; Edwards 1995; Gonzalez, Vásquez & Mikkelson 1991; Roberts & Schweda Nicholson 2003; Schweda Nicholson 2005a, 2005b, 2002). As a result, the American framework has become a model for many other countries wishing to create their own programs. The European Union (EU), for example, looked to the United States for input and advice shortly after it introduced a legislative “Proposal for a Council Framework Decision” (PCFD), whose goal is to provide language services for suspects, witnesses, victims and defendants in criminal proceedings (PCFD 2004, Schweda Nicholson 2009). The author was invited to participate in a conference in The Hague in late 2004 in order to provide the American perspective on the EU’s plans (KeijzerLambooy & Gasille 2005a, Schweda Nicholson 2005c). Over this three-decade span in the United States, growing numbers of training programs have been created, codes of ethics have been promulgated, federal and state laws have been enacted and professional organizations have been formed (Crooker 1996, Roberts & Schweda Nicholson 2003, Schweda Nicholson 1986). Testing and certification procedures have been developed and formalized. Noteworthy bodies in this regard include the Administrative Office of the United States Courts, the National Center for State Courts’ (NCSC) Consortium for State Court Interpreter Certification, and the National Association of Judiciary Interpreters and Translators



Chapter 2.  Interpreting at the ICTY 

(NAJIT) (Herman & Hewitt 2001; Lowney 2005; Schweda Nicholson 2005a, 2005b, 1986; van der Heide 2003). What are the modes of interpreting, and what role do they play in the American courtroom/legal system (as well as in many other Common Law countries)? The framework/protocol for interpreter use merits discussion. “In simultaneous interpretation, interpreters listen, analyze, translate and speak with a lag of only seconds/words separating the original source-language (SL) version and the target-language (TL) rendition” (Schweda Nicholson 1987:  194). There is a real-time overlap between the incoming and the outgoing signal. As a result, interpreters must speak and listen at the same time. As they analyze new input, they are expressing material that has already been processed. This mode is the one that is most often associated with the United Nations. Simultaneous interpreting (SI) is used for a non-English-speaking defendant in order to provide a continuous information feed when English (or another language) is being spoken. The interpreter may sit next to the defendant at counsel table and speak softly or whisper. Alternatively, if equipment is available, the interpreter may be positioned in another part of the courtroom and talk into a small microphone or cone. The message is then transmitted to the defendant, who wears headphones. The benefit of the latter configuration is that the interpreter does not have to be close to the defendant. At times, there is a safety concern if the accused person has a record of violent activity. Moreover, the interpreter generally has more room for dictionaries, glossaries and other relevant documents if he/she can sit in another area. In consecutive interpreting (CI), a person produces an utterance in the SL and pauses. (Depending upon the length of what is said, the interpreter may take notes.) The interpreter then interprets that utterance into the TL. Unlike SI, there is no realtime overlap between the SL and TL. As a result, the “speak and listen at the same time” factor is not present. CI is generally employed in the courtroom when witnesses testify. In an American courtroom, the interpreter’s English rendition of the witness statement goes into the record. Outside the formal courtroom setting, consecutive interpreting is also used at depositions, to facilitate conversations between attorneys and clients and during police questioning. Finally, in sight translation (ST), the written word is used as the SL material. The interpreter translates into the TL out loud for the record. The NAJIT definition reads: “Sight translation is the rendering of written material in one language into spoken speech in another language” (NAJIT Position Paper 2006: 2). ST is often needed when an attorney wishes to introduce a non-English document (like a letter or birth certificate) into evidence. The material is given to the interpreter and he/she translates the written material aloud so that it can be entered into the record. Although many Common Law countries have developed policies and procedures for court interpreting similar to those in the United States, we will now see



Nancy Schweda Nicholson

that the hybrid legal system at the ICTY differs in its approach to the role of the interpreters in the courtroom. ICTY framework The ICTY was created on May 25, 1993, by United Nations (UN) Security Council Resolutions 808 and 827. The ICTY was to be: an international Tribunal with the sole purpose of judging those persons deemed responsible for serious human rights breaches committed on the territory of former Yugoslavia since 1991 … and to adapt the Statute of International Tribunal to this end. (Lescure and Trintignac 1996: 3)

To be more specific, the “serious human rights breaches” include “…violations of law and customs of war, genocide and crimes against humanity” (Nikolič 2005: 1). As an example, the Srebrenica massacre marked its tenth anniversary in July 2005. Approximately 8,000 Muslim boys and men were slaughtered by Bosnian Serbs on July 11, 1995. This tragedy constitutes “Europe’s worst mass killing since World War II” (Stojanovic 2005:B1). Noteworthy is that the ICTY was created during wartime, while the conflict was still raging. The establishment of the Tribunal at that point was unlike the Nuremberg or Tokyo Trials, which came into being after World War II had ended. The Conference and Language Services Section (CLSS) The Conference and Language Services Section (CLSS), a part of the Registry, furnishes interpreting and translation services throughout the ICTY and at various external sites. When the ICTY was first created, there was no structure in place to facilitate language services for the Tribunal. As a result, there were many recruitment and start-up challenges. For example, official guidelines for interpreting services were nonexistent in the areas of (1) hours and working days, (2) the size of the booths, and (3) the importance of providing documents in advance. Moreover, a Code of Ethics for ICTY interpreters was not created until 1999 (Ruzič 2003). The author has always been surprised at the lack of an official ICTY framework regarding interpreting and translation services, primarily because the ICTY is a UN organization. Since the UN has more than a half-century of experience in planning for language services, it is puzzling that standards were not established early on. Unlike the historically less-than-desirable situation described earlier with respect to the occasional use of ad hoc “interpreters” in a variety of legal settings, the ICTY courtroom interpreters are professional conference interpreters. Many belong



Chapter 2.  Interpreting at the ICTY 

to prestigious international interpreter organizations with stringent membership requirements. As a result, they are highly-skilled and experienced professionals. In addition to providing interpreting services in a number of languages in The Hague’s courtrooms, the CLSS is also responsible for assisting with suspect and witness interviews and sending interpreters into the field to help teams of investigators as they search for additional perpetrators and witnesses to their crimes. The CLSS is also in charge of court reporting. The first time a person walks into the Visitor Gallery facing Courtroom 1 (the largest room), one cannot help but notice that there are video monitors in front of each seat. Such monitors have also been placed in the interpreting booths. As the proceeding unfolds, real-time English appears on all screens. The input is provided by the court reporter. If a language other than English is spoken, the court reporter listens to the English booth, and transcribes the interpreter’s rendition. For the permanent record, taperecordings of all courtroom hearings as well as the ICTY’s plenary meetings are used as the basis to produce transcripts in English and French only. Written translations at the ICTY are produced by translators who are members of different language units within the CLSS. They work from and into English, French and Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian (or “BCS”, as it is known at the Tribunal). “BCS is the politically correct solution coined by the ICTY to designate the language formerly known as Serbo-Croatian, different variants of which were spoken throughout Yugoslavia” (Der-Kévorkian 2008: 25). In terms of the actual content and structure of BCS, Browne believes that it is “three different standardized versions of the same (almost 100%) raw material … that de facto function as one communication system” (2003: 1). There are some pronunciation differences among Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian, but these are not so radical as to impede communication. Variations in vocabulary (similar to those between American and British English) also exist. (See Browne 2001 for a more detailed linguistic description of BCS and Draženović-Carrieri 2002 for information on BCS lexicography and language policy.) Translations are not always produced directly from one language to another. For example, a document in BCS is translated into English first. It may also be translated into French as well, but the English translation is used as the basis for the production of the French version (Der-Kévorkian 2008). In a way, this is like relay interpreting, in which one interpreted version constitutes the SL for another TL rendition. (For further details see the section entitled Modes of Interpreting at the ICTY.) In 2008, a combination of in-house and contract translators had an output of 75,000 translated pages, including all of the ICTY’s various language combinations (Fifteenth annual report 2008).



Nancy Schweda Nicholson

Language use in the ICTY courtroom There are 127 Rules in the ICTY’s Rules of Procedure and Evidence. Language policies are delineated at the outset. Rule 3 (“Languages”) establishes the working languages of the ICTY as English and French (Rules of Procedure and Evidence 2003: 4). No languages are given “official” status, as is frequently the case in international organizations (like the UN), where a clear distinction is generally made between “official” and “working” languages. Rule 3 also describes the possible use of other languages. For example, the accused and victims are entitled to use their mother tongues. Counsel are generally expected to use either English or French; however, Section (D) of Rule 3 states that an attorney who wishes to use a language other than the working languages or the language of the accused “…may apply to the Presiding Judge of a chamber for leave…” to do so (Rules of Procedure… 2003: 4). Of interest here is that Slobodan Milošević (who died on March 11, 2006) acted as his own attorney for much of his trial. As a result, he spoke Serbian in court and questioned all witnesses in Serbian as well. As an observer in ICTY courtrooms on multiple occasions, the author is keenly aware of the challenges posed by the clash of different linguistic and cultural perspectives. For example, in addition to English and French, BCS is used on a daily basis by an overwhelming percentage of witnesses. Moreover, most native BCS-speaking attorneys question witnesses in BCS, but often address the court in English. As might be expected, the English skills of these lawyers vary greatly, so some are more persuasive in their arguments than others. From the witness’s perspective, it is certainly more comfortable to be addressed in their native language and to be able to answer in it. Many attorneys (for both the defense and prosecution), however, are native English-speakers, so their questions have to be interpreted for the witnesses. Inasmuch as some of these lawyers know little about the ethnic conflicts and history of the region before coming to The Hague, it is an ongoing challenge for them, not only to prepare their cases, but also to become aware of the different cultures’ perspectives and motivations as the courtroom drama plays out. Tensions often run high, and there can be misunderstandings. The Milošević trial necessitated the addition of Albanian as one of the ICTY’s working languages in practice. (Neither Albanian nor BCS is referred to specifically in the Rules.) Initially, there were only three SI booths; however, a fourth was added when the trial began. The reason for this extra booth is that Milošević was accused of masterminding crimes that were allegedly committed in Kosovo, the Albanian-speaking part of Yugoslavia. Many of the witnesses testifying against him were Albanian speakers. Inasmuch as Albanian and BCS are not traditional conference languages, interpreter recruitment efforts centered on non-governmental organizations (NGOs) within the Former Yugoslavia and other Balkan



Chapter 2.  Interpreting at the ICTY 

states. There is a very limited pool of conference interpreters working in the required language combinations. What this means is that, unlike interpreters whose working languages have a wider diffusion and are spoken in many regions of the world (such as Spanish in Mexico, Spain, and Cuba), those who are employed at the ICTY are more likely than not to have themselves lived through the atrocities of the war, losing relatives, friends and neighbors in this horrible conflict. Everyone from this region that the author spoke to had been touched by the war in one way or another. There are often needs for interpreters of languages over and above the four cited above. For example, the author observed a Russian general testifying on behalf of Milošević in court one day. The additional language requirements also result because there is a well-developed witness and victim relocation program. Individuals have been resettled in places as far away as Indonesia. For this reason, it is not uncommon to bring in Bahasa Malay interpreters as well as those who speak Dutch, Portuguese, German, Italian, Polish, Norwegian and Spanish, to name just a few (Draženović-Carrieri 2003a). Modes of interpreting at the ICTY SI is the mode used exclusively for courtroom proceedings (including witness testimony) at the ICTY. With three (and frequently four) languages employed, SI was the logical choice in order to allow for real-time interpreting. This mode allows the lengthy and involved proceedings to move forward in the most efficient manner. Relay interpreting (RI) is also often needed. “There are virtually no interpreters working, for instance, into French, both from English [and] BCS... [as well as from] German/ Dutch/ Italian…” (Draženović-Carrieri 2003a). Inasmuch as RI requires that an interpreter work from another interpreted version, this process creates more possibilities for errors and omissions. To offer an illustration, let’s say that a witness wishes to testify in German. If there are no interpreters available who work from German into BCS, for example, but there is one who interprets from German to English, then the English interpreter (called a “pivot”) produces a rendition in that language. Subsequently, the French, BCS and Albanian interpreters switch their control boxes to listen to the English booth (rather than listening to the floor language) and work from this interpretation into French, BCS and Albanian. In other words, in RI, interpreters listen to an interpreted rendition in order to formulate their own version in their target languages. Although RI is far from ideal, it is, practically speaking, required in order to handle the wide variety of languages with a limited number of interpreters. In 2005, all three ICTY courtrooms were remodeled. As a result, it is now possible to conduct trials of up to eighteen defendants at the same time. The renovations



Nancy Schweda Nicholson

included updating the facilities to permit SI into four languages in every courtroom (Thirteenth annual report 2006: 25). In addition to SI and RI, CI is frequently employed, but not in the courtroom itself. All pre-trial activities, such as depositions and prison meetings between defendants and attorneys, utilize CI. Whereas the quality of courtroom interpreters is generally excellent, a defense attorney stated that she has sometimes been disappointed with the contract interpreters that assist when she talks to her clients or interviews potential witnesses (Lindsay 2005). CI is also imperative during work in the field. Interpreters frequently accompany investigators who are searching for victims and witnesses, both in Bosnia-Herzegovina and worldwide. Once again, because many people have been relocated, investigators are required to travel great distances, at times, in order to find and interview those who suffered at the hands of Serbia, Milošević and his armies as well as other groups. Interpreter stress In e-mail correspondence with Maja Draženović-Carrieri (former Chief Interpreter at the ICTY), the author posed an open-ended question. She asked: “Are there any particular problems/challenges re: working with interpreters in this very specific ICTY setting which you believe I should include…?” Draženović-Carrieri’s response was very telling yet not at all unexpected, given the gravity of the matters investigated and the stories told by witnesses. She singled out “emotional strain” and went on to say that the “…impact is even greater on people who come from the Former Yugoslavia, though ‘complete foreigners’ may be equally affected” (Draženović-Carrieri 2003b). Draženović-Carrieri volunteered that the Welfare Office at the ICTY was set up to deal with these types of issues. She provided the author with contact information for Kevin Cullen, Welfare Officer, and an interview took place in The Hague in December 2003 (Cullen 2003). A trained psychologist, Cullen furnishes social, psychological and practical services for more than 1,400 ICTY employees. He stated that he has counseled (both individually and in groups) approximately 30% of the ICTY staff. Cullen enumerated some of the effects of stress experienced by his clients. These include nightmares, burn-out and indirect trauma. Indirect trauma results when a person who hears someone’s story finds him/herself feeling like he/ she is right there going through the same ordeal with the individual. (In her presentation at the New York University International Translation Conference “Global Security: Implications for Translation and Interpretation” in June 2004, psychologist Adeyinka Akinsulure-Smith referred to this same phenomenon as “vicarious trauma” [2004]). Cullen stated that, to the interpreters’ and translators’ credit,



Chapter 2.  Interpreting at the ICTY 

many from the CLSS remain employed at the ICTY for long periods. He believes that the language personnel are particularly good at developing coping strategies. Cullen also talked at length about the challenges involved in field interpreting. First, the ethnic and cultural background of the accompanying interpreter must be taken into consideration, as he/she must be acceptable to the interviewees. Clearly, hatred between enemies in this region is intense, and witnesses may simply refuse to cooperate if the interpreter comes from an untrusted group. When interpreters accompany investigators into the field, they frequently meet with informants, victims and witnesses in secret places. These are highly confidential meetings. If secrecy is compromised, the person’s life (or that of his/her family members) may be in jeopardy. As in any delicate situation, the interpreter must be certain to maintain confidentiality regarding the individuals involved and the subject(s) under discussion. Interpreters in the field find themselves encountering a variety of cultures and folks with widely divergent educational levels, from the poorest, illiterate peasants to highly-trained university professors. Some people are completely rational and coherent; however, others may be extremely emotional and find it difficult to think clearly and/or remember what transpired, often many years in the past. As a result, the interpreter is often placed in very difficult and stressful situations. These circumstances are, of course, over and above the normally demanding task of interpreting, even when conditions are ideal (Schweda Nicholson 2004). The ADC-ICTY Training Course, The Hague, December 2003, and subsequent classes Rationale and participants An ADC-ICTY Training Course was held in The Hague from December 11 to 14, 2003, at the Grotius Centre for International Legal Studies (affiliated with the University of Leiden). The four-day seminar was organized for a number of reasons. There was a need, for example, to highlight the differences between Common and Civil Law systems. The Balkan and other European participants come from a civil law background, whereas the Americans, British and Australians practice within a common law framework (see above). It is also important to note that ICTY experience among the attorney attendees varied. Some had worked on cases in the past (or were currently involved in cases), others would soon be assigned to a case, and still others were taking the course in order to ascertain what practice would be like before the ICTY. One could characterize this last group as on a “fact-finding mission,” one which would help them to make up their minds about whether they were interested in future participation. The faculty included distinguished



Nancy Schweda Nicholson

international criminal lawyers from the United States, Great Britain, Ireland, and the Netherlands, as well as a lone linguist. The author participated fully in all sessions and offered continuous feedback during the role-playing activities. One of the sponsors was the Association of Defense Counsel, the official defense bar at the ICTY. Eighteen attorney “students” came to the seminar to prepare to represent defendants at the ICTY. The “advocacy” part of the course provided intensive training in direct and cross-examination techniques. Inasmuch as witness questioning in court is generally not part of the Civil Law system, these lawyers needed to learn the nuts and bolts of the process as well as specific strategies and procedures associated with both direct and cross-examination. All of the attorneys spoke English, but to varying degrees. Of course, the American and United Kingdom participants were all native English-speakers whereas the Balkan attorneys were not. During the course, participants’ language abilities (whether native or not) often had an effect on the persuasiveness of their arguments and/or the skills with which questions were posed. Course design Days began early and lasted late into the evening. Lectures, discussions and demonstrations brought together everyone in a large group. The formal presentations were numerous and on target with respect to the work of the ICTY. These included: (1) Common Law versus Civil Law systems, (2) rules and procedures of the ICTY, (3) how to work with interpreters (one of the author’s contributions), (4) brainstorming and team defense, (5) direct and cross-examination techniques, (6) working with expert witnesses, (7) field investigation, and (8) case management (including a demonstration of state-of-the-art software). In addition, the attorney trainers prepared detailed background information on a hypothetical case, which was the focus of the small-group exercises. Although fictitious, the case was devised to ring true in terms of the type of legal action one might expect at the ICTY. The trainees reviewed a variety of supporting documents with the goal of preparing cross-examination questions for witnesses such as medical experts. Much of the day was spent on role-playing scenarios. Each participant received multiple opportunities to practice direct and cross-examination under the watchful eyes of their criminal defense attorney faculty and those of the author, who monitored their performance from an interpreter perspective. One afternoon was spent at the ICTY in a small conference room. Trainees practiced questioning a French-speaking witness in English via SI. This exercise was especially eye-opening for those who had little experience working with interpreters (Schweda Nicholson 2005d).



Chapter 2.  Interpreting at the ICTY 

Participant evaluation Seasoned ICTY defense attorneys as well as those who were completely new to the international criminal tribunal process rated the course a resounding success. They wrote about the excellent qualifications of the trainers as well as the expert assistance they provided at all levels. Participants were very positive about the topics that were covered and the wealth of knowledge they gained in only four days. Many without prior ICTY experience decided that they would pursue the possibility of being selected to work on a case. Numerous participants told the author that they were very glad that “how to work with interpreters” had been included as a topic. They also appreciated the detailed feedback she provided during the small group exercises. All of the trainees felt that the course should be repeated in other jurisdictions and for other populations. In fact, similar courses with many of the same trainers have been held in both The Hague and Montreal over the past several years. The most recent course was in Montreal in December 2006. Subsequent classes have emphasized training for defense work before the International Criminal Court (ICC), also in The Hague. Noteworthy was a five-day session in Montreal in May 2004 that brought together primarily African attorneys hoping to become involved in advocacy at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) as well as the ICC. Conclusion Before proceeding to summary remarks, the author would like once again to express her gratitude to the ADC-ICTY Training Course organizers for including the interpreting perspective as an integral part of the December 2003 class in The Hague. The “working with interpreters” segment has figured prominently in every subsequent course. All too often, language issues are relegated to the back burner when international meetings are planned. It is unfortunate that something as critical as providing services that facilitate communication among the participants is frequently dealt with as an afterthought, long after the framework is in place. The ADC-ICTY participants appreciated the attention that was paid to the power, value and importance of the interpreters, both within and outside the courtroom. From the author’s perspective, involvement in the ADC-ICTY Training Course (as well as subsequent classes) was a “dream” job. Court interpreters and language planners alike muse about how wonderful it would be to be given the opportunity to have the undivided attention of attorneys and judges in order to advise them about the work and the role of the court interpreter. The courses in The Hague and Montreal were just such opportunities. A deeper appreciation and understanding



Nancy Schweda Nicholson

of the interpreting process, with its inherent challenges and problems, facilitate the activities of people involved in judicial systems at all levels. (For additional guidelines on working with interpreters, see Keijzer-Lambooy & Gasille 2005b.) The current paper has offered a look at ICTY interpreting from a variety of perspectives. It examined the differences between Civil and Common Law, the field of court interpreting, the creation of the ICTY, the languages involved, the modes of interpreting employed, the role of stress in both the courtroom and the field, and training courses for attorneys in The Hague and Montreal. Interpreting at the ICTY is a fact of daily life. The women and men of the CLSS toil in the trenches to permit communication among parties who would otherwise be unable to interact. Their work constitutes a noble and ongoing effort in the search for justice. As the ICTY completes its work in the next several years (trials are currently projected to end in 2012 and appeals in 2013: see http://www.icty.org/ sid/10016), the ICC is carrying out investigations and hearing cases. It is hoped that this new court will carry on in the ICTY tradition, holding those who commit crimes against humanity accountable and meting out punishment. Through it all, the interpreters will continue to play a pivotal and integral role. References Akinsulure-Smith, Adeyinka M.A. 2004. “Speaking the Unspeakable: Interpreting for Survivors of Torture, War and Refugee Trauma”. Paper presented at New York University’s 2nd International Translation Conference – Global Security: Implications for Translation and Interpretation. New York City, June 3–5, 2004. Benmaman, Virginia. 2000. “Interpreter Issues on Appeal”. Proteus 8:4.1, 3–9. Benmaman, Virginia. 1997. “Legal Interpreting by Any Other Name Is Still Legal Interpreting”. The Critical Link: Interpreters in the Community ed. by Silvana E. Carr, Roda Roberts, Aideen Dufour & Dini Steyn, 179–190. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Browne, Wayles. 2003. Personal communication. November 28. Browne, Wayles. 2001. “Serbo-Croatian”. Facts about the World’s Languages: An Encyclopedia of the World’s Major Languages, Past and Present ed. by Jane Garry & Carl Rubino, 629–632. New York & Dublin: H. W. Wilson. Crooker, Constance E. 1996. The Art of Legal Interpretation: A Guide for Court Interpreters. Portland, OR: Continuing Education Press, Portland State University. Cullen, Kevin. 2003. Interview (December 10). The Hague. de Jongh, Elena. 1992. An Introduction to Court Interpreting. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. Der-Kévorkian, Isabelle. 2008. “Delivering Multilingual Justice: A Look into the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia”. ATA Chronicle, February, 24–26. Draženović-Carrieri, Maja. 2003a. Personal communication. November 23. Draženović-Carrieri, Maja. 2003b. Personal communication. November 25.



Chapter 2.  Interpreting at the ICTY Draženović-Carrieri, Maja. 2002. “BCS – A practical approach”., Lexical Norm and National Language: Lexicography and Language Policy in South-Slavic Languages after 1989 ed.by Radovan Ĺučić, 49–52. Munich: Otto Sagner. Edwards, Alicia Betsy. 1995. The Practice of Court Interpreting. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Fifteenth Annual Report of the International Tribunal for the Prosecution of Persons Responsible for Serious Violations of International Humanitarian Law Committed in the Territory of the Former Yugoslavia since 1991. 2008. A/63/210-S/2008/515. New York: United Nations. Gibbons, John. 2003. Forensic Linguistics: An Introduction to Language in the Justice System. Malden, MA: Blackwell. González, Roseann D., Victoria Vásquez & Holly Mikkelson. 1991. Fundamentals of Court Interpretation. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press. Hale, Sandra. 1997a. “Clash of World Perspectives: The Discursive Practices of the Law, the Witness and the Interpreter”. Forensic Linguistics 4:2.197–209. Hale, Sandra. 1997b. “The Treatment of Register Variation in Court Interpreting”. The Translator 3:1.39–54. Herman, Madelynn & William E. Hewitt. 2001. “The National Center for State Courts and the Consortium for State Court Interpreter Certification Program”. ATA Chronicle, October, 20–25, 27. Hewitt, William E. & Robert Joe Lee. 1996. “Beyond the Language Barrier, or ‘You say you were eating an orange?’” State Court Journal 20:1.23–31. Keijzer-Lambooy, Heleen & Willem Jan Gasille, eds. 2005a. Aequilibrium: Instruments for Lifting Language Barriers in Intercultural Legal Proceedings. Utrecht: ITV Hogeschool voor Tolken en Vertalen. Keijzer-Lambooy, Heleen & Willem Jan Gasille, eds. 2005b. Working with Legal Interpreters and Translators: Some Training Materials for the Legal Professions. Utrecht: ITV Hogeschool voor Tolken en Vertalen. Kelly, Arlene. 2004. “The unheard ‘I’: Interpreters in the Judiciary”. ATA Chronicle, March, 20–24. Lescure, Karine & Florence Trintignac. 1996. International Justice for Former Yugoslavia: The Working of the International Criminal Tribunal of the Hague. The Hague: Kluwer Law International. Lindsay, Virginia. 2005. Interview (June 12). The Hague. Lowney, Robert. 2005. “Federal Judiciary Accomplishments of the Last 10 Years and the Challenges of the Future”. Proteus 14:3.9–11. NAJIT Code of Ethics and Professional Responsibilities. [No date]. http://www.najit.org/documents/NAJITCodeofEthicsFINAL.pdf (13 February 2010). NAJIT Position Paper. 2006. Modes of Interpreting: Simultaneous, Consecutive & Sight Translation. National Association of Judiciary Interpreters and Translators. http://www.najit.org/ documents/Modes%20of%20Interpreting.pdf (13 February 2010). Nikolič, Marijana. 2005. “Interpretation after Nuremberg: International War Crimes Trials”. Proteus 14:1.1, 6–8. PCFD (European Union). 2004. “Proposal for a Council Framework Decision on Certain Procedural Rights in Criminal Proceedings Throughout the European Union”. COM (2004) 328 F of 28.4.04. Roberts, Roda P. & Nancy Schweda Nicholson. 2003. “Translation and Interpretation”. International Encyclopedia of Linguistics, 2nd edition, ed. by William J. Frawley. Vol. 4, 281–285. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press.





Nancy Schweda Nicholson Rules of Procedure and Evidence. 2003 (July 28, revised). International Tribunal for the Prosecution of Persons Responsible for Serious Violations of International Humanitarian Law Committed in the Territory of the Former Yugoslavia since 1991. The Hague: United Nations. Ruzič, Maja. 2003. Personal communication, December. Schweda Nicholson, Nancy. 2009. “The Law on Language in the European Union: Policy Development for Interpreting/Translation Services in Criminal Proceedings”. International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law 16:1.59–90. Schweda Nicholson, Nancy. 2005a. “The Court Interpreters Act of 1978: A Twenty-Five Year Retrospective: Part I”. ATA Chronicle, August, 36–41. Schweda Nicholson, Nancy. 2005b. “The Court Interpreters Act of 1978: A Twenty-Five Year Retrospective: Part II”. ATA Chronicle, September, 32–38. Schweda Nicholson, Nancy. 2005c. “The European Commission’s Proposal for a Council Framework Decision: The United States’ Perspective”. Keijzer-Lambooy & Gasille 2005a:35–53. Schweda Nicholson, Nancy. 2005d. “Proactive Efforts to Educate Attorneys and Judges on the Role of the Court Interpreter in the United States, at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), and at the International Criminal Court (ICC)”. FORUM 3:2.167–192. Schweda Nicholson, Nancy. 2004. “Interpreting at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia”. Paper presented at New York University’s 2nd International Translation Conference – Global Security: Implications for Translation and Interpretation, New York City, June 3–5. Schweda Nicholson, Nancy. 2002. “Interpretation”. The Oxford Handbook of Applied Linguistics ed. by Robert B. Kaplan, 443–456. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press. Schweda Nicholson, Nancy. 1994. “Professional Ethics for Court and Community Interpreters”. Professional Issues for Translators and Interpreters ed. by Deanna Hammond, 79–97. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Schweda Nicholson, Nancy. 1989a. “Ad hoc Court Interpreters in the United States: Equality, Inequality, Quality?” Meta 34:4.711–723. Schweda Nicholson, Nancy. 1989b. “Linguistic Perspectives on Courtroom Language and Interpretation Services”. Northeast Conference on Legal Interpretation and Translation ed. by Angela Aguirre, 65–74. Wayne, NJ: The Consortium of Educators in Legal Interpretation and Translation at Jersey City State College. Schweda Nicholson, Nancy. 1987. “Linguistic and Extralinguistic Aspects of Simultaneous Interpretation”. Applied Linguistics 8:2.194–205. Schweda Nicholson, Nancy. 1986. “Language Planning and Policy Development for Court Interpretation Services in the United States. Language Problems and Language Planning 10:2.140–157. Sherr, Daniel. 2000. “Anyone Here Speak Russian? Proteus 8:3.17. Stojanovic, Dusan. 2005. “Thousands Mourn Balkan Massacre”. Boulder Daily Camera, July 12: B1, 48. Thirteenth Annual Report of the International Tribunal for the Prosecution of Persons Responsible for Serious Violations of International Humanitarian Law Committed in the Territory of the Former Yugoslavia since 1991. 2006. A/61/271-S/2006/666. New York: United Nations. Trabing, Eta M. 2005. “Does It Mean What You Think it Means?” ATA Chronicle, October, 28–33. van der Heide, Marijke. 2003. “Administrative Office of the United States Courts Federal Court Interpreter Program”. The ATA Chronicle, October, 26–28. Vesler, Igor. 2004. “Translator as Accomplice?” Proteus 13:3.1,5–12.

chapter 3

Translating and interpreting sign language Mediating the DEAF-WORLD Timothy Reagan Translating and interpreting sign languages has received relatively little attention outside the applied world of sign language interpretation. In this chapter, the general theme of the translator as the mediator of cultures will be applied to the complex case of sign languages, using ASL and, to a lesser extent, other sign languages, as cases in point. Because of the diversity within sign languages, and the typical lack of overall codification for sign languages, the tasks of translation and interpretation become heavily reliant on the cultural and linguistic knowledge, sensitivity and judgment of the interpreter or translator. In this chapter, I will explore the concept of diversity in sign languages, the special challenges faced by sign language translators and interpreters, the role of culture in deaf-hearing interchanges, and finally, the implications of such points for other translators and interpreters.

Translating and interpreting American Sign Language (ASL) in particular, and sign languages in general, is an interesting case that has received relatively little attention outside the applied world of sign language interpretation. In this chapter, the general theme of the translator as the mediator of cultures will be applied to the complex case of sign languages, using ASL and, to a lesser extent, other sign languages, as cases in point. Members of the DEAF-WORLD1 (that is, individuals who are culturally and linguistically, as opposed merely to audiologically, deaf2) rely 1. The sign DEAF-WORLD or DEAF^WORLD is used in ASL to refer to the cultural phenomenon of deafness. Also used to express the same concept are the phrases “deaf culture” and “deaf community” or, more rarely, “deafhood” (for examples of the use of the sign DEAFWORLD, see Bragg 2001; Lane, Hoffmeister & Bahan 1996; for “deaf culture,” see Padden & Humphries 1988, 2005; for “deafhood,” see Ladd 2003). 2. A common distinction made in writing about deafness is between ‘deaf ’ and ‘Deaf ’; the former refers to deafness solely as an audiological condition, the latter to Deafness as a cultural condition (as indicated in the terms and phrases discussed in the preceding note). The basic



Timothy Reagan

extensively on interpretation services, as do some (though not all) other deaf people. Because of the diversity within sign languages, and the typical lack of overall codification or commonly employed written forms of such languages, the tasks of translation and interpretation become heavily reliant on the cultural and linguistic knowledge, sensitivity and judgment of the interpreter or translator. To be sure, this is also true in many, and perhaps all, interpreting and translating interactions, but I believe that there may also be some unique and especially problematic aspects found in the interpretation of sign languages, and this view is common among both sign language interpreters and those who train them (see Cokely 1992, 2008; McIntire 1986; Metzger 1999; Roy 2000, 2005, 2006). As Metzger has noted, for instance, While spoken-spoken or signed-signed language interpreters deal with participants who are presumably not fluent in one another’s languages, interpreters who work in signed-spoken language settings encounter a unique phenomenon. That is, the interlocutors not only cannot understand the other language, but even prosodic information, or the fact that an utterance has occurred at all, might be totally unknown to a participant without the interpreter’s contributions. (Metzger 1999: 180).

In this chapter, I will explore the concept of diversity in sign languages, the special challenges faced by sign language translators and interpreters, the role of culture in deaf-hearing interchanges, and, finally, the implications of such points for other translators and interpreters. It is true that, for the most part, little work has been done on the translation of sign languages into spoken languages in written form – although there is a growing and well-recognized literature in ASL, for instance, and while this literature has been the focus of scholarly study, it is generally not actually translated as written prose, poetry, and so on, into English or other spoken and written languages (see Bahan 1992, Bragg 1996, Christie & Wilkins 1997, Corrado 1990, Frishberg 1988, Jacobowitz 1992, Jepson 1992, Krentz 2000, Low 1992, Peters 2000). Rather, for the sign language community, the focus of interlingual communication remains principally at the level of interpreting. And yet, in spite of the obvious and important distinction between interpretation and translation, the case of sign language interpreting does, I think, overlap two major themes: those of “the invisible translator” and “literature and culture.” The idea of “the invisible translator,” it idea underlying this distinction is that when writing about cultural groups in general, upper case letters are employed (‘African American’, ‘Hispanic’, ‘Native American’, etc.). Thus, a person can be ‘deaf ’ without being ‘Deaf ’ (as in the case of an older person who gradually loses his/her hearing). I have followed common practice here, although I am concerned that it has the potential to oversimplify and dichotomize the complexity of membership in the Deaf community. In fact, in my view, deafness is not only socially and individually constructed, but its construction is complex and multilayered (see Branson & Miller 2002; Ladd 2003; Lane, Hoffmeister & Bahan 1996; Padden & Humphries 1988, 2005; Reagan 1990, 2002).



Chapter 3.  Translating and interpreting sign language 

should be noted here, refers to the notion that the translator or interpreter should function as a neutral agent whose task is simply to convey what is said in one language into another language. Such a view of translation and interpretation, which was quite popular at one point in the history of interpreting and translating, is now generally recognized as overly simplistic for a variety of linguistic and extralinguistic reasons, although it is not without advocates, and remains a commonplace understanding of the process of interpreting and translating (see Angelelli 2001, 2003, 2004a, 2004b). This chapter will examine the unique situation of sign language interpretation, especially in terms of ASL, and then briefly explore how the case of sign language interpretation may indeed relate to these two themes. A good place to starting is with the nature of the diversity found within sign language, both in single sign languages such as ASL, and among sign languages as a specific type of language. All languages, of course, are characterized by internal variation, and this variation presents both interpreters and translators with a plethora of difficult challenges. For instance, H. T. Lowe-Porter, one of the early British translators of Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, perceptively and powerfully noted that “The translation of a book which is a triumph of style in its own language, is always a piece of effrontery. Buddenbrooks is so leisurely, so chiseled:... the author has recorded much dialect. This difficulty is insuperable. Dialect cannot be transferred” (Mann 1984 [1901], “Translator’s Note”). Of course, the difficulty of which Lowe-Porter spoke was not really insuperable; he produced a very readable translation of Buddenbrooks, which is still in print and widely sold, although obviously much of the force of the variation of the German spoken by the characters is minimized if not lost altogether for the English reader. The situation in ASL, though, is one in which both the degree and kind of variation is significantly different from that typically found in spoken and written languages, and the same is certainly true in many other sign languages. Variation in sign languages actually refers to a number of different, and significant, kinds of variation that do not easily parallel those found in spoken and written languages. In certain respects, of course, there is in fact the direct parallel to spoken languages: there are large numbers of sign languages that are natural sign languages used by deaf people in different settings around the world. Although these different natural sign languages share certain generic features (such as their gestural and visual nature, their use of space for linguistic purposes, etc. – see Dively, Metzger, Taub & Baer 2001; Emmorey 2003; Emmorey & Reilly 1995; Lucas 1990; Sandler & Lillo-Martin 2006), and while some sign languages are genetically related to others (that is, there are sign language families just as there are spoken language families),3 3. See Woll, Sutton-Spence and Elton (2001), for a discussion of the historical relationships among sign languages; also relevant here is Woodward (2000).



Timothy Reagan

these languages are nevertheless distinctive languages in their own right. Aspects of many of these natural sign languages have been studied by linguists; among these languages are not only ASL, but also Albanian Sign Language (Hoyer 2007), Australian Sign Language (Johnston & Schembri 2007), Brazilian Sign Language (de Quadros 2003), British Sign Language (Sutton-Spence & Woll 1998), Danish Sign Language (Engberg-Pedersen 1993, 2003), Dutch Sign Language (Schermer 2004, van der Kooij 2001), Flemish Sign Language (Vanhecke & De Weerdt 2004, Antoons & Boonen 2004), German Sign Language (Keller, Hohenberger & Leuninger 2003), Hausa Sign Language (Schmaling 2001), Hong Kong Sign Language (Sze 2003, Tang 2003), Indo-Pakistani Sign Language (Zeshan 2000, 2003), Irish Sign Language (Leeson & Grehan 2004), Israeli Sign Language (Meir 2001, Meir & Sandler 2008), Italian Sign Language (Corazza 1990; Pizzuto, Giuranna & Gambino 1990), Japanese Sign Language (Nakamura 2006), Nicaraguan Sign Language (Senghas, Özyürek & Kita 2003), Russian Sign Language (Grenoble 1992, Yoel 2007), South African Sign Language (Penn & Reagan 1990), Swedish Sign Language (Bergman & Wallin 2001, 2003), Thai Sign Language (Collins-Ahlgren 1990, Woodward 2000), Vietnamese Sign Language (Woodward 2000), and Venezuelan Sign Language (Oviedo 2004, Pietrosemoli 2001), and this is far from an exhaustive list. Indeed, although impressive in its own right, this list is but the proverbial tip of the iceberg, since most natural sign languages (like most spoken languages) remain unstudied by linguists. Tove Skutnabb-Kangas has reminded us that “there probably are something between 6,500 and 10,000 spoken (oral) languages in the world, and a number of sign languages which can be equally large” (2000:  30). Although this is true in principle, for a number of reasons the total number of sign languages is almost certainly far smaller than the total number of spoken languages in the world. In any case, it is an interesting observation that in international settings in which sign language interpreting is taking place, the most common format often appears to be from signed language to spoken language to signed language, rather than directly from sign language to sign language, though the latter does also take place on occasion. The numbers of natural sign languages are but one sense in which we can talk about sign language variation, however. The second way in which variation enters the picture is with respect to the diversity present within particular natural sign languages. In the case of ASL, for instance, we know that there is not only extensive lexical diversity related to region of the country, but also diversity related to age, gender, and ethnicity (see Lucas, Bayley & Valli 2001). At the same time, there is reason to believe that to some extent geographic mobility, coupled with new technologies, may ultimately result in increased standardization of ASL. A far more extreme case of internal diversity is provided by South African Sign Language



Chapter 3.  Translating and interpreting sign language 

(SASL) (see Ogilvy-Foreman, Penn & Reagan 1994; Penn 1992; Penn & Reagan 1990, 1991, 1994, 1995; Penn, Reagan & Ogilvy 1991; Reagan 1996, 2004; Reagan & Penn 1997; Reagan, Penn & Ogilvy 2006). SASL, at least in part as a consequence of the social and educational policies of the apartheid régime, is characterized by extensive lexical variation coupled with an underlying syntactic unity. As Penn and Reagan have noted, Of the 2500 lexical items collected under the auspices of the SASLRP [South African Sign Language Research Programme] for the dictionary of SASL [South African Sign Language], only 2% of all of the words represented had a single, common sign across all the different deaf groups, and roughly 10% of the words have as few as one or two signed variants... On average, six variants per word were found and the range went as high as eleven variants [for a single word]... (2001: 55)

Indeed, the situation is so complex that linguists studying SASL have actually engaged in arguments and debates about whether SASL is a single sign language, or whether it is a related collection of different sign languages (see Aarons 1996; Aarons & Akach 1998, 2002a, 2002b; Aarons & Reynolds 2003; Branson & Miller 2002: 244–245; Reagan 2004). The third sort of variation that plays a role in understanding sign language is not so much variation in terms of sign language per se as it is variation with respect to what is actually meant by “signing.” The distinction between “sign language” and “signing,” although not one to which many non-signers are particularly sensitive, is in fact a very significant one. Up to this point, we have been concerned only with natural sign languages – the sign languages that emerge and are used in communities of deaf people for intragroup communication. The deaf, however, do not live apart from the hearing: rather, they are integrated into the hearing world in a number of ways and on a number of different levels. The vast majority of deaf people (about 90%) have hearing parents, and the vast majority of deaf people (again, around 90% of the relevant deaf community) will have hearing children. In addition, the deaf need to have access to at least some other hearing people in order to function socially and economically. While the children of deaf people may well learn their parents’ sign language as a native language, most parents of deaf children and other hearing people who are in contact with the deaf will generally not learn the natural sign language. Instead, they will learn to sign using what is in essence a contact sign language – that is, a sign language that has elements of both the natural sign language and the surrounding spoken language (see Lucas & Valli 1989, 1991, 1992). Such contact languages, originally termed “pidgin sign language,” are in fact the primary kind of sign language used in hearing-deaf communicative interchanges. These contact languages, like natural sign languages, are



Timothy Reagan

the result of normal linguistic development, and their emergence parallels that of spoken contact languages. Finally, there have been efforts to design “manual sign codes” to represent spoken languages (see Bornstein 1990, Reagan 1995). These manual sign codes are simply efforts to represent a spoken language in a gestural/visual modality – comparable, really, to writing a spoken language. Manual sign codes were developed in educational settings as a way of providing deaf children with access to spoken language. In the case of the United States, for instance, the most popular of these manual sign codes is “Signing Exact English” (Gustason & Zawolkow 1993). It is important to note that manual sign codes are just that: codes to represent language, not language in and of themselves (see Reagan 1995, 2001). The actual educational value of such manual sign codes is in fact somewhat debatable, but to a fluent signer, the codes are often perceived as slow, awkward and confusing (see Reagan 1995). What all this means for the sign language interpreter has some interesting implications for the theme of the translator as mediator of cultures. To begin, of course, from a primarily linguistic perspective, the interpreter must select from his or her repertoire of different kinds of signing. In some instances, the interpretation must really go from (for example) English to ASL and back to English, while in other settings contact sign is used. In extreme cases, and certainly in educational settings with young children (see Winston 2004), an interpreter may need to utilize a manual sign code (see Seal 1998). In such instances, I suppose, one could even question whether such interpretation really is interpretation, since what is really taking place is that we are shifting from one mode of English to another. Often, given a diverse audience with different linguistic skills and backgrounds, the sign language interpreter is forced to seek some sort of a middle ground. As Stewart, Schein, and Cartwright have suggested in a well-respected guide for sign language interpreters, “When feasible, interpreters in a given situation should consult with the deaf participants as to their desires. If two or more of the deaf participants disagree, the interpreter should urge them to compromise, rather than deciding for them. The existence of other signing options imposes yet another burden on interpreters” (1998: 137). This range of options is just the first of several challenges faced by the sign language interpreter; code mixing and code switching are both more common in ASL, for instance, than would be the case for spoken languages, as is lexical borrowing and direct transliteration using a manual alphabet – and yet, again, there are individual and subgroup disagreements. Next, there is the problem of mouthing: in contact signing, it is common practice to mouth the spoken language as the contact sign interpretation is provided; in ASL, due to its radically different word-order and internal syntactic structure, as well as is own unique mouthing patterns that are not related to spoken language,



Chapter 3.  Translating and interpreting sign language 

mouthing is impossible. (This, by the way, should provide non-signers with some valuable information about what actually takes place in most public interpreting settings, including on television, at college and university commencements, and so on.) Finally, just as translators and interpreters of spoken languages must deal with the challenges of register, so too must signed language interpreters. As Risa Shaw has noted in terms of the training of ASL interpreters, Ability to act effectively as interpreter in any situation is directly related to the interpreter’s experience and knowledge... [and] the ability to manage register is no exception.... Register analysis must be done separately in each language – English and ASL – so as not to cause interference or confusion about how the culture of the users of each language determines what register is appropriate for what occasions. Register, as with all linguistic and sociological aspects of communication, must also be considered in context while realizing its dynamic nature. (1992: 83–84)

One way to think about the realities of the functions of the sign language interpreter has been clearly articulated by Nancy Frishberg, who notes that: – The interpreter is much like any other listener, making sense of the discourse as it is expressed through time. – The interpreter’s signing choices are those of a listener’s construction, rather than those of the speaker who knows where the rest of the narrative will lead. – The spatial arrangement of signs in an interpreted narrative depends on the speaker’s meanings as revealed successively through speech time and understood by the working interpreter. – The spatial arrangement of signs in a skillful interpretation is also constrained by the conditions (phonological dominance relations, discourse structures) that signers generating their own messages follow. (2000: 170) It is culture, though, rather than simply the additional linguistic challenges faced by the sign language interpreter, that I want to address here. The real challenge faced by the sign language interpreter has less to do with language per se (as significant as that is) than it does with cultural matters. In a powerful essay entitled “Critical linguistic and cultural awareness,” Kyra Pollitt (2000) has graphically illustrated the difference between interpreting and translating for hearing individuals from two or more cultures, and for interpreting between the deaf and hearing worlds. Her argument, basically, is that each of us lives in our own “lifeworld” which in turn overlaps both other “lifeworlds” and a more public sphere. There is, thus, a high degree of intersection, and it is the translation among and between public spheres, in turn, as well as the individual “lifeworlds” connected to them, that is the focus of the translator. This is obviously no small or easy matter. In the case of the deaf, however, things are even more complex, since the individual deaf person typically functions

 Timothy Reagan

not only in the public sphere and in his “lifeworld,” but also in the DEAF-WORLD. Nor is what is being addressed merely bilingualism coupled with biculturalism, since the typical target audience for the signed language interpreter may well have limited cultural and linguistic skills in both the hearing world and the DEAFWORLD. It is especially important to note here that this challenge is not completely comparable to that experienced by interpreters and translators addressing individual idiolects, to the extent that they do so at all. True, a translator in the Balkans may need to vary his or her translation based on the extent to which a client is educated, from a particular region, and so on, but the underlying assumption is that the client is fully competent in some variety of the target language. In the case of the sign language interpreter, however, it is the linguistic competence of the client itself that often plays a key role in how any particular message must be conveyed. DEAF-WORLD is the sign used by ASL users to describe what has also been termed the “deaf culture” or “deaf community.” Edward Dolnick, in an article in The Atlantic Monthly some years ago, noted that: Lately... the deaf community has begun to speak for itself. To the surprise and bewilderment of outsiders, its message is utterly contrary to the wisdom of centuries: Deaf people, far from groaning under a heavy yoke, are not handicapped at all. Deafness is not a disability. Instead, many deaf people now proclaim, they are a subculture like any other. They are simply a linguistic minority (speaking American Sign Language) and are no more in need of a cure than are Haitians or Hispanics. (1993: 37)

There is here an intriguing question concerning the sense in which Haitians or Hispanics might, for reasons of political disempowerment, be considered to be “disabled”; but, while this point is certainly worth discussing, it is not really relevant to our present focus. In addition, I suspect that such rhetoric is in fact more metaphorical than real. One of the fascinating aspects of any discussion of the deaf as a cultural and linguistic community is the need to make a case that there really is such a thing as deaf culture, just as one sometimes needs to build a case for ASL being a “real” language. The need for such discussions tells us a great deal already – not, perhaps, so much about the deaf as about the stereotypes and biases of the hearing world, and about issues of power, paternalism and cultural imperialism. Central to any discussion of the culture and language of the deaf must be a concern with the role of language in domination and power relations as these relate to deaf-hearing interaction (see Foucault 1972, Ball 1990, Reagan 2002). As Harlan Lane, speaking not only for himself but for many scholars concerned with the DEAF-WORLD, has argued: I maintain that the vocabulary and conceptual framework our society has customarily used with regard to deaf people, based as it is on infirmity, serves us and



Chapter 3.  Translating and interpreting sign language 

the members of the deaf community less well than a vocabulary and framework of cultural relativity. I want to replace the normativeness of medicine with the curiosity of ethnography. (1992: 19)

Further, the language of pathology that is used to discuss the deaf has encouraged an essentially paternalistic view of both the deaf and the DEAF-WORLD. Harlan Lane notes: Like the paternalism of the colonizers, hearing paternalism begins with defective perception, because it superimposes its image of the familiar world of hearing people on the unfamiliar world of deaf people. Hearing paternalism likewise sees its task as “civilizing” its charges: restoring deaf people to society. And hearing paternalism fails to understand the structure and values of deaf society. The hearing people who control the affairs of deaf children and adults commonly do not know deaf people and do not want to. Since they cannot see deaf people as they really are, they make up imaginary deaf people of their own, in accord with their own experiences and needs. Paternalism deals in such stereotypes. (1992: 37)

In order to avoid such paternalism, writers on the DEAF-WORLD have attempted to deal with it from what is basically an anthropological, rather than the more common medical or pathological, perspective, focusing on the ways in which deaf people themselves see their world. No one, to my mind, has done this more effectively than Carol Padden and Tom Humphries, the deaf authors of both Inside Deaf Culture (2005) and Deaf in America: Voices from a Culture (1988), who describe their own undertaking as follows: The traditional way of writing about Deaf people is to focus on the fact of their condition – that they do not hear – and to interpret all other aspects of their lives as consequences of this fact.... In contrast to the long history of writings that treat them as medical cases, or as people with “disabilities,” who “compensate” for the deafness by using sign language, we want to portray the lives they live, their art and performances, their everyday talk, their shared myths, and the lessons they teach one another. We have always felt that the attention given to the physical condition of not hearing has obscured far more interesting facets of Deaf people’s lives. (1988: 1)

In short, what Padden and Humphries and others have compellingly argued is that the DEAF-WORLD is characterized by the same kinds of elements that characterize any other cultural community, among which are: – – – – –

a common, shared language a shared awareness of cultural identity distinctive behavioral norms and patterns cultural artifacts endogamous marital patterns



Timothy Reagan

– a shared historical knowledge and awareness – a network of voluntary, in-group social organizations.4 There is, then, among the deaf a very strong sense of cultural identity. Members of the DEAF-WORLD identify themselves as socially and culturally deaf, maintaining a clear-cut distinction between audiological deafness and cultural deafness (see Janesick & Moores 1992, Kannapell 1993, Reagan 1990). From the perspective of members of the DEAF-WORLD, the fact of audiological deafness is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for cultural deafness. Hearing children of deaf people in the United States, who grow up with ASL as their first language, are (at least to some extent) members of the DEAF-WORLD (see Lane 1993a: 288), just as older hearing people who lose their hearing are, under normal circumstances, decidedly not deaf – they are, rather, “hearing people who can no longer hear.” It is interesting to note that in ASL there is actually a sign used to denigrate a deaf person who “thinks like a hearing person” – HEAFIE5 – roughly comparable in use to the term “Uncle Tom” among African Americans (the term is typically translated into English as “heafie,” a word that is almost certainly completely unrecognizable to the overwhelming majority of English speakers). There is also in the DEAF-WORLD an extensive body of humor – targeting mainly hearing people, not surprisingly (see Bienvenu 1994; Bouchauveau 1994). Of especial interest here is the fact that the single most significant component of deaf cultural identity is competence in ASL, the community’s vernacular language as well as a powerful marker of group solidarity. It is important to note, though, that this applies only to ASL or to another natural signed language, not to a contact sign language or a manual sign code. The argument that the deaf constitute a cultural community is one that is not without detractors. The problem, really, comes from the question of how we choose to define culture – no small matter, as contemporary anthropology has made all too clear. If we focus on such matters as clothing, food, religious identification, and so on, then the deaf are clearly at best a subset of the dominant American culture. If, as suggested above, we focus on language, cultural self-identification, marital patterns, and so on, then the case for the deaf as a cultural community becomes far 4. See Bragg 2001; Hoffmeister 2008; Kyle 1990; Lane, Hoffmeister & Bahan 1996; Neisser 1983; Reagan 1990, 1995; Schein 1989; Wilcox 1989. 5. I have followed the common practice here of indicating a particular sign (“HEAFIE”) by writing its English meaning in capital letters. It should be noted that many signs require multiple English words to represent a single sign; in these instances, the English words are joined by hyphens or carets to indicate that although there are several English words used to express the meaning of the sign, there is only a single sign (e.g., DEAF-WORLD). It should be noted that in this chapter my practice is a bit inconsistent, since ‘ASL’ refers both to the sign for ASL and to the English acronym.



Chapter 3.  Translating and interpreting sign language 

stronger. I would argue that in the case of the deaf, as in other difficult cases, the best way to resolve the matter is by allowing the group itself to make the determination – and in the case of the DEAF-WORLD, at least part of the deaf community has clearly determined that it sees itself as a distinctive cultural community. Nowhere, perhaps, can we see the implications of this cultural identification more clearly than in the on-going debate and controversy about cochlear implants for young children. On the one side of this controversy are those who see such interventions as potentially life-changing in a very positive way for deaf children; on the other are those who, like Harlan Lane, view cochlear implants as an essentially genocidal assault on the DEAF-WORLD: If the birth of a Deaf child is a priceless gift, then there is only cause for rejoicing, as at the birth of a black child, or an Indian one. Medical intervention is inappropriate, even if a perfect “cure” were available. Invasive surgery on healthy children is morally wrong. We know that, as members of a stigmatized minority, these children’s lives will be full of challenge but, by the same token, they have a special contribution to make to their own community and the larger society. (1993b: 490–491)

In addition, there is one further factor that complicates the challenges faced by the signed language interpreter, and this challenge has to do with the extreme diversity of his or her audience, with respect not only to access to spoken and written language, and their concomitant culture, but also with respect to their access to signed language and the DEAF-WORLD. Among the different subgroups within the deaf population are those who: – use ASL as their primary language and identify with the Deaf cultural community; – communicate primarily through speech (i.e., in a spoken language) and identify with the hearing community; – became deaf later in life, as a result of the aging process (i.e., the elderly deaf); – do not know either ASL or English, but rather communicate through gestures, mimes, and their own “home” signing systems; and – have normal hearing but (generally as a result of family ties to deaf people) understand and use ASL and integrate with the Deaf cultural community.6 The challenge faced by the signed language interpreter is to serve all of these groups, to the extent necessary. In a context such as South Africa, of course, the extreme internal lexical diversity of SASL makes the job even more difficult. In essence, the sign language interpreter is asked and expected to be not merely the “mediator of culture,” but the “mediator of multiple cultures” as well as functioning 6. See Reagan 2002: 42.



Timothy Reagan

in a variety of linguistic modes. All too often, such complex interpreting can result in misunderstandings that go far beyond linguistic differences, as Kristen Johnson has powerfully demonstrated with respect to signed language interpreting in the university classroom (1992: 120–161). Beyond this, the interpreter is all too often expected (by both of the other parties in the interpreting exchange) to function as an additional source of information and explanation. For instance, in a detailed study of medical interpreting, Melanie Metzger has determined that: Interpreters influence interactive discourse [between deaf patients and medical practitioners]. The reality of the interpreters’ influences is at odds with professionally defined goals (e.g., in professional codes). Interpreters working in medical settings should be aware of this discrepancy. (Metzger 1999: 199)

One example provided by Metzger comes from one of the deaf participants in her study, who attempts to defend such practices: A Deaf patient described the behavior of a hearing interpreter at a medical interview. The hearing doctor had just completed an examination and was encouraging the patient to make an appointment for surgery when the interpreter surreptitiously signed, “Don’t make the appointment yet. Wait until I talk outside with you for a moment.” The Deaf patient told the doctor he would take some time to consider the surgery, then met with the interpreter outside. The interpreter informed the man that there was something about the way the doctor was talking that made the interpreter distrustful, and suggested that the patient get a second opinion. The Deaf man did so, and discovered that he did not, in fact, need the surgery in question. (1999: 1–2)

Quite similar interventions on the part of signed language interpreters are also found, hardly surprisingly, in educational settings (see Scheibe & Hoza 1986), as well as in legal settings (Pokorny 1986) and psychotherapeutic settings (see DeMatteo, Veltri & Lee 1986). For instance, Ellen Schneiderman (1995: 9) has suggested that in the case of a young student in a school setting, the signed language interpreter must be able to: – attend and respond to the child’s focus of attention; – support verbal (spoken or signed) utterances with nonverbal information (gestures, facial expressions, body language); – model the correct form of the targeted linguistic structure in a meaningful communicative context; – allow the child opportunities to initiate; – respond to child initiations with semantically contingent or linguistically appropriate feedback; and – fine-tune responses to match the child’s skill level.



Chapter 3.  Translating and interpreting sign language 

In short, the signed language interpreter is often expected to play a role that other interpreters would find inappropriate at the very least. Returning to Metzger, we are left with the conclusion of her study, which, in summary, stated that What can be seen from this study is that some interpreter-generated contributions are an essential part of the interpretation of interactional equivalence. For example, summoning a participant so they know they are being addressed, and attributing the source of an utterance... are essential components of the interaction. (Metzger 1999: 199)

The DEAF-WORLD is not only a cultural community; it is also on many issues a deeply divided one. Given the sensitivity of members of the DEAF-WORLD to issues surrounding their common language, it is hardly surprising that many of the more contentious matters about which individuals disagree have to do with examples of signing in the media. One example that has proven especially controversial arose in the NBC television show “Reasonable Doubts,” which starred Marlee Matlin as a deaf prosecuting attorney. As Bernard Bragg (1992:  32) has articulated the concerns of some members of the DEAF-WORLD, A number of deaf advocates of... ASL are highly critical of Marlee Matlin’s signing style. They consider her character, Tess Kaufman, a member of the hearing world – not of Deaf culture. Their argument in support of this judgment is that Marlee Matlin occasionally vocalizes words, and that her attitude, rather her character’s attitude, portrays that of a hearing person – not that of a Deaf person.

Nor is Matlin’s character alone in being criticized; the hearing interpreter with whom she works is also a target: Let us now shift our focus to the role of the courtroom interpreter in the television show, played by Bill Pugin, who uses the same English-like method of communication as used by Marlee Matlin’s character, Tess Kaufman. Actually, the interpreter’s job [in this particular setting] is to transliterate, not interpret. He has to transliterate, if he expects his deaf prosecutor to absorb the exact words expressed by the judge, defense lawyers, witnesses and others in and out of the courtroom. (Bragg 1992: 32)

I suppose, in short, that what I am really suggesting here is that at least at the present time, for signed language interpreters, the ideal of “the invisible translator” is not only a goal that cannot be achieved, but it is one that no one really wants to have achieved. A “mediator of cultures” (in the plural) to be sure – but invisible, maybe not so much.



Timothy Reagan

References Aarons, Debra. 1996. “Signed Languages and Professional Responsibility”. Stellenbosch Papers in Linguistics 29.285–311. Aarons, Debra & Philemon Akach. 1998. “South African Sign Language – One Language or Many? A Sociolinguistic Question”. Stellenbosch Papers in Linguistics 31.1–28. Aarons, Debra & Philemon Akach. 2002a. “Inclusion and the Deaf Child in South African Education”. Perspectives in Education 20.153–170. Aarons, Debra & Philemon Akach. 2002b. “South African Sign Language: One Language or Many?” Language in South Africa ed. by Raj Mesthrie, 127–147. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Aarons, Debra & Louise Reynolds. 2003. “South African Sign Language: Changing Policies and Practice”. Many Ways To Be Deaf: International Variation in Deaf Communities ed. by Leila Monaghan, Constanze Schmaling, Karen Nakamura & Graham Turner, 194–210. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press. Angelelli, Claudia. 2001. Deconstructing the Invisible Interpreter: A Critical Study of the Interpersonal Role of the Interpreter in a Cross-Culture/Linguistic Communicative Event. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University. Angelelli, Claudia. 2003. “The Visible Collaborator: Interpreter Intervention in Doctor/Patient Encounters”. From Topic Boundaries to Omission: New Research on Interpretation ed. by Melanie Metzger, Steven Collins, Valerie Dively & Risa Shaw, 3–25. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press. Angelelli, Claudia. 2004a. Medical Interpreting and Cross-Cultural Communication. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Angelelli, Claudia. 2004b. The Visible Interpreter: A Study of Community, Conference, Court Interpreters in Canada, Mexico, and the United States. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Antoons, Iris & Diane Boonen. 2004. “HARD and HARD and HARD: The Same Sign? On the Evolution of Signs in Flemish Sign Language”. To the Lexicon and Beyond: SocioLinguistics in European Deaf Communities ed. by Mieke Van Herreweghe & Myriam Vermeerbergen, 74–88. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press. Bahan, Ben. 1992. “American Sign Language Literature: Inside the Story”. Deaf Studies: What’s Up? – Conference Proceedings, 153–164. Washington, DC: College for Continuing Education, Gallaudet University. Ball, Stephen, ed. 1990. Foucault and Education: Disciplines and Knowledge. London: Routledge Bergman, Brita & Lars Wallin. 2001. “The Discourse Function of Noun Classifiers in Swedish Sign Language”. Signed Languages: Discoveries From International Research ed. by Valerie Dively, Melanie Metzger, Sarah Taub, & Anne Marie Baer, 45–61. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press. Bergman, Brita & Lars Wallin. 2003. “Noun and Verb Classifiers in Swedish Sign Language”. Perspectives on Classifiers in Sign Languages ed. by Karen Emmorey, 35–51. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Bienvenu, M. J. 1994. “Reflections of Deaf Culture in Deaf Humor”. Carol Erting, Robert Johnson, Dorothy Smith & Bruce Snider, eds. The Deaf Way: Perspectives From the International Conference on Deaf Culture. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press. 16–23. Bornstein, Harry, ed. 1990. Manual Communication: Implications for Education. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press.



Chapter 3.  Translating and interpreting sign language  Bouchauveau, Guy. 1994. “Deaf Humor and Culture”. The Deaf Way: Perspectives From the International Conference on Deaf Culture ed. by Carol Erting, Robert Johnson, Dorothy Smith & Bruce Snider, 24–30. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press. Bragg, Bernard. 1992. “In Defense of English-like Signing on NBC-TV’s Reasonable Doubts”. Viewpoints on Deafness: A Deaf American Monograph, Vol. 42, ed. by Mervin Garretson, 31–33. Silver Spring, MD: National Association of the Deaf. Bragg, Bernard. 1996. “The Past and Present of Deaf Theatres around the World”. Deafness: Historical Perspectives ed. by Mervin Garretson, 17–20. Silver Spring, MD: National Association of the Deaf. Bragg, Lois, ed. 2001. DEAF-WORLD: A Historical Reader and Primary Sourcebook. New York: New York University Press. Branson, Jan & Don Miller. 2002. Damned for Their Difference: The Cultural Construction of Deaf People as Disabled. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press. Christie, Karen & Dorothy Wilkins. 1997. “A Feast for the Eyes: ASL Literacy and ASL Literature”. Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education 2.57–59. Cokely, Dennis, ed. 1992. Sign Language Interpreters and Interpreting. Burtonsville, MD: Linstok Press. Cokely, Dennis. 2008. “Never Our Language, Never Our Culture: The Importance of Deaf Community Connectedness for Interpreters”. English in International Deaf Communication ed. by C. Bidoli & E. Ochse, 57–73. Bern: Peter Lang. Collins-Ahlgren, Marianne. 1990. “Spatial-Locative Predicates in Thai Sign Language”. Sign Language Research: Theoretical Issues ed. by Ceil Lucas, 103–117. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press. Corazza, Serena. 1990. “The Morphology of Classifier Handshapes in Italian Sign Language”. Sign Language Research: Theoretical Issues ed. by Ceil Lucas, 71–82. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press. Corrado, Alfred. 1990. “Sign Theatre”. Sign Language Research and Application ed. by Siegmund Prillwitz & Tomas Vollhaber, 241–250. Hamburg: Signum. DeMatteo, Asa, Daniel Veltri & Seungyong Lee. 1986. “The Role of the Sign Language Interpreter in Psychotherapy”. Interpreting: The Art of Cross Cultural Mediation ed. by Marina McIntire, 135–153. Silver Spring, MD: RID Publications. de Quadros, Roncie. 2003. “Phrase Structure of Brazilian Sign Language”. Cross-Linguistic Perspectives in Sign Language Research ed. by Ann Baker, Beppie van den Bogaerde & Onno Crasborn, 141–161. Hamburg: Signum. Dively, Valerie, Melanie Metzger, Sarah Taub & Anne Marie Baer, ed. 2001. Signed Languages: Discoveries from International Research. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press. Dolnick, Edward. 1993. “Deafness as Culture”. Atlantic Monthly 272.37–53. Emmorey, Karen, ed. 2003. Perspectives on Classifier Constructions in Sign Languages. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Emmorey, Karen & Judy Reilly, ed. 1995. Language, Gesture, and Space. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Engberg-Pedersen, Elisabeth. 1993. Space in Danish Sign Language: The Semantics and Morphosyntax of the Use of Space in a Visual Language. Hamburg: Signum. Engberg-Petersen, Elisabeth. 2003. “How Composite is a Fall? Adults’ and Children’s Descriptions of Different Types of Falls in Danish Sign Language”. Perspectives on Classifiers in Sign Languages ed. by Karen Emmorey, 311–332. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Foucault, Michel. 1972. Naissance de la clinique: Une archéologie du regard médical. 2nd edition. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.



Timothy Reagan Frishberg, Nancy. 1988. “Signers of Tales: The Case for Literary Status of an Unwritten Language”. Sign Language Studies 59.149‑170. Frishberg, Nancy. 2000. “An Interpreter Creates the Space”. The Signs of Language Revisited: An Anthology to Honor Ursula Bellugi and Edward Klima ed. by Karen Emmorey & Harlan Lane, 169–192. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Grenoble, Lenore. 1992. “An Overview of Russian Sign Language”. Sign Language Studies 7.321–338. Gustason, Gerilee & Esther Zawolkow. 1993. Signing Exact English. Los Alamitos, CA: Modern Signs Press. Hoffmeister, Robert. 2008. “Language and the Deaf World: Difference not Disability”. Language, Culture and Community in Teacher Education, ed. by María Estela Brisk, 71–98. New York: Lawrence Erlbaum, for the American Association of Colleges of Teacher Education. Hoyer, Karin. 2007. “Albanian Sign Language: Language Contact, International Sign, and Gesture”. Sign Languages in Contact ed. by David Quinto-Pozos, 195–234. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press. Jacobowitz, E. Lynn. 1992. “American Sign Language Literature: Curriculum Considerations”. Deaf Studies for Educators: Conference Proceedings, 76–82. Washington, DC: College for Continuing Education, Gallaudet University. Janesick, Valerie & Donald Moores. 1992. “Ethnic and Cultural Considerations”. Toward Effective Public School Programs for Deaf Students: Context, Process, and Outcomes ed. by Thomas Kluwin, Donald Moores & Martha Gaustad, 49–65. New York: Teachers College Press. Jepson, Jill, ed. 1992. No Walls of Stone: An Anthology of Literature by Deaf and Hard of Hearing Writers. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press. Johnson, Kristen. 1992. “Miscommunication in Interpreted Classroom Interaction”. Sign Language Interpreters and Interpreting ed. by Dennis Cokely, 120–161. Burtonsville, MD: Linstok Press. Johnston, Trevor & Adam Schembri. 2007. Australian Sign Language: An Introduction to Sign Language Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kannapell, Barbara. 1993. Language Choice, Language Identity: A Sociolinguistic Study of Deaf College Students. Burtonsville, MD: Linstok Press. Keller, Jörg, Annette Hohenberger & Helen Leuninger. 2003. “Sign Language Production: Slips of the Hand and Their Repairs in German Sign Language”. Cross-Linguistic Perspectives in Sign Language Research ed. by Ann Baker, Beppie van den Bogaerde & Onno Crasborn, 307–333. Hamburg: Signum. Krentz, Christopher, ed. 2000. A Mighty Change: An Anthology of Deaf American Writing, 1816– 1864. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press. Kyle, J. G. 1990. “The Deaf Community: Custom, Culture and Tradition.” Sign Language Research and Application, ed. by Siegmund Prillwitz & Tomas Vollhaber, 175–185. Hamburg: Signum. Ladd, Paddy. 2003. Understanding Deaf Culture: In Search of Deafhood. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Lane, Harlan. 1992. The Mask of Benevolence: Disabling the Deaf Community. New York: Alfred Knopf. Lane, Harlan. 1993a. “Cochlear Implants: Their Cultural and Historical Meaning”. Deaf History Unveiled ed. by John van Cleve, 272–291. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press. Lane, Harlan. 1993b. “The Medicalization of Cultural Deafness in Historical Perspective”. Looking Back: A Reader on the History of Deaf Communities and Their Sign Languages ed. by Renate Fischer & Harlan Lane, 479–494. Hamburg: Signum.



Chapter 3.  Translating and interpreting sign language  Lane, Harlan, Robert Hoffmeister & Ben Bahan. 1996. A Journey into the DEAF-WORLD. San Diego: DawnSign Press. Leeson, Lorraine & Carmel Grehan. 2004. “To the Lexicon and Beyond: The Effect of Gender on Variation in Irish Sign Language”. To the Lexicon and Beyond: Sociolinguistics in European Deaf Communities ed. by Mieke Van Herreweghe & Myriam Vermeerbergen, 39–73. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press. Livingston, Sue. 1997. Rethinking the Education of Deaf Students: Theory and Practice from a Teacher’s Perspective. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Low, W. 1992. “Colors of ASL... A World Expressed: ASL Poetry in the Curriculum”. Deaf Studies for Educators: Conference Proceedings, 53–59. Washington, DC: College for Continuing Education, Gallaudet University. Lucas, Ceil, ed. 1990. Sign Language Research: Theoretical Issues. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press. Lucas, Ceil, Robert Bayley & Clayton Valli. 2001. Sociolinguistic Variation in American Sign Language. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press. Lucas, Ceil & Clayton Valli. 1989. “Language Contact in the American Deaf Community”. The Sociolinguistics of the Deaf Community ed. by Ceil Lucas, 11–40. San Diego: Academic Press. Lucas, Ceil, & Clayton Valli. 1991. “ASL or Contact Signing: Issues of Judgement”. Language in Society 20.201–216. Lucas, Ceil, & Clayton Valli. 1992. Language Contact in the American Deaf Community. San Diego: Academic Press. Mann, Thomas. 1984 [1901]. Buddenbrooks, trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter. New York: Vintage Books. McIntire, Marina, ed. 1986. Interpreting: The Art of Cross Cultural Mediation – Proceedings of the Ninth National Convention of the Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf. Silver Spring, MD: RID Publications. Meir, Irit. 2001. “Motion and Transfer: The Analysis of Two Verb Classes in Israeli Sign Language”. Signed Languages: Discoveries From International Research ed. by Valerie Dively, Melanie Metzger, Sarah Taub & Anne Marie Baer, 74–87. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press. Meir, Irit & Wendy Sandler. 2008. A Language in Space: The Story of Israeli Sign Language. New York: Erlbaum. Metzger, Melanie. 1999. Sign Language Interpreting: Deconstructing the Myth of Neutrality. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press. Nakamura, Karen. 2006. Deaf in Japan: Signing and the Politics of Identity. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Neisser, Arden. 1983. The Other Side of Silence: Sign Language and the Deaf Community in America. New York: Knopf. Ogilvy-Foreman, Dale, Claire Penn & Timothy Reagan. 1994. “Selected Syntactic Features of South African Sign Language: A Preliminary Analysis”. South African Journal of Linguistics 12.118–123. Oviedo, Alejandro. 2004. Classifiers in Venezuelan Sign Language. Hamburg: Signum. Padden, Carol & Tom Humphries. 1988. Deaf in America: Voices from a Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Padden, Carol & Tom Humphries. 2005. Inside Deaf Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.



Timothy Reagan Penn, Claire. 1992. “The Sociolinguistics of South African Sign Language”. Language and Society in South Africa ed. by Robert Herbert, 277–284. Johannesburg: University of the Witwatersrand Press. Penn, Claire & Timothy Reagan. 1990. “How Do You Sign ‘Apartheid’? The Politics of South African Sign Language”. Language Problems and Language Planning 14.91–103. Penn, Claire & Timothy Reagan. 1991. “Toward a National Policy for Deaf Education in the ‘New’ South Africa”. South African Journal of Communication Disorders 38.19–24. Penn, Claire & Timothy Reagan. 1994. “The Properties of South African Sign Language: Lexical Diversity and Syntactic Unity”. Sign Language Studies 85.319–327. Penn, Claire & Timothy Reagan. 1995. “On the Other Hand: Implications of the Study of South African Sign Language for the Education of the Deaf in South Africa”. South African Journal of Education 15.92–96. Penn, Claire & Timothy Reagan. 2001. “Linguistic, Social and Cultural Perspectives on Sign Language in South Africa”. Freedom and Discipline: Essays in Applied Linguistics from Southern Africa ed. by Elaine Ridge, Sinfree Makoni & Stanley Ridge, 49–65. New Delhi: Bahri Publications. Penn, Claire, Timothy Reagan & Dale Ogilvy. 1991. “‘On That Day the Deaf Shall Hear’: DeafHearing Interchange in South Africa”. Sign Language Studies 71.131–142. Peters, Cynthia. 2000. Deaf American Literature: From Carnival to the Canon. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press. Pietrosemoli, Lourdes. 2001. “Politeness and Venezuelan Sign Language”. Signed Languages: Discoveries From International Research ed. by Valerie Dively, Melanie Metzger, Sarah Taub & Anne Marie Baer, 163–179. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press. Pizzuto, Elena, Enza Giuranna & Giuseppe Gambino. 1990. “Manual and Non-Manual Morphology in Italian Sign Language: Grammatical Constraints and Discourse Processes”. Sign Language Research: Theoretical Issues ed. by Ceil Lucas, 83–102. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press. Pokorny, D. 1986. “Cultural and Psychological Dynamics in Court Interpreting”. Interpreting: The Art of Cross Cultural Mediation ed. by Marina McIntire, 86–94. Silver Spring, MD: RID Publications. Pollitt, Kyra. 2000. “Critical Linguistic and Cultural Awareness: Essential Tools in the Interpreter’s Kit Bag”. Innovative Practices for Teaching Sign Language Interpreters ed. by Cynthia Roy, 67–82. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press. Reagan, Timothy. 1990. “The Development and Reform of Sign Languages”. Language Reform: History and Future, Vol. 5 ed. by Istvan Fodor & Claude Hagège, 253–267. Hamburg: Buske. Reagan, Timothy. 1995. “Neither Easy to Understand nor Pleasing to See: The Development of Manual Sign Codes”. Language Problems and Language Planning 19.133–150. Reagan, Timothy. 1996. “Bilingualism and the Dual Culture of the Deaf ”. South African Medical Journal 86.797-799. Reagan, Timothy. 2001. “Language Planning and Policy’. The Sociolinguistics of Sign Languages ed. by Ceil Lucas, 145–180. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Reagan, Timothy. 2002. “Toward an ‘Archeology of Deafness’: Etic and Emic Constructions of Identity in Conflict”. Journal of Language, Identity, and Education 1:41–66. Reagan, Timothy. 2004. “Delimiting South African Sign Language: Politics, Ideology, and Linguistics”. Paper presented at the 21st World Congress of the Fédération Internationale des Professeurs de Langues Vivantes, Rand Afrikaans University, Johannesburg, South Africa, 2–5 July.



Chapter 3.  Translating and interpreting sign language  Reagan, Timothy, Claire Penn & Dale Ogilvy. 2006. “From Policy to Practice: Sign Language Developments in Post-Apartheid South Africa”. Language Policy 5.187–208. Roy, Cynthia, ed. 2000. Innovative Practices for Teaching Sign Language Interpreters. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press. Roy, Cynthia, ed. 2005. Advances in Teaching Sign Language Interpreters. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press. Roy, Cynthia, ed. 2006. New Approaches to Interpreter Education. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press. Sandler, Wendy & Diane Lillo-Martin. 2006. Sign Language and Linguistic Universals. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Scheibe, K. & J. Boza. 1986. “Throw It Out the Window! (The Code of Ethics? We Don’t Use That Here): Guidelines for Educational Interpreters”. Interpreting: The Art of Cross Cultural Mediation ed. by Marina McIntire, 128–134. Silver Spring, MD: RID Publications. Schein, Jerome. 1989. At Home Among Strangers: Exploring the Deaf Community in the United States. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press. Schermer, Trude. 2004. “Lexical Variation in Sign Language of the Netherlands”. To the Lexicon and Beyond: SocioLinguistics in European Deaf Communities ed. by Mieke Van Herreweghe & Myriam Vermeerbergen, 91–110. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press. Schmaling, Constanze. 2001. “ASL in Northern Nigeria: Will Hausa Sign Language Survive?” Signed Languages: Discoveries From International Research ed. by Valerie Dively, Melanie Metzger, Sarah Taub & Anne Marie Baer, 180–193. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press. Schneiderman, Ellen. 1995. “The Effectiveness of an Interactive Instructional Context”. American Annals of the Deaf 140.8–15. Seal, Brenda. 1998. Best Practices in Educational Interpreting. Boston: Allyn and Bacon. Senghas, Ann, Asli Özyürek & Sotaro Kita. 2003. “Encoding Motion Events in an Emerging Sign Language: From Nicaraguan Gestures to Nicaraguan Signs”. Cross-Linguistic Perspectives in Sign Language Research ed. by Ann Baker, Beppie van den Bogaerde & Onno Crasborn, 119–130. Hamburg: Signum. Shaw, Risa. 1992. “Determining Register in Sign-to-English Interpreting”. Sign Language Interpreters and Interpreting ed. by Dennis Cokely, 71–98. Burtonsville, MD: Linstok Press. Skutnabb-Kangas, Tove. 2000. Linguistic Genocide in Education – Or Worldwide Diversity and Human Rights? Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Stewart, David, Jerome Schein & Brenda Cartwright. 1998. Sign Language Interpreting: Exploring its Art and Science. Boston: Allyn and Bacon. Sutton-Spence, Rachel & Bencie Woll. 1998. The Linguistics of British Sign Language: An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sze, Yim Binh Felix. 2003. “Word Order in Hong Kong Sign Language”. Cross-Linguistic Perspectives in Sign Language Research ed. by Ann Baker, Beppie van den Bogaerde & Onno Crasborn, 163–191. Hamburg: Signum. Tang, Gladys. 2003. “Verbs of Motion and Location in Hong Kong Sign Language: Conflation and Lexicalization”. Perspectives on Classifiers in Sign Languages ed. by Karen Emmorey, 143–165. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. van der Kooij, Els. 2001. “Weak Drop in Sign Language of the Netherlands”. Signed Languages: Discoveries From International Research ed. by Valerie Dively, Melanie Metzger, Sarah Taub & Anne Marie Baer, 27–42. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press.



Timothy Reagan Vanhecke, Eline & Kristof De Weerdt. 2004. “Regional Variation in Flemish Sign Language”. To the Lexicon and Beyond: SocioLinguistics in European Deaf Communities ed. by Mieke Van Herreweghe & Myriam Vermeerbergen, 27–38. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press. Wilcox, Sherman, ed. 1989. American Deaf Culture: An Anthology. Burtonsville, MD: Linstok Press. Winston, Elizabeth, ed. 2004. Educational Interpreting: How It Can Succeed. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press. Woll, Bencie, Rachel Sutton-Spence & Frances Elton. 2001. “Multilingualism: The Global Approach to Sign Languages”. The Sociolinguistics of Sign Languages ed. by Ceil Lucas, 8–32. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Woodward, James. 2000. “Sign Languages and Sign Language Families in Thailand and Viet Nam”. The Signs of Language Revisited: An Anthology to Honor Ursula Bellugi and Edward Klima ed. by Karen Emmorey & Harlan Lane, 23–47. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Yoel, Judith. 2007. “Evidence for First-Language Attrition of Russian Sign Language among Immigrants to Israel”. Sign Languages in Contact ed. by David Quinto-Pozos, 153–191. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press. Zeshan, Ulrike. 2000. Sign Language in Indo-Pakistan: A Description of a Signed Language. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Zeshan, Ulrike. 2003. “‘Classificatory’ Constructions in Indo-Pakistani Sign Language: Grammaticalization and Lexicalization Processes”. Perspectives on Classifiers in Sign Languages, 113–141. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

chapter 4

Translators in a global community Jonathan Pool The popular yet paradoxical idea of a diverse global community raises questions about language and translation. Would a global community with a global language lose its other languages? Would a global community without a global language be able to interact efficiently across thousands of linguistic frontiers? One strategy that might make global community compatible with linguistic diversity is panlingual transparency via aspectual phased translation. With it, translators translate aspects of a discourse at each phase of a multiphase process, rather than translating the discourse in its entirety in a single act. In an initial simple model, communication in a global community relies on translation partitioned into four phases; the translation in each is either linguistic or cultural, but not both. A source discourse is translated culturally (within the source language), then linguistically (from the source language to a global representation), then linguistically (from the global representation to the target languages), then culturally (within the target languages). Such partitioning could elevate productivity by facilitating divisions of labor between professional and lay translators and between human and machine translators, and by letting monolinguals act as translators.

We have to appreciate the diverse cultures on the planet. But that should not be used as an obstacle to developing a new culture.... There is a new culture developing. It’s a shared culture. It incorporates the best of Western and Eastern and Asian and African culture, and it is part of the new planetary civilization of the future. (Kurtz 2006) The Problem Global diversity and global integration are popular ideas, not only among cosmopolitan elites but also, as international opinion polls show (e.g., World 2006, items A035, A125, A129; Globescan 2003), among the world population. So it is no surprise when people like Kurtz express the hope that these two values can be made compatible. This aspiration is evident in norms of human rights guaranteed by the



Jonathan Pool

“international community” amidst respect for nation-state sovereignty (e.g., Smith 1999), in demands that indigenous small-scale agricultural producers growing local varieties participate directly in world trade (e.g., Shiva 2005), and in other expressions of ideals. The hope that diversity and integration can coexist applies to language as well. It suggests an ideal world where all persons have access to literature and to live interaction with their fellow human beings, while the many languages used across the globe continue to thrive. But, contrary to this ideal, global integration may accelerate language assimilation and language death. Of the reportedly 7,000 natural languages in the world (Gordon 2005), most are expected to be extinct within a century (Woodbury 2006). The incompatibility seems obvious. How could all of humanity interact with the world’s literature and with one another across the boundaries of thousands of languages: with a global natural or artificial language known by the masses along with their native languages, and with publication, broadcasting, lecturing, and other public utterances normally taking place bilingually? Perhaps, but mass bilinguality may be unstable and lead to the atrophy and intergenerational nontransmission of local languages (e.g., Schiffman 1987: 66–71). Where it is not possible to earn one’s living in a language, the maintenance of that language may be problematic (Mufwene 2002: 390). Or could mass monolinguality be the norm, with translators providing the linguistic integration? Perhaps, but this would include translation of each general-interest publication into thousands of languages, and translation of person-to-person communications between arbitrary pairs of languages, thus often with two translators performing relay translation. The cost of such a regime in money and delay is presumably higher than its beneficiaries would agree to bear, as illustrated by a popular commercial translation-on-demand service supporting 170 languages, which takes three business days and charges $66 for 100 words between most language pairs (Language 2005). Machine translation is an unlikely savior, since high-quality translation takes into account the principals’ knowledge, beliefs, and values (Clark 1996: 98–120), and there is no evidence that automated translation can be made to do this satisfactorily, even among the few languages with multimillion-word corpora. If the demand for global interaction and mass access to the world’s information increases, it seems likely that the smallest languages will continue to die, an increasing fraction of humanity will invest in becoming fluent in whichever language offers the greatest access to knowledge and interchange (the “global language”), and an increasing fraction of all transactions (courses taught, newspapers published, Web sites posted, etc.) will take place in the global language. The taste for linguistic diversity will persist, but the amount of linguistic diversity that those with this taste are willing to buy will be far smaller than 7,000 living languages.



Chapter 4.  Translators in a global community 

S

F IR

P DG O

Korean

Chinese

English Japanese

K J E C S I R F P D G O

Korean Japanese English Chinese Spanish Italian Russian French Portuguese Dutch German Other

Figure 1.  Web Logs by Language, March 2006 Sources: Sifry 2006, Duncan 2006

If, alternatively, the demand for access and participation were predominantly local or regional rather than global, local or regional languages might thrive, remain dominant (or recover dominance) in their own territories, and make increasing use of advanced communication technology. As one manifestation, the evolution of the World Wide Web from a predominantly English-language medium into a linguistically diverse one could continue, led by the blogosphere, whose current diversity is shown in Figure 1. Some individuals would acquire competence in a global language, but not enough (i.e. not enough individuals and not enough competence) to render the local and regional languages redundant. Under this alternative scenario, global linguistic diversity persists because there is no pervasive demand for a global community. A solution Suppose, however, that a world consensus insisted on mass participation in global information exchange plus the continued vitality of thousands of languages. Could this demand be satisfied? The prospects seem weak, but at least one concept merits consideration. This is a concept I shall call panlingual transparency. With it, human monolingualism is a norm, so global information access and interaction depend on massive translation among all languages, and translation is so efficient



Jonathan Pool

that what is uttered in any language can be practically accessed in any other language. Panlingual transparency would resemble the world imagined by Adams (1979: 51–52) where people wear Babel fish in their ears and can thereby “understand anything... in any form of language” (except for Adams’s conjecture that the removal of barriers to intercultural communication would cause “more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation”). The details A strategy that might make panlingual transparency nonfictional is aspectual phased translation. Such translation would take place in phases, and different phases would accomplish different aspects of translation. Abstractly, we might model translation as having two aspects: cultural and linguistic. Aspectual phased translation would partition these aspects into distinct phases. In particular, translation would take place in four phases, the translation being cultural in two and linguistic in the other two. Each of the four phases would have a different translator or translation team. Consider an original text in, say, the Bantu language Yao (spoken by about 2 million people in Malawi, Mozambique, Tanzania, and Zambia), to be published on the Web for global consumption, including by a monolingual speaker of Muong (spoken by about 1 million people in Vietnam). In my model of aspectual phased translation (Figure 2), the Yao-speaking author or another speaker of Yao performs phase 1 of the translation. In this phase the text is translated from standard literary Yao into global Yao. Global Yao is a standard

Phase 2 (auto) Global Yao Phase 1 (human)

Interlingua

Phase 3 (auto) Global Muong Phase 4 (human)

Literary Yao

Literary Muong

Yao

Muong

Figure 2.  Aspectual Phased Translation



Chapter 4.  Translators in a global community 

written variety of Yao that generally shares syntax, morphology, and orthography with standard literary Yao, but complies with a global semantic-pragmatic standard. This standard specifies the meanings that a global variety of any language must be able to express and, conversely, the ambiguities that it must prevent. An automatic program performs phase 2 of the translation. It translates the text from global Yao into a global standard representation, an interlingua. This is an abstract, machine-oriented code that represents the semantics and pragmatics of the global standard with controlled ambiguity. Another automatic program performs phase 3 of the translation. It translates the text from the global standard representation into global Muong. This is the Muong analog to global Yao. Finally, a Muong-speaking reader or another speaker of Muong performs phase 4 of the translation. In this phase, the text is translated from global Muong into standard literary Muong. In phases 1 and 4, the translation is intralingual. It takes place between a standard literary variety and a global variety of the same language. What is modified by this translation is the expression of the semantic and pragmatic denotations of the text. Thus, common knowledge, presuppositions, or evaluative connotations that may be assumed understood in a literary variety but cannot be assumed understood in a global variety are made explicit in the latter; ambiguities are preventively resolved; and distinctions made in literary varieties but missing in global varieties are erased. A work in a literary variety might describe “a hero back from Vietnam, who skulked for years in a Unabomberish cottage” (Rushdie 2002: 120), but the interlingua might not tolerate the assumptions of common knowledge behind this description, so it might require global varieties to contain more generic descriptions. “I can show you how to become an Internet service provider for $45,000” might be acceptable in a literary variety and its ambiguity resolved by knowledgeable readers, but the interlingua might prohibit reliance on the presumption that $45,000 is a more reasonable cost for becoming an ISP than for being shown how to become one, so it might require that attachment ambiguities like this be absent from global varieties. Global varieties might prevent such ambiguities by annotations (brackets, proximity symbols, etc.), word-order constraints (“show you for $45,000...”), or other constructions. Given that the translation in phases 1 and 4 is changing the assumptions about what the reader knows, believes, wants, etc., the “cultural” aspect of the text is deemed to be what is translated. The source and target texts are in two culturally different varieties of the same language. In phases 2 and 3, the translation is interlingual. It takes place between the global variety of a language and the interlingua. These are different languages, but they are semantically and pragmatically equivalent. In these phases, the translation is deemed linguistic, not cultural.



Jonathan Pool

Thus, aspectual phased translation involves collaboration between humans and machines, with humans translating interculturally (in phases 1 and 4) and machines translating interlingually (in phases 2 and 3). In addition, the intercultural translation of phases 1 and 4 can also involve human-machine collaboration, insofar as automated translation support has been developed for the language in question. There is no foreseeable end to the need for human judgment in these phases, but human productivity can be enhanced with automatically generated drafts, automatic validation of human-produced drafts, and support tools (Trujillo 1999:  57–61). Automatic validation is particularly applicable to phase 1, where the target is a variety with a formally specified grammar and lexicon. Even where a program cannot verify whether the human translation in phase 1 is correct, it can verify whether the translated text complies with the global variety’s grammar and lexicon. Aspectual phased translation also involves collaboration between professional and lay translators. The presupposition behind this claim is that a global variety of a natural language is a reasonable object of literacy. Just as some fraction of any speech community learns the literary variety of its language (if it has a literary variety), so, in the model of panlingual transparency, some fraction of each speech community learns the global variety, too. Those who do learn the global variety can compose texts directly in their global varieties and can understand texts that are automatically translated into them, obviating phases 1 and 4. They can also translate overtly between their literary and global varieties, perhaps with instruction by and advice from professional translators. Professional translators can also translate for those who do not know global varieties and those who prefer to read and write in literary varieties, and can translate literature between their language’s literary and global varieties. Aspectual phased translation makes it possible for monolinguals to be translators. Both professional and lay translators in this model are monolinguals. Their ability to translate arises from their being (at least) diglossic (fluent in literarystandard and global varieties of their native languages) and bicultural (knowing what to assume when using these varieties). Bilingual translators do exist, but they are machines. Thus, the panlingual transparency model involves language learning, human translation, and automatic translation all contributing to global linguistic integration, in a regime that makes all languages viable media for the production and consumption of both local and global information and therefore arguably satisfies the requirements for the continued vitality of all languages.



Chapter 4.  Translators in a global community 

Construction and maintenance If a regime of panlingual transparency emerged and persisted, its origin might be either spontaneous or deliberate. The more plausible (or less implausible) scenario is a deliberate standardization process involving both construction and maintenance of the regime. This is how an existing successful panlingual regime, the Unicode standard, came into existence and persists (Unicode 2006). It replaces dozens of separate encodings for the writing systems of the world with a single encoding that allows practically any language, living or dead, to be represented by computers, and the makers of computer operating systems and applications have generally embraced it. It did not evolve spontaneously. It is the outcome of, and continues to be maintained by, an international deliberative process in which differences of interest and principle are debated and resolved, mostly by consensus but partly by non-unanimous voting. The Unicode Technical Committee holds weeklong quarterly meetings and conducts policymaking discussions by correspondence on its Unicore forum, which during the year ending 30 September 2006 registered a mean of 3.6 messages per day. A semantic-pragmatic standard prescribing and constraining expressible meanings, i.e. an interlingua, could be expected to arouse more conflict and be regarded as more fundamental than a character-encoding standard such as Unicode and hence would be more likely to require a perceivedly legitimate deliberative process in order to be generally adopted. Translators, those who regularly mediated between literary and global varieties, would naturally be the main participants in the definition and maintenance of global varieties. In principle, a global variety could be defined autonomously for each language, without interference by other languages’ specialists or by global standardizing bodies, as long as it complied with the global semantic-pragmatic standard. However, algorithms for automatic translation between the interlingua and particular global varieties would be most efficiently developed as generic rules with variations determined by parameters of the respective languages and their families. This is the strategy employed by an existing project, the LinGO Grammar Matrix, that provides a platform for the construction of computational grammars for all languages of the world (Bender 2006). It would thus be realistic to expect the developers of global varieties to collaborate, particularly within language families. Global varieties would be logically dependent on the interlingua, but would also exercise de facto influence on the interlingua. Each global variety would be required to be equivalent to the interlingua, such that any expression valid in a global variety would have to correspond to exactly one expression in the interlingua and vice-versa. But the interlingua would be a standard constructed and maintained by representatives of the world’s speech communities, and the persons (mainly translators) who construct and maintain global varieties would probably be the



Jonathan Pool

most active participants in the definition of the interlingua. They would know about problems that any features of the interlingua were causing for the designers of global varieties and could argue for appropriate relief. Thus, the definitions of the interlingua and the global varieties would in practice be interdependent. Another relationship of mutual dependence would be that between each language’s global variety and its literary variety. As a first approximation, a literary variety would preexist, and a global variety would be defined so as to resemble the literary variety to the greatest possible extent, consistent with the obligation to be semantically and pragmatically equivalent to the interlingua. But in reality literary varieties would also depend on global varieties. Speakers who know both varieties might spontaneously exert assimilative pressure on literary varieties. In addition, global varieties would naturally act as lexical conduits for literary varieties, transmitting to them new lexemes created as equivalents to new lexemes in the interlingua. If, for example, the concept of antiretroviral were to be lexically recognized in the interlingua and consequently in global Yao, it might be thence adopted by literary Yao. Where literary varieties didn’t preexist, they could come into existence as byproducts of the efforts to define global varieties. An interlingua would not be developed from a tabula rasa. Interlingua-like construction has taken place for centuries, producing philosophical languages (Maat 1999), artificial auxiliary languages (Blanke 1989), knowledge-representation languages (Russell & Norvig 2003:  320–344), machine-translation interlinguas (Trujillo 1999: 167–201), controlled natural languages (Pool 2006), and ontologies (Noy & McGuinness 2001). Some of these products result from world-scale standardization efforts, inspired by the Semantic Web Initiative (Berners-Lee 2001). Results of that work would be available to inform any new effort at interlingua design. What would be new in a panlingual-transparency interlingua would be its panlingual basis, including the participation of representatives of the world’s languages in its definition. One sees hints of this idea in some existing projects (e.g., Leith 2004, Mitamura and others 2004), but no serious effort at panlingually participatory interlingua construction has taken place. Feasibility There are at least five major obstacles to the implementation of a regime of panlingual transparency: – agreement on an interlingua – expressivity of an interlingua – design of global language varieties – fluency in global language varieties – coexistence of global and literary language varieties.



Chapter 4.  Translators in a global community 

The design of an interlingua affects the interests of those using it. The conflicts over its design could be intense enough to prevent an agreement on any single interlingua. It could also be impossible to reach a consensus on the identification of the parties whose agreement is required. One property of an interlingua affecting users’ interests is its similarity to their native languages. Misalignments in content words, such as river and stream in English versus fleuve and rivière in French (Sowa 2000: 409–412), or like and love in English versus beğenmek and sevmek in Turkish, are among the many potential bases for disagreements on interlingua properties. One approach to achieving consensus on an interlingua is to avoid semantic distinctions that are not articulated by the speakers of some languages, but following this principle could make an interlingua inadequately expressive for the purposes of some users. An example might be the use of a single construction to represent all kinds of the present tense: momentary, continual, habitual, etc. Aspectual phased translation could then be considered inferior, between some language pairs (i.e. between languages that share more granular tense features), to traditional translation. If an interlingua were adopted, the design of satisfactory global varieties of languages could be difficult. The requirement that each of them be semantically and pragmatically equivalent to the interlingua could interfere with the attempt to make them resemble their corresponding literary standard varieties in lexicon, morphology, and syntax. Lexemes would not all have identical denotations in the two varieties, or else designers might avoid semantic divergence by infusing global varieties with unique lexemes, thus impairing their learnability. A regime of panlingual transparency would be most efficient if large fractions of all speech communities were diglossic. But fluency in a global variety could be difficult to achieve, both because of its deviations from the corresponding colloquial and literary varieties and because of its formality. Some attempts to make people fluent in formally defined varieties of natural languages have been described as spectacular successes (e.g., Bernstein, Kaufmann, Fuchs & von Bonin 2004: 5), but others have revealed cognitive limitations interfering with mastery (e.g., Clark and others 2005: 5–6). Among these are difficulty articulating relations that are normally tacit (as in “walk three miles,” “walk three hours,” and “walk three dogs”) and difficulty in “canonicalization,” i.e. using only the single valid expression of a particular meaning when the colloquial and literary varieties permit several synonymous expressions (e.g., “meet with” instead of “hold a meeting with”). In the judgment of some knowledge engineers, mastery of formal codes for the representation of knowledge, no matter how well supported or how much they may resemble natural languages, is beyond the practical reach of the mass public (Marshall 2003).



Jonathan Pool

If mass fluency in global varieties were achieved, this fluency might jeopardize literary varieties by making them redundant. If the global varieties drove the literary varieties into extinction, the semantic and pragmatic aspects of linguistic diversity would survive only in colloquial varieties and thus not in written literature. The result could be the loss of one of the main assets justifying a regime of panlingual transparency. Before presuming that one or more of these obstacles would necessarily make panlingual transparency impractical, we should observe the results of some projects that currently aim at versions or underpinnings of panlingual transparency. These projects support Web sites and other resources where a person can access information in whichever language the person prefers (if the information has been translated into that language). Among the most multilingual are projects to translate the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, currently with 365 languages (UNHCHR 2010); to compile a panlingual encyclopedia, currently with 272 languages (Wikimedia 2010); to compile a panlingual dictionary, currently with about 172 languages (Wiktionary 2010); and to translate the interface of the Google search engine, currently with 318 languages (Google 2010). Other notable projects with panlingual aims are translating subject descriptors (Open 2004, OCLC 2006, Dublin 2006a, Dublin 2006b), translating user interfaces (Plone 2006, LiveJournal 2006), providing multilingual image retrieval (Colowick 2008), and constructing and coordinating lexical databases (Global 2006b). Some of these projects seek to produce panlingual semantic systems that could be bases for an interlingua. For example, the Global WordNet Association’s aims include “the standardization of the Inter-Lingual-Index for inter-linking the wordnets of different languages, as a universal index of meaning” (Global 2006a). As a next step in pursuing the idea of panlingual transparency, the suspected obstacles could be evaluated in small-scale experiments and in the analysis of data from existing projects. The most problematic obstacles could be selected for earliest evaluation. For example, if it were surmised that an agreement on an interlingua’s taxonomy of emotional states would be difficult to reach, experiments involving negotiations on such a taxonomy could be conducted, and results of work on the Global WordNet Association’s “universal index of meaning” and on the Wiktionary project could be examined with respect to the translingual coordination of words describing emotional states. Conclusion Various individuals and organizations strive to maintain linguistic diversity and to promote translingual integration on a world scale, though rarely both at the same



Chapter 4.  Translators in a global community 

time. The efforts for each of these goals may be interfering with one another. But some organizations have developed systems of multilingual–and potentially panlingual–interaction. Until now, systems that have tried to make it possible for people to express arbitrary thoughts and feelings in arbitrary languages and have those expressions rendered intelligible to the speakers of arbitrary other languages have relied on human translation and have provided their services at costs and with transaction times that make language barriers impenetrable under most conditions. No existing projects for multilingual interaction appear to be scalable to thousands of languages with billions of daily communications. A scenario of panlingual transparency, relying on a negotiated interlingual semantic standard, aspectual phased translation, and mass biculturality with diglossia, might have the scalability that current strategies lack, but several obstacles to its realization merit evaluation before it would deserve advocacy or real-world trials. References Adams, Douglas. 1979. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. London: Pan Books. Bender, Emily. 2006. LinGO Grammar Matrix (Web site). http://www.delph-in.net/matrix/ (20 February 2010). Berners-Lee, Tim, James Hendler & Ora Lassila. 2001. “The Semantic web”. Scientific American 284:5.34–43. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?articleID=00048144–10D2– 1C70–84A9809EC588EF21&catID=2 (20 February 2010). Bernstein, Abraham, Esther Kaufmann, Norbert E. Fuchs & June von Bonin. 2004. “Talking to the Semantic Web – A Controlled English Query Interface for Ontologies”, delivered at 14th Workshop on Information Technology and Systems, 2004. http://www.ifi.uzh.ch/pax/uploads/pdf/publication/765/TalkingToTheSemanticWeb_WITS2004.pdf (22 February 2010). Blanke, Detlev 1989. “Planned Languages – A Survey of Some of the Main Problems”. Interlinguistics: Aspects of the Science of Planned Languages ed. by Klaus Schubert, 63–87. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Clark, Herbert H. 1996. Using Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Clark, Peter, Phil Harrison, Tom Jenkins, John Thompson & Rick Wojcik. 2005. “Acquiring and Using World Knowledge Using a Restricted Subset of English”, delivered at the 18th International FLAIRS Conference (FLAIRS 2005). http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/pclark/papers/flairs.pdf (20 February 2010). Colowick, Susan 2008. “Multilingual Search with PanImages”. MultiLingual 19:2, March 2008: 61–63. http://turing.cs.washington.edu/PanImMultilingual.pdf (22 February 2010). Dublin. 2006a. Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, “Translations of DCMI Documents”. http:// www.dublincore.org/resources/translations/ (20 February 2010). Dublin. 2006b. Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, “DCMI Localization and Internationalization Working Group”. http://dublincore.org/groups/languages/index.shtml (20 February 2010). Duncan [pseudonym]. 2006. “South Korean Numbers Up: At Least 20 Million Blogs in South Korea”. The Blog Herald, 21  July. http://www.blogherald.com/2005/07/21/south-koreannumbers-up-at-least-20-million-blogs-in-south-korea/ (20 February 2010).



Jonathan Pool Global. 2006a. “The Global WordNet Association” (Web site). http://www.globalwordnet.org/ (20 February 2010). Global. 2006b. Global WordNet Association, “Wordnets in the World”. http://www.globalwordnet.org/gwa/wordnet_table.htm (20 February 2010). Globescan. 2003. “World Public Opinion Says World Not Going in Right Direction”. http:// www.pipa.org/OnlineReports/Other%20Studies/GlobalIss_Jun04/GlobalIss_Jun04_pr.pdf (20 February 2010). Google. 2010. “Google Translation Status Report of Main Site”. http://services.google.com/tcbin/ tc.py?cmd=status (20 February 2010). Gordon, Raymond G., Jr., ed. 2005. Ethnologue: Languages of the World, 15th edn. Dallas: SIL International. http://www.ethnologue.com/ (20 February 2010). Kurtz, Paul. 2006. “Science and Planetary Ethics” (interview). Point of Inquiry, 12 May 2006. http://www.pointofinquiry.org/?p=49 (20 February 2010). Language. 2005. Language Line Services, “Language Line Document Translation Service, Customer Charges – Attachment A”. http://web.archive.org/web/20061015014153/http://www. languageline.com/main/files/WebPTPriceSheet.doc (15 October 2006). Leith, Alex. 2004. “What Is Loglan?”. http://www.loglan.org/what-is-loglan.html (20 February 2010). LiveJournal. 2006. “Translation Area”. http://www.livejournal.com/translate/ (20 February 2010). Maat, Jaap. 1999. Philosophical Languages in the Seventeenth Century: Dalgarno, Wilkins, Leibniz. Amsterdam: Institute for Logic, Language & Computation, Universiteit van Amsterdam. Marshall, Catherine C. & Frank M. Shipman. 2003. “Which Semantic Web?”, delivered at the Fourteenth Conference on Hypertext & Hypermedia (Hypertext ‘03). http://www.csdl. tamu.edu/~marshall/ht03-sw-4.pdf (20 February 2010). Mitamura, Teruko, Keith Miller, Bonnie Dorr, David Farwell, Nizar Habash, Stephen Helmreich, Eduard Hovy, Lori Levin, Owen Rambow, Florence Reeder & Advaith Siddharthan. 2004. “Semantic Annotation for Interlingual Representation of Multilingual Texts”, delivered at the Fourth International Conference on Language Resources & Evaluation (LREC 2004). http:// www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~teruko/LREC04-Sem-Label-camera-final.pdf (20 February 2010). Mufwene, Salikoko S. 2002. “Colonization, Globalization and the Plight of ‘Weak’ Languages”. Journal of Linguistics 38.375–395. Noy, Natalya F. & Deborah L. McGuinness. 2001. “Ontology Development 101: A Guide to Creating Your First Ontology”. Stanford Knowledge Systems Laboratory Technical Report KSL01–05 & Stanford Medical Informatics Technical Report SMI-2001–0880, March 2001. http:// smi-web.stanford.edu/auslese/smi-web/reports/SMI-2001–0880.pdf (20 February 2010). OCLC [Online Computer Library Center]. 2006. “Dewey is the World’s Most Widely Used Library Classification System”. http://www.oclc.org/dewey/about/translations/default.htm (20 February 2010). Open Directory Project. 2004. “About the World Category in ODP”. http://dmoz.org/world.html (20 February 2010). Plone Foundation. 2006. “What Language Translations Are Available for Plone?”. http://plone. org/documentation/faq/translations (20 February 2010). Pool, Jonathan. 2006. “Can Controlled Languages Scale to the Web?”, delivered at 5th International Workshop on Controlled Language Applications (CLAW 2006). http://www.mt-archive.info/CLAW-2006-Pool.pdf (20 February 2010). Rushdie, Salman. 2002. Fury. New York: Random House. Russell, Stuart J. & Peter Norvig. 2003. Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, 2nd edn. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education.



Chapter 4.  Translators in a global community  Schiffman, Harold. 1987. “Losing the Battle for Balanced Bilingualism: The German-American Case”. Language Problems and Language Planning 11.66–81. Shiva, Vandana. 2005. Earth Democracy. Cambridge, MA: South End Press. Sifry, Dave. 2006. “State of the Blogosphere, April 2006 Part 2: On Language and Tagging”. Technorati Weblog, 1  May 2006. http://www.technorati.com/weblog/2006/05/100.html (20 February 2010). Smith, Michael J. 1999. “Humanitarian Intervention: An Overview of the Ethical Issues”. Ethics & International Affairs: A Reader ed. by Joel H. Rosenthal, 271–295. Washington: Georgetown University Press. Reprinted 2001 in The Philosophy of Human Rights, ed. by Patrick Hayden, 478–501. St. Paul: Paragon House. Sowa, John F. 2000. Knowledge Representation: Logical, Philosophical, and Computational Foundations. Pacific Grove, CA: Brooks/Cole. Trujillo, Arturo. 1999. Translation Engines: Techniques for Machine Translation. London: Springer. UNHCHR [United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights]. 2010. “Universal Declaration: Search by Translations”. http://www.ohchr.org/EN/UDHR/Pages/SearchByLang.aspx (22 February 2010). Unicode Consortium. 2006. The Unicode Standard, Version 5.0. Boston: Addison-Wesley Professional. Wikimedia Foundation. 2010. “List of Wikipedias”. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_ Wikipedias (20 February 2010). Wiktionary. 2010. “Wiktionary: Multilingual Statistics”. http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ Wiktionary:Multilingual_statistics (20 February 2010). Woodbury, Anthony C. 2006. “What is an Endangered Language?”. Linguistic Society of America, 2006. http://www.lsadc.org/info/pdf_files/Endangered_Languages.pdf (20 February 2010). World. 2006. World Values Survey (Web site). http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org (20 February 2010).

part 2

Translation and negotiation

chapter 5

The treason of translation? Bilingualism, linguistic borders and identity John Edwards It is perfectly obvious that using a translator or interpreter has practical benefits; it is perhaps less obvious that psychological disadvantages may present themselves. The translator is one whose linguistic competence gives entry to (at least) two language communities, and there may be apprehension. As George Steiner has pointed out, “there is in every act of translation – and specially where it succeeds – a touch of treason. Hoarded dreams, patents of life are being taken across the frontier.” The old Italian proverb is blunter: traduttori traditori. This reflects the familiar idea that concealment is as much a feature of language as is communication. Privacy, the construction of fictionalised myths, legends and stories, and outright dissimulation are at once important and threatened by translation and translators; one contemporary theme here is the “appropriation” of native stories by outsiders, for in many cultures, particularly those with powerful and rich oral traditions, stories belong to the group or, indeed, to some designated story-teller. There is, then, a potential tension between the necessity of translation and its invasive qualities. This chapter suggests some points relevant to this tension – with particular regard to ethnic-group boundaries and the politics of group identity.

Bilingualism and group membership People belong to many groups, and all of them – all, at least, that have boundaries possessing some degree of permanence – have characteristics that mark their identity. The implication is that each of us may carry the tribal markings of many groups, that our “group identity” is itself a mosaic rather than a monolith. Still, it is clear that, where language issues are central, the pivotal group is the ethnocultural community. Overlaps of importance may occur because of simultaneous membership in gender, socioeconomic, educational, occupational and many other categories, but the base here is an ethnic one.

 John Edwards

What, then, is the significance of a bilingualism which links an individual to more than one ethnocultural community? How does it feel, we might ask, to have a foot in more than one camp? Some have thought that it could lead to some psychological “splitting,” a possibility now generally rejected in cognitive science. Is such duality the origin of the expanded acuity and awareness that others have claimed for bilinguals? In a world where complicated patterns of social relations are made more intricate still by a very wide – theoretically infinite, in fact – range of linguistic capabilities, a great many possibilities are plausible. Of course, a great deal of bilingualism has very little psychological or emotional significance: the purely instrumental fluencies needed to conduct simple business transactions do not, after all, represent much of an excursion from one’s ethnic base camp. Those with such limited capabilities probably comprise a larger category than is often thought: breadth of multiple fluencies does not, in and of itself, imply psychological depth – it may, more simply, reflect the exigencies of a complicated public life. Equally, it is obviously possible to hold dual (or multiple) allegiances, involving different-language groups, in the absence of personal bilingualism. The attachment felt by the English-speaking Irish or Welsh to a culture and an ancestry whose language they no longer possess is a psychologically real one, and demonstrates the continuing power of what is intangible and symbolic. Indeed, there often exists a continuing attachment to the “lost” language itself, seen as perhaps the most important specific aspect of that more general ancestry, and as the point of entry into cultural tradition. The fact that such attachments rarely lead to actual linguistic revival is regrettable in the eyes of those who feel that language is the pillar of culture, but this is not the place to explore the reasons why passive sympathies do not become active ones. Rather, the point is that these attachments – however attenuated or residual – have a meaning, and represent a sort of symbolic bilingual connectivity. The argument has been made elsewhere (see Edwards 1985, 1995) that a continuing sense of ethnic-group identity need not inevitably depend upon the continuing use of the original language in ordinary, communicative dimensions – again, this a matter of considerable complexity which cannot detain us further here – but it can hardly be denied that linguistic continuity is a powerful cultural support. It is not the only pillar, but it is obviously an important one, and its importance takes on a particularly interesting slant when it rests upon more than a monolingual fluency. The many bilinguals whose competence is more deep-seated and whose abilities go beyond commercial instrumentality are the individuals one usually has in mind when considering the relationship between bilingualism and identity – and, if we are to think about this socio-psychological relationship, it may be useful to consider the manner in which bilingualism arises. Yet again we are confronted with a topic whose complexity can only be acknowledged in passing.



Chapter 5.  The treason of translation? 

Still, there are two broad divisions of relevance: the first comprises those bilinguals who have a kinship attachment to each group (bypassing a large and often vexed literature, we can accept either real or perceived attachments for our present purposes); the second is made up of people who have, in a more formal way, acquired another linguistic citizenship, as it were (there is a redolence, here, of the integrative motivation once much discussed in the literature). Bilingualism by design The latter division involves what has been referred to as élite bilingualism, a variety best exemplified by members of the educated classes whose formal instruction would, historically, have been seen as incomplete without the acquisition of another language or two. Élite bilingualism has typically involved two (or more) prestigious languages – although the term could reasonably be extended to cover the competence of those whose maternal variety is of lesser-used status, as well as of those lucky, or intelligent, or industrious enough to have achieved upward mobility through education. Élite bilingualism is usually discussed in comparison with folk bilingualism – where the latter signifies that necessity-induced repertoire expansion already touched upon – and, indeed, the distinction seems apt, particularly when one considers that, historically, the élite variety often had as much to do with social-status marking as it did with a thirst for knowledge and cultural boundary crossing. In earlier times, not to have known Latin or Greek or French in addition to one’s vernacular would have been unthinkable for educated people – but often unthinkable, perhaps, in the same way that it would have been unthinkable not to have had servants. Among those fortunate élite bilinguals, of course, there were – and are – many driven by purer scholastic motives. But acknowledging this also means acknowledging that élite bilingualism need not rule out motives of necessity more usually associated with the “folk” variety. It is just that necessity itself becomes a little more rarefied. One’s intellectual pursuits and desires may demand, for example, the acquisition of other languages and an acquaintance with other cultures. Both élite and folk varieties of bilingualism involve what I am calling here “bilingualism by design” – neither is a capability learned at the maternal knee; both reflect the pressures of necessity. The essential differences are found along the dual and often related continua of the formality of the learning context, on the one hand, and the cultural level of the necessity – if I could put it that way – on the other. It is generally a mistake, then (if a rather common one) to equate folk bilingualism with capacities related to blood and belonging (see the following section). But there are indeed continua, and not compartments, here. Humphrey Tonkin (personal communication) has suggested, for instance, that while the activities of immigrants to a different linguistic area are commonly seen to fall under a “folk”



John Edwards

heading – after all, they are motivated by mundane but usually pressing considerations – they (or their children) typically learn the new language at school. This hardly represents élite bilingualism. So formal education per se seems not enough to elicit the élite label, and Tonkin goes on to suggest, in fact, that there are many levels within the élite category. It follows that we could equally say that there are levels within the folk category. A concrete example here was traditionally provided by non-anglophone immigrants to Quebec: Italians in Montreal, say. Before the passage of legislation strengthening the position of French at school, it was very common for them to maintain Italian at home, to learn French dans les rues, and to put their children into English-medium schools. Trilingualism was the result of this interesting mixture of folk and élite approaches. Beyond the more clear-cut examples that fall largely along folk continua, it is not difficult to see that more élite approaches to bilingualism could also expand personal boundaries. The life’s work of a sensitive scholar, for example, could depend upon or, at least, produce – as an incidental result of more specific researches – an extended allegiance or sense of belonging. Indeed, this scenario also theoretically applies to those whose excursions across boundaries are motivated by nothing more than interest. After all, given some minimum threshold of intelligence and sensitivity, the difference between the scholar and the amateur lies in formality of focus. The general point here is that we can ally ourselves, by more or less conscious effort, with another group – and that a formally cultivated bilingualism can act as the bridge. And it is important, I think, to acknowledge the depth that can be attained by such effort. Boundaries are really crossed, cultural and linguistic sensitivities are really enlarged, and allegiances are both refined and broadened. Sometimes, indeed, the scholar shows astonishing capacities in these connections: I possess a general acquaintance with the languages and literature of the Aryan and Syro-Arabic classes... with several [languages] I have a more intimate acquaintance... Italian, French, Catalan, Spanish, Latin and in a less degree Portuguese, Vaudois, Provençal... I am tolerably familiar with Dutch... Flemish, German, Danish. In Anglo-Saxon and Moeso-Gothic my studies have been much closer... I know a little of the Celtic... with the Sclavonic [sic]... of Russian... of Hebrew and Syriac... to a less degree I know Aramaic Arabic, Coptic and Phenician [sic]. (Murray 1977: 70)

Can anyone doubt that James Murray – who, after describing his linguistic abilities and interests in an unsuccessful letter of application for a job in the British Museum, went on to become the editor of the Oxford English Dictionary – through this remarkable broadening of his capabilities, must necessarily have achieved a heightened cultural awareness, an exploded sense of “groupness”? It seems unlikely. But, if one reads the biography written by Murray’s granddaughter – or,



Chapter 5.  The treason of translation? 

indeed, if one merely looks at the pictures of this quintessential Victorian scholar – one also realises that Murray always retained an unshakeable sense of his original Scottishness, which became allied to a wider British sense of identity. (This was not at all unusual at the time, and in the circumstances of an educated and ambitious life.) In fact, the picture is a little more interesting still. I thought of Murray here, not only because of his linguistic breadth – and the motivations behind it, and the sensitivities it nourished – but also because he felt himself the possessor of a special sort of identity. Scholars have recently turned their attention to “border identities” – see, for example the work of Thomas Wilson and Hastings Donnan (1998, 1999) – and Murray would have endorsed this. His granddaughter tells us that he never felt really English – but his Scottishness was also qualified. He was a Borderer, born and raised in Teviotdale: within three hours walk of English ground... very near to that nondescript tract which in older times was known as the Debateable [sic] Ground – because it was claimed by both England and Scotland and whose inhabitants were neither English nor Scotch [sic] but simply Borderers. (Murray 1977: 3)

All who grow up as “borderers” have an awareness of others and a propensity for heightened cultural sensitivity that may be denied to their counterparts in the heartland. This applies even where – as in Murray’s case – the border is not a linguistic one (prescinding here, of course, from matters of dialect and accent variation). It is likely to be particularly striking in settings where borders mark status differentials and is, relatedly, more noticeable among those borderers who are on the “weaker” side of the divide; this “weakness”, however, is often a complicated element, and may be a subtle one. Given this qualification, Murray’s Scottish–English frontier is a case in point, but there are many others: the Canadian–American boundary, for example. Where the border also has language significance, the effects are of course amplified. The broader point about borders is that, for those whose bilingualism is of the more “formal” variety, they are more often intellectual than geographical – but the effects may be just as consequential as those associated with commerce and customs-posts. Murray’s case is interesting because it reflects both physical boundaries and scholarly ones. It is an intriguing idea – one worth some pursuit, perhaps – that those nurtured along the former might be more disposed, as adults, to wish to cross the latter.



John Edwards

Bilingualism by blood But we must pass now to a brief consideration of the other broad category, comprising those bilinguals who have some real or understood blood attachment to more than one language community. There is a large literature on varieties of bilingualism, which concerns itself with onset and timing, and with the consequences for fluency to which technicalities of acquisition lead. In terms of identity, it is surely the case that the deeper the linguistic and cultural burrowing into another community, the greater the impact upon identity. This in turn suggests that those whose bilingual competence is nurtured early will, other things being equal, have a firmer foot in the two (or more) camps. It will usually be the case, of course, that one camp will have psychological and emotional primacy. If we return for a moment to Murray, as an example, we can see that his Victorian solidity, expressed – whether as Scottish, British or Borderer – in English, always remained of pivotal centrality. This is not to belittle in the slightest those cross-group sensitivities that were so marked in his case, but it does remind us that – however many camps we may visit with ease and comfort – the fires typically burn brightest at home. But there are some cases where home itself is difficult to establish, at least in any simple unidimensional sense. There are some cases, that is, where bilingual or multilingual capacities, linked to their several cultural bases, develop so early and so deeply that a primary allegiance is hard to discover. There are generally two ways to consider the situations of those whose bilingualism begins at the parental knee. The first is simply that two or more base camps are home simultaneously; the second is that one primary home indeed exists, but it is constructed – in a manner unique to the individual – from materials taken from the several sources. Thus, Steiner (1992) claims early and continuing competence in German, French and English. He also notes that careful self-examination – of which variety emerges spontaneously at times of emergency or emotion, of which language is dreamt in, of which is associated with earliest memories – shows that no one of the three seems dominant. He is by his own account maternally and perfectly trilingual. And Steiner has suggested that such “primary” multilingualism is, as I have implied above, an integral state of affairs in itself. There has been virtually no research on the consequences for identity of multilingual tapestries so closely woven, but one imagines that there are subtleties here that go far beyond simple additive relationships. It is of course difficult to define and assess perfectly and fully balanced bilingualism, and it may be that even polyglots like Steiner would fall short under the most rigorous examination; nonetheless, more attention to deep-seated multiple fluencies is indicated. As we move towards the bilingualism of more ordinary individuals, we move more obviously towards the idea of a unitary identity – woven from several strands,



Chapter 5.  The treason of translation? 

to be sure, but inevitably influenced by one language and culture more than by others. But, if we move from the Steiners (and Conrads, Nabokovs, Kunderas, Stoppards and all the rest) – whose literary power, and the ability to reflect in meaningful ways upon its multifaceted origin, are simply unavailable to most people – we must not imagine that we have moved away from enlarged identities per se. It is both the obligation and the fulfilment of intellectual life, after all, to express what less articulate souls may somehow feel or possess. When we consider that the language competences of most bilinguals are shallower than those of the Steiners of the world – broader, sometimes, but rarely as deep – and that neither the capacity nor the inclination to think much about identity is a widely distributed quantity, we realise again what important questions remain to be asked, what research – more psychological than linguistic – still needs to be undertaken. The intellectuals can look after themselves here: Steiner has written famously about the ‘extraterritoriality’ of multilingual writers; Ilan Stavans argues that monolingualism is a form of oppression (see Kellman 2000); and many others, from Goethe to Eliot, have argued over the ability – particularly the poet’s ability – to be fully expressive beyond the muttersprache. We need reports from more mundane quarters, too. As it is, we rely largely upon inference to support the contention that it is the identity components, the symbols of the tribe, that energise languages beyond their instrumental existences. One large and obvious example here is the powerful association between language and nationalism. Since the latter is, among other things, a pronounced and often mobilising sense of groupness, it follows that any language component is likely to be carefully delineated. And so, historically, it is. The language in which you do your shopping, and which – if you thought much about it – is also the variety in which your group’s tradition is inscribed, can become a symbol of your oppressed state, a rallying-point, a banner under which to assemble the troops. Would people be so ready to sacrifice for something that was of purely mundane importance? We might regret that circumstances encourage us to put aside a familiar tool, and learn to use another – but we go to war over histories, not hammers. Bilingualism and translation The important associations of a particular language with a particular base camp are made clearer – and here we move from languages in general to languages in tandem – when we think about translation. This is an exercise driven by obvious necessity and, if language were not invested with emotion and association, its operation would be unremarkable. While employing them, we might applaud those whose expertise allows them the access denied the rest of us, but we would rarely



John Edwards

be suspicious. We would hardly equate translation with treason unless we feared that those “hoarded dreams” and those “patents of life” were being taken across group lines. And what are “patents of life”, if not the psychological collections of past and present that are unique – or are felt to be unique, at any rate – to ourselves? An informal Whorfianism tells us that every language interprets and presents the world in a somewhat different way, that the unique wellsprings of group consciousness, traditions, beliefs and values are intimately entwined with a given variety. So, translation may mean the revealing of deep matters to others, and cannot be taken lightly. The translator, the one whose multilingual facility permits the straddling of boundaries, is a necessary quisling. But necessity is not invariably associated with comfort, and not even their employers care very much for traitors. Before returning to – and concluding with – some remarks about the psychological consequences of linguistic border-crossing, I should perhaps insert a few words here about translation itself, and about the contexts in which its operation seems particularly salient for matters of identity. How, in other words, does the work of those required quislings most commonly have its effect in terms of group identity? In fact, complaints about the “treasonous” aspect of translation – the one of greatest interest in contexts of identity – are less frequent than those that point the finger at the inadequacies of translation. Thus, as both Humphrey Tonkin and Marcia Moen have suggested to me, the “good” translation may be accused of border-crossing, the “bad” one of building inadequate or unsatisfactory linguistic bridges. In the following section, I consider some perspectives on the latter. Translation and interpretation A great deal of translation, while it may be technically very sophisticated, constitutes a psychologically unremarkable fact of multilingual life. It is never, however, a simple or purely technical matter. Apart from almost useless word-for-word exercises, every act of translation involves interpretation and judgement. For this reason, it has sometimes been supposed that “true” translation is impossible. However, although a perfect version that captures every nuance and allusion may be rather unlikely – and becomes more so as the material to be translated becomes less prosaic (see below) – we have nonetheless translated, for practical purposes, throughout history. Steiner notes: to dismiss the validity of translation because it is not always possible and never perfect is absurd... the defence of translation has the immense advantage of abundant, vulgar fact. (Steiner 1992: 264)



Chapter 5.  The treason of translation? 

Seeing translation as interpretation also links, incidentally, cross-language exercises with communications within the same language. That is, even the simplest of conversations between two speakers of the same language involves interpretation, and is analogous to “reading between the lines” in written language. The contextualisation of messages and the necessity, for fuller understanding, for at least some degree of familiarity with the appropriate cultural background and underpinnings lie at the heart of the difficulties experienced by those who know a language only at the technical level of lexicon and grammar. We need only look over our “own” literature to realise that, as the centuries roll back, we are in more and more unfamiliar territory. Indeed, we very soon arrive at a place where even lexicon and grammar change. Even Dickens is now sufficiently linguistically alien to be offputting to many. It is through a constant process of translation that we continue to possess our own literature and, indeed, our own culture. And there are similarities for second-language learners: the fluent technical English sufficient for Japanese engineers is hardly going to fit them for an appreciation of Shakespeare. In summary, one is faced with an act heavy with subjectivity and nuance, an act in which mistakes are common, and where one slip can break a chain of understanding. As Steiner (1992) observes, it is an act in four scenes. The first extends from Cicero’s admonition not simply to translate verbum pro verbo (in his Libellus de Optimo Genere Oratorum) up to the end of the eighteenth century. In this long first period we observe, above all, a concern for practical problems of the translation exercise, and it is marked by statements and theories largely driven by the difficulties of rendering the classics into English (for example). In his Defence and Illustration of the French Language (1549), Joachim du Bellay wrote a little chapter devoted to the difficulties of translation. I reproduce it in its entirety because it focusses our attention upon the first of the translation “contexts” that I wish to highlight here. Here is “Of Bad Translators, and of not Translating the Poets”: But what shall I say of some truly more worthy to be called traducers than translators [traducteurs/traditeurs]? For they traduce those whom they undertook to explain, robbing them of their glory, and by the same means seduce ignorant readers, showing them white for black; and, to acquire the name of savants, they translate on credit those languages of which they never understood the first elements, like Hebrew and Greek; and again, to make themselves the better known, tackle the poets – a race of authors certainly to which if I were able or wished to translate I would so little address myself, because of that excellence of invention which they have more than others, that grandeur of style, magnificence of words, gravity of sentences, audacity and variety of figures, and countless other lights of poetry: in short, that energy, and I know not what of spirit which is in their writings, which the Latins would call genius. All which things can as much be expressed in translating, as a painter can represent the soul with the body of him



John Edwards

whom he undertakes to draw from nature. What I say is not addressed to those who by command of princes and great lords translate the most famous Greek and Latin poets, because the obedience one owes to such personages admits of no excuse in this place, but indeed I mean to speak to those who from blitheness of heart (as we say) undertake such things lightly and in the same way acquit themselves thereof. O Apollo! O muses! thus to profane the sacred relics of antiquity! But I will say no more thereof. He then who would make a work worthy of price in his own tongue, let him leave this labour of translating, principally the poets, to those who from a laborious and little profitable thing, I would even say useless, nay, harmful, to the enrichment of their language, rightly get more of vexation than of glory. (du Bellay 1549/1939: 35–36).

A century and a half later, in the preface to his translations from Virgil, John Dryden suggested a solution that has become widely endorsed: On the whole matter, I thought fit to steer betwixt the two extremes of paraphrase and literal translation; to keep as near my author as I could without losing all his graces, the most eminent of which are in the beauty of his words; and those words, I must add, are always figurative. Such of these as would retain their elegance in our tongue, I have endeavoured to graft on it; but most of them are of necessity to be lost, because they will not shine in any but their own... I have endeavoured to make Virgil speak such English as he would himself have spoken, if he had been born in England, and in this present age. (Cited by Steiner 1992: 269–270)

I reproduce this passage, as well, because – even though he is discussing the translation of the “classics” – Dryden touches upon the second of the translation contexts that I think are central to my broader theme: vernacular and sometimes ephemeral language. In his final sentence, Dryden refers to the difficulties of casting an original in the language of the “present age” – a matter exacerbated further when the translator is faced with the problem of reflecting a variety of social-class distinctions of speech. Between 1871 and 1893, Emile Zola wrote twenty novels meant to follow “scientifically” the effects of heredity and environment on one family: les RougonMacquart. The novels include L’Assommoir and Germinal and, in his introduction to each, the translator, Leonard Tancock, makes some apposite remarks. The former, Tancock notes: is for Paris what a rich novel of Cockney life would be for London... the nicknames Bec-Salé, Bibi-la-Grillade, Mes Bottes, Gueule d’or (called Goldie in this translation)... have as authentic a ring as, say, Nobby Clark or Ally Sloper or for that matter Fanny Adams might have to a Londoner. (Cited in Zola 1876 /1970: 16)



Chapter 5.  The treason of translation? 

The problem is how best to indicate to English readers the sense of slum life and language intended by Zola in his style indirect libre, and Tancock saw it as a formidable one: The translation of slang and swearing in general is self-defeating in that the more exactly it hits off the tone of the original in the slang of the moment... the less durable it is likely to be... on the other hand, a translation must speak the language of its own time, and any attempt to reproduce “period” slang or popular language is bound to produce effects as grotesque as “Marry, thou art a scurvy knave”. In the case of L’Assommoir nobody could in any case hope to reproduce the idiom of, say, the east end of London in 1870, but on the other hand contemporary slang is bound to introduce an element of TV and Americanism. (Cited in Zola 1876 /1970: 18)

One might interject here that, if a translation is to “speak the language of its own time,” and if that time is heavily influenced by television and by America, then these elements should – for best effect – be reflected. The only solution to this aspect of the translator’s problem is re-translation as necessary and, indeed, new translations of the classics have always been seen as vital to their continued popular existence. Tancock’s more immediate solution was to use popular speech as timeless as I could make it, sprinkled fairly freely with the obvious and equally timeless swear-words and obscenities... my rendering is therefore unavoidably ‘free’ in this respect, since one can only hope to reproduce the sort of language comparable people might use in pubs or off their guard. (Cited in Zola 1876 /1970: 18)

He then echoes these concerns in his preface to Germinal: Some of the strongest French oaths used in this novel are more or less blasphemous variations and elaborations on the Nom de Dieu! theme. I have frequently substituted for this sort of thing language more likely to be used by Englishmen of a similar type in similar circumstances. (Cited in Zola 1885 /1954: 16)

Tancock also discusses his more general intent, which is, of course, to remain faithful to the tone of the original, to what Emile Rieu (the founder editor of the series of which Tancock’s renderings of Zola are a part) called the “law of equivalent effect.” Since Germinal is a “brutal and angry book” (it deals with a violent clash between owners and workers in northern French collieries), a translation which attempted to make it more “refined” or “literary” would have been ludicrous, and a travesty of Zola’s intent. The two important contexts, then, in which translation is at once the most problematic and the most interesting – in terms of its relationship to questions of identity and “groupness” – appear at opposite ends of the literary continuum. On the one hand, rough and slang-laden speech poses the sorts of difficulties Tancock

 John Edwards

discusses; on the other, poetic or philosophical productions also lay traps in their use of metaphor, allusion or dense, abstract reasoning. It is in fact a greater awareness of this latter issue – roughly speaking, the need to “understand” an original work in a hermeneutic way – that characterises the second historical thrust in translation theory, which is embedded in a larger concern with the relationship between language and mind. In the contemporary world, both “practical” and “philosophical” matters inform serious translation; indeed, they have always coexisted and it is perhaps more accurate only to say that the relative weightings have altered over time. The most modern current, dating from the 1940’s, comprises the last two “scenes” in the translation production, which supplement without replacing the two earlier dimensions. Here we can observe the possibility – endorsed by some, and condemned by others – of translation giving rise to novel interpretations, of greater departures from either the words or the tone of an original. The third stage has to do with the technical and professional developments that can be brought to bear upon this more expansive view of translation: the possibilities of machine translation, more formal linguistic enquiry, sophisticated statistical manipulation, institutions for professional translators and interpreters, scholarly journals devoted to the subject, and so on. But – and this is the fourth and final scene – there has arisen most recently a renewed concern for a more philosophical, almost “metaphysical” approach to translation (Steiner 1992). The theories of postmodernists – Lyotard, Foucault, Baudrillard and, especially, Derrida – provide the most obvious examples here. Although the hermeneutic tradition is, of course, a very old one, poststructuralist emphases upon textual deconstruction, coupled with the idea that texts have no single or intrinsic meaning, have the potential to greatly broaden the translator’s remit. The greatest potential here occurs with poetry, and it is interesting to consider that, in this context, postmodern efforts can be seen as reworkings – though often rather impenetrable ones – of the traditional approaches to poetry with which all students have long been familiar. What did the poet mean here? What else might she have meant? What do you take from the piece? Why is it acceptable for different intentions and interpretations to coexist? And so on. In a way, we have come back to the beginning, and we can see that the basic issues in the area have remained quite stable. This is surely not to be wondered at. The essential questions remain the same, from Cicero’s day to our own: does the literal version or the literary one come first, and how much freedom should the translator exercise? These are the oversimplified statements upon which rest all matters of translation. If we remember Cicero’s precept not to translate word-forword, and then consider Vladimir Nabokov’s declaration that, in the translation of poetry, anything but the “clumsiest literalism” (Steiner 1992: 254) is a fraud, we see that we have indeed come full circle. Somewhere between a literalism which



Chapter 5.  The treason of translation? 

reflects the view that any translation freedom means a sea change from the original (that translation means loss and that, therefore, we had better eschew interpretation) and the opposing view that Nabokov’s idea is itself unworkable in any satisfactory sense (that for better or worse we must depart from literalness) we find both an animating tension and most actual production. Translation may be blasphemous, insensitive or inaccurate but, in a multilingual world, we need it. And, we might want to add, there is much of a relatively prosaic nature that can be translated without undue difficulty. This may be true, not only for the technical manuals of engineers, but also for some varieties of literature. Thus, Josef Škvorecký (1985), the Czech-Canadian writer, observed that Theodore Dreiser is not as threatened by translators as is Emily Dickinson. Given the needs, inclinations and reading habits of the vast majority of the population, we could perhaps take some comfort from this. Shakespeare, because of the richness and density of his language, has always presented problems, and is a good example of the “Emily Dickinson” end of the continuum. For a Paris production of The Tempest, Peter Brook observed that, whereas in English a word is often marvellously used because of its many meanings to the audience, a French listener might respond best to a clear and single significance (see Hemming 1990). Perhaps Brook had in mind Rivarol’s famous statement that “ce qui n’est pas clair n’est pas français”; it is rather less well-known that Rivarol went on to add that “ce qui n’est pas clair est encore anglais, italien, grec ou latin”. Equally, however, a good translation can bring fresh urgency to Shakespeare and, it is claimed, can unlock new layers of meaning. In Azerbaijani, “to be” is alom and “not to be” is the same word pronounced slightly differently; it is easy to see that this might give a quite moving freshness to Hamlet’s soliloquy. It is interesting to consider, then, that the very poetic richness of an original might engender, through sensitive translation, new and provocative insights. As Humphrey Tonkin recently suggested to me (personal communication), the essence of the matter here may actually be the impossibility of fully capturing Shakespearean nuance in altered linguistic clothing. Emerging in a particular cultural setting, the plays can be difficult enough for modern educated English speakers, let alone for non-anglophone audiences. Hence, Brook’s idea, as noted above, may be a little misguided: it is not some aspect or other of French that suggests the usefulness of a reworking; rather, it is the specificities of particular cultural-inferential contexts that can create problems – faults that are not, then, in our linguistic stars, but rather in our larger cultural selves. But what of the “Theodore Dreiser” end of Škvorecký’s continuum? At the beginning of this little digression, I implied that even translating for those engineering professionals was not as straightforward as it might first appear. In like manner – and given what I have already noted here about the problems of

 John Edwards

translating the most unpoetic language of all: the language of the street – dealing satisfactorily with the Dreisers of literature (to say nothing of the truly “downmarket” end of the literary spectrum) may present its own special problems. Škvorecký himself suggests an apposite case in point, when he turns to the translation of Agatha Christie’s novels into Czech. Early attempts here were seen to fail because they made Hercule Poirot talk like the other characters whereas, in Christie’s English original, the clever Belgian detective speaks a very “Frenchified” English. But a new translation made Poirot sound like a Sudeten German. More interesting still, Škvorecký suggests, are the efforts to translate Christie into French, to render Poirot’s Frenchified English into French itself. Poirot’s statement that: Stamboul, it is a city I have never visited. It would be a pity to pass through – comme ça [he snaps his fingers]. Nothing presses – I shall remain there as a tourist for a few days

comes out, in Postif ’s translation for the Librairie des Champs-Elysées, as: Ne connaissant pas Stamboul, je ne voudrai pas y passer sans m’arrêter. Rien ne me presse. Je visiterai la ville en touriste.

M. Bouc, a director of the Compagnie Internationale des Wagon Lits is made to say in the English original, “c’est rigolo”. In the French translation he says, “Dites plutôt que c’est inconcevable”. And so on. Language and identity To return to our sheep: the essence of the linkage between linguistic border-crossing and psychosocial identity is one of privacy and coherence, something which – while not necessarily secretive – nonetheless wraps its hoarded dreams in a particular linguistic package. Of course, many have gone further, arguing that concealment is more central to language than is communication. Talleyrand said that “la parole a été donnée à l’homme pour déguiser sa pensée” and he should have known. (Larousse used to describe him as “plein d’esprit et de ressource, mais sans valeur morale.”) But Popper also noted that “what is most characteristic of the human language is the possibility of story telling.” Steiner, with his usual felicity, speaks of the “enclosure and willed opaqueness” of language (1992: 300; Talleyrand and Popper cited on pp. 235 and 236). Und so weiter. Privacy, the construction of myths, legends and stories, and outright dissimulation are at once central to a group’s self-identity and potentially threatened by translation. As noted at the beginning here, a contemporary ramification is “voice appropriation” – the telling of



Chapter 5.  The treason of translation? 

native stories by outsiders – and the injury and resentment that such “theft” may cause; for fuller details here, see Edwards (2009). Stories are what constitute our identity. Some are sacred and, indeed, the power of words themselves has often attained mythic or religious significance. In St John’s gospel, we read that “in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” In Christian tradition, the scriptures are divinely incarnate in Christ – as the logos – but many religions (perhaps all of them) view tampering with the Word as sinful. The stain which mortal utterance of the arcana verba would represent, and the three days of darkness caused by the translation of Jewish law into Greek– these are examples of the potency here (see Steiner 1992). The stories are sacred but so too is the language which clothes them. As well, the perspective is not only biblical: Irish, for example, has been described in contemporary times as “the casket which encloses the highest and purest religion” and as the “instrument and expression of a purely Catholic culture” (Fullerton 1916: 6; O’Donoghue 1947: 24). Similar equations can be readily found elsewhere. Not all chapters in our stories are sacred, of course; legends and literatures are in the province of the profane. Still, it is often the case that the central and the most enduring narratives achieve a sort of sacred status: what was lying outside the fanum has now been given an inside niche, and canonical literatures can be as important as religious canons themselves. The point of general interest here is that group identity is based on both stories and the language in which they are told. Small wonder, then, that translation can be blasphemous, and that multiple linguistic capabilities may be suspect. Such potentials need not worry bilinguals themselves, of course, but they clearly reinforce – from a negative perspective, in this case – the central theme: the psychological heart of bilingualism is identity. In the postmodern era, many populations are more mixed and more mobile than ever before. Previously monolingual societies are more and more aware of multilingual fluencies – in their own midst, as well as elsewhere. These and related considerations might suggest that group narratives, the stories we tell about ourselves, are less distinct and separate than once they were. But this is only, in fact, a specific reference to a post-national world in which some of the old socio-cultural verities are seen as collapsing. Whether or not this is, indeed, the direction towards which things are tending, there is little doubt that, like Mark Twain’s demise, the eclipse of old forms of groupness has been exaggerated; we have not yet outgrown Tip O’Neill’s aphorism that “all politics is local.” There is plenty of life left in the old stories. Indeed, there is surely evidence that globalising trends of all kinds often strengthen or engender local reactions; the matter of “voice appropriation” (see above) is a case in point here. At the heart of such political and social reactivity is the protection of particular “stories.”

 John Edwards

Both contemporary observation and the historical record demonstrate that language and identity can be powerfully intertwined. Useful contemporary overviews of this important but often vexed relationship can be found in Joseph (2004) and Riley (2007), as well as in my own discussions (Edwards 1985, 2009). The particular salience of this relationship, where bilingualism is involved, obviously arises from the linguistic division. And this, in turn, leads to a final inferential context of special relevance. For monolingual majority-group speakers in their own “mainstream” settings, the instrumentality and the symbolism of language are not split and, for most such individuals, the language-identity linkage is not problematic – indeed, it is seldom considered. Minority-group speakers, however, rarely have this luxury; for them, matters of language and culture are often more immediate. Now, while it is true that no simple equation exists between bilingualism and minority-group membership, it is also true that many bilinguals are found in the ranks of “smaller” or threatened communities. The implication is that a link will often exist between bilingualism and a heightened awareness of, and concern for, identity. Specific linguistic manifestations include attempts at language maintenance or revival, the use of language in ethnic or nationalist struggles, the efforts to sustain at least some domains in the face of external influence, and so on. A more general consequence is that the position and the responses of minority groups focus attention on the possibility – and, in many instances, the inevitability – of a split between the communicative and the symbolic functions of language: you may have to live and work in a new language, a medium that is not the carrier of your culture or the vehicle of your literature. In these sorts of settings we see, in fact, an extended value to the study of bilingualism and identity. First, the attitudes and actions of bilinguals in situations of risk and transition have a special poignancy and visibility – identities, like everything else, are thrown into sharper relief when threats are perceived. Second, these same attitudes and actions can galvanise others, and can remind a larger and often unreflective society that matters of language and identity are not relevant for “ethnics” and “minorities” alone. The importance of bilingualism – and, perforce, of the translation that it necessitates – is of both intrinsic and generalisable value. We need to know more about it because it is an issue in its own right, with all the ramifications and technicalities to which I have only alluded here; as well, it may illuminate wider patches of ground. More specifically, I have tried to suggest that the essence of a bilingual identity is, above all, social and psychological rather than linguistic. Beyond types, categories, methods and processes is the essential animating tension of identity. Beyond utilitarian and unemotional instrumentality, the core of bilingualism is belonging.



Chapter 5.  The treason of translation? 

References du Bellay, Joachim. 1549 / 1939. The Defence and Illustration of the French Language. London: Dent. Donnan, Hastings & Thomas Wilson. 1999. Borders: Frontiers of Identity, Nation and State. Oxford: Berg. Edwards, John. 1985. Language, Society and Identity. Oxford: Blackwell. Edwards, John. 1995. Multilingualism. London: Penguin. Edwards, John. 2009. Language and Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fullerton, Robert. 1916. The Prudence of St Patrick’s Irish Policy. Dublin: O’Brien & Ards. Hemming, Sarah. 1990. “Found in Translation”. The Independent (London), 25 October. Joseph, John. 2004. Language and Identity. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Kellman, Steven. 2000. The Translingual Imagination. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Murray, Katharine. 1977. Caught in the Web of Words: James Murray and the Oxford English Dictionary. New Haven: Yale University Press. O’Donoghue, Dennis. 1947. “Nationality and Language”. Irish Man – Irish Nation: Lectures on Some Aspects of Irish Nationality Delivered Before the Columban League, Maynooth, During 1946. Cork: Mercier. Riley, Philip. 2007. Language, Culture and Identity. London: Continuum. Škvorecký, Josef. 1985. “Literary Murder at 5¢ a Word”. English Today 4.39–42. Steiner, George. 1992. After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation. 2nd edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wilson, Thomas & Hastings Donnan, eds. 1998. Border Identities: Nation and State at International Frontiers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zola, Emile. 1876 /1970. L’Assommoir. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Zola, Emile. 1885 /1954. Germinal. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

chapter 6

The poetics of experience Toward a pragmatic understanding of experience, practice, and translation Vincent Colapietro The author explores what he calls the poetics of experience (the translation of experience into various forms of expression, linguistic and otherwise) against the backdrop of a pragmatist understanding of human practices. Such an understanding of these practices highlights their historical and thus open-ended character, also the ubiquitous possibility of dramatic alterations in the selfunderstanding of the participants in these practices. Anything approximating an adequate account of translation in its various senses demands that critical attention be paid to linguistic and literary practices, precisely as historically evolved and evolving affairs. Interlingual and, indeed, other forms of translation generate the need for complex renegotiations involving various aspects of these interwoven practices. Translating a text from one language into another (to take but one example) is far from a simple process of decoding and re-encoding; it is rather a complex practice in which historically established relationships are, in some measure, renegotiated and thereby transformed.

Introduction Translation takes myriad forms and fulfills diverse functions. The word itself, having been borne across from Latin into English, French, Italian, and countless other languages, carries a significant fragment of its human significance in its sound and shape: it bears witness to the process by which it came into being and those by which it is yet coming to be (cf. Benjamin in Venuti 2000a). To leap immediately into the pragmatic sense I will develop, let us take a common, yet unacknowledged, case of translation – that of education. Teachers in effect translate for their students the language of assigned texts into more intelligible language (i.e., into an

 Vincent Colapietro

idiom more intelligible to their students).1 To take but three other examples, choreographers and dancers translate music into movement, directors and actors often translate works of literature into cinema, and jazz musicians in their improvisations translate standards into, well, jazz. Even more pervasively, thus more imperceptibly, all of us translate our experiences into some forms of expression, if only as somatic symptoms obscuring (even more than disclosing) their experiential import. The translation of experience into expression, linguistic or otherwise, is what I mean by the poetics of experience. This is the primordial, if not the paradigmatic, form of translation. The task of those, however, who translate works in one language into works in another designates what is arguably the paradigmatic sense of this protean term. Even so, the main focus of my concern is not interlingual translation2 but various kinds of cultural renegotiations enjoined by interlingual translation (including linguistic and artistic renegotiations) and other instances of this complex process. More accurately, such renegotiations are in the immediate foreground of my concern, whereas the irresolvable tension between experience and expression is in the not-too-distant background. There is, closely allied to the acknowledgment of this tension, a distinctive understanding of human practices that I want to recommend here. This pragmatist conception of practices is linked to an equally pragmatist conception of experience, of art as experience (see, above all, Dewey 1987), and finally of translation as art. Not only are human practices irreducibly complex affairs forever eluding the codifications of formalists, but human experience is prolepticly an aesthetic affair variously intimating, at times in subtle and gentle ways, at other times in a manifest and urgent manner, opportunities for luminous expression. In so intimating, experience as a consequence of its own drive generates a tension between itself 1. Insofar as this serves as a substitute or replacement for the text being translated, such a translation is more likely to serve the cult of immediacy (in particular, immediate accessibility, comprehensibility, and relevance) than either the work being “translated” or the work of education (work inescapably involving the arduous, painstaking task of coming to terms with what is other than those modes and schemes of intelligibility by which so much of our everyday experience is effortlessly, unreflectively translated into the world in which we are so comfortably at home). Insofar as it helps students to inhabit a work, to get lost in it without being utterly lost, especially insofar as it assists students in seeing why the language of the text is not only difficult and demanding but also difficult and demanding in just these ways, such a translation is more likely to serve the work and the students than the cult of immediacy. 2. I follow Roman Jakobson in distinguishing three senses of translation – intralingual, interlingual, and intersemiotic. See “On Linguistic Aspects of Translation” in Jakobson 1990: 428–35, or in Venuti 2000: 113–18. Intralingual translations are ones within a single language, interlingual translations are those from one language to another, and intersemiotic translations are those from one system of signs (e.g., music) into another system (e.g., the movements of a dancer).



Chapter 6.  The poetics of experience 

and expression. This tension is at the heart of what I mean by the poetics of experience: the impulse to make something out of experience, especially something arresting or luminous or, in some other respect, noteworthy. At the outset, however, the point that I most want to stress is this: the fate secured by translation is one involving, at its center, renegotiations.3 The prefix re- here is as important as the prefix trans-: indeed, the complex movement (cf. Steiner in Venuti 2000a) involved in the cultural work both undertaken in, and thereafter generated by, interlingual translation is an intricate pattern involving various movements by these two prefixes and numerous other ones. I stress the fate of translation being bound up with renegotiations because the processes by which one culture becomes available4 to another through the mediation of translators are processes in which the relationship between these cultures5 (and the languages on which they so deeply depend) are, in some measure, redefined or reframed. 3. Though renegotiation is not a term Lawrence Venuti uses in “Translation, Community, Utopia” (Venuti 2000b), in this essay he brings into sharp focus the kind of complex interplay between different languages – also different cultures – set in motion by the work of translators that I am using this term to designate. Our attempt to come to terms with another culture as other cannot avoid being our attempt, mostly on our terms. While the “domestic inscription” of “a foreign text” (482) – i.e., the inscription of the foreign text with and indeed within the framework of “domestic intelligibilities and interests” (468) – cannot be gainsaid, the possibility that there will be, within such inscriptions, an irreducible “remainder” of the foreign (see, e.g., 471) makes of translation something other than a completely violent process of appropriation and expropriation. In attempting, anew (hence, renegotiation), to come to terms with foreign modes of discourse, narration, textuality, and practice, the established terms in which my understanding and interests are expressed and enacted are to some extent subjected to the force, threat, and seductions of the foreign. The encounter with the stranger not infrequently makes one a stranger to oneself, makes one aware of the strangeness of one’s own ways (cf. Kristeva 1991: 181–92) – and such a realization can prompt one to re-interpret, to explore more candidly and imaginatively, the humanity and intelligibility of ways not one’s own (the foreign remainder as irreducibly foreign yet inherently intelligible). 4. I am experimenting with availability as an alternative to the ideal of equivalence (understood variously as “accuracy,” adequacy,” correctness,” “correspondence,” “fidelity,” and “identity) and also as an identification of one of the functions of translation, though one not ordinarily expressed in this way (Venuti 2000a: 5). 5. I am using culture here in a descriptive, not a normative, sense to mean simply the totality of institutions, practices and discourses embodied in the habits, artifacts, and other physical forms of some identifiable group of human actors. (The criteria by which such groups are identified are themselves matters of controversy, though insofar as they include affirmations, avowals and other forms of self-identification there is some hope of avoiding the thornier of these problems.) This is sometimes identified as culture in the anthropological sense, though within the disciplines and discourses making up anthropology today the concept of culture is a highly contested one (so much so that many anthropologists argue that it would be better to jettison than to try salvaging this concept). But I am in agreement with the anthropologist E. Valentine

 Vincent Colapietro

Translating human practices into a pragmatic register One of my aims, then, is to translate human practices into a pragmatic idiom. As a first step in this direction, reflecting upon the practice of translation itself promises to reveal paths of inquiry, to open routes of interrogation. It promises to do so precisely because it is a practice in which historicity and alterity, irrepressible hope and virtually inevitable frustration, expertise and incompetence, defining purposes and idiosyncratic policies, are dramatically present. Moreover, this practice is one in which the processes of mediation, not least of all historical mediation (e.g., mediating between past and present, on the one hand, present and future, on the other), are constitutive of the practice itself. Finally, (as noted, at least implied, a moment ago) the practice of translation entails processes in which the very meaning of the practice is, time and again, called into question, also processes in which the newly secured availability of one historically defined community to another such community is fraught with danger and opportunity. For the moment, I want to focus on the fact that translation inaugurates a series of possibilities for self-transformation (this fact is as much, if not more, a fate as it is a fact) and I want to do so in reference to a relatively simple example. The translation of Dante into English cannot help but be, if it is worthy of the work in the Italian of its author,6 a transformation of English. Better, such a translation cannot help but be the inauguration of a series of transformations of the language, possibly also the culture in other of its dimensions, into which the work is translated (this series constituting nothing less than what Walter Benjamin calls the Überleben or “afterlife” of a work) (Venuti 2000a:12, 16). From a historicist perspective, what English is, at present, cannot be separated from either what this linguistic community has been or what this community will become (what it will

Daniel, a scholar who makes effective use of Peircean semiotics, when he writes: “Culture as a dense cluster of semeiosic habits has such recuperative and appeasing capabilities that it cannot be easily undermined or even challenged despite all the intellectual belligerence we may summon to mount such a challenge” (Dirks 1998: 67). 6. The language in which Dante’s Commedia and other texts were written is of course that of the second half of the thirteenth and the opening decades of the fourteenth centuries. Languages are essentially historical and, even (perhaps especially) with respect to translation, the historically evolved and evolving character of natural languages must be given its full weight. At any rate, part of my aim is to render plausible the thesis that only a historically inflected understanding of language, thus of the task of the translator, is ultimately defensible. However much formalist approaches to language, literature, and translation may shed light on various facets of these practices, only a historicist approach can in the end do justice to these approaches. My aim is not to prove this, but to go some distance (if only a short distance) toward rendering this plausible.



Chapter 6.  The poetics of experience 

transform itself into).7 And what it will become can be decisively altered by the translation of such a work as the Commedia. In making such a work available in English, the translator subjects English itself to the forces and trajectories inherent in this work. This means that the translator is caught up not only in a complex linguistic negotiation but also in an equally intricate historical negotiation or, better, renegotiation. To mediate between this work and these readers entails mediating between medieval Italian and contemporary English, and also medieval Italian and contemporary Italian. Historical differences are as critical to renegotiate as are linguistic ones: the terms in which one language or culture stands to another are not fixed once and for all. One of the most decisive and indeed fateful ways in which they become unsettled – hence, become open to renegotiation – is through the efforts and ingenuity of translators. Having the other as other made available to oneself works toward making oneself available to the other as other; and, in turn, making oneself available to the other in this manner ineluctably exposes one to the risk – or adventure – of making oneself other than one has been, not in any trivial but in a profound sense. Properly understood, then, what is at stake in translation is the possibility of self-transformation (cultural, linguistic, artistic, literary, and, at bottom, personal transformation). Though not the main focus of my concern, I will nonetheless touch upon interlingual translation, and I will do so in explicit reference to what might be called, for the moment, a semiotic perspective. But first I want to connect the task of the translator in this sense to the struggle to improvise forms of expression more or less adequate to the disclosures of our experience (to the weight, force, textures, intricacies, and tensions disclosed in our encounters – not least of all, those with texts). But to reflect on the poetics of experience drives us to consider the experience of “poetry,”8 i.e., our experience of either crafting or reading texts in which the unceasing exploration of some medium of articulation (be it language or movement or sound or any other sensuous, textured, modifiable medium) is undertaken for the sake of articulation. The medium is not so much the message as it is a site of interrogation wherein the unique possibilities and power, also the sensuous qualities and textures, of this medium are exploited for the sake of articulating

7. Alasdair MacIntyre (1988) highlights the “historical dimension” of human language (especially “language-in-use”) (see, e.g., 384) and in “Translation, Community, Utopia,” Venuti underscores the relevance of this dimension for understanding the work of translation (Venuti 2000b: 472–73). 8. In this usage, as in much else, I have been influenced by the work of Roman Jakobson. The poetic or aesthetic function is directed toward the message; see, for example, “Closing statement: linguistics and poetics” in Language in Literature (Jakobson 1990).

 Vincent Colapietro

just this experience, or narrating just this sequence of actions and events,9 or simply giving expression to something urgent or pressing or in some other respect having the power to elicit the energy and imagination, the obsessions and fanaticism, of some singular sensibility. By the poetics of experience, moreover, I mean to underscore the haunting sense of inadequacy attending our most conscientious efforts to be articulate or expressive. I however take this haunting sense of inadequacy to be allied to undeniable moments of exhilaration, most evidently the exhilarating experience of having hit upon just the right word or expression, of having formed a sentence in sound, sense, and all else as perfectly shaped as we can imagine is possible.10 The tension here is not to be resolved, but to be lived. On the one side, I invoke the witness of the poet Charles Simic, who insists, “Poetry is the orphan of silence. The words never equal the experience behind them. We are always at the beginning, eternal apprentices.” On the other side, the impossible is achieved, more or less adequately (or, if one prefers, more or less inadequately) – poems in one language are translated into those in another language, a novel is “translated” into a film, the entrance of an actress in a scene in a film (e.g., Lee Remick in Anatomy of a Murder) is “translated” into music (Duke Ellington’s composition and Johnny Hodges’ solo).11 Translation enjoys what George Steiner characterizes as “the immense advantage of vulgar, abundant fact.” Experience drives toward expression (Smith 1995: 13) and, in its drive toward expression or articulation, something meaningful and indeed memorable is not infrequently achieved. This is true even if poetry or, more generally, expression in all of its forms is never more than raids upon the unsayable. Hence, what I mean by the poetics of experience is the lived, creative tension between inevitable failure and irrepressible aspiration.12 Individuals who devote 9. In I Could Tell You Stories, Patricia Hampl (1999) contends: “For we do not, after all, simply have experience; we are entrusted with it. We must do something – make something – with it. A story, we sense, is the only possible habitation for the burden of our witnessing.” I disagree with Hampl that a story is “the only possible habitation” for the experiences with which we are, in effect, entrusted. We might bear witness, or give expression, to our experience in media other than language and genres of articulation other than those of narration. 10. Here it is instructive to recall the etymology of translation as given in the OED: translate, back formation of Lat. translatus (p.p. of transferre), ‘carried over’; archaic meaning ‘bring to a state of spiritual or emotional ecstasy.’ 11. Think here also of the sound track composed by Miles Davis in the studio, December 5, 1957, for Louis Malle’s Ascenseur pour l’échafaud. 12. In his essay “Cézanne’s Doubt,” Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1964) quotes a letter, written by the painter “at the age of 67 – one month before his death” in which Cézanne declares: “ … I see more clearly the direction my studies are taking. Will I ever arrive at the goal, so intensely sought and so long pursued? I am still learning from nature, and it seems to me that I am making slow progress” (9). Even so, the painter still had (as Merleau-Ponty stresses) “moments of



Chapter 6.  The poetics of experience 

themselves to interlingual translation are, as much as the authors whom they are translating, defined by this tension.13 The living of this tension implicates artists (and there is no question that translators are artists in their own right) in an ongoing history, so that the translator mediates not only between two cultures but also between or among various historical “moments,” including mediation between the present and the future. I take this to be one of the most profound, even if a borrowed, insight in Walter Benjamin’s “The Task of the Translator.” (Venuti 2000a: 22). The task of the translator, conceived precisely as a mediator between (or among) cultures, concentrates most immediately on the work of making a text in one language available in another. Such work inevitably highlights the intricacies of natural languages and the polysemy of linguistic signs.14 But, in some measure, this task concerns nothing less than the totality of the two cultures, not just their manifestly different languages. The translator, in making a work available in another language, always to some degree makes – or ought to make – another world available to the speakers of that language.15 There is no translation of a work without, doubt about this vocation”; he even wondered if the novelty of his painting came from an impairment of vision (9). 13. To take but one example of this, an example at once broadly representative of a distinctive theoretical sensibility (a sensibility identifiable in terms of questions concerning difference) and undeniably singular, Venuti concludes “Translation, Community, Utopia” by investigating “The utopian dimension in translation” (Venuti 2000b:484–88). Hope is, in effect, given the last word. “Implicit in any translation is,” he notes early in this concluding section, “the hope for a consensus, a communication and recognition of the foreign text through a domestic inscription” (485). And in his final sentence he returns to his nuanced conception of interlingual translation as a “utopian projection”: such a projection “expresses the hope that linguistic and cultural differences will not result in the exclusion of foreign constituencies from the domestic scene” (488). In the main, I am deeply sympathetic to this conception of the task of the translator. There is, however, one respect in which I am disposed to be critical of this conception: Venuti’s apparent endorsement of the possibility of translation being more than utopian (the possibility of resolving ideological differences). He claims, “a translation projects a utopian community that is not yet realized” (485). In any enduring and inclusive sense, however, such a community will never be realized. Translation is utopian precisely because it is, at once, impossible and necessary. The alternatives are either to give up trying to do the impossible or (following the advice of Samuel Beckett) to fail better the next time. I suspect that here either I have misread Venuti or he might simply agree with me (taking my criticism as a friendly amendment). 14. In this context linguistic signs should be taken in a broad sense – i.e., it should not be taken to refer simply to words, but also to syntactical devices and the full range of linguistic operations used within a language to generate meaning. 15. This is one of the reasons why the premium on accessibility and intelligibility can be problematic: to the extent that the translated work allows us to inhabit a familiar world it arguably has concealed a host of differences between distinct cultural spheres that make deep and critical differences. This point has been made by any number of translation theorists. For our purposes,

 Vincent Colapietro

at the same time, the translation of the world in which the work arose and made a place for itself. But the translation of one world is also the achievement of those who are, in effect, representatives of another world – hence, translation is inescapably a process in which the foreign is domesticated, the strange rendered familiar and, in the process, largely effaced. The dominant terms of intelligibility are those of the translating (not the translated) language. Even so, translation at its best is also a process in which an irreducible “remainder” of foreignness is – or legible traces of otherness are – made available (cf. Venuti 2000a). Corrigible practices, modifiable habits, and inescapable failures Accordingly, it is crucial to articulate a set of concepts in terms of which this process, in all its complexity, tensions, and ambivalences, can itself be rendered intelligible, without ceasing to be strange, perplexing, perhaps even unfathomable. Toward this end, I want to call attention to a largely neglected resource for translation theorists – Peircean semiotics. And here is the occasion to draw an important distinction between semiology and semiotic. In the semiological tradition tracing its origin back to the work of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913), including the notes taken by his students in three courses devoted near the end of his life to general linguistics (1906–1907, 1908–1909, and 1910–1911), the concept of a code occupies a central place. This is so even if this concept is not especially prominent in Saussure’s inaugural reflections but only in subsequent developments of this theoretical tradition.16 A deep irony here is that – at least if Paul J. Thibault re-reading of Saussure’s contribution is correct – the concept of code distorts our understanding of let José Ortega y Gasset stand as a representative voice: “Men of other times had need of the ancients in a pragmatic sense. They needed to learn many things from the ancients in order to apply those things to daily life. So it was understandable for translation to try to modernize the ancient text, to accommodate it to the present. But it is advisable for us to do otherwise. We need the ancients precisely to the degree they are dissimilar to us, and translation should emphasize their exotic, distant character, making it intelligible as such” (Venuti 2000: 62). Aye, there’s the rub – for the concern with intelligibility tends to work against that of defamiliarization, distantiation. Hans-Georg Gadamer once wrote: “The best definition of hermeneutics: to let what is alienated [or unavailable] by the character of being distantiated by cultural [including linguistic] or historical distances speak again. This is hermeneutics: to let what seems to be far and alienated speak again.” 16. In his invaluable Handbook to Semiotics (1990), however, Winfried Nöth is certainly not altogether wrong in claiming: “Saussure’s primary interest was in language [la langue rather than speech, i.e., la parole] as a system or a code, and a social phenomenon” (63). Indeed, Nöth’s point is well taken.



Chapter 6.  The poetics of experience 

Saussure’s theoretical aspirations and actual achievements. 17 However that may be, the semiological tradition as advanced by Roland Barthes and numerous others is one in which this notion plays a critical role in theoretical accounts of various processes and practices, including those constitutive of translation. In its most simplistic form, translation is imagined to be a process of decoding and recoding. In the semiotic tradition tracing its origin back to the writings of the American philosopher C. S. Peirce (1839–1914), the concept of code is all but absent. The widely influential semiotic writings of Umberto Eco are, however, likely to hide this fact. Eco translates Peirce into the fading shadow of a structuralist, i.e., into Eco’s own image. While Peirce appears to have been decisive in Eco’s own movement beyond structuralism, the leading ideas of the structuralist framework ironically inform his appropriation of Peirce. This is nowhere truer than in his widely read and immensely influential A Theory of Semiotics (1976). The substantive and methodological point is, however, far more important than any historical or exegetical consideration. To state this point quite bluntly, then, codes are, from a pragmatist (and thus from a Peircean) perspective, always derivative. Indeed, a code is the result of a codification of the immanent, evolving norms integral to (or constitutive of) our practices.18 The habits and, more narrowly, the skills, competencies, and expertise identifiable in reference to such practices as linguistic communication, literary authorship, and interlingual translation are the substance of these practices. Whereas codes are formalizations of some of the more definitively abstractable structures inherent in these practices, the life of these practices is, above all, rooted in the integration of habits enabling somatic, social, and indeed semiotic agents to go on19 in everyday circumstance, 17. In Re-Reading Saussure, Paul J. Thibault (1997) observes: “Typically, Saussure’s model has been assimilated to the code model of communication. In my reading, Saussure’s conception does not correspond to this model.” In this context, he offers a helpful definition of code: “ ... the shared rules of interpretation which enable a Sender (S) and Receiver (R) successfully to encode and decode messages transmitted from S to R.” In his re-reading of Saussure (one aimed, as the title of his book signals, in no small measure at Roy Harris’s Reading Saussure), “the language system is not a code in this sense; it is a meaning-making resource. … Meanings … are not ‘transmitted’ and, hence, ‘communicated’ by S to R; rather they are jointly made or constructed by the ways in which interactants deploy the available social-semiological resources on a given social occasion of discourse” (130). 18. Joseph Esposito notes: “[A]s Peirce began to see pragmatism, not as a method whereby ideas became clarified in the practice of inquiry, but as a method whereby inquirers become subject to the controlling influence of ‘living’ Ideas, it became evident that pragmatism will have to have a foundation nearly as deep as metaphysics” (1979: 60). In this sense, pragmatism involves “living norms replacing dead forms” (59). 19. This expression is deliberately used to echo the famous passages in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations (e.g., I, 149, 151, 153, & 179). I take this ability to be akin to what Vico identifies as ingenuity.

 Vincent Colapietro

especially to go on in innovative or novel ways.20 And for Peirce the life inherent in these practices is the feature to which we must do justice.21 A symbol “may have,” Peirce insists, “a rudimentary life, so that it can have a history, and gradually undergo a great change of meaning, while preserving a certain self-identity” (MS 290 [1905]; quoted in Shapiro 1991). The obvious but critical point to recall here is that our practices are not completely formalizable or codifiable affairs – far from it.22 The pragmatic concept of habit and a large array of closely allied concepts such as skill, competency, fluency, and expertise are, especially from a distinctively Peircean (or pragmaticist) perspective, far more basic and important than the structuralist concepts of structure, form, code, and system. The evolved and evolving habits at the heart of any distinctively human practice have assumed their more or less determinate forms in complex interactions involving natural settings and social dramas. These habits are, for the social actors whose very agency is so dependent on these attunements and orientations, resources for improvisation (cf. Thibault 1997). 23 We are by virtue of habituation implicated agents (agents implicated in myriad practices, standing in complex relationship to one another); and, in turn, we are by virtue of this status, at once, unwitting dupes and ingenious actors – much goes on, as it were, behind our backs, but we prove able, time and again, to seize opportunities for attaining or, at least, approximating our purposes, indeed for experiencing nothing less than jouissance. To repeat, these habits enable us to go on in novel or innovative ways. Moreover, the generation of meaning is always, in some measure, an exercise of ingenuity, rarely a mechanical replication of antecedently instituted (or fixed) patterns. Such, in all too broad and quick strokes, is the picture of our practices (including those identifiable as linguistic communication, literary authorship, and 20. What Peirce understands by habit in this connection is very close to what Pierre Bourdieu understands by habitus. See Bourdieu’s Outline of a Theory of Practice (1977). 21. Here it is illuminating to recall Saussure’s own dream of a science of signs, a discipline at the time of his lectures not yet instituted. In the Course in General Linguistics (1966), he writes: “A science that studies the life of signs within society is conceivable; […] I shall call it semiology (from Greek semeion ‘sign’). Semiology would show what constitutes signs, what laws govern them. Since the science does not yet exist, no one can say what it would be; but it has a right to existence, a place staked out in advance” (Saussure 1966: 16). 22. “The work of the philosopher consists,” as Wittgenstein suggests, “in assembling reminders for a particular purpose” (Philosophical Investigations I, 127). He also insists: Philosophy simply puts everything before us, and neither explains nor deduces anything.” That is, it “only states what everyone admits” (Philosophical Investigations, I, 126, 599). 23. As I understand these habits, they are akin to what Heidegger identifies as the unreflective pre-understanding by which we inhabit the world. See also Gadamer.



Chapter 6.  The poetics of experience 

interlingual translation) offered by pragmatism.24 Turning our attention now specifically to the practices of translation, let me note a curious lacuna in translation theory. The foremost theorists in this newly emergent and still dramatically growing field are, even at this time, not expected to possess a rudimentary knowledge of Peircean semiotics. This means that Peirce’s general theory of signs has a largely unexplored relevance to the exciting work of these theorists. The work of Dinda Gorlée stands out for its creative application of Peircean theory to questions of translation. Despite her systematic employment of Peircean theory, the efforts of Gorlée and, indeed, others endeavoring to use Peirce’s ideas for this purpose have not received, from translation theorists, very much critical attention. From such a pragmatist perspective, one important question is: How do the habits of one linguistic community, at a given historical moment, map onto the habits of another linguistic community? This should not be understood as simply a paraphrase, in a pragmatic idiom, of the traditional question of equivalence. Here it is not amiss to stress that mapmaking is an especially apt metaphor for whatever is taken, also what is attainable, through translation. The most obvious reason why this is so is that both entail trade-offs, the most striking one in cartography being that between conformality and equivalence (Monmonnier 1992: 14). Some projections distort both angles and areas; in addition, no projection can be both conformal and equivalent. So, like the task of the translator, that of the cartographer involves sets of choices, omissions, uncertainties and intentions – and, in the end, the assumption of the responsibility, therefore the liabilities, of authorship. Questions of cartography, ones concerning the perspective from which and the purposes for which the mappings are undertaken, also questions concerning the distortions introduced by relying on this rather than other modes of projection, are not only always salient but also frequently pressing. Practices are, at least implicitly, arguments among their practitioners (especially among their most expert practitioners) of the defining purposes and most effective procedures of what are, after all, inherently problematic undertakings.25 For a book significantly entitled Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession, Janet Malcolm (1982) uses as one of her epigrams a text from Freud’s “Analysis Terminable & Interminable” (1937): “It almost looks as if analysis were the third of those ‘impossible’ professions to which one can be sure beforehand of achieving unsatisfying 24. According to Wittgenstein (1970: 567), “How could human behaviour be described? Surely only by sketching the actions of a variety of humans, as they are all mixed up together. What determines our judgment, our concepts and reactions, is not what one man is doing now, but the whole hurly-burly of human action, the background against which we see any action.” 25. Part of the value of Lawrence Venuti’s The Translation Studies Reader (2000) is that he presents the practices of translation and the theorizing of these practices (itself a practice of no negligible importance) in just this light.

 Vincent Colapietro

results. The other two, which have been known much longer, are education and government.” I am disposed to suggest that the professions meriting the title of impossible are not limited to these three: this designation is, possibly, coextensive with the entire array of human practices, at least ones of a sufficiently complex and enduring character. Samuel Beckett’s advice to the writer is, accordingly, worthy of being recalled by the participant in any one of our distinctively human practices – “Fail better.” Or to recall this in full:

Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better. (Worstword Ho, 1983)

Peirce’s theory of signs, as applied to the practice of translation, returns us to Walter Benjamin’s reflections in his famous essay on “The Task of the Translator.” But it returns us to this essay with new eyes. The task of the translator inextricably implicates this practitioner in the historicity of language – moreover, it demands of this individual not only improvising countless linguistic maneuvers but also securing the opportunities for such improvisations on the part of the translator’s readers. Finally, the task of the translator demands fostering the growth of language, including the relationship among various, or simply between two, languages. In “The Task of the Translator,” Benjamin insists: In all language and linguistic creations there remains in addition to what can be conveyed something that cannot be communicated; depending on the context in which it appears, it is something that symbolizes or something symbolized. It is the former only in the finite products of language, the latter in the evolving of the languages themselves. And that which seeks to represent, to produce itself in the evolving of languages, is that very nucleus of pure language. Though concealed and fragmentary, it is an active force in life as the symbolized thing itself, whereas it inhabits linguistic creations only in symbolized form. (Harry Zorn, trans., Venuti 2000a: 21–22)

There is an active force driving toward expression, a force by which the implicit, inchoate community of all actual, human languages (in brief, “pure language”) becomes, in some measure, realized. It is just such considerations that move Benjamin to quote Rudolf Pannwitz approvingly: Our translations, even the best ones, proceed from a wrong premise. They want to turn Hindi, Greek, English into German instead of turning German into Hindi, Greek, English. Our translators have a far greater reverence for the usage of their



Chapter 6.  The poetics of experience 

own language than for the spirit of the foreign works.… The basic error of the translator is [then] that he preserves the state in which his own language happens to be instead of allowing his language to be powerfully affected by the foreign tongue. (Venuti 2000a: 22)

In Peircean register, the task of the translator is to assist the growth of symbols (see, e.g., Short 1988), more fully, to make available in one language writings from another and, in doing so, to render the translating language vulnerable to forces other than itself. Therein the translating language becomes a transformed affair. The encounter with the other always has the power to disrupt settled habits, to undermine established frameworks, to call into question the most basic categories by which human agents make sense out of their lives (put alternatively, the very conditions of intelligibility as these are found in this or that culture). For this very reason, such encounters are as often as not avoided or evaded. Even so, an encounter or exchange with all its disruptive power, its transformational energy, is what, in its most rudimentary and arguably also most important sense, experience means. If Peirce returns us to Benjamin and, in turn, if Benjamin returns us to Pannwitz with new eyes, these reflections make experience itself available to us from a novel perspective. Toward a poetics of experience As participants of intricately interwoven practices that are at once mutually supportive and mutually thwarting, we encounter the world and, in these encounters, the world discloses its guises and dimensions, textures and trajectories, its regularities and idiosyncrasies. This returns us, finally, to the poetics of experience. The accent on experience is, in effect, sounded by Rilke when he writes: For verses are not, as people imagine, simply feelings (those one has early enough), – they are experiences. For the sake of a single verse, one must see many cities, men and things, one must know the animals, one must feel how the birds fly and know the gesture with which the little flowers open in the morning. One must be able to think back to roads in unknown regions, to unexpected meetings and to partings one had long seen coming; to days of childhood that are still unexplained, to parents whom one had to hurt when they brought one some joy and one did not grasp it (it was a joy for someone else); to childhood illnesses that so strangely begin with such a number of profound and grave transformations, to days in rooms withdrawn and quiet and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel that rushed along on high and flew with all the stars – and it is not yet enough if one may think of all this. One must have memories of many nights of love, none of which was like the others, of the screams of women in labor,

 Vincent Colapietro

and of light, white, sleeping women in childbed, closing again. But one must also have been beside the dying, must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open window and the fitful noises. And still it is not yet enough to have memories. One must be able to forget them when they are many and one must have the great patience to wait until they come again. For it is not yet the memories themselves. Not till they have turned to blood within us, to glance and gesture, nameless and no longer to be distinguished from ourselves – not till then can it happen that in a most rare hour the first word of a verse arises in their midst and goes forth from them. (Notebooks 1964: 26–27)

The transmutation, transfiguration, or translation of experience into art or something akin to art is a process both generated by, and consummated in, experience. The poetics of experience – the drive to make something out of experience, something memorable or arresting or luminous or, in some other respect, noteworthy – this drive being a function of the energies of experience itself – points toward a process haunted by a sense of inadequacy, in the words of William James, a sense of “ever not yet” and “ever not quite”. The richness of experience exceeds even our most adequate articulations: the depth of our encounters – more exactly, the depth of both what is disclosed in these encounters and the defining features of the distinctive modes of human disclosure – remains unfathomed even in our most penetrating expressions. The translation of experience into art or something akin to art provides us with, arguably, a model for understanding the practice of translation in the more straightforward, less metaphorical sense of interlingual translation. No code underlies experience, no single purpose governs the circuitous course of our experiential involvements, and no truly exemplary articulation is ever final or definitive, but also (especially at the moment of its initiation or original reception) any exemplary expression, is above all else, a largely unrecognized resource for future improvisations. At first, the romance of articulation is, at least in those transcendent experiences of what seem to be nothing short of unsurpassable expression, one of plenitude. In time, a more workaday orientation, more critical attitude, takes hold and guides our encounters with, and probings of, the art work, including the work of translation. Conclusion In a letter to Lady Victoria Welby, Peirce asserted, the “essential function of a sign is to render inefficient relations efficient – not to set them [directly] into action, but to establish a habit or general rule whereby they will act on occasion” (Peirce 1958: 390; also in Peirce 1977: 31). The translator is a sign in just this sense.



Chapter 6.  The poetics of experience 

Might we not, then, imagine (or re-imagine) the task of the translator to be that of instituting new habits, on the basis of established ones (often quite recalcitrant ones), for the sake of providing resources of improvisations – albeit resources renewing or establishing links with linguistic communities at present disparate from one another? Is not the irrepressible hope of human consensus (Venuti 2000b:485) – of a truly humane, hence uncoerced or, in other ways, unmanufactured result – the implicit ethos animating our translational endeavors? Is not the task of transfiguring experience into art a resource for understanding the task of translating works in one language into those in another? With the realization that no codes underlie our practices, does not the dream of finding even just the nearest equivalents in the translating (or target) code to the units or patterns in the translated (or source) code disappear as quickly as we open our eyes? Does not the task of translating, by virtue of the theoretically articulated self-understanding of such practitioners as Spivak, Bhabha, Gutt, and Venuti as well as Benjamin, Borges, Ortega, and Steiner, translate itself into the task of renegotiating the terms in which we are able most effectively to render intelligible self and other, agent and world, the present moment and the intersecting histories constituting this contested locus? As Salman Rushdie writes in “Imaginary Homelands” of himself and other British Indian writers, “The word ‘translation’ comes, etymologically, from the Latin for ‘bearing across.’ Having been borne across, we are translated men [and women]. It is normally supposed that something simply gets lost in translation. I cling, obstinately, to the notion that something can also be gained” (1991: 17; emphasis added).26 But have the worlds from which these individuals have been carried themselves been translated along with these men and women? The ethics and politics of 26. Let me recall, if only in a footnote, the fuller passage in which this claim appears. The matter concerns translation, the translation of the experience of displaced persons into a language other than their own. Many mount “an argument about the appropriateness of this language [in Rushdie’s case, English] to Indian themes. And I hope all of us share the view that we can’t simply use the language in the way the British did; that it needs remaking for our own purposes. Those of us who use English do so in spite of our ambiguity towards it, or perhaps because of that, perhaps because we can find in that linguistic struggle a reflection of other struggles taking place in the real world, struggles between the cultures within ourselves and the influences at work in societies. To conquer English may be to complete the process of making ourselves free” (17; emphasis added). Then Rushdie adds: “But the British Indian writer simply does not have the option of rejecting English, anyway. His children, her children, will grow up speaking it, probably as a first language; and in the forging of a British Indian identity the English language is of central importance. It must, in spite of everything, be embraced. The word ‘translation’ comes, etymologically, from the Latin for ‘bearing across.’ Having been borne across, we are translated men. It is normally supposed that something simply gets lost in translation. I cling, obstinately, to the notion that something can also be gained” (17).

 Vincent Colapietro

translation make this question integral to the task of the translator. Our experience of our world forces upon us this and allied questions. There is at the heart of this experience the irresolvable tension between experience and expression, between all in our experience that drives toward articulation and the presently intelligible, authorized forms of intelligibility. But what is our experience if not an intimation of forms of intelligibility, at present (perhaps forever), eluding our comprehension? And what is art – including the art of translation – if not a “failure” that makes even better failures possible? In translation, as in any other human practice, the prospect of failing better than we have done thus far is, at least for many of us, hope sufficient unto the day, this day and every foreseeable day after this one. But, as Rushdie notes in “Imaginary Homelands,” those of us who are in our lives translated beings – those of us who have been borne across vast expanses and difficult terrains – (in still other words, virtually all of us, especially insofar as we have any consciousness of who we are, thus how we have come to be and, more pointedly, to be here)27 cling, obstinately, to the notion that, while something is always lost in translation, something vital can be gained. And here the word vital means just that – that which nourishes and sustains human life in its irreducibly myriad forms and functions. The life of signs is as manifest in the practices of translators as it is anywhere else in culture or nature. The translation of texts in one language into those in other languages is, arguably, a continuation of the translation of experience into text, art, work – something other than experience in its immediacy and transience, but also something continuous with experience in just these respects. That is, the practices of translation might be a vivid illustration of the poetics of experience. References Barnstone, Willis. 1993. The Poetics of Translation: History, Theory, Practice. New Haven: Yale University Press. Benjamin, Walter. 1968. Illuminations: Essays & Reflections ed. by Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken Books. Benjamin, Walter. 2000. “The Task of the Translator”, trans. Harry Zohn. Venuti 2000: 15–23. 27. In Man and People, Ortega (1957) notes: “all human acts have an etymology because in all of them, to one degree or another, usages intervene, and the ‘usual’ act, being a human action transformed into a mechanical imposition of the collectivity on the individual, goes on existing by inertia and as it were adrift. … as it continues to lose meaning through its very usualness, through the wear [usura] of all use, it also keeps changing its form until it reaches the absolutely unintelligible aspects that we call residual. Words do not have etymologies because they are words but because they are usages. But this obliges us to recognize and declare that man is constitutively, by his inexorable destiny, as a member of a society – the etymological animal. Accordingly, history would be only a vast etymology…” (Ortega 1957: 203).



Chapter 6.  The poetics of experience  Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1990. The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Caesar, Michael. 1999. Umberto Eco: Philosophy, Semiotics, and the Work of Fiction. Cambridge: Polity Press. Certeau, Michel de. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press. Colapietro, Vincent. 2003. “Translating Signs Otherwise”. Petrilli 2003: 189–215. Colapietro, Vincent. 2004. “Striving to Speak in a Human Voice”. Review of Metaphysics 58.367–398. Culler, Jonathan. 1986. Ferdinand de Saussure. Revised edition. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Daniel, E. Valentine. 1998. “The Limits of Culture”. Dirks 1998: 67–91. Dewey, John. 1987. Art as Experience. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Dirks, Nicholas B., ed. 1998. In Near Ruins: Cultural Theory at the End of the Century. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Eco, Umberto. 1976. A Theory of Semiotics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Eco, Umberto. 1994. The Limits of Interpretation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Esposito, Joseph L. 1979. “The Development of Peirce’s Categories”. Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 15:1.51–60. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1980. Practical Philosophy as a Model of the Human Sciences. Research in Phenomenology 9.74–85. Gorlée, Dinda L. 1994. Semiotics and the Problem of Translation, with Special Reference to the Semiotics of Charles S. Peirce. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Gorlée, Dina L. 2003. “Meaningful Mouthfuls in Semiotranslation”. Petrilli 2003: 235–252. Hampl, Patricia. 1999. I Could Tell You Stories: Sojourns in the Land of Memory. New York: Norton. Hawkes, Terrence. 1977. Structuralism & Semiotics. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. 1977. The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press. Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie & Edward Robinson. New York: Harper & Row. Jakobson, Roman. 1990. Language in Literature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kristeva, Julia. 1991. Strangers to Ourselves, trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. Levin, Jonathan. 1999. The Poetics of Experience: Emerson, Pragmatism, and American Literary Modernism. Durham: Duke University Press. MacIntyre, Alasdair. 1988. Whose Justice? Which Rationality? Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Malcolm, Janet. 1982. Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession. New York: Vintage. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1964. Sense and Non-Sense, trans. Hubert L. Dreyfus & Patricia A. Dreyfus. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Monmonnier, Mark. 1992. How To Lie with Maps. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Nöth, Winfried. 1990. Handbook of Semiotics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Oakeshoot, Michael. 1933. Experience and Its Modes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Oakeshoot, Michael. 1962. Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays. London: Methuen. Ortega, José y Gasset. 2000. “The Misery and the Splendor of Translation”. Venuti 2000: 49–63. Ortega, José y Gasset. 1957. Man and People, trans. Willard R. Trask. New York: Norton. Peirce, Charles S. 1958. Charles S. Peirce: Selected Writings ed. by Philip P. Wiener. New York: Dover.

 Vincent Colapietro Peirce, Charles S. 1977. Semiotic and Significs: The Correspondence between Charles S. Peirce and Lady Victoria Welby ed. by Charles S. Hardwick. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Cited as SS. Peirce, Charles S. 1998. The Essential Peirce. Vol. 2. Peirce Edition Project. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Petrilli, Susan, ed. 2003. Translation Translation. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Piaget, Jean. 1971. Structuralism, trans. Chaninah Maschler. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Rilke, Rainer Maria. 1964. The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, trans. M. D. Herter Norton. New York: Capricorn. Rowe, John Carlos. 1995. “Structure”. Critical Terms for Literary Study ed. by Frank Lentricchia & Thomas McLaughlin. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rushdie, Salman. 1991. Imaginary Homelands. New York: Penguin. Saussure, Ferdinand de. 1966. Course in General Linguistics, trans. Wade Baskin. New York: McGraw-Hill. Shapiro, Michael. 1991. The Sense of Change: Language as History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Short, T. L. 1988. “The Growth of Symbols”. Cruzeiro Semiotico January. 81–87. Silverman, Kaja. 1985. The Subject of Semiotics. New York: Oxford University Press. Smith, John E. 1995. Experience and God. New York: Fordham University Press. Smith, John E. 1989. “Interpreting Across Boundaries”. Understanding the Chinese Mind ed. by Robert E. Allison, 26–47. New York: Oxford University Press. Steiner, George. 1975. After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation. London: Oxford University Press. Steiner, George. 2000. “The Hermeneutic Motion”. Venuti 2000: 186–191. Thibault, Paul J. 1997. Re-Reading Saussure: The Dynamics of Signs in Social Life. London: Routledge. Venuti, Lawrence, ed. 2000a. The Translation Studies Reader. London: Routledge. Venuti, Lawrence. 2000b. “Translation, Community, Utopia”. Venuti 2000a: 468–488. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1968. Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe. New York: Macmillan. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1970. Zettel, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe. Berkeley: University of California Press.

part 3

Translation and the interpretation of texts

chapter 7

Translation and the rediscovery of the multinational Central European Thomas Cooper Since the fall of communism the study of the cultures of Central Europe has been strongly marked by the national paradigm. Cultural artifacts such as works of literature, visual arts and music, as well as forms of dance, have been considered for their role in the construction and perpetuation of distinctive national identities, in part as a means of exploding the myth of a monolithic Eastern Bloc. Relevant as this approach may be to the study of Central Europe, it overlooks ways in which works of art from the region are frequently resistant to the national paradigm. Works of literature, in particular, often incorporate palpable influences from several national traditions, alluding to and participating in a cultural heritage that transcends the borders of language. Translation constitutes one of the primary instruments of this process of influence. The traditional understanding of translation as a bridge between cultures, however, is inadequate in this context, as it reinforces the notion of distinctive national cultures. In the multilingual culture of Central Europe translation figures not simply as a conduit but rather as a form of expression through which a shared multinational culture is sustained.

Following the fall of communism in Central Europe, particularly during and in the wake of the outbreak of armed hostilities in the former Yugoslavia, scholarship in Western Europe and the United States was quick to undertake investigations in a variety of disciplines, including literary studies, political science, and history, but also ethnomusicology and art history, into the causes and forms of the perceived resurgences of nationalist sentiments in this region. A part of the world the study of which had for several decades been shaped by the exigencies of the Cold War became, within the space of only a few years, a new context for discussions of national forces that were considered agents of the collapse of Soviet rule. This shift of interest has manifested itself in the proliferation of scholarly articles and monographs addressing nationalism in the context of post-1989 Central Europe, as well as in the creation of new institutions devoted to the study of this subject (such as

 Thomas Cooper

the Association for the Study of Ethnicity and Nationalism founded in 1990 at the London School of Economics and Political Science, the Nationalism Studies Program at the Central European University in Budapest, successor to the Center for the Study of Nationalism founded in 1993 in Prague, and the Centre for the Study of Nationalism in Europe founded in 1996 at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies at University College London). It is perhaps not an exaggeration to claim with respect to Central Europe that over the course of the past fifteen years a desire to achieve systematic understandings of nationalisms has become one of the stronger motivating forces for the study of the region as well as the prism through which the region itself is frequently perceived. While the immediate relevance of the study of nationalisms in Central Europe is undeniable, in some instances this emphasis may have precluded more nuanced understandings of the cultures of the region. In its insistence on an alleged complicity of culture in the construction and maintenance of political nationalisms, the study of nationalism is at times compelled to overlook the ways in which numerous cultural artifacts in Central Europe, far from affirming national borders, transgress them and subject myths of national identity to continuous questioning. In the realm of literature, these include works by some of the most prominent figures of Central European culture, even authors traditionally (and simplistically) thought of as central to the national movements. One might think of the nineteenth-century Hungarian poet János Arany, whose verse epic Toldi is unquestionably a major work of Hungarian national culture, but whose less often mentioned Bolond Istók (Stephen the Fool) and Elveszett alkotmány (The Lost Constitution) treat both the conventions of the national epic and the notion of historical continuity with flippant irony. Examples abound from contemporary Central European literature as well, written both before and after the fall of communism (the novels of Banat Schwab Herta Müller and Transylvanian Hungarian Ádám Bodor, the poetry of Transylvanian Saxon Wolf von Aichelburg and his Hungarian translator, Transylvanian Hungarian Sándor Kányádi). Yet, as made clear by the volume International Postmodernism: Theory and Practice, published in 1998 as part of the series Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages sponsored by the International Comparative Literature Association, the concept of national culture continues to prevail as a discrete category in the humanities. The chapters on the cultures of Central Europe are divided along national lines and there is little mention within the various chapters either of the importance of translation or the possible influence of other national cultures of the region. In ignoring works of literature (and music and the fine arts) that adopt a critical distance from national canons, the study of culture as nationalism contributes to the (re)writing of the cultural history of the region along the lines of national(ist) histories, thereby abetting the nationalist’s denial of the multilingual,



Chapter 7.  The rediscovery of the Central European 

multicultural nature of the region. This has the lamentable consequence of sanctioning the use in the social sciences of designations of national affiliation as selfsufficient and discrete instead of acknowledging these designations as products of constant debate and renegotiation through the media of culture. To cite a single example among many, in an article entitled “Attitudes Towards Roma Minority Rights in Hungary: A Case of Ethnic Doxa, and the Contested Legitimization of Roma Inferiority,” Robert E. Koulish accepts without question or critical comment the division of citizens of Hungary into three categories: self-identified Roma, nonRoma, and non-self-identified Roma. Non-Roma and non-self-identified Roma were categorized as such by anonymous interviewers on the basis of “color, language, lifestyle, and family name” (2003: 332). Neither Koulish nor the source on which his article draws offers any explanation of the vague categories of color or lifestyle, nor is there any explanation of the relevance of family name (or the gender bias underlying the equation of patrilineally inherited name and ethnic identity). This a-critical acceptance of culturally determined categories as self-explanatory and discrete constitutes little more than a tautological reenactment and affirmation of the racist thinking on which these designations (Roma, non-Roma) are based. Yet parallel to these developments, there has been an effort among scholars in the humanities to draw attention to the ways in which works of art from the region, including music, the visual arts, and literature, both partake of and affirm what can be thought of as the shared cultural legacy of the different linguistic – i.e. national – groups in the region. In the late 1990s scholars from Poland, the Czech and Slovak Republics, Romania, Hungary, Serbia, and Bulgaria began planning a comparative literary history of the region that would compensate for the narratives of internally homogeneous national cultures offered by national literary histories by examining analogies and junctures where these traditions intersect and overlap. These efforts came to fruition in 2004, 2006 and 2008 with the publication of the first three of four volumes of the History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe (part of the same series in which International Postmodernism was published). Alongside this, numerous scholars from Central Europe have recently challenged the chauvinism of national collective identity through comparative research on cross-cultural influence. Rather than trace (and thereby reify) alleged borders of national cultures in the literatures of the region, their work discovers (and recovers) palimpsests and overlappings (Babeţi & Ungureanu, 1997; Culic, Horváth, Magyari & Lazăr, 1998; Ungureanu, 2004). Yet even as early as 1990 scholars such as Michael Heim observed that the notion of a Central European culture was gaining or rather regaining currency (p.405). This observation was made in the preface to the publication in the 1990 edition of the journal Cross Currents of the English translations of Czech author Bohumil Hrabal’s short story Want to see Golden Prague and Hungarian Péter

 Thomas Cooper

Esterházy’s Want to see Golden Budapest, the latter of which was written for a collection entitled Hommage à Hrabal, published on the occasion of the Czech writer’s 75th birthday. The Hungarian Péter Esterházy’s story, soon followed by his novel the Book of Hrabal, constitutes a paradigmatic example of the ways in which the national literatures of this region intermingle. The presence of Hrabal’s influence is palpable not merely in the direct allusions to his works (nor even in the incarnations of Hrabal himself in the story and the novel), but also in the structural similarities of the narratives and the mixture of nostalgia and anxiety that pervade both – what Esterházy has referred to as the “betweenness” that characterizes central European literatures (1990: 273). One finds in works such as this, and in the nuanced study of the literatures of the region in general, approaches to questions of cultural identity that may prove more flexible than those offered by some of the methodologies of the social sciences, specifically because they blur rather than accept distinctions of national or cultural affiliation. In this context there is perhaps a growing need for an exploration of the ways in which translators have contributed to this (re)creation of a transnational Central European literary ethos (or mythos). Even in their earliest incarnations the literatures of the region were rich with translations and adaptations from the literatures of Western Europe. Der Amerikaner, one of the early narratives of György Bessenyei (misleadingly referred to in histories of Hungarian literature as a figure of the Hungarian Enlightenment), came into Hungarian literature through Ferenc Kazinczy’s translation and has since been forgotten in German. The same is true of Albrecht Christoph Kayser’s novel of 1778, Adolfs gesammelte Briefe, also translated into Hungarian by Kazinczy. The translator as mediator of cultures is no less prominent today. Hrabal appears in the works of Hungarian Péter Esterházy in part because many of his writings were translated into Hungarian very soon after they appeared in Czech. The novella Dancing Lessons for Older and Advanced Pupils, published in 1964 in Czech, appeared in 1969 in Hungarian, and Tender Barbarians, a samizdat publication from 1973 published in Cologne in 1981, was published in Hungarian translation in Budapest by the Europa Publisher in 1985, five years before the fall of communism in Hungary. Of particular interest are works in translation from what can be thought of as the borderlands between different cultures of the region. These include Transylvania, where live a large Hungarian speaking minority and a dwindling German and Saxon speaking minority, as well as Banat, which includes parts of Romania and Serbia and in which Hungarian, German, Romanian and Serbian speakers can be found. These territories have been subject, over the course of the twentieth century, to numerous border changes. Part of the multi-national Austro-Hungarian Monarchy before the First World War, Transylvania and much of the neighboring territory of Banat became part of Romania in accordance with the Treaty of



Chapter 7.  The rediscovery of the Central European 

Trianon. Following the so-called Second Vienna Award of 1940, the northern part of Transylvania became part of Hungary again until the end of the Second World War. Since the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1947 it has been part of Romania. Both Banat and Transylvania have been home to a variety of linguistic groups. These included, in addition to the numerically most significant Romanian and Hungarian communities, Serbs, Saxons, Schwabs, Armenians, and German-, Romanian-, Hungarian-and/or Yiddish-speaking Jews. With the upheavals of the Second World War and the assimilationist policies of the interwar and communist governments, however, Transylvania and Banat have lost much of their multilingual, multinational character. The Yiddish and Armenian communities, for example, have vanished, and even the number of German-speaking Saxons and Schwabs has declined dramatically, particularly since the fall of communism. Whereas the German-speaking population of western Romania numbered 530,000 in 1941 and 330,000 in 1948, by 2002 this number had dropped to under 50,000 (Kocsis 2007:  182). Up until the mid 1990s the German speaking communities of Transylvania and Banat retained a strong cultural presence, with newspapers, literary journals, and other cultural institutions in German. Today this culture is still palpable, for instance in the continued use of German in church services in traditionally German-speaking villages and cities, but with the departure of many of the Germans of Romania for Germany the use of German in print media has all but disappeared. Hungarian speakers, however, still number some 1,500,000, in part due to a large contiguous block of Hungarianspeaking communities in the south-eastern part of Transylvania, and the presence of Hungarian as a cultural influence is still strong. Hungarian remains a language of instruction in schools in communities in which the majority is Hungarianspeaking and there are numerous publications in Hungarian, including newspapers such as A hét (The Week) and literary journals such as Korunk (Our Age). In addition there is a two-hour weekly broadcast in Hungarian on national television. Hungarian speakers all learn Romanian in school and bilingualism is pervasive (though it is not common for Romanian speakers to learn Hungarian). An examination of the ways in which national identity is viewed from these regions is particularly important specifically because their ownership (their cultural affiliation) is contested. Because they reside on the disputed margins of national culture, works of literature from Transylvania and Banat frequently subvert national paradigms, in part by incorporating influences from the literatures of other national groups. Often they can be interpreted as comments on the (in)validity or (in)applicability of the concept of nationhood. As hybridized versions of national narratives, they encourage the deconstruction of the concept of nation and promote instead an approach to cultural identity that explores interconnections between cultural traditions that coexist in a given region. In this context, translation

 Thomas Cooper

figures not as a vehicle by which to bridge distinct cultures, but rather as a mode of expression of a common culture shared by different linguistic groups. Transylvanian Hungarian poet Sándor Kányádi is among the translators prominent in this expression of a shared cultural heritage. Kányádi has translated poems by Goethe, Rilke, Apollinaire, and numerous others, but more significant in this context are his translations of Saxon, German, Romanian, and Yiddish poetry of Transylvania into Hungarian. He has translated the works of prominent Transylvanian Romanian poets such as Octavian Goga and Mihai Beniuc (who themselves translated poetry from Hungarian to Romanian, including the poems of the nineteenth-century Hungarian poet and national figure Sándor Petőfi). Kányádi has also translated the poetry of Transylvanian Saxons such as Wolf von Aichelburg and Joachim Wittstock, whose poems have also been translated into Romanian by Dan Dănilă (now living in Germany). Worth mention is Kányádi’s translation of the poem Dorfturm by Aichelburg, which Kányádi renders as Falusi torony Erdélyben, or “Transylvanian village tower.” The abandoned tower of a village church, which has an iconic status in Transylvania as a symbol of the Saxon cultural presence, becomes a metonym for the communities that have, over the past two decades, almost completely vanished as the German/Saxon speaking inhabitants have left for Germany. The poem acquires poignancy in Hungarian, as many Transylvanian Hungarian speakers correctly or incorrectly perceive that the landmarks of their culture are slowly becoming grave-markers of their communities. It is worth noting that Kányádi adds the word Transylvania to the title, thereby drawing attention to a geographical context that is not bound to a specific national group or language. Here the act of translation transplants a narrative of loss, and the symbols through which that poetic narrative is anchored to a territory, into the language of a culture that perceives itself as in an analogous position, thereby inviting the culture of the target language to populate the narrative with its own symbols, something Kányádi himself does in another poem, Armenian Tombstones, a poem that reminds the reader of yet another vanished linguistic minority of Transylvania the presence of which is marked only by the churches and tombstones it left behind. If Kányádi’s activities as a translator can be thought of as an appeal to the shared cultural legacy of Transylvania, or in the larger context Central Europe in general, his work as a poet is no less deserving of attention. In the poem All Souls’ Day in Vienna (1976), which has been translated into several languages including English (by Paul Sohar), the reader is confronted with a mixture of languages that recalls the multilingual nature of this region. Kányádi cites a line from a Saxon folk poem that he himself translated into Hungarian, but in this poem he cites it in



Chapter 7.  The rediscovery of the Central European 

German and alludes to the next line in Hungarian. Sohar’s translation attempts to preserve this feature of the original Hungarian:

They will braid you too some day in a wreath with pomp replete but the world will feel as cold and strange as this Vienna street wie die Glocken ihren Schall verloren forget your joy you will so soon.

The last two lines of this excerpt (the line in German could be translated as “as the bells their clang lost”) are taken from a sixteenth-century Saxon song Wie kam der Tod. I offer the following excerpt in Transylvanian Saxon, German translation by Hermann Roth, and my English translation:

Wae kâum dier Duit? Hie brâch mech nider, hîe zebrâch mir alle mene Glider; … Wän dai Klôken îren Schaul verluoren, esu vergôß ech men Fraud mäd allem Flaiß.



Wie kam der Tod? Er brach mich nieder, er zerbrach mir alle meine Glieder; … Wie die Glocken ihren Schall verloren, so vergaß ich meine Freud mit allem Fleiß.



How did death come? He laid me low, And shattered all my limbs; … As the bells their clang lost, So hastily I forgot my joy.

Kányádi also cites lines from the poem Logos, by twentieth-century Romanian poet Ioan Alexandru, leaving the first two lines of the twelve-line poem in Romanian but translating the entire poem into Hungarian. I cite here the original Romanian, Kányádi’s translation into Hungarian (the first two lines of which are the first two lines of the Romanian original) and Sohar’s translation:

Tu eşti văpaie fără grai de dincolo de matca mumii Ceea ce îngerii stârnesc când se lovesc de marginile lumii.

 Thomas Cooper



O, dă-mi putere să rămân De-a pururi în această zare Pe unde negre trec pierind Zădărnicii pustietoare.



Nu-i veac, nu-i ochi să poată şti Cât de adânc – şi de departe Un fluture de foc m-a dus În cuibul meu de după moarte.



Tu eşti văpaie fără grai de dincolo de matca mumii te vagy a láng a szótalan az áldott anyaméhen túli világvégét érintő angyalok szárnyaitól szoktál kigyúlni



ó itt maradnom adj erőt örökre itt legyek megáldott hol sötéten enyésznek el gyilkos hiábavalóságok



nem tudhatja század se szem oly mélyre nem lát olyan távol hová fészkemre menekít egy tűzpillangó a halálból



Tu eşti văpaie fără grai de dincolo de matca mumii, past the blessed mother’s womb you’re the wordless flame who whips a blaze of itself with the wings of the angels of apocalypse



Let me have the strength to stay here and feel my endless blessing’s fizz where the night is painted black by murderous futilities



what a hundred eyes are blind to for none around me has a tip that to my nest a firefly rescues me from death’s tight grip.



Chapter 7.  The rediscovery of the Central European 

This incorporation into the Hungarian poem of lines from poems written in the other languages of the region reminds the reader that individuals in Central Europe, and particularly in these border lands, frequently contribute to the cultural life of more than one, and often more than two languages. As interesting as these citations are the passages in the poem in French. Again Sohar’s translation preserves this:

my friend dr rudi schuller will happily translate into hungarian german or romanian for those who don’t speak french the part about … … les grands voyageurs who claimed that the inhabitants of … les plus lointaines civilisations who were totally indifferent to the tom-toms of neighboring tribes would perk up their ears … on hearing mozart’s music.

There is an irony to this reference to “les plus lointaines civilisations.” Since the late eighteenth century Romanian and Hungarian literatures have been marked by an anxiety that they are either peripheral or lagging behind the so-called West. In this case the “betweenness” to which Esterházy refers must be understood as a temporal as well as a special metaphor. This (mis)perception constitutes a significant similarity between these cultures, as it has influenced the creation of cultural artifacts that can be thought of as analogous responses. When Kányádi refers in the language of the Enlightenment to “les plus lointaines civilisations,” he is evoking the shared anxiety that Hungary and Romania themselves belong to this category, an evocation that is strengthened by the description in the next stanza of a yard filled with lice-ridden chickens, scab-covered piglets, and “filthy little brats/conceived in boozy haze.” Thus the poem again appeals, through a mixture of language rendered in the English translation, to a common past and common predicaments of the peoples of Central Europe. The reframing of the literatures of the region as transnational rather than national is furthered by comparative analyses of works across languages that reveal commonalities in theme and structure. These commonalities relocate these works outside the confines of national literatures within a context in which they assume meaning beyond their significance as artifacts of a cultural minority. Correspondences between the narratives of Herta Müller, a member of the community of German speaking Schwabs of Banat, and those of Ádám Bodor, a Transylvanian Hungarian from Cluj, remind us that the literatures of Central Europe must be conceptualized in regional as well as national terms. Müller’s Niederungen, a collection of stories translated by Sieglinde Lug Lincoln and published in English

 Thomas Cooper

under the title Nadirs, is pervaded by the same nightmarish sense of oppression and helplessness that permeates Sinistra körzet, a collection of interrelated narratives by Ádám Bodor excerpts of which have been translated into English by Paul Olchvary as Sinistra District. Experiments in genre that rupture and fragment linear narrative, these works constitute challenges to the teleological narratives of progress imposed by Ceausescu’s communist regime. As Monica Spiridon observes, “in their struggle against Totalitarianism, [these writers] used a variety of devices, such as the refusal of official conventions, the cultivation of formal pluralism, fragmentation, and parody … showing consensus – the pervasive utopia of any dictatorship – to be an impossibility. The communist rulers correctly saw that this type of literature could not legitimize any official metanarrative” (2004: 69). Resisting the centripetal impulse that couples literature with linguistic group, these works retrieve an inclusive vision of the cultural identity of the region, appealing to the shared heritage of the linguistic groups inhabiting it. They occupy a place outside national canons within a multi-lingual canon of literature of resistance. It is appropriate to conclude this discussion of the ways in which translation has served to (re)create a translational literary and cultural ethos in Central Europe by mentioning an example of translation from the nineteenth century that went unmentioned as such at the time. In 1834 Hungarian playwright József Katona’s play Bánk Bán (translated into English by Bernard Adams and Kalman Ruttkay as The Viceroy) was performed for the first time. Based on medieval manuscripts, the play tells the story of a Hungarian viceroy who slays the scheming Queen of Hungary, herself a German. In Hungary at the time it was read as an allegory, a sort of call to arms to fight against the Habsburg court in Vienna, and it continues to this day to be read and performed as a work of national liberation. However, there is an amusing and little-known – even in Hungary – detail to this story. József Katona was not the first author in Habsburg lands to write a play based on this episode of medieval Hungarian history. Austrian poet and playwright Franz Grillparzer’s play Ein treuer Diener seines Herrn, first performed in 1828 – six years before Katona’s play – tells the same story, if with some differences in emphasis. As a close reading of both plays and the manuscripts on which they are based reveals, Katona was not only familiar with Grillparzer’s work, he even translated passages of his play directly from it. The irony is that a play which now occupies a place in the Hungarian canon as an early call for Hungary’s liberation from foreign rule in fact contains passages that themselves are plagiarized, if in translation, from the work of the author who has acquired the status of one of the greatest Austrian playwrights. The concept of discrete, self-sufficient national culture can no more be applied to the literatures of Central Europe than can the literatures of Central Europe be used to demonstrate the self-sufficiency of national cultures. Far from reifying national identities, much of the literature of this region reveals these



Chapter 7.  The rediscovery of the Central European 

identities as subjects of constant dispute and renegotiation. It is a curious irony that literature, which it has been argued was the most influential medium in the creation of national identity, now functions in part as a forum for its deconstruction. Translation remains not only the primary mode of cultural mediation in this process, but also the tool through which the interrelations between these cultures are made discernible to the international community. References Babeţi, Adriana & Cornel Ungureanu. 1997. Europa Centrală: Nevroze, dileme, utopii. Iaşi: Polirom. Culic, Irina, István Horváth, Nándor Magyari & Marius Lazăr. 1998. Bazinul Carpatic: Români şi maghiari în tranziţie – Imagini mentale şi relaţii interetnice în Transilvania. Cluj: Research Center for Interethnic Relations. Esterházy, Péter. 1990. “On Hungarian Contemporary Literature”. Cross Currents: A Yearbook of Central European Culture 9.273–280. Heim, Michael. 1990. “Bohumil Hrabal and Péter Esterházy”. Cross Currents: A Yearbook of Central European Culture 9.405–406. Kocsis, Károly. 2007. “Changing Ethnic Patterns in Transylvania since 1989”. Journal of Hungarian Studies 21.179–201. Koulish, Robert E. 2003. “Attitudes Towards Roma Minority Rights in Hungary: A Case of Ethnic Doxa, and the Contested Legitimization of Roma Inferiority”. Nationalities Papers 31:3.327–345. Roth, Hermann. Wie kam der Tod, translation of folk song Wae kâum dier Duit?, at http://ingeb. org/Lieder/wiekamde.html (13 February 2010). Spiridon, Monica. 2004. “Models of Literary and Cultural Identity on the Margins of (post) Modernity: The Case of pre-1989 Romania”. History of the Literary Cultures of East Central Europe ed. by Marcel Cornis-Pope & John Neubauer, 1:65–69. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Ungureanu, Cornel. 2004. Europa Centrală. Bucharest: Curtea Veche.

chapter 8

Transcriação / Transcreation The Brazilian concrete poets and translation K. David Jackson The Brazilian concrete poets Haroldo de Campos (1929–2003) and Augusto de Campos (b. 1931) emphasize creative translation of a synchronic selection of world literature as an integral part of neovanguard poetics and criticism. “Transcriação/transcreation” was the term coined by HC to characterize a new approach to creative literary translation, launched in Brazil with their joint translations of many of the founders of contemporary poetics, Pound, Mallarmé, cummings, Mayakovsky, and Joyce. Departing from a linguistic approach to expressive language, HC applied “transcreation” theory to his translations of Chinese poetry, Japanese haiku, and the biblical book of Genesis, among others. The translators’ goal was phonetic, syntactical, and morphological equivalency, aided by the flexibility of the Brazilian Portuguese language. AC’s translations range from French Provençal poetry to cummings, while HC’s last published translation was a Greek/Portuguese bilingual edition of The Iliad. The theory of transcreation was first applied to a constructivist, linguistic current of twentiethcentury vanguard poetics, and more broadly to a synchronic construction of tradition and linguistic analysis in many languages, literatures, and periods. The translations of the Brazilian Concrete poets thus added an essential and influential component to the concept and practice of world literature. Their work as translators made available in Portuguese a more complete and complex reading of poetics grounded in language than was available in many other major languages.

The neo-vanguard poetry movement inaugurated in São Paulo in 1952 by Décio Pignatari (b. 1927), Augusto de Campos (b. 1931), and Haroldo de Campos (1929– 2003) known as Concretism (the poets preferred the term “Poesia Concreta” – “Concrete Poetry” – a name that appeared in 1956 in the third number of their magazine Noigandres) is distinguished from other literary trends in the post-1945 period by its leadership of a world-wide Concrete movement in poetry and its incorporation of other arts, particularly plastic arts and music, selected for their geometrical, rational, and non-figurative contents. The São Paulo concrete poets

 K. David Jackson

were interested in working directly on language and, as part of their internationalism, they attempted ingenious translations of dense, communicative language in other cultures and literatures. Official recognition of the movement came in December 1956 with an exhibition of Concrete works in the Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo, along with paintings and sculptures. Concrete Poetry did share, despite its radical break, many of the qualities of Brazilian post-war poetics in an atmosphere of eclecticism, experimentation, and social consciousness (Picchio 2004: 589–592). Diverging from the poets of the Generation of 1945, the future Concrete poets linked its critical posture and formal rigor to the creative intelligence and social consciousness that Mário de Andrade had postulated as imperatives of historical modernism (Andrade 1925). What their neo-vanguard movement sought to retain from the modernism of the 1920s was to reflect modernization critically, whether in cultural or political terms (Aguilar 2005: 41). Reflecting the modernists’ use of colloquial speech, their interest in national language reflected popular sayings, slogans, and commonplaces; they wished to combine the modernist poets’ freedom and versatility within the formal demands of poems as material and graphic objects. Under the pervasive post-war rubric of development, the Concrete poets drew up a “pilot plan” (1959: see Bibliography 4) for poetry to mirror the pilot plan for the construction of the new capital, Brasília; in the same terms, the rapid technological development of metropolitan São Paulo was central to the content and form of their vanguard inventions (Aguilar 2005: 180). The poets formed alliances with popular musicians (Caetano Veloso, Tom Zé), musicologists (Rogério Duprat), composers of new music (Gilberto Mendes), painters (Alfredo Volpi), and innovative plastic artists (Hélio Oiticica). The technical control that the Concrete poets applied to poetry was placed at the service of a wide movement of national renovation and neo-modernist exuberance, comparable to the internationalism of Oswald de Andrade’s “poetry for export,” and allied itself with the latest trends in experimental arts in Europe (Max Bense, Francis Ponge, Ezra Pound), the United States (John Cage), and Japan (Kitasono Katue). Constituting a new school of poetic translation, the São Paulo Concrete poets Haroldo de Campos and Augusto de Campos applied aesthetic and linguistic principles to an eclectic library of texts. Firstly, works chosen for translation represented a synchronic array of inventive writing drawn from many languages, literatures, and periods, with an approach based on linguistic analysis. To select their target texts, the Concrete poets compiled a non-linear, synchronic selection of creative writing from diverse literatures and periods; the works and authors selected constituted a core library as well as a laboratory for experimental translation, first applied to a constructivist, linguistic current of twentieth-century vanguard poetics, exemplified by Mallarmé, Pound, and Joyce. While the São Paulo poets rediscovered and published creative precursors in Brazilian literature, their



Chapter 8.  The Brazilian concrete poets and translation 

interests were principally international, where they drew from contemporary music, plastic arts, and theory. Schooled in techniques found in early twentieth-century European and American modernists, the Brazilian neovanguardists next created a significant and influential theory and practice of translation, intensively developed as a principal component of their mutual creative project, described in the Teoria da Poesia Concreta.1 Their essays on major literary figures were almost always accompanied by poetic translations, as in HC’s 1962 essay on the poetry of Vladímir Maiakovsky, accompanied by a translation, “Carta a Tatiana Iácovleva.”2 A third component was their firm grounding in linguistics and semiotics, as concerned poetics or poetic language; HC knew both Latin and Greek and read widely in linguistics. With an eye to Saussure, Jakobson, and Peirce, the Concrete poets redrew the relationship between poetics and linguistics, with a special interest in semiotics. Concrete poetry proposed the materiality of the word as object, placed in an isomorphic relationship with time and space: “tension of the word-object in space-time” is the concise definition found in the movement’s “pilot plan” (“Plano Piloto da Poesia Concreta”).3 They found common ground between their own constructed, graphic poetry and literary translation of precursors, centered on esthetic and communicative elements of language. They sought alternatives to analytical-discursive syntax in synthetic forms in the wake of Fenollosa’s celebrated essay on the Chinese character as a medium for poetry (Fenollosa 1936). In Ideograma: Lógica, Poesia, Linguagem, HC expanded his work with the ideogram through Pound and Fenollosa as a guiding principle of reading and of semiotic structures. His atelier was devoted to a radical intervention in form and poetic language with the intention of recognizing and promoting a wide range of poetic functions. Poetic translation became a dynamic principle in HC’s concept of the open work of art.4 HC’s preferred term, “transcriação” (“transcreation”), invoked the key concept of verbivocovisual, found in Book 2, Episode 3 of Finnegans Wake. The Concrete poets applied verbivocovisual logic to the literary text, seeking to replace the logical-discursive text with the analogical, non-linear approach found in Chinese 1. Haroldo de Campos, Augusto de Campos & Décio Pignatari, Teoria da Poesia Concreta, 1965. See Bibliography 4. 2. “Maiakóvski e o Construtivism.” O Estado de São Paulo, Suplemento literário (São Paulo) (September 29, 1962); reprinted in Maiakóvski Poemas, 2nd ed. 1982: 143–148 (see Bibliography 1). 3. Augusto de Campos, Décio Pignatari, Haroldo de Campos, “Plano Piloto para Poesia Concreta,” 1959. See Bibliography 4. 4. Haroldo de Campos, “Maiakóvski em português,” 1961 (see Bibliography 7); “Mephistofaustian Transluciferation,” 1982 (see Bibliography 7); “Ezra Pound: La vida, texto,” 1975 (see Bibliography 7); “Francis Ponge: Visual Texts,” 1974 (see Bibliography 7); “The Open Work of Art,” 1981 (see Bibliography 5).

 K. David Jackson

ideograms, or in musical and plastic arts. They sought phonetic, syntactical, and morphological equivalencies, aided by the flexibility of the Brazilian Portuguese language and defended in early essays on translation theory, which attempted to define the density of language.5 Chinese ideograms described by Fenollosa; the contemporary music of Webern, Stockhausen, and Boulez; and the aleatory methods of John Cage were models for a poetics founded on a composite vanguard recipe of graphics, phonetics, icon, image, and indeterminacy or chance. In “arttranslation” AC compares the isometric relationship of the translator to the original text with that of a performer of music to the composer’s score, in favor of the maximum liberty of individual interpretation. While respecting the literal components of an original, AC is open to the novelty of recreation or transcreation, when it promises to renew an interpretation, or bring it alive in the target language, Portuguese. He considers the main approach to be “above all, a question of hearing” (“acima de tudo, uma questão de ouvido”). AC gives examples of free interpretation with examples drawn from jazz classics, in a 2008 interview: A tradução-arte tensiona-se em relação ao original como as intervenções do intérprete musical em relação ao compositor. Nesse sentido reivindico a liberdade que têm, por exemplo, os cantores e instrumentistas de jazz para darem a “sua” versão de clássicos como Gershwin ou Cole Porter. Há muita direrença entre ouvir “Summertime” interpretado por Billie Holiday, ou Janis Joplin, que fazem uma leitura pessoal e única da canção, e por uma cantora lírica como Barbara Hendricks, que a segue ortodoxamente. Ou por alguém que apenas canta com afinação correta. Por isso mesmo, embora procure estar atento o mais possível à literalidade do original, não tenho interesse em manter essa literalidade quando sinto que me tolha a recriação, no sentido de “make it new”, fazer do texto vertido para o meu idioma uma interpretação regenerativa, diferenciada, que o faça reviver em português como algo “que se quer decorar”. Não há regras absolutas quanto a isso, embora a técnica seja “o teste da sinceridade”, como dizia Pound. É, acima de tudo, uma questão de ouvido.6 [Art translation holds the same tension in relation to the original as the musical interpreter does in relation to the composer. In this sense I can invoke the liberty that jazz singers and instrumentalists have, for example, to give “their” version of classics such as Gershwin or Cole Porter. There is a great difference between hearing “Summertime” sung by Billie Holiday or Janis Joplin, each with a personal and unique reading of the song, and by a lyrical singer like Barbara Hendricks, who gives an orthodox performance. Or by someone who just sings it in tune. For this very reason, although I try to stay attuned as much as possible to the literal original, I have no interest in keeping this literality when I feel the desire to recreate it, in the sense of “making it new,” to make a regenerative and differenced 5.

Haroldo de Campos, “A temperatura informacional do texto,” 1960 (see Bibliography 5).

6. Interview with Augusto de Campos. Mnemzine 4 (São Paulo):8.



Chapter 8.  The Brazilian concrete poets and translation 

interpretation in my language that makes it come alive in Portuguese as a work that “everyone wants to recite by memory.” There are no absolute rules about this, although technique becomes “the test of sincerity,” as Pound said. It is, above all else, a question of hearing.]

While aware the of the literal components of an original, AC is open to the novelty of recreation or transcreation when it promises to renew an interpretation, or bring it alive, in the target language, Portuguese. He considers the main approach to be guided by the ability to hear stylistic differentiations. By allying linguistics with the arts, above all music, transcreation discovered exciting, brilliant solutions, unusual and spontaneous inventions, and at times surprisingly poetic outcomes in translation. Their works pursued structural and phonetic similarities, paratactic or parallel constructions, while seeking the side of language that itself breaks with traditional logic and grammatical order. Concrete poetry allied itself with semiotics and ethnography in its interest in the “primitive” function of signs, accepting the “concrete logic” of Lévi Strauss’ “penseé sauvage,” emphasizing the literal “thingness” of language. Translations by the Concrete poets evidence a high degree of awareness of language, while at the same time the texts selected possess, in HC’s term, a “high degree of informational temperature” because of their strong esthetic charge. They were the most distant from ordinary writing and the most difficult to translate. Transcreation means transformation, or re-writing, of the original text both as a goal and as a task of translation. It was a new approach to creative literary translation as a form of critical reading and analysis, which contributed to an etymology of symbolic forms in metamorphosis within language and among languages. Rather than “formative moments” of national literary history, HC sees the main process at work as transformative, not a closed entity but as “difference, as overtness, a dialogic moment of difference against the background of the universal.”7 HC’s creative translation is a form of hybridism, or transgressive appropriation at its extreme limits, in which virtually anything can be expropriated and its meaning changed. Referring to Oswald de Andrade’s manifesto of cultural devouring (Andrade 1928), he proposes a non-reverential attitude toward tradition, which functions by expropriation, reversion, and de-hierarchy. He presented a concise overview of his position in a 1999 conference at Oxford University, positioning transcreation between tradition (Brazil’s baroque hybridism) and transculturation (non-reverential assimilation of the universal cultural legacy).8 For HC, the 7. “The Ex-Centric’s Viewpoint: Tradition, Transcreation, Transculturation,” Jackson 2005: 3–13. Here Haroldo is countering Antônio Cândido (1959). 8. “The Ex-Centric’s Viewpoint,” 2005. See Bibliography 5.

 K. David Jackson

transcreator is a choreographer of semantics, always moving and multi-dimensional. Transcreation should foment dialogue within languages and constitute an intertext among language systems. To renew poetic form in another language means to re-create it, re-write it, or as HC preferred, transcreate it using equivalent or parallel linguistic forms. His aim was a radical intervention in form and poetic language, with the intention of recognizing and promoting linguistic functions. He sought a new isomorphic version of the original text, in Jakobsonian terms, translating languages in contact by exploring visual and rhythmic as well as parallel and paratactic exchanges. The work to be translated is thus substituted, mirrored, and rewritten using equivalents discovered by linguistic analysis. In their work as translators, the Brazilian Concrete poets produced both singular texts that revisit creative masters, those within their synchronic pantheon of world literature, as well as Ur-texts that extrapolate and recapitulate the creative strategies of the founders of inventive poetics. Translation is considered to be parallel creation, and its most challenging application as an amalgam of translation, theory, and criticism is to a library of select, creative texts, both Western and Asian, ancient and modern. In addition to being an esthetic and creative procedure, transcreation is a constant project in progress, a voyage among world languages and literatures. Departing from a linguistic approach to expressive language, the Concrete poets (with the collaboration of Boris Schnaiderman in the case of Maiakovsky) applied transcreation theory to a synchronic body of world literature. In Poundian terms, transcreation could be defined as a dance of intellect among languages, bringing their expressive elements into contact and promoting their contributions to creative writing. Early correspondence with Pound influenced the Brazilian poets to follow his example of working across the same broad traditions, from Li Tai-Po to John Cage. Such a universal Utopian project was characteristic of literary modernism, and comparable examples of the universal library can to be found in João Cabral de Melo Neto’s Museu de Tudo, André Malraux’s Le musée imaginaire, Jorge de Sena’s Poesia de 26 Séculos, and João Alexandre Barbosa’s Biblioteca Imaginária.9 The Concretists have refined and enlarged their translations in volumes published since the 1960s. The innovative contribution of transcreation is that it focused on unexpected linguistic encounters and combinations not only in particular works but also among and within diverse traditions and practices, which could then be viewed as belonging to an omnibus creative tradition: for example, applying oriental techniques to Concrete poetry; or tracing Dante to Pound, Joyce, and Guimarães Rosa; or e.e. cummings to the isomorphic poetry of the neovanguards. In using this approach, they followed the example of Pound who, as AC wrote, 9. Melo Neto 1975, Malraux 1947–50, Sena 1971, Barbosa 1996.



Chapter 8.  The Brazilian concrete poets and translation 

“assimila a técnica do hai-cai à logopeia sintética dos epigramas greco-latinos” (“assimilated the technique of haiku to the syntactic logic of Greco-Latin epigrams”).10 Pound set the parameters for the Concrete poets’ dedication to world literature and to the esthetic of “Make It New,” yet each translation from a different language, culture, or time period presented particular challenges and difficulties. In translating Dante, HC comments on o uso caracterizado da rima como suporte da informação estética: a rima, elemento de redundância, função-lastro, passa a produzir informação original, dado o inusitado do seu esquema...fugindo à normalidade da expectativa, acaba se convertendo em fator de surpresa e gerando informação original... [Dante] inventa uma sextina dupla... 60 versos, em 5 estâncias de 12 versos cada uma, sobre 5 palavras-rima (donna, tempo, luce, freddo, petra), rematando com uma coda de 6 versos. [the characteristic use of rhyme as a support for esthetic information: rhyme, a redundant element, a rigid function, begins to produce original information because of its unusual scheme.... departing from expected norms, it becomes converted into a factor of surprise and generates original information.... [Dante] invents a double sestina … 60 verses in 5 stanzas of 12 verses each, with 5 rhyming words (donna, tempo, luce, freddo, petra), followed by a coda of 6 verses.]11

In Mallarmé, the Concrete poets faced “subdivisões prismáticas” (prismatic subdivisions) that still respected traditional form. With cummings, graphics became the poetic function (“a grafia se faz função”), the subject of essays by translator AC: Na poesia de Cummings as palavras não são dissociadas de seu significado, nem as letras valem por si sós. A atomização dos vocábulos tem em mira efeitos construtivos de sinestesia do movimento e fisiognomia descritiva. [In Cummings’ poetry words are not separated from their meanings, nor do the letters stand alone. The atomization of words produces constructive effects of synesthesia of movement and descriptive physiognomy.]12

Critic João Alexandre Barbosa comments on HC’s 1958 essay and translation of the poetry of Christian Morgenstern (1871–1914); rather than an easy paraphrase of nonsense meanings, HC worked with “deformations of words, portmanteau words, humorous effects generated by the absurd and by paradox, in typographical inventions, use of sonorous materials and of the possibilities of the visual field” (Barbosa 2005: 93–94). 10. Ezra Pound Antologia Poética, 1968: 31. See Bibliography 1. 11. “Petrografia Dantesca,” 1998: 23. See Bibliography 5. 12. “E.E. Cummings: Olho & Fôlego,” 1979. See Bibliography 6.

 K. David Jackson



Das ästhetische Wiesel Ein Wiesel saß auf einem Kiesel inmitten Bachgeriesel.

Wißt ihr, weshalb? Das Mondkalb verriet es mir im Stillen: Das raffinier te Tier tat’s um des Reimes willen.

O teixugo estético Um teixugo sentou-se num sabugo no meio do refugo

Por que Afinal?

O lunático Segredou-me estático: o refinado animal acima agiu por amor à rima

(“O teixugo estético Haroldo de Campos,” O Arco-Íris Branco, 1997: 100. See Bibliography 5) By joining constructive space to poetic time, Barbosa concludes that “poetic function is intensified by the metalinguistic.” For HC translation was an approach to critical description and understanding of the text, within a structural model supported by discovering similarities and correspondences in phonetics, syntax, and visual form. The Brazilian Concrete poets created their own translation workshop, understanding translation to be a form of criticism as well as creation.13

13. Haroldo de Campos, “Da Tradução,” 1963. See Bibliography 5.



Chapter 8.  The Brazilian concrete poets and translation 

Literary translation continued to occupy a prominent place alongside essays and poetry in their production; in fact, they worked as poets, critics, and translators simultaneously. HC firmly established his reputation as a theorist and practitioner of poetic translation in two early books, A Arte no Horizonte do Provável (“Art on the Horizon of the Probable”), which foregrounds the problem of translation in major essays such as “Comunicação na Poesia de Vanguarda” (“Communication in Vanguard Poetry”), and A Operação do Texto (“Textual Operation”), in which classification of textual differences operates as a guide to translation strategies in three modes: construction (Poe’s mirror texts), production (Vladímir Maiakovsky), and deconstruction (Friedrich Hölderlin). These books introduce the world library of authors and genres selected for translation throughout HC’s career.14 Confirming more than four decades dedicated to analysis and practice of translation, HC’s O Arco-Íris Branco (“The White Rainbow”) discusses problems of translation with special attention to the German language in Goethe, Arno Holz, and Christian Morgenstern. Individual essays again conjoined critical interpretation with poetic translation. HC’s last translation is a two-volume GreekPortuguese bilingual edition of Homer’s Iliad; his translations are now the subject of an increasing bibliography (see Aguilar 2005). AC strengthened the combination of critical essay with poetic translation and its graphic presentation. Literary essays in journals and in the literary supplement of O Estado de São Paulo were accompanied by a special interest in graphics and artisanship, illustrated by limited editions from Editora Noa Noa and experiments with graphic design. Early work with graphics led to computer design, such as the CDR Clip poems included in NÃO (2003). AC’s work with Provençal troubadours occupies Verso Reverso Controverso, which extends chronologically thorough a selection of English metaphysical and French symbolist poets, accompanied by translations. The poet writing against tradition is the anti-normative focus of O Anticrítico (“The Anticritic”), a creative compilation of AC’s translations of modern poetry (Dante and Donne to Emily Dickinson, Lewis Carroll, Gertrude Stein, Marcel Duchamp, and John Cage); and in Invenção, the essayist and translator revisits the early modern poetry of Raimbaut D’Aurenga, Arnaut Daniel, Dante Alighieri, and Guido Cavalcanti. The range of Augusto de Campos’ essays and poetic translations thus extends from Provençal poets to the most contemporary and experimental poets, brought together under the Concrete poets’ theory of invention across time and language. AC’s 2006 retrospective, A Poesia da Recusa (“Poetry of Refusal”) expands his treatment of contemporary poets.

14. His subjects range from Pindar to Ungaretti and Leopardi, from haiku and visual Japanese poetry to the work of Kitasono Katue.

 K. David Jackson

AC used the the phrase “tradução-arte” (“art-translation”), as well as “intradução” (“intraduction/intra-lation”), when intervening in works by other poets, and “interversions” (“interversões”), when altering the generally accepted nature of an original. In an interview in MnemoZine (2008: see Bibliography 6), AC stresses the importance of translation to his overall poetics: Augusto de Campos – A maior parte da minha atividade poética foi desde sempre direcionada mais para a leitura do que para a minha produção própria, e quanto a esta, veio a privilegiar cada vez mais a tradução (como forma de diálogo com as grandes obras e seu estudo) antes que os artefatos de minha própria lavra. Essa prática fez migrar muito de mim para as “personae” que assumo em tais incursões tradutórias, iseridas no âmbito do que chamo de “tradução-arte” (Haroldo preferia o termo “transcriação”). É o que acontece na versão nada ortodixa da linha do primeiro terceto do Canto I do Inferno dantesco, “che la diritta via era smarrita”, por “solitário, sem sol e sem saída”, com a qual me remeto à linha “solitário, sem sol ou solo em guerra” de meu primeiro livro O Rei Menos o Reino, de resto muito influenciado pela linguagem poética da Divina Comédia. Em casos mais específicos de interferência icônica em textos ou segmentos particulares de texto, tenho usado o termo “intradução” (jogando com os significados de “in” e “intra”) para destacar essas intromissões artísticas em obra alheia -- “interversões”, se poderia dizer também, abrangendo a acepção de laterar a origem natural ou habitual de um fato. (p. 8) [Augusto de Campos – The greatest part of my poetic activity was always directed more toward reading than my own production, and as for that, it began to give more and more importance to translation (as a form of dialogue with great works and their study) before the artifacts I produced myself. This habit led a lot of my inner self to migrate to the “personae” that I assume in such translation quests, which fit into the realm of what I call “art translation” (Haroldo preferred the term “transcreation”). That’s what happens in the non-orthodox version of the first line of the first tercet of Canto I of Dante’s Inferno, “che la diritta via era smarrita,” as “solitário, sem sol e sem saída” [‘’solitary, sunless and solutionless”], for which I returned to the line of my first book O Rei Menos o Reino (“The King Less A Kingdom”), “solitário, sem sol ou solo em guerra” [“solitary, sunless or soil at war”], by the way being very influenced by the poetic language of the Divine Comedy. In more specific instances of iconic interference in texts, or particular segments of texts, I have used the term “intradução” (playing with the meanings of ‘in’ and ‘intra’) to underline these artistic intrusions into works by others – one could also use “interversões” to bring in the meaning of a lateral approach to the natural or habitual origin of a fact.]



Chapter 8.  The Brazilian concrete poets and translation 

Four examples can serve to illustrate solutions applied by HC and AC to different kinds of texts: 1. Literary texts. Provençal troubadour poetry exemplifies poetry that is especially challenging to translate because of problems of etymology, morphology, syntax, and cultural differences. In this example, AC translates “noigandres,” the mysterious word that ties the group to Pound, in “Er vei vermeils, vertz, blaus, blancs, gruocs”:

XIII ER VEI VERMEILLS, VERTZ, BLAUS, BLANCS, GRUOC Er vei vermeills, vertz, blaus, brancs, gruocs vergiers, plans, plais, tertres e vaus, e ii votz dels auzels sona e tint ab doutz acort maitin e tart. Som met en cor qu’ieu colore mon chan d’un’aital fior don lo /ruitz sia amors, e jois lo grans, e l’olors d’enoi gandres. D’amor mi pren penssan lo fuocs e 1 desiriers doutz e coraus; e1 mals es saboros qu’ieu sint eil llama soaus on plus m’arl: c’Amors enquier los sieus d’aital semblan, verais, francs, fis, merceians, parcedors, car a sa cort notz orguoills e val blandres. Mas mi non camja lemps ni luocs, cosseils, aizina, bes ni maus; e s’ieu al meu enten vos mint, jamais la bella no m’esgart qu’el cor el sen tenc dormen e veillan; qu’eu non vuoill jes quan pens sas grans valors, valer ses lieis on plus vaic Alixandres.



VERMELHO E VERDE E BRANCO E BLAU Vermeiho e verde e branco e blau, vergel, vau, monte e vale eu vejo, a voz das ayes voa e soa em doce acordo, dia e tarde; então meu ser quer que eu cobra o canto de uma flor cujo fruto seja amor,

 K. David Jackson



grão, alegria, e obor de noigandres.15 Amor me leva em sua nau e poe seu fogo em meu desejo, mas tal viagem, sei que é boa, e a flama é suave, onde mais arde; que Amor requer de mim que eu seja tanto: franco, veraz, fiel e cumpridor, e em sua corte urn rei não vale urn flandres. Tempo e lugar, ou born ou rnau, näo mudam a alma do que almejo e se meu canto a atraiçoa jamais a bela me ame e guarde, que, de alma e corpo, enfermo ou são, eu canto, pois não quero, se penso em seu valor, valer, sem ela, as glórias de Alexandres.16

(“Vermelho e Verde e Branco e Blau,” Augusto de Campos, Mais Provençais, 1987: 110–111. See Bibliography 2) 2. Ur-texts. In Pound and Joyce, the Concrete poets faced the widest range of techniques used by the masters of inventive modernism. Their fragments of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake were accompanied by essays on Joyce’s style and use of language. riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs. Sir Tristram, violer d’amores, fr’over the short sea, had pas- sencore rearrived from North Armorica on this side the scraggy isth-mus of Europe Minor to wielderfight his penisolate war: nor had top-sawyer’s rocks by the stream Oconee exaggerated themselse to Lau-rens County’s gorgios while they went doublin their mumper all the time: nor avoice from afire bellowsed mishe mishe to tauftauf thuart-peatrick: not yet, though venisoon after, had a kidscad buttended a bland old isaac: not yet, 15. (*) noigandres: uso, para efeito de rima, esta variante misteriosa, tal como aparece em Canello. Emil Levy decompôs a palavra em duas: enoi (tédio, próximo do frances ennui) e gandres (do verbo gandir, proteger). Um olor que protege do tédio. A licão foi adotada no texto em provencal, ao lado. [(*) noigandres: for the effect of rhyme, I use this mysterious variant as it appears in Canello. Emil Levy divided it into two: enoi (tedium, near to the French ennui) and gandres (from the verb gandir, to protect). A fragrance that protects from tedium. The lesson was incorporated into the Provençal text.] 16. (**) Alexandres: alusão a Alexandre, o Grande, da Macedonia, cuja fama era bastante difundida na Idade Media. [(**) Alexandres: allusion to Alexander the Great of Macedonia, whose fame was widely spread in the Middle Ages.]



Chapter 8.  The Brazilian concrete poets and translation 

though all’s fair in vanessy, were sosie sesthers wroth with twone nathandjoe. Rot a peck of pa’s malt had Jhem or Shen brewed by arclight and rory end to the regginbrow was to be seen ringsome on the aquaface. The fall (bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonner-ronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!) of a once wallstrait oldparr is retaled early in bed and later on life down through all christian minstrelsy. The great fall of the offwall entail-led at such short notice the pftjschute of Finnegan, erse solid man, that the humptyhillhead of humseif prumptly sends an unquiring one well to the west in quest of his tumptytumtoes: and their upturnpikepointandplace is at the knock out in the park where oranges have been laid to rust upon the green since devlinsfirst loved livvy. riocorrente, depois de Eva e Adão, do desvio da praia a dobra da baIa, devolve-nos por urn commodius vicus de recirculaçao devolta a Howth Castle Ecercanias. Sir Tristrào, violista d’arnôres, através o rnar breve, näo tinha ainda revoltado de Norte Armórica a êste lado do áspero istmo da Europa Menor para loucomover sua guerra penisolada: nem tinham os calhöes do altom sawyerrador pelo rio Oconee sexagerado aos gorgetos de Laurens County enquanto êles jam dublando os bebêbados todo o tempo: nem avoz de urnachama brarnugira mishe mishe a urn tau-tauf tuèspatruIsquio: nem ainda, embora logo mais veniesse, tinha urn noveiho esaürido urn veiho e aiquebrando isaac: nern ainda, em-bora tudo seja feério em Vanessidade, tinham as sesters sósias se enru-tecido corn o unIduo nathandjoe. Nern urn galao de papamalte haviam Jhem ou Shen recevado arcaluz e auroras antes o barcofris fôra visto circularco sôbre a aquaface. A queda (bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonner-ronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!) de urn ex venereável negaciante é recontada cedo na cama e logo na fama por todos os recantores da cristã idade. A grande queda do ovalto db muro acarretou era tao pouco lapso o pftjschute de Finnegan, outrora sólido ovarao, que a humptyhaltesta dêle prurnptamente manda uma testemunha para oeste a cata de suas tumptyturntunhas: e o retrospico-pontoepouso delas repausa ern pés no parque onde oranjos mofarn sôbre o verde desde que o prirnoarnor ao diablin levou lívia. (traduçao de Augusto de Campos) (Haroldo & Augusto de Campos, Panaroma de Finnegans Wake, 1977. See Bibliography 1)

3. Parallel creation, paratactic and parallel construction. AC translated at least 40 poems by e.e. cummings, and the precise graphic placement and lay-out were of paramount interest to the author in his correspondence with the translator.

 K. David Jackson

(“o-h-o-t-n-a-f-g-a” – Augusto de Campos, e.e. cummings 20 poem(a)s, 1979. See Bibliography 2) AC is particularly attentive to language in Emily Dickinson, finding equivalencies in Portuguese for rhyme, concision, and rhythm:

A word is dead When it is said, Some say. I say it just Begins to live That day.



Chapter 8.  The Brazilian concrete poets and translation 



A palavra morre Quando ocorre, Se dizia. Eu digo que ela Se revela Nesse dia. (Augusto de Campos, Emily Dickinson: Eu Não Sou Ninguém, 2008: 92–93)

4. Signs, semiotics, and material language. AC made use of calligraphy and graphics to design pages of tigers, constituting a panoramic art exhibition, to translate William Blake’s “Tiger.”

(“O Tygre” – Augusto de Campos, POESIA 1949–1979: 223. See Bibliography 7) For HC and AC, there was no text that could not be translated into the poetry and musicality of the Brazilian Portuguese language. Any creative literature could be translated; no school or language was excluded. From this perspective, the work of the transcreators could be allied with Oswald de Andrade’s cultural theory in the “Cannibal Manifesto” (1928). Brazilians, like the supposed cannibal tribe of Tupinambás, would devour cultural goods arriving from Europe. The Concrete poets did succeed in “devouring” texts and languages, overcoming barriers between languages and instilling the idea of a world cultural heritage open to all in translation. The home target of their translation remained, however, Brazilian Portuguese. In a photograph of the first course HC gave in Stuttgart, Germany, in 1964, one can see the blackboard covered with dozens of names of Brazilian writers and works (reproduced on the cover of Haroldo de Campos: A Dialogue with the Brazilian Concrete Poet [Jackson 2005]). HC placed Brazilian literature on a

 K. David Jackson

Figure 1.  Haroldo de Campos. Ilíada. 2 vols. São Paulo: Arx, 2002 (See Bibliography 3)



Chapter 8.  The Brazilian concrete poets and translation 

par with other literatures and proved it to be an exemplary language not only for poetic translation but for creating new trends and movements to lead the literary vanguard in the Western tradition of world literature. His theory of translation provided for Brazil a foundation for the reception of world literature in translation, as well as a critical debate on esthetics, translation theory, and the nature of language. HC and AC promoted a “panaroma” of world authors and works translated, or transcreated, into Brazilian Portuguese in a way that had not existed before. Their translations put at the disposal of new generations of Brazilian readers and students a rich library of texts and a consciousness of world literature, read not only by students of literature but on a national, commercial scale. Their transcreations made available in Brazilian Portuguese a wide array of poetic and inventive texts from world literature. For the first time, a Brazilian literary movement led and participated in international trends at the cutting edge. Transcreation also recuperated national texts, as in the case of Sousândrade (author of the “Inferno de Wall Street”), whose meanings had been forgotten over time, or fallen into disuse.17 With the mission of working in world poetry, these poet-translators rescued for the Portuguese language a legacy of universal literature that would have otherwise been “lost” for their generation. Transcreation thus became one of the important literary tools for transculturation in contemporary letters. Concrete poetry created controversies and literary firestorms in Brazilian criticism for more than three decades. Doubtless, the Concretists’ translations stimulated a continuing debate on the value and role of poetry and translation in Brazil, whether as social or literary imperative; the continuing polemics received the widest public attention and do so even now. Given the scant attention to poetry or to translation in today’s media, one can appreciate all the more the combative contribution that made of the presence of poetry a major item of esthetic contention and public debate in the 1950s and 60s. Transcreation promoted a higher consciousness of the literary craft and of the work of writers and translators; it promoted an interactive, open, timeless idea of literature. The Concrete poets succeeded in popularizing their synchronic vision of innovative literature in the literate, intellectual youth culture of urban Brazil, which brought together popular music, resistance poetry, and translations from world literature. In their translations, the Brazilian poet-translators united translation theory with a poetics of language. Readers of their translations were able to accompany and interact with vanguard trends in arts and letters, reading from a Brazilian periphery that had become transformed into a center of action in world languages and letters.

17. Haroldo and Augusto de Campos, Re-Visão de Sousândrade, 2002. See Bibliography 7.

 K. David Jackson

Bibliography of translations and theoretical works by the São Paulo concrete poets 1. Collaborative translations

Antologia Poética de Ezra Pound (Augusto de Campos, Décio Pignatari, Haroldo de Campos, José Lino Grünewald & Mário Faustino). Lisboa: Ulisséia, 1968. ABC Da Literatura, de Ezra Pound (A. de Campos, José Paulo Paes). São Paulo: Cultrix, 1970. Cantares de Ezra Pound (A. de Campos, D. Pignatari & H. de Campos). Rio de Janeiro: Serviço de Documentação/­MEC, 1960. Ezra Pound: Poesia (D. Pignatari, H. de Campos, José Lino Grünewald & Mário Faustino). Organization, introduction and notes by A. de Campos. São Paulo: Hucitec, 1983. Ezra Pound: Antologia Poética (A. de Campos, D. Pignatari, J. L. Grünewald & M. Faustino). Lisboa: Ulisséia, 1968. 2nd. ed., Ezra Pound: Poesia. São Paulo/Brasília: Hucitec/UnB, 1985; 3rd ed., 1993. Maiakóvski: Poemas (A. de Campos, H. de Campos & Boris Schnaiderman). Rio de Janeiro: Tempo Brasileiro, 1967; 2nd ed., São Paulo: Perspectiva, 1982; 5th ed., 1992. Mallarmé (A.de Campos, H. de Campos & D. Pignatari). São Paulo: Perspectiva, 1974 (Coleção Signos); 2nd ed., 1980; 3rd ed., enlarged, 2002. Panaroma do Finnegans Wake (H. de Campos, A. de Campos). São Paulo: Conselho Estadual de Cultura, 1962; 2nd ed., São Paulo: Perspectiva, 1971; 3rd ed., 1986; 4th ed. (Coleção Signos), revised & enlarged, 2001. Poesia Russa Moderna (H. de Campos, A. de Campos & Boris Schnaiderman). Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 1968; 2nd ed., São Paulo: Brasiliense; 4th ed., 1985; 6th ed., revised & enlarged, São Paulo: Perspectiva, 2001. Traduzir e Trovar (A. de Campos, H. de Campos). São Paulo: Papyrus, 1968.

2. Translations by Augusto de Campos

Dez Poemas de E. E. Cummings. Rio de Janeiro: Serviço de Documentação­/MEC, 1960. e.e. cummings 20 poem(a)s. Florianópolis: Noa Noa, 1979. Emily Dickinson – Não sou ninguém. Campinas: UNICAMP, 2008. Hopkins: A Beleza Difícil. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 1997. Hopkins: Cristal Terrível. Florianópolis: Noa Noa, 1991. Invenção: De Arnaut e Raimbaut a Dante e Cavalcanti. São Paulo: Arx, 2003. Irmãos Germanos. Florianópolis: Noa Noa, 1993. John Cage: De Segunda a um Ano. Introduction & revision of the translation by Rogério Duprat. São Paulo: Hucitec, 1985. John Donne, O Dom e A Danação. Florianópolis: Noa­Noa, 1978. John Keats: Ode a um Rouxinol e Ode sobre uma Urna Grega. Florianópolis: Noa­Noa, 1984. Invenção. São Paulo: Arx, 2003. Linguaviagem. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1987. Mais Provençais: Raimbaut e Arnaut. Florianópolis: Noa­Noa, 1982; 2nd ed., enlarged, São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1987. Mallarmargem. Florianópolis: Noa­Noa, 1971; São Paulo: Perspectiva, 1978. Paul Valéry: A Serpente e o pensar. São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1984. Poem(a)s – E.E. Cummings. Rio de Janeiro: Francisco Alves, 1999. Poesia da Recusa. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 2006.



Chapter 8.  The Brazilian concrete poets and translation  Porta-Retratos: Gertrude Stein. Florianópolis: Noa Noa, 1990. Pré-lua e Pós-Lua. São Paulo: Arte Pau Brasil, 1991. 40 Poem(a)s – E.E. Cummings. São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1986. Rilke: Poesia-Coisa. Rio de Janeiro: Imago, 1994. Rimbaud Livre. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 1992. O Tygre, de William Blake. São Paulo: Edição do autor, 1977. Verso Reverso Contraverso. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 1978. 20 Poem(a)s – E.E. Cummings. Florianópolis: Noa­Noa, 1979.

3. Translations by Haroldo de Campos

Bere’shith: A Cena de Origem [and other studies of Biblical poetry]. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 1993; 2nd ed., 2001. Dante: Seis Cantos do Paraíso. Recife: Gastão de Holanda Editor, 1976 (limited edition of 100 copies illustrated with 10 lithographs by João Câmara Filho); 2nd ed., Rio de Janeiro: Fontana/ Istituto Italiano di Cultura, 1978. Éden: Um Tríptico Bíblico. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 2004 (Coleção Signos). Escrito sobre Jade [22 classic Chinese poems, bilingual edition]. Ouro Preto: Tipografia do Fundo de Ouro Preto, 1996. Hagoromo de Zeami: O Charme Sutil [classical Japanese theater, bilingual edition]. With the assistance of Darcy Yasuco Kusano and Elsa Taeko Doi. São Paulo: Estação Liberdade, 1994. Ilíada de Homero, Vol.1. Edited and introduced by Trajano Vieira. São Paulo: Mandarim, 2001; 2nd ed., São Paulo: Arx, 2002; 3rd ed., 2002; 4th ed., 2003. Ilíada de Homero, Vol.2. Edited by Trajano Vieira. São Paulo: Arx, 2002; 2nd ed., 2003. Mênis: A Ira de Aquiles [Canto I of Homer’s Iliad, bilingual edition]. With an essay by Trajano Vieira. São Paulo: Nova Alexandrina, 1994. Os Nomes e os Navios. [Canto 2 of Homer’s Iliad]. Edited, with introduction and notes, by Trajano Vieira; translation and critical essay by Haroldo de Campos; translation by Odorico Mendes (1874). Rio de Janeiro: Sette Letras, 1999. Pedra e Luz na Poesia de Dante [bilingual edition]. Rio de Janeiro: Imago, 1998. Qohélet-O-Que-Sabe [Ecclesiastes]. With the assistance of Jacó Guinsburg. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 1990; 2nd ed., 1991. Transblanco: Em Torno a Blanco de Octavio Paz. With the assistance of Octavio Paz. Rio de Janeiro: Guanabara, 1985; 2nd ed., enlarged, São Paulo: Siciliano, 1994. Ungaretti: Daquela Estrela à Outra. With the assistance of Aurora Bernardini; edited by Lucia Wataghin. São Paulo: Ateliê Editorial, 2003.

4. Collaborative theoretical work, with Décio Pignatari

Noigandres (São Paulo). 5 nos., 1952–1960. “Plano Piloto para Poesia Concreta”. Tempo Presente 1 (1959):26–27; reprinted in Teoria da Poesia Concreta, São Paulo: Invenção, 1965. Teoria da Poesia Concreta (D. Pignatari, H. de Campos & A. de Campos). São Paulo: Edições Invenção, 1965; 2nd ed., enlarged, São Paulo: Duas Cidades, 1975; 3rd ed., São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1987; 4th ed. São Paulo: Ateliê, 2006.

5. Theoretical texts by Haroldo de Campos

O Arco-Íris Branco: Ensaios de Literatura e Cultura. Rio de Janeiro: Imago, 1997.

 K. David Jackson A Arte no Horizonte do Provável e Outros Ensaios. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 1969 (Coleção Debates); 2nd ed., 1972; 3rd ed., 1975; 4th ed., 1977. “Da Tradução como Criação e como Crítica”. Tempo Brasileiro: Revista de Cultura (Rio de Janeiro) 4–5 (1963):164–181. “The Ex-Centric’s Viewpoint: Tradition, Transcreation, Transculturation”. Jackson 2005: 3–13; translated into Spanish as “Tradición, traducción, transculturación: El punto de vista del ex-céntrico,” Reflejos: Revista del Departamento de Estudios Españoles y Latinoamericanos (Jerusalem) 3 (Dec. 1994):7–11. Ideograma: Lógica, Poesia, Linguagem (organization and introductory essay, “Ideograma, anagrama, diagrama”). São Paulo: Cultrix, 1977; 2nd ed., 1986; 3rd ed., 1994; 4th ed., São Paulo: Edusp, 2000. “The Open Work of Art,” Dispositio: American Journal of Comparative and Cultural Semiotics (Ann Arbor) 6:17–18 (Summer-Fall 1981):5–7. A Operação do Texto. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 1976 (Coleção Debates). “Petrografia Dantesca”. Pedra e Luz na Poesia de Dante, Rio de Janeiro: Imago, 1998. 23. “A temperatura informacional do texto”. Revista do Livro (Rio de Janeiro) 5 (June 1960):61–70; “The Informational Temperature of the Text,” trans. Jon Tolman, Poetics Today (Tel Aviv) 3.3 (Summer 1982):77–82.

6. Theoretical texts by Augusto de Campos

O Anticrítico. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1986. “E.E. Cummings: Olho & Fôlego”. e.e. cummings, 20 Poemas, trans. & intro. Augusto de Campos, Florianópolis: Noa Noa, 1979. “Entrevista.” MnemoZine 4 (2008); http://www.cronopios.com.br/mnemozine4/interface.html Verso Reverso Contraverso. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 1979.

7. Literary and critical texts and periodicals

Haroldo de Campos “Ezra Pound: La vida, texto”. Plural: Critica, Arte, Literatura (Mexico) 50 (1975):23–27. “Francis Ponge: Visual Texts”. Books Abroad (Norman, OK) 48 (1974):712–14. “Maiakóvski em português: Roteiro de uma tradução”. Revista do Livro (Rio de Janeiro) 6 (July-Dec. 1961):23–50. Maiakóvski Poemas. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 1982. 143–148. [with Boris Schnaiderman] “Mephistofaustian Transluciferation: Contribution to the Semiotics of Poetic Translation”. Dispositio: American Journal of Comparative and Cultural Semiotics (Ann Arbor) 7:19–21 (1982).181–187. Augusto de Campos POESIA 1949–1979. São Paulo: Ateliê. 2001. Haroldo de Campos, Augusto de Campos Re-Visão de Sousândrade. 3rd ed., revised & enlarged, São Paulo: Perspectiva, 2002.



Chapter 8.  The Brazilian concrete poets and translation 

References Aguilar, Gonzalo. 2005. Poesia Concreta Brasileira: As Vanguardas na Encruzilhada Modernista. São Paulo: EDUSP. Andrade, Mário. 1925. A Escrava que não é isaura. (Discurso sobre algumas tendéncias de poesia modernista). São Paulo: Livraria Lealdade. Andrade, Oswald de. 1928. “Manifesto antropófago”. Revista de Antropofagia (São Paulo) 1:3,7; trans. Leslie Bary as “Cannibal Manifesto.” Latin American Literary Review (Pittsburgh) 19:38 (1991).35–47. Barbosa, João Alexandre. 2005. “A half-century of Haroldo de Campos”. Jackson 2005: 81–95. Barbosa, João Alexandre. 1996. Biblioteca Imaginária. São Paulo: Ateliê. Cândido, Antônio. 1959. Formação de literatura brasileira. 2 vols. São Paulo: Livraria Martins. Castellões de Oliveira, Maria Clara. 2003. “O tradutor Haroldo de Campos e a (des) leitura da tradição”. Literatura em perspectiva ed. by Evando Nascimento and others, 93–106. Juiz de Fora: Universidade Federal de Juiz de Fora. Dickinson, Emily. The Poems of Emily Dickinson. Vol. 1. R.W. Franklin, ed. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998: 297. Fenollosa, Ernest. 1936. The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry: An Ars Poetica, with a foreword and notes by Ezra Pound. London: Stanley Nott. Jackson, K. David, ed. 2005. Haroldo de Campos: A Dialogue with the Brazilian Concrete Poet. Oxford: Centre for Brazilian Studies, University of Oxford. Lévy-Strauss, Claude. 1962. La pensée sauvage. Paris: Plon. Malraux, André. 1947–50. Le musée imaginaire. Genève: A. Skira. Melo Neto, João Cabral de. 1975. Museu de tudo. Rio de Janeiro: J. Olympio. Milán, Eduardo. 2004. “El Odiseo Brasileño: Haroldo de Campos”. Justificación Material: Ensayos de poesía Latinoamericana. México: Universidad del Distrito Federal. Monteiro de Castro Pereira, Cristina. 2004. “Transcriação: a tradução em jogo”. CIEFI, 27 Agosto, 2004. http://www.filologia.org.br/viiicnlf/anais/caderno06-15.html. Morgenstern, Christian. Das ästhetische Wiesel. Zürich: Diogenes, 1981. Motta, Leda Tenorio da. 2005. Céu acima: para um “tombeau” de Haroldo de Campos. São Paulo: Editora Perspectiva. Picchio, Luciana. 2004. História da Literatura Brasileira. 2nd ed. Rio de Janeiro: Nova Aguilar. Ribeiro Pires Vieira, Else. 2005. “Liberating Calibans: Readings of Antropofagia and Haroldo de Campos’ Poetics on Transcreation”. Post-Colonial Translation: Theory and Practice ed. by Susan Bassnett & Harry Trivedi. New York: Routledge. Seligmann-Silva, Márcio. 1998. “Haroldo de Campos: Tradução como Formação e ‘Abandono’ da Identidade”. Discurso Histórico e Narrativa Literária ed. by Jacques Leenhardt & Sandra Jatahy Pesavento, 273–291. Campinas: Editora da UNICAMP. Sena, Jorge de. 1971. Poesia de 26 Séculos. Porto: Inova. Vieira, Brunno. 2006. “Contribuições de Haroldo de Campos para um programa tradutório de latino-portugues”. Terra roxa e outras terras – Revista de Estudos Literários 7.

chapter 9

Expression and translation of philosophy Giorgio Colli, a master of time Marie-José Tramuta Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari won the prestigious Wheatland Prize for Translation in 1987 for their translations and critical edition of the works of Nietzsche. That version in Italian (1960–1975) was the first collection of all of Nietzsche’s works in their entirety. The late and posthumous recognition of their work has been followed in 1995 by the project of the University of Washington to translate the Colli-Montinari critical edition of Nietzsche’s complete works into English, still in progress. But Giorgio Colli is also the author, the passeur, the translator, of Greek Wisdom (1977), a monumental project that aimed to reform Diels and Kranz’s famous edition of Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker with particular attention to the religious antecedents of Presocratic thinking. Colli’s premature death in 1979 interrupted the edition, which ended with the third volume (out of a projected eleven).

Language is the main instrument of man’s refusal to accept the world as it is…. To what extent is culture the translation and rewording of previous meaning?  George Steiner Giorgio Colli won the Wheatland Prize for Translation in 1987. The prize was awarded to him and his colleague Mazzino Montinari for their Italian translation and critical edition of the works of Nietzsche. Although the prize was for translation, and although Colli and Montinari started their work merely in order to translate Nietzsche – the true Nietzsche, over time their activity was increasingly directed toward the editing of Nietzsche’s works rather than merely to their translation. The reading (in the broad sense of that word) of these works was the common denominator of the enterprise, uniting philology, translation and editing. Their version was the first collection of all of Nietzsche’s works in an exact scholarly chronology. Colli (1917–79) and Montinari (1928–86) were dead by the time the prize was awarded, but this late recognition of their work led to a project initiated by the University of Washington to translate the Colli-Montinari critical edition of

 Marie-José Tramuta

Nietzsche’s complete works into English. Directed by project editor Ernst Behler, chair of the University of Washington’s department of comparative literature, who died in 1997, the project consists of twenty volumes and is being published by Stanford University Press. Three volumes have been published since 1995. The series should be completed by 2013. Ten years ago Van A. Harvey, of Stanford, remarked that “The Colli-Montinari critical edition of Nietzsche’s works is one of the most important works of scholarship in humanities in the last quarter century. It was not until after World War II that one began to realize the extent to which Nietzsche’s notebooks had been tampered with, jumbled, badly deciphered, and poorly edited, and it was not until the Colli-Montinari edition that scholars could be confident for the first time of having a trustworthy text.” Dave E. Wellbery of John Hopkins University added: “The English-language edition should become a classic that will be used by generations of scholars” (http://www.washington.edu/research/showcase/1995c.html). Giorgio Colli, born in Italy in 1917, was translator, philologist, Hellenist, professor, editor, and a philosopher in his own right. In 1948, his first published work, Physis Kryptesthai Philei (Heraclitus’ fragment “Nature loves to hide”) which he dedicated to Nietzsche’s memory, was a philosophical statement as well as a profound innovation in Hellenic studies. In this work, Colli is already reversing the tendency to interpret as “progress” the road leading from the pre-Socratics to Plato and Aristotle. He would continue to enrich and to radicalize this inversion throughout his life’s work, culminating with the three volumes of “Greek Wisdom,” a critical edition of ancient Greek texts translated into Italian. They were published from 1977 onwards. Philosopher, philologist, translator, Hellenist, teacher, editor, but above all by virtue of these six qualifications a contrabandist, Colli was a man who tried to restore life to the spoken word, using all his strength to achieve this goal, and refusing the open roads plotted out by his predecessors when they did not suit him. He achieved this in his book Filosofia dell’espressione (Philosophy of Expression), which according to him represented his “greatest emotion.” Theoretics and logic seem slightly paradoxical compared to emotion and expression of sentiment. And yet this combination corresponds to the new definition that Colli as a translator and as a philosopher gave to Logos as expression. For Colli the philologist, “The accomplishment of such a task is difficult. It requires seizing the intimacy hidden behind an expressive appearance, plus a scientific approach of induction and analysis, so that philology and history can become, not heterogeneous, but the indispensable instruments to translate historical data to expressions where the primitive interiority, thymos, becomes evident” (Colli 1969:  27). Published in 1969, Filosofia dell’espressione was defined by an Italian critic as a theoretical hand-to-hand fight with Aristotle.



Chapter 9.  Giorgio Colli, a master of time 

I had the pleasure of translating Filosofia dell’ espressione into French in 1988. I must say that this first experience with Colli’s universe was exhilarating. Translating his thought from Italian to French was arduous but exceedingly rewarding. And then I had the great joy of translating the first volume of his La sapienza greca (Greek Wisdom), which saw the light of day in Italy in 1977 and in France in 1990. This book is the first of Colli’s critical editions of ancient Greek texts and is composed of the original Greek with Colli’s translations, notes, and references facing them in Italian. My job consisted in not only translating the Italian text to French but in verifying the Greek versions and reflecting and comparing the versions among themselves and also with Colli’s choices as they related to the totality of his research and his search for the breath of thymos. I was dazzled by so much beauty: by the originals, and by Colli’s rendering of them, and I did my best to be up to the task, working in their luminous shadow. My intention here is not only to evoke Giorgio Colli’s memory and works but also to share with you the procedure that leads up to translating a thought while searching for a way to restore its vital power, in the sense that knowledge is to be considered as a vision embracing life as a whole. To quote Colli, a philologist “is a great lover. He studies and spies on each expression in order to discover a private life that would be equal to his own, and thus find the link to the world” (Colli 1975: 115). The same notion pertains to one’s translation of a work such as Colli’s in that it is Logos that is at stake. The written word is not the end of the journey for Colli, it is only the beginning. He doesn’t write to consign, he writes to find. Colli followed Nietzsche step by step, in his light and in his darkness to his inmost corners. He devoted two works to the German philosopher: Dopo Nietzsche (After Nietzsche: 1974), and Scritti su Nietzsche (Essays on Nietzsche: 1980). Colli’s interpretation is based on Nietzsche’s entire person, conscious of the premise that Nietzsche’s philosophy acts upon life, and that life is attracted by life and not by abstract and rigid thought, but by thought that merges with life itself. Nietzschean thought was Colli’s life-long companion. But to understand Nietzsche meant seizing his thinking in its integrity, unabridged. This also meant reading his works as a philologist. In 1958, he proposed a retranslation of Nietzsche’s works to the Italian publisher Einaudi. Given Nietzsche’s reputation as a notoriously fascistic philosopher, celebrated ad nauseam by the Nazis and rejected for the same reasons by left-wing culture, Einaudi, paragon of the resistance to fascism and sympathetic to communism, refused to participate in the project of rehabilitating Nietzsche’s works by the restoration of the authentic original text. In 1958, the publisher Adelphi (born from this project) and Gallimard, the prestigious French publisher, became partners to finance the project. In 1967, the German publisher De Gruyter joined the project, followed by the Japanese publisher Hakusuisha.

 Marie-José Tramuta

As Colli dug deeper into his subject he realized that he would have to start anew. He was given access to the Nietzsche archives in Weimar and began the gigantic undertaking of the critical edition of Nietzsche’s works that he achieved with Mazzino Montinari. Colli and Montinari, as they put it, spent fifteen years “gripping, squeezing, exhausting, putting to pieces, reconstructing” a work that had been subject to misappropriations and to misunderstandings. Their critical edition has become the universal reference. Death took Colli by surprise in January 1979, just as he was finishing the third volume (of a project of eleven) of La sapienza greca. Following Nietzsche’s example, Colli drew from the Greek sources and immersed himself in pre-Socratic thought. But to understand it, to seize the totality of this wisdom, he had to swim upstream, even farther than Diels and Kranz’s famous research in Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, to draw on religious thought: Apollo, Dionysus, Orpheus, and the enigmas of Eleusis. Colli died, exhausted, without completing this titanic enterprise. Colli’s project to reform Diels and Kranz edition in La sapienza greca must be placed in the context of his own philosophical doctrine that included full awareness of the perplexity and the criticism that his philological results and his options as a translator could provoke. His goals as a philologist consisted not only in the study of the written word, but in a global vision, a philosophical perspective, of Logos as expression. Of La sapienza greca he said: “In order to avoid the danger of adapting this thought that is so very distant from us to the patterns and problems of modern man, we will here resort to the opposite temptation. Rather than look for support in the interpretation of ancient Greek wisdom from the interventions of later philosophers, we will try to go upstream, beyond wisdom, to try to discover what was before wisdom, what its background was” (Colli 1977: 15). Colli sets about seizing the birth of Logos, of reason, in expression. For Colli, behind wisdom stands folly. Mania is represented as the base of divination. Folly is the matrix of wisdom, through Dionysus and Apollo, here not in opposition but complementary – Dionysus through the immediate, interior folly, and Apollo through the folly of expression and knowledge. As Fritz Graf says in a review of the book, the source of philosophy is folly, mania. The way of cognition in Presocratic philosophy, in his opinion, was akin to that of ecstasy, and the Presocratics were not philosophers (philosophy begins with Plato), but sages, teachers of wisdom, sapienza. In the budding of dialectics, Logos was a polemos, a dialogue or conversation played out by two’s or three’s, on a background of enigma and verbal jousting, meaning contact and immediacy (not mediation). It took place on the basis of games and violence with Dionysus and Apollo, and including the Eleusinian mysteries. With Plato, by contrast, thought becomes literature. From this point on, Colli’s thought-process unfurled under this paradox: defending expression while promoting the written word in order to spread ideas.



Chapter 9.  Giorgio Colli, a master of time 

In La nascita della filosofia (The Birth of Philosophy: 1975), Colli continued his research on the origins of philosophy. Plato called philosophy “love of wisdom, his own educative research, linked to the written word, to the literary form of dialogue” (Colli 1975:  42), and in this sense philosophy is perceived by Colli as a phenomenon of decadence. The love of wisdom indicates that wisdom is no longer present: “There is no continuous, homogeneous development between wisdom and philosophy. What makes philosophy appear is an expressive reform, the intervention of a new literary form, a filter through which the knowledge of what came before finds itself conditioned” (Colli 1975: 17). The frozen forms of Plato’s dialogues do not restore the immediacy of polemos. The Symposium’s author himself, in the Seventh Letter (if one accepts its authenticity) refers to a non-written doctrine orally reserved to the tiny group of his disciples at the Academy. For Colli, Plato has two sides, one mystic, the Plato of the Seventh Letter, the other rationalist, creator of philosophy, of pure concepts, who finds no grace in Colli’s eye. In the diary recording the progress of his work, Colli writes, on September 23, 1964, at Weimar, “If it had been taken into account that Plato wrote his dialogues as entertainment and even to acquire prestige among a large audience (thus serving his political ambitions), the history of philosophy would not be what it is (one would be ashamed to found on them the speculations that followed). It is thus upon an error that all Platonism has been based for the last two thousand years” (Colli 1982: 193). As an editor he defended expression, and through the written word he condemned the decadence of the written word. Montinari said that it was not the written word but action that defined Colli. He found the same immediacy, the same contact, the famous thymos, in his activity as Professor of Philosophy in Pisa, where he taught for more than thirty years. As an editor he encouraged the publication of Voltaire, Pascal, Machiavelli, Fermat, Leopardi, Einstein, Plato, Stendhal, Newton, among others. His introductions were later regrouped under the title Per un’ enciclopedia degli autori classici (Towards an Encyclopedia of Classical Authors: 1980), to be considered as an ideal symposium. And where is Colli the translator in all this activity? The translator is a shadow. The language of the original text is reflected by the translator’s language, a “reflection” characterized by obliquity, anamorphosis, shadow theatre. One of my Italian friends, Professor Antonio Prete, who has translated Charles Baudelaire to Italian, put it this way: “Translation is always a state of shadow. One always translates subsequently. To translate is to be in the shadow of the subsequent.” To quote Ludmilla Marjanska, To translate is to speak With a foreign voice Is to change faces, to live

 Marie-José Tramuta

Another life, to die And to be reborn from death. There is always an effect of rebirth in translation, a nekuia, a descent to Hades, and its aftermath. Every translator knows this fearsome experience. It is the wakening or awakening of the transmitted voice that counts, and if I have hardly spoken of my own activity as a translator, it is because it is contained in this form of listening, in this code of ethics, in this interiority, in this respiration that no theory can render in a satisfying manner. In La sapienza greca Colli wanted to descale, to undo the inlays, the excess of interpretation that confused the words of the sages, the same way he attempted to free Nietzsche’s words from the inlays of an ideology that led its readers astray. The title of Colli’s first book, Physis Kryptesthai Philei, is usually translated as “Nature loves to hide.” At the end of his life, in the third volume of La sapienza greca, a few days before his death, Colli retranslates this phrase as “Birth loves to hide.” There is a word which condenses Giorgio Colli’s whole activity and thought: vissutezza. First proposed by Colli, this neologism could be translated by another neologism: livingness. It contains all the terms of his philosophy: memory, enigma, contact, life, action. Later, Colli will replace vissutezza by immediacy. By “immediacy” he means contact expressed through a mediation which is at the same time a representation: “The equivalence between the hidden and the manifest is similar to the equivalence between an original text and its translation, or rather, since the quality is different, between a piece of music and its translation to words” ( Colli 1982: 97). Representation, meaning the substitution of an object for a subject, does not express the hidden quality that signals immediacy: “ Birth loves to hide.” Physis is better expressed by “birth” then by arkhé, the beginning that reveals Mnemosyne. For Colli, this idea belongs to the nature of expression: it “indicates, alludes to, manifests something that is presupposed, and is thus related, in temporal terms, to the past ” (Colli 1982: 436). Thus, Physis kryptesthai philei. Livingness, contact and immediacy determine the new translation of the Heraclitean fragment. Colli tries to rediscover the Physicians’ thymos, the commencement that is also “command,” arkhé, and it is here that his thought is no longer philosophy but poetry, for the reasons evoked, and for the implications of real presences (Steiner 1989). It is poetry that is closest to the Physicians’ thought. We find an echo in Colli’s contemporary, the poet Eugenio Montale, in a passage from Lemon Trees:

See, in these silences where things give over and seem on the verge of betraying their final secret, sometimes we feel we’re about to uncover an error in Nature,



Chapter 9.  Giorgio Colli, a master of time 

the still point of the world, the link that won’t hold, the thread to untangle that will finally lead To the heart of a truth. The eye scans its surroundings, the mind inquires aligns divides in the perfume that gets diffused at the day’s most languid. It’s in these silences you see in every fleeting human shadow some disturbed Divinity. (trans. Jonathan Gallassi) At the end of La nascita della filosofia Colli concludes that “Our intention was to propose a picture of the birth of philosophy. At the very moment philosophy is born, here we abandon it. But what we find important to suggest is everything that precedes philosophy, this trunk that tradition names ‘wisdom’ is for us, their faroff descendants, and following a paradoxical inversion of time, more vital than philosophy itself ” (Colli 1975: 110). In this sense, just as paradoxical, Colli is a master of time. Of course Colli also wanted to be the poet of his own life, and perhaps poetry alone is still able to express the ineffable, the “hidden pathos” (Heraclitus again). So to conclude, let us consider a few lines by the French poet Robert Desnos. The lover’s lyrics might well be those of the translator. And with this we would like to show that a translator is first and foremost a reader, or, better still, a listener.

I’ve dreamed of you so much you’re losing your reality. …………………. I’ve dreamed of you so much, walked so much, spoken and lain with your phantom that perhaps nothing more is left me than to be a phantom among phantoms and a hundred times more shadow than the shadow that walks and will joyfully walk on the sundial of your life.

Bibliography Barnes, Jonathan. 1979. “Greek Wisdom II”. Classical Review 29.242–243. Colli, Giorgio. 1969. Filosofia dell’espressione. Milano: Adelphi. Colli, Giorgio. 1974. Dopo Nietzsche. Milano: Adelphi. Colli, Giorgio. 1975. La nascita della filosofia. Milano: Adelphi. Colli, Giorgio. 1977. La sapienza greca, I: Dioniso, Apollo, Eleusis, Orfeo, Museo, Iperborei, Enigma. Milano: Adelphi.

 Marie-José Tramuta Colli, Giorgio. 1980. Scritti su Nietzsche. Milano: Adelphi. Colli, Giorgio. 1980. Per un’ enciclopedia degli autori classici. Milano: Adelphi. Colli, Giorgio. 1982. La ragione errabonda. Milano: Adelphi. Colli, Giorgio, 1988. Philosophie de l’expression, trans. Marie-José Tramuta. Combas: Editions de l’Eclat. Colli, Giorgio. 1990. La sagesse grecque, vol. I, trans. Marie-José Tramuta. Combas: Edition de l’Eclat. Desnos, Robert. 2004. The Voice of Robert Desnos, Selected Poems, trans. William Kulick. Riverdale-on-Hudson, NY: Sheep Meadow Press. Graf, Fritz. 1979. “Greek Wisdom I”. Classical Review 29:239–242. Montale, Eugenio. 1997. Cuttlefish Bones in Collected poems, trans., with annotations, Jonathan Galassi. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1995. Complete Works: Unfashionable Observations, vol. 2, trans., with afterword, Richard T. Gray. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1997. Human, All Too Human (1), trans., with afterword, Gary Handwerk. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1999. Unpublished Writings from the Period of Unfashionable Observations, vol. 11, trans., with afterword, Richard T. Gray. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Steiner, George. 1975. After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Steiner, George. 1989. Real Presences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

chapter 10

The semantics of invention Translation into Esperanto Humphrey Tonkin The particular challenges of translating Winnie-the-Pooh into a planned language like Esperanto include grappling with culture-specific and idiomatic phraseology, word-play, the choice of proper names, and an audience divided between children and adults. The problem is none the less made simpler because there does exist a literary tradition in Esperanto and particularly a tradition of translation that goes back to the very beginnings of the language: its author Zamenhof translated several major literary works, beginning with Hamlet, published just seven years after the language was launched. He did so in part to increase the flexibility and range of his language. Furthermore, Zamenhof created a past for Esperanto by drawing on the common semantic stock of European languages. Walter Benjamin’s idea of the “pure language,” reine Sprache, lying behind a literary work has an obvious connection with the linguistic creativity of Zamenhof and other planners of languages. In a sense, even the original literature of Esperanto is translated, because Esperanto is a language of bilinguals that mediates between cultures and the languages that convey those cultures. Translating Shakespeare into Esperanto presents particular problems because of the density of meaning in the Shakespearean text and because of the importance of retaining its playability. Historical distance is also an issue, especially when translating into a relatively new language like Esperanto.

One day, when Christopher Robin and Winnie-the-Pooh and Piglet were all talking together, Christopher Robin finished the mouthful he was eating and said carelessly: “I saw a Heffalump to-day, Piglet.” “What was it doing?” asked Piglet. “Just lumping along,” said Christopher Robin. “ I don’t think it saw me.” “I saw one once,” said Piglet, “At least, I think I did,” he said. “Only perhaps it wasn’t.” A. A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh, p. 56 Piglet’s commentary on the ephemeral nature of the imagination can stand as a suitable epigraph to a chapter on translation into the international language

 Humphrey Tonkin

Esperanto, a planned or invented language – not least because Christopher Robin takes command of the discourse from the outset by framing it, quite literally, in his own terms – the made-up term Heffalump. Piglet and Pooh are left to make sense of something that manifestly makes no sense, or at least just enough sense to confuse. Such, one might imagine, would be the fate of the speaker of Esperanto attempting to translate a literary work into that language. A blind man and a Heffalump, as it were. How do words mean in Esperanto? How can the complexity of meaning that we find in, say, English, be conveyed in a made-up language? And in what sense can Esperanto be described as made-up?1 Years ago, my friend Mark Starr, an old-time leftist who was for many years the educational secretary of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union and was involved in a nasty dustup with the right when Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia tried to name him director of adult education for the City of New York in 1943, called me in Philadelphia to say that his friend Elliot Macrae, the president of E. P. Dutton, the publisher, had received a rather strange manuscript and wanted advice on it. Written in spidery pencil on a sheaf of paper torn from yellow pads, it was a translation into Esperanto of the children’s book Winnie-the-Pooh. Macrae was planning to write to the translator, an elderly lady from California, informing her that Dutton was disinclined to publish an Esperanto translation of Winnie-thePooh, for which he suspected there would be only a very limited market (and whose handwritten manuscript struck him as daunting even for the best of stenographers); but he decided to check with Mark Starr, a longtime enthusiast for Esperanto, before doing so. And Starr got in touch with me. I asked to see the manuscript. As an active user of Esperanto for a number of years, I felt I could judge whether it was worth our attention. What I found was something of a surprise. The translator was Ivy Kellerman Reed, who, almost sixty years earlier, had done a quite sprightly translation of Shakespeare’s As You Like It, which was performed by professional actors in a Washington, DC, park on the occasion of the Sixth World Congress of Esperanto in 1910 – presumably in the presence of Dr. Zamenhof, the founder of Esperanto, himself. The present translation was plodding by comparison. Ralph Lewin, who taught at the Scripps Oceanographic Institute in San Diego, had helped Mrs. Reed with it, but, even with his assistance, it lacked the requisite energy. What was I to do? The chance of having a publisher as illustrious as Dutton produce a book in Esperanto struck me, as a practicing Esperantist, as too good to pass up, but I could hardly

1. The question of how to identify Esperanto is pursued by Blanke (1987) in an important essay. Blanke argues, convincingly, for the term “planned language,” in preference to such terms as “artificial language,” “constructed language,” “universal language,” “auxiliary language,” etc.



Chapter 10.  Translation into Esperanto 

recommend this somewhat uninspired effort. So, with the aplomb of the book’s illustrious hero, Winnie-the-Pooh himself, I Hit on a Plan. Under the guise of typing the manuscript so that we would have a clean text to examine, I set about what was essentially a re-translation. I renamed the characters, rewrote all the songs, and made countless adjustments to the balance of the text. And I did all this at lightning speed, for fear that Mr. Macrae and his publishing house might forget about it if I took too long. While I showed it to the putative translators and they gave their blessing, it was essentially a new text. Elliot Macrae died soon after. One of his last acts as a publisher was to agree to publish. The book appeared in 1972, with prefatory material in which I introduced the English reader to Esperanto, and a glossary. Although Dutton is no longer the publisher, the book has enjoyed steady sales ever since. Between that first typed version and the final, published text, it went through numerous further revisions and all manner of improvements proposed by such figures as William Auld, who was later to become the first Esperanto writer nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature, the biographer of Zamenhof Marjorie Boulton, the poet Reto Rossetti, the psycholinguist Victor Sadler, and the now retired Professor of Phonetics at University College London, John C. Wells. Thus as an Esperanto translation it acquired a certain iconicity. As I polished the text, I pored over numerous other translations of the book, made available to me by the publisher, including the witty Latin translation and the rather less inspiring versions in French and Italian. I also grappled with the question of audience. Is Winnie-the-Pooh a children’s book, pure and simple? It may have started out as such (though I suspect that its primary audience was always the child on the edge of self-awareness), but today it is more than that – in fact a children’s book whose audience is in part adults. I tried to take this bifurcated audience into consideration as I translated and corrected. The names were a particular problem. In translating out of English, how important is it to make the names fit Esperanto orthography and grammar? What characteristics of the original names should one seek to preserve in Esperanto? The problem starts with Pooh himself. The origins of the “Winnie” part of his name are obscure, but appear to be derived from Winnie, the name of a black bear in the London Zoo (donated by a Canadian soldier from Winnipeg), while the connection of the Pooh part with excretion seems inescapable (despite the different explanation provided on page 20 of the original text). Fortunately the interjection “pu” in Esperanto, uttered in response to a bad smell, has much the same connotation as “pooh” in English. I settled for Winnie-la-Pu in order to convey a sense of the Englishness of the book while also making a concession to Esperanto (Lenard’s Latin translation Winnie Ille Pooh follows a similar principle). Piglet, strictly speaking, means the young of a pig rather than a little pig, but I decided that Porketo (little pig) gave a better sense of the original than Porkido (the young

 Humphrey Tonkin

of a pig). Small children, after all, are likely to be more interested in appearance than in provenance. Eeyore, which Reed had rendered, awkwardly, as Ijoro (j’s are pronounced as y’s in Esperanto), struck me as unacceptable, since Esperantospeaking donkeys do not say “eeyore!” Kálmán Kalocsay’s term for a bray (first used, I believe, in the 1920s in his poem Ezopa Fablo) was “ia!” and so Ia seemed a suitable name for Eeyore (“ia” in Esperanto also means “any kind of,” which also struck me as a name sufficiently disrespectful to evoke protest from Eeyore, a creature permanently suffering from a weak self-image). Most admirable about the Latin translation was its author’s skill in finding equivalent devices for the numerous puns and wordplays with which the original abounds – devices that are based above all on the ironic distance between the actual reader and the characters in the book (Lenard 1960). But the characters in the book also operate in their own ironic space: Christopher Robin’s grounded awareness of the fictive nature of his animals’ adventures, and his own vaguely imperialist interventions on their behalf (this is a very British book), are matched by our own sense that the entire structure that Christopher Robin has created for himself is one that we have experienced but moved beyond. We enter into a conspiracy with Christopher Robin to keep his stuffed animals alive, but with the tacit understanding that they are, indeed, just stuffed animals. And the ridiculous behavior of the animals is, in its way, merely a distorted image of the ridiculous behavior of adults themselves. The work is unusual in that it contains its ideal reader, Christopher Robin, as both innocent participant and knowing critic. In short, the book, situated in liminal territory between childhood and adulthood, is a translator’s minefield (or perhaps goldmine) of contrasting linguistic registers, lexical jokes, contrived solemnities, and restricted witticisms.2 The book in its Esperanto form fits with a long tradition of translation into Esperanto. When, in Warsaw in 1887, Zamenhof published his first little book on Esperanto – an introduction to the language sufficient to allow people to begin learning it – it appeared in four editions: Russian, Polish, French, and German, with Hebrew following in 1888 and English, Swedish and Yiddish in 1889. Thus the very introduction to the language was itself a translation. Each edition had the same contents: (1) a foreword explaining the principles and genesis of the language, (2) six “specimens of the international language,” (3) a section containing a pledge, to be filled out and mailed to Zamenhof, that the reader will learn Esperanto provided a certain number of others pledge to do the same, (4) a “Complete Grammar of the International Language” on six pages, and (5) a brief vocabulary, in the International Language and the target language, of rather less than a thousand 2. The book served as the raw material for Frederick C. Crews’s brilliant parody of literary criticism The Pooh Perplex (1963), and a later volume The Postmodern Pooh (2001).



Chapter 10.  Translation into Esperanto 

roots, which, if used in conjunction with the grammar, will allow the reader to understand a simple International Language text (Boulton 1960: 33–39). The design could not be simpler. Interestingly, the vocabulary offers nothing by way of explanation as to why Zamenhof chooses the roots he chooses, nor does Zamenhof explore the semantic complexities of those choices: this is simply a glossary, not an explanatory dictionary. In essence, the roots carry with them the semantics of their source languages, or at least the semantics of a kind of pan-European reservoir of meaning. They were selected, it would seem, at least in part to maximize this sense of a common heritage and a common semantics. The six “specimens of the international language” consist of (1) the Lord’s Prayer, (2) a brief passage from the beginning of the Book of Genesis, (3) a letter in the new language, (4) an original poem Mia penso (My thought), (5) a translation of a brief poem by Heine (Mir träumte von einem Königskind: En sonĝo princinon mi vidis), and (6) a second original poem Ho, mia kor’ (Oh my heart). In 1888 Zamenhof followed his first book on Esperanto with a second. In it, he comments further on his project, replying to criticisms that he has received, and discussing his plan to collect pledges. He supplements this introductory section with sixteen paragraph-long readings so that learners of the language “may repeat in practice the rules of the international grammar and clearly understand the meaning and use of the suffixes and prefixes.” These readings are followed by a complete translation of The Shadow (La ombro), a fairy tale by Hans Andersen retranslated from the German, and by a brief collection of fifteen proverbs (Kia patrino, tia filino: Like mother, like daughter; En sia urbeto neniu estas profeto: No one is a prophet in his/her village – and so on). Completing the brochure are two poems – a translation of the student song Gaudeamus Igitur by “Hemza” (probably Zamenhof himself) and another, somewhat awkward, translation of a Heine poem (Lieb Liebchen, leg’s Händchen aufs Herze mein), this time bearing the initials K.D. but apparently the work of Leo Belmont (Leopold Blumenthal), who had bought Zamenhof ’s brochure in August 1887 and begun to learn the language. Thus translation, and also original literary composition, was a part of the language from the beginning (Tonkin 1993, 2002a). Zamenhof, I believe, had two principal reasons for such inclusion. First, the existence of literary works in a language is a guarantee that it has a life of its own, and that it is connected to the cultural past: it declares that Esperanto is not a code, but rather a work of art grounded in earlier works of art. Second, it obliges the language to expand into domains in which it may not yet have been used in practice. Thus the language of literature opens the way to the language of experience. “We should not avoid difficult translations,” Zamenhof wrote. “On the contrary, we should seek them out and conquer them, because only in that way will the language be fully developed”

 Humphrey Tonkin

(Waringhien 1983: 149–150).3 As if to prove his point, and amid his many other activities, both professionally and as the begetter not just of a language but very soon of a movement of users of that language, Zamenhof launched a program of translation that would have daunted many others.4 His first major undertaking was Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1894), and this was followed (considerably later in his career, when he had the time to translate, and a publisher willing to publish the results) by the publication of Gogol’s Government Inspector (1907), Schiller’s Die Räuber (1908), Goethe’s Iphigenia auf Tauris (1908), Molière’s Georges Dandin (1908), and the Polish novelist and activist Eliza Orzeszko’s Marta (1910). During these years Zamenhof also published extensive translations of the Old Testament (he completed his translation of the entire Old Testament in 1915), and at his death he left translations of the complete fables of Hans Andersen (by way of a German translation from the Danish), Heine’s Rabbi of Bacharach (published 1924), Sholem Alechem’s The High School (published 1924), and the Old Testament (published, with many corrections – theological rather than linguistic – as part of the Esperanto Bible, which appeared in 1926). The initial emphasis on drama (Shakespeare, Gogol, Schiller, Goethe) can be readily explained: Zamenhof was interested in providing models not just for written Esperanto but also for the spoken language of his newly-founded language community, and theatre provided a means to do so. Unlike most other languages, it was written Esperanto that informed spoken Esperanto, rather than the other way round. We need not dwell on the history of Esperanto itself, except as background to our topic. Although the language progressed more slowly than Zamenhof wished, it rapidly developed a following, and within two years the earliest Esperanto societies were in operation and the first periodical began to appear. Zamenhof was an idealist, in fact the kind of practical idealist, like Eliezer Ben Yehuda, the founder of modern Hebrew, that the cultural ferment of northeastern European Ashkenazi Jews was apt to produce. His ideals, particularly his views on religious ecumenism, were at odds with many of the more practical and down-to-earth bourgeois commercial types who adopted his language. They wanted a language that would serve the ordinary purposes of practical communication; Zamenhof saw himself as founding a far more spiritually rich community of like-minded citizens of the world (Korĵenkov 2009, 2010; Schor 2010). “Our language,” he wrote, “must serve not only for documents and contracts, but also for life” (Waringhien 1983: 150). Indeed, for a brief moment before the nations of Europe were swallowed up in the reassertion of nationalism in World War I, it seemed possible that, moving on the 3.

Translations from Esperanto in this chapter are the author’s.

4. Gaston Waringhien examines this “program of translation” in his essay “La tradukplano de Zamenhof ” (Waringhien 1983: 149–156).



Chapter 10.  Translation into Esperanto 

wings of an expanding technology, a new society of universal values might be born (Harper 2002:  160–163). Zamenhof ’s purpose was utterly serious, his linguistic goals courageously expansive. In The Search for a Perfect Language, Umberto Eco has suggested that languages like Esperanto are part of a strong and well established tradition in western culture – the search for a perfect means of communication (Eco 2005; see also Okrent 2009). The search intersects with the work of the translator at least in so far as translation is itself a search for meaning – for meaning in the source language (capturing the essence of the text to be translated) and its accurate transferal to the target language. This meaning, Walter Benjamin suggests, resides in “pure language,” reine Sprache, a phenomenon that underlies the individualized text: “A translation, instead of resembling the meaning of the original, must lovingly and in detail incorporate the original’s mode of signification, thus making both the original and the translation recognizable as fragments of a greater language” (Benjamin 1968: 78). This language, says Benjamin, is “imprisoned” in the original text and must be released, and thus “the great motif of integrating many tongues into one true language is at work” (1968: 77). The notion that between source and target there exists either an autonomous language (in Benjamin’s case the only autonomous language, round which there revolve the heteronomies of individual languages5) or an interlanguage functioning as an intermediary, resembles (in a very different sense) practical ways in which Esperanto has been used, for example as a black-box language in machine translation: in the DLT project run by the Dutch software firm BSO in the late 1980s, Esperanto played such a role, primarily as a disambiguating agent between languages (Sadler 1991). Esperanto has also been recommended, by both Auld (1976) and Waringhien (1987), as a language well suited for comparatist scholarship, occupying as it does a kind of space between languages. It requires little extension of Benjamin’s essentially mystical idea to point out that the process of creating a language resembles the pursuit of meaning that engages the translator. Much as Zamenhof sought meaning in the common Western linguistic heritage, so the translator searches for meaning in the semantic totality of an individual language: translation is a form of language-making. In the same way, Zamenhof ’s linguistic creation (often called in Esperanto a verko, a creative work) can be readily construed as the pursuit of the pure language to which Benjamin refers. Zamenhof ’s handful of original poems, particularly La Espero, confirm that such an idea was not far from his mind (Tonkin 2002b). Regardless of whether our position is essentially mystical or merely practical, what this implies is that translation

5.

In the sense in which Romaine (2000: 14) uses these terms.

 Humphrey Tonkin

into Esperanto is in some sense translation into a translation – because Esperanto is both an original language and also a relexification of European semantics.6 The obstacles confronting Zamenhof as he sat down to translate Hamlet were of course immense. He had chosen for his translation the work that most of those around him would probably have described as the greatest single work of western literature: Shakespeare was popular in both Germany and Russia, the two cultures from which Zamenhof drew his greatest inspiration, and, of all Shakespeare’s works, it was Hamlet that held prime of place. That was why Zamenhof chose it. The late nineteenth-century Hamlet of Central and Eastern Europe was no indecisive weakling, but the very epitome of the seeker after truth. In a celebrated essay, Turgenev refers to Hamlet as a dark and enigmatic figure, who yet “wages relentless war” against evil and “is irreconcilably at war with falsehood”; and “through this very quality he becomes one of the foremost champions of a truth in which he himself cannot fully believe” (Stříbrný 2000: 46). Examine the independence movements of Central Europe and Hamlet is never very far away. Thus Zamenhof begins his linguistic movement – the attempt to establish a second language for international communication beside the ethnic languages – with a revolutionary statement, a statement that at one blow might silence those who suggest that his language has no life. Internally, within the Esperanto movement, it was a brilliant move: it gave the early Esperantists a sense of cultural dignity, and above all it linked them with the elite cultures of Europe. In this sense the Hamlet translation can be seen as a political act – as indeed literary translation generally is (Spivak 1993), particularly if we see languages not as linguistic systems but as social institutions. It was also a symbolic act: if Hamlet can be conquered, so can everything else. Recently, in Poland, following a talk I had given on language policy in Europe, a questioner rose to take me to task for suggesting that translators mediate between languages. No, she maintained, we mediate between cultures. In a larger sense, she was of course correct. But, translating Hamlet in 1891, into a language barely four years old, between what and what, exactly, was Zamenhof mediating? The likelihood is that he used a German, or possibly a Polish, translation (or both), rather than the original English text, since his knowledge of English was limited; but of course by this time Shakespeare had drifted loose from his moorings on the south bank of the Thames: Turgenev claimed him for Russia; Schlegel claimed him for Germany (Stříbrný 2000). 6. Ortega, attempting, in a 1937 essay, to explain the relative ease with which it is possible to translate a scientific text, takes a less kindly view of such intermediate languages, describing the language of scientific terminology, for example, as a “pseudolanguage” – a “Volapuk, an Esperanto established by a deliberate convention” among those who cultivate a given discipline, regardless of their original language (Ortega 2000).



Chapter 10.  Translation into Esperanto 

So the Shakespeare that Zamenhof translated was not the Shakespeare of the First Folio (which had long been assigned to the category of untranslatables in Jakobson’s sense [Jakobson 1959]) but the already translated Shakespeare of European culture. We should not look in Zamenhof ’s translation for the exactitude of a scholarly translation based on the original, but rather for a living and performable text. Furthermore, it is a text that has circulated through many languages: fidelity to the original is less important than bringing the international Shakespeare, the disembodied and circulating text, to earth in the particularity of Esperanto. Zamenhof was engaged in capturing the text – and he was doing so in a linguistic net of his own creation. Thus his translation is much more than a mere rendering of an English original in another language: it is an attempt to prove the universality of the original by rendering it in the language of universality. Benjamin, famously, quotes Mallarmé, in a passage particularly fitting in this context: “The imperfection of languages consists in their plurality, the supreme one is lacking: thinking is writing without accessories, or even whispering, the immortal word still remains silent; the diversity of idioms on earth prevents everybody from uttering the words which otherwise, at one single stroke, would materialize as truth” (Benjamin 1968:  77). Zamenhof ’s Hamlet was the seeker after truth; and Esperanto, if Umberto Eco is right, was part of the search for the perfect language, the language of truth. As Benjamin himself suggests, “A real translation is transparent; it does not cover the original, does not block its light, but allows the pure language … to shine upon the original all the more fully.” Zamenhof had taken a huge risk in providing so little guidance on the meaning of the roots that he included in his first book of 1887. The possibilities of misunderstanding, given the range of mother tongues of the earliest Esperantists, were vast. But his options were unpromising. To render his language inert, by pulling elements from existing languages while suppressing or severely limiting their semantic freight, would make no sense – indeed would bring Esperanto dangerously close to what Jakobson calls intersemiotic translation, between verbal and non-verbal (or deverbalized) signs. Zamenhof counted on the kind of linguistic convergence that arises when people are eager to communicate and to be understood, and he also relied on what the early speakers could themselves bring to the language, rather than dictating such matters a priori. By choosing words from existing languages, Zamenhof empowered the earliest speakers of the language to bring their own semantic experience to bear on its structures. In fact, the lexicon rapidly acquired a semantic valency that proved to be remarkably consistent. As we have noted, in its infancy Esperanto was mostly a written language, which helped, since the newly established norms circulated widely through the printed word, thus assisting in stabilizing the language.

 Humphrey Tonkin

Zamenhof ’s translation was therefore based on a common European semantics. In effect, it was Zamenhof ’s attempt to take the translated Hamlet one step further by expressing its common Europeanness in a new, international medium (and also, incidentally, to claim for his language what Even-Zohar [1990/2000] would call the literary polysystem of Europe). So the mediation was above all between two attitudes of mind – that rooted in nationalism and particularity, and that rooted in a sense of common heritage. The latter was, of course, dangerously speculative, but it had been given meaning by Zamenhof ’s highly conscious efforts to construct a past for his newly constructed language – much as nationalist movements construct an interpretation of history that justifies their political action in the present (see for example Hobsbawm & Ranger 1983). Because of his wholesale transfer of the common semantic base to which I have referred, Zamenhof relexified a pre-existing collection of shared understandings: Esperanto was not so much a new language as a restatement of the old in a new context. One could call it a translation of the European semantic base. Translating the literary works of the past was one way of reaffirming this new context, as indeed was the translation of the Bible. We might also note that Zamenhof included proverbs in his first book. His father had a particular interest in collecting proverbs from many languages and looking for connections among them; the son was interested in proverbs as a kind of instant folklore for his new language (Zamenhof 1961). One cannot construct a linguistic present without constructing a linguistic past. If Zamenhof had to deal with the sheer literary eminence of the work he chose to translate first, and if he was also faced with the issue of addressing a kind of nascent semantics, in addition he had a third potential problem to contend with: how to handle the blank verse of his original. But precedent was already laid down. His choice of a poem by Heine for the poetic translation in his 1887 book, and the two original poems that he wrote, established from the beginning that his literary Esperanto was to be an accentual language: despite the Latinate appearance of the language, he followed German prosodic models rather than, say, French.7 In 7. This is not to say that the language cannot be adapted to suit other prosodic approaches – as Grabowski proved in his translation of Juliusz Słowacki’s Polish-language tragedy Mazeppa, written in the 13-syllable lines (7 + 6) characteristic of epic poetry in that language. Grabowski further developed the style in his translation of Mickiewicz (1918). Vallienne rendered his early translation of the first two books of the Aeneid in tolerable representations of the Latin hexameter. Leppäkoski reproduced the movement of the original, and its 16-syllable lines, in his translation of the Finnish Kalevala. But the poetic mainstream (picked up also by the poets of China and Japan later on) remained accentual. Kalocsay, representative of that mainstream, is remarkably successful in his translation of Dante’s Inferno in reproducing the rhythmic hendecasyllables of the original. For a brief English-language introduction to Esperanto poetry,



Chapter 10.  Translation into Esperanto 

Esperanto the accent falls on the second to last syllable of each word, and this fact, coupled with rules for the elision of the at the ends of nouns (such elision can offset what might otherwise be a trochaic emphasis to the poetic line), gives the language a naturally iambic cadence, which in turn allows it to be rendered in the iambic pentameter of a Shakespeare relatively easily. On the other hand, the lexical category of most roots is expressed by suffixes, thus reducing the number of monosyllables and expanding the number of syllables required to render, let us say, a passage in English. This syllabic prolixity is offset by rules for the compounding of roots that allow for extreme concision, and the system of affixation also produces wide flexibility among parts of speech. Thus, the root pal-, meaning “pale,” yields pala in its adjectival form, palo in its substantival form (“paleness”), pale as an adverb (“palely”), palas (“is pale”) in the present tense, and so on. There are other ways of expressing these same concepts (paleco, estas pala, etc.), each carrying its own particular contextualized meaning, so that the structures of the language also yield a wide range of synonyms. Thus, while the language functions differently from English (indeed in certain important respects differently from all its source languages), it offers an openness of form and structure that is a boon to the translator. Like any other language, Esperanto is subject to language change. Much of that process has come about not so much from changes in the basic structure as from discoveries of latent possibilities in the structure as it was originally conceived.8 At the surface level, the language appears to be a fairly conventional Indo-European language with heavy Romance elements, but while Zamenhof based his language on the vocabulary and semantics of European languages, he used grammatical principles akin to those of what used to be called isolating languages, in which invariant lexical elements are used to construct utterances. In his brochure he is rather careful to emphasize that he has presented the grammar of his new language in terms readily understandable by those familiar with the grammatical terms and categories used for the languages that they might know, particularly Latin, but that it actually functions according to rather different principles, involving “words” (today we would call them lexical items) that can be combined in a more or less infinite series of combinations (see Janton 1993: 44–45). Thus, it

see Tonkin 1993. On prosody in Esperanto, see Kalocsay, Waringhien & Bernard 1968. On original literature in Esperanto in general, see Sutton 2008. 8. A majority of the lexical elements in the language have entered Esperanto independently of Zamenhof: in providing the bare bones of a lexis, he wished to encourage the active linguistic participation of all members of his speech community.

 Humphrey Tonkin

is erroneous to think of grammatical affixes as mere appendages: potentially they can stand on their own. Zamenhof writes as follows: I introduced a complete dismemberment of ideas into independent words, so that the whole language consists, not of words in different states of grammatical inflexion, but of unchangeable words.... The various grammatical inflexions, the reciprocal relations of the members of a sentence, are expressed by the junction of immutable syllables. But the structure of such a synthetic language being altogether foreign to the chief European nations, and consequently difficult for them to become accustomed to, I have adapted this principle of dismemberment to the spirit of the European languages, in such a manner that anyone learning my tongue from grammar alone... will never perceive that the language differs in any respect from that of his mother-tongue. (Ludovikito 1991: 306)

Accordingly, it is possible for scholars, in describing the structure and conceptual base of Esperanto, to see it as everything from revolutionary and non-European to a mere simplification of Latin (see Parkvall 2010). We know very little about Zamenhof ’s connection with the scholarly currents in linguistics in his day, but in fact the noted Polish linguist Jan Baudouin de Courtenay, a precursor of Ferdinand de Saussure and his structuralism, was developing his linguistic theories at the Universities of Kazan and Tartu at the same time as Esperanto was coming into being (he later became the founding president of the Polish Esperanto Association), and René de Saussure, one of Ferdinand’s younger brothers, was a prominent Esperantist. Baudouin de Courtenay was among the first linguists to articulate the difference between language (an abstract structure) and speech (the rule-bound but idiosyncratic behavior of the individual). Zamenhof ’s keen awareness of this distinction, and his emphasis on building a speech community as well as constructing a language, was one of the principal reasons why his language, almost unique among planned languages, developed a significant following, leading in turn to the establishment of a functionally autonomous language community. At the same time, his structuralist approach to the language allowed non-Europeans to find familiar elements in it, so that, quite early on, Esperanto broke out of the semantic and lexical cocoon of its European origins to embrace other parts of the world. One of the first Esperanto poets, Antoni Grabowski, was among those who experimented most extensively with the language. Others followed. Thus, Esperanto literature, both original and translated, was a key element in the ordered development of the language, providing models for language use, the incorporation of new realms of experience into the lexical and semantic repertoire, opportunities for linguistic experiment, and a sense of cultural solidarity. The major literary movements of the twentieth century have had their imitators and practitioners among writers in Esperanto (Sutton 2008). Great works of literature have been



Chapter 10.  Translation into Esperanto 

translated into the language: Mickiewicz’s Pan Tadeusz by Grabowski, around half of the plays of Shakespeare, Dante, Boccaccio, Camões, Cervantes, Goldoni, Petöfi, Ibsen, Baudelaire – but also Outlaws of the Marsh, Ba Jin, the Koran, Ihara, Tanizaki. Pleadin’s lexicon of Esperanto writers (2006) contains biographies of over 900 published authors. Perhaps this brief enumeration, more than any more theoretical argument, offers confirmation of the fact that translation into Esperanto is neither as paradoxical an exercise nor as unusual as it might otherwise appear. Esperanto is a second (or third or fourth) language for most of its speakers. Until recently, at least, linguists have been content to examine the behavior of native speakers of a language, regarding their use of the native (or first, or primary) language as somehow more authentic and typical. They have tended to ignore communities of second-language speakers. Likewise, their emphasis has tended to fall on speech rather than on writing. Literary scholars like to think that a literature is owned by the native speakers of a language, with second-language contributors mere addons; but increasingly this is an inadequate description even of the literatures of English or Spanish, and certainly of the literatures of many developing countries. Esperanto is uncommon in that its native speakers number no more than a few hundred and do not set its linguistic norms; and its development, as we have noted, has taken place as much through writing as through speech. These characteristics make it both developmentally conservative and also unusually open to potential influences (and often enrichment) from a range of languages. Translators into Esperanto tend to translate out of their native languages into the target language, rather than out of the source language and into their native language. The latter is surely the norm among translators. Working out of one’s native language has obvious advantages (Auld 1997: 60–62). When in recent years I came to translate two of Shakespeare’s plays, I found that my close acquaintance with his linguistic complexity was a huge advantage. It was also an advantage to have cut my teeth on the even more formidable problems of Winnie-the-Pooh. With Shakespeare, perhaps the first question that I had to tackle was the goal of the translation. When Zamenhof translated Hamlet he was probably less concerned with rendering its linguistic details than with presenting a smooth and readily recited text: he wanted Shakespeare’s text to resound in Esperanto with all the vitality that it reveals in the English original (and also in its German and Russian translations). Reto Rossetti describes the process as having Shakespeare read as though Shakespeare were writing in Esperanto (Tonkin 2006b: 218). Zamenhof ’s translation proved eminently playable when it was finally presented on the stage in Antwerp in 1928. When Leonard Newell retranslated the play thirty years after that, in the late 1950s, he was concerned to produce a translation as faithful to the original as possible – a task that he fulfilled with considerable skill

 Humphrey Tonkin

(Newell 1964) but that resulted in a text that seems weighed-down and cumbersome when we read it today and that would be extremely difficult actually to perform. One wonders exactly what Newell’s purpose was: perhaps to provide the non-English-speaker with the complete contents of Shakespeare’s text? His approach to the play is essentially textual; Zamenhof ’s is much more concerned with fidelity to character and action. Newell’s disadvantages were two: he did not move widely in the Esperanto community outside English-speaking countries, and, perhaps as a result, did not develop a sensitivity to the cadences of spoken Esperanto; and, secondly, his desire to fit every last element of Shakespeare’s text into his translation causes the text to expand out of control. Thus, Hamlet’s speech “Now all occasions do inform against me” (4.4) expands from 34 lines in the original to 42 in Newell, the “To be or not to be” speech (3.1) picks up an extra four lines, and so on. Newell neglects the incontrovertible fact that compression is an essential element of Shakespeare’s verse: the verse of the original explodes with meaning, and much of its energy derives from the organization of the individual line. He also fails to observe a principle well enunciated by Auld (1986: 93): avoid translating a word or expression out of context. Context is all. Early on, as I began my translation of Henry V (Tonkin 2003), I set myself what may seem an artificial limitation that in practice proved extremely valuable: my translation would have the same number of lines as the original and would, as far as possible, reproduce the lines as they appear. Shakespeare paragraphs his blank verse, and so my translation often broke with the latter principle, but I sought to shape and balance the lines rhetorically and linguistically as I imagine Shakespeare might have done had he, as Rossetti suggested, signed Zamenhof ’s pledge and learned the language. If this required jettisoning complexities, then, reluctantly, I did so. I sought also to maintain the approximate balance of run-on and end-stopped lines – a defining characteristic of the chronology of Shakespeare’s plays – and also sought to avoid, as Shakespeare avoided at this stage of his career, the addition of extra syllables. When, later, I translated The Winter’s Tale (Tonkin 2006a), I allowed for more run-on lines and more extra syllables, in accordance with Shakespeare’s later style. My goal was to render the explosive quality of the verse to which I have just alluded, and to do so in language that would make my translations playable on the stage. I continue to hope that one day someone will choose to perform them. Of course, I was making these translations in the first decade of the twenty-first century and my audience consisted of the speakers of a language 120 years old, with its established literary norms and with a vocabulary greatly expanded since Zamenhof ’s time. My translations reflect that. One day they will wear out and, we can only hope, new translations will replace them. While the Shakespearean style is



Chapter 10.  Translation into Esperanto 

an elevated style, and the rhetoric of an Esperanto translation should reflect that, it is not clear that it should make use of archaisms: we own the Shakespeare of today and the voice should be as timeless as we can make it. This consideration caused me to avoid both outdated locutions (such stylistic relics exist in Esperanto as they do in any other language) and anything that could be regarded as linguistic experiment. I believe that my Shakespeare translations include no neologisms – words invented by me – or near-neologisms – recent coinages of limited circulation. Henry V presents particular linguistic problems because among its characters are the non-native English speaker Fluellen, whose use of the English language seems often to lag behind the complexity of the ideas he attempts to express in it; and a collection of non-elite characters with a range of non-elite modes of expression. Rendering dialect and non-standard speech in Esperanto (in fact accurately rendering register in general) is a particular problem, best overcome by seeking analogous locutions in Esperanto, but not necessarily the same ones as in the original (Fluellen’s Welsh speech in Shakespeare’s original seems idiosyncratic in the extreme, and a stereotyped representation of the stage Welshman common in Elizabethan theatre). In addition, there are the French. Shakespeare has their leaders speak English, employing a common convention that irons out linguistic difference in the interests of audience comprehension. This is so except in the memorable scene in which the Princess Katherine attempts to learn English, ending the experience in shock at the sheer vulgarity of the English language. The scene depends on translingual puns, in which innocent English words, mangled by their French speakers, turn into homonyms of French obscenities. Shakespeare needs a second language in this scene, since he can hardly depict an English lesson in which the pupil speaks fluent English (though something similar has been achieved by Brian Friel with Irish and English in his brilliant play Translations); and thus he writes the scene in French. I was able to render the scene in Esperanto, having no need for a third language, and, since Esperanto has a quite rich vocabulary of obscene language (created mostly in the 1930s by the Hungarian poet Kalocsay, but rapidly absorbed, especially by young people, into everyday Esperanto), it was not difficult to turn innocent English into punning Esperanto vulgarities. Although the rank chauvinism (if that is what it is) of much of this play might seem to make it unsuitable for translation into Esperanto, of all Shakespeare’s plays it is one of the most sensitive to the nuances of language difference. Indeed the scene with Katherine just described comes immediately after Henry’s speech at the siege of Harfleur, whose principal subject is the horrors of rape by uncontrollable soldiers. The nonetheless hilarious scene that follows is therefore also, and more troublingly, a depiction of a kind of linguistic rape of the Princess Katherine, who is later to become one of the spoils of war.

 Humphrey Tonkin

These particular problems, and opportunities, presented by Henry V were accompanied, in both of my Shakespeare translations, by other more mundane issues: the problem of proper names, for example (the question of the extent to which they should conform to Esperanto orthography and grammar, already noted in connection with Pooh), the rendering of nuance related to status, the occasional wordplay – and ultimately, therefore, the degree of interpenetration of source and target. This last is a point of some importance in a language associated with an anti-nationalistic ideology. One does not have to accept the full implications of the Whorfian hypothesis in order to be aware that all languages carry with them, to a greater or lesser extent, ideological freight that frames their utterances. Finally, a translation must demonstrate communicative as well as linguistic competence: it is not enough to get one’s grammar right; one must also be able to move within a language as the speakers of that language move. When Newell translated Hamlet, he had the example of Zamenhof ’s translation before him. Mine was the first translation of Henry V. William Auld had translated the Crispin’s Day speech from Act 4 in a collection of translations mostly from twentieth-century English poetry called Omaĝoj, which appeared in 1987 (Auld 1987). I decided to ignore his translation, and in fact did not go back to it until after my translation had come out. My reasoning was that, if Auld had found solutions to problems that I was struggling with, those solutions would distort my own perception of their context: in translation, other people’s solutions may actually become limitations. Today, our two texts make an interesting comparison, from which contrasting translating principles can be adduced.9 For the most part, the translation of literary prose presents different problems from those presented by the poetry of Shakespeare, particularly difficulties of register, and often difficulties of historical distance,10 as in this passage from Daniel Defoe’s novel Moll Flanders (1722) and my attempt at a translation: I knew a woman that was so dexterous with a fellow, who indeed deserved no better usage, that while he was busy with her another way, conveyed his purse with twenty guineas in it out of his fob pocket, where he had put it for fear of her, and put another 9. Auld’s essays on translation are particularly valuable. On translation from English to Esperanto, see particularly his essay “La plej malfacila arto” (The most difficult art) in Auld 1986: 91–108. On “translatability” of poetry (and, incidentally, its importance in Esperanto) see “Pri la tradukado de poezio” in Auld 1978: 21–32, and on “The international language as a device for translating creative writing” (“La internacia lingvo kiel belarta tradukilo”) see the extensive essay in this same volume: Auld 1978: 95–157. The latter provides abundant specific examples. See also “La arto de la verstraduko en Esperanto” in Kalocsay 1985: 39–54 10. These are present in Shakespeare too, but the heightened speech of Shakespearean drama changes the nature of the historical mediation, because neither the original nor the translation can be said to reproduce the normal register at either side of the historical gap.



Chapter 10.  Translation into Esperanto 

purse with gilded counters in it into the room of it. After he had done he says to her, ‘Now han’t you picked my pocket?’ She jested with him, and told him she supposed he had not much to lose; he put his hand to his fob, and with his fingers felt that his purse was there, which fully satisfied him, and so she brought off his money. And this was a trade with her; she kept a sham gold watch and a purse of counters in her pocket to be ready on all such occasions, and I doubt not practised it with success. Mi konis virinon, kiu tiel lertis ĉe iu bonulo (kiu ja ne meritis pli bonan trakton), ke dum li okupiĝis pri ŝi laŭ alia difinita maniero, ŝi transportis lian monujon, kun dudek gineoj ene, el lia horloĝa poŝeto, kien li jam metis ĝin ĝuste pro timo pri ŝi, kaj metis alian monujon plenan je orumitaj disketoj en ties anstataŭon. Fininte sian prilaboron li diras al ŝi, “Nu, vi ne priŝtelis mian poŝon, ĉu?” Ŝi ŝercis kun li, dirante, ke ŝi supozas, ke li ne havas multon por perdi; li pripalpis sian poŝeton, kaj liaj fingroj konfirmis, ke lia monujo ĉeestas, kio plene kontentigis lin, kaj tiel ŝi liberigis lian monon. Kaj temis pri komerco ŝiaflanke: ŝi kutimis teni en la poŝo falsan oran horloĝon kaj saketon de disketoj por esti preta por ĉiuj okazoj, kaj mi neniel dubas, ke ŝi praktikis sian komercon sukcese.

The almost two and a half centuries separating us from this text have produced changes in phraseology (fellow, deserved no better usage, conveyed, into the room of it, han’t, brought off and so on). To what extent should the translator seek to convey that sense of distance, if at all? Obviously much will depend on the strategic purpose of the translation. The present-day reader of the original cannot put aside the alien nature of its turns of phrase: a translation that flattens such oddities and attempts a version of the text that might satisfy a contemporary of Defoe will be a translation without a living target. Antoine Berman’s well-known essay on “Translation and the Trials of the Foreign” (Berman 2000) suggests that preservation of foreignness (the concept of “foreignization”) is an important element in literary translation: the reader should be aware of the distance that the utterance has traveled. What is true of geographical distance is also true of historical distance. The issue is particularly vexed in the case of Esperanto: if a text is to expand the language, in the here and now, it must speak in a contemporary idiom; but if it is to convey a sense of historical distance, it must seek out the strange and unusual. There are other, more mundane problems associated with the preservation of distance in the Defoe passage. How easily will a simple translation of “while he was busy with her another way” convey to, say, a Japanese reader of Esperanto both the circumlocution employed and the meaning of that circumlocution? (The phrase “in another way” is a charmingly indirect means to explain what was actually going on, and it seems essential to preserve the balance between indirection and plain sense here.) The same is true of “after he had done.” I decided to add the word difinita, roughly equivalent to in another specific way, in the first instance, and I translated while he was busy with her with the somewhat mundane dum li okupiĝis pri ŝi, which translates as while he was occupied with her. Having sacrificed in some

 Humphrey Tonkin

measure that sense of busy-ness, I was able to work it in later by translating after he had done by fininte sian prilaboron, which translates as having finished his working-on (in Esperanto, if one works on something, oni laboras pri io; hence prilaboro is working on [something or someone]). As for archaisms in phraseology, I did my best to find locutions that would sound sufficiently different from customary turns of phrase to convey this sense of distance. The term brought off presented particular difficulties: in the eighteenth century, one brought off passengers from a ship by taking them by boat to the shore, or one brought off shipwrecked mariners in a rescue operation. The term therefore came to mean rescue. I decided to use the verb liberigi, to set free, rather than the literal term transportis, which I had in any case used earlier in the text to translate the term conveyed. Outside my topic on this occasion are the problems of translation out of Esperanto and into English. In many ways they are greater than going in the reverse direction. I have, for example, never seen translations of Esperanto poetry into English that even begin to reproduce the complexity of their originals: English is too constricting for the free-wheeling nature of expressivity in Esperanto (a noble attempt is Girvan McKay’s skilled English translation of Auld’s long poem La infana raso: McKay 2009). Poets choose to write in Esperanto not because they are born into it but because they detect particular qualities in Esperanto that cause them to use it. These qualities are different, almost by definition, from those of their native language. By exploiting them they may well render the result nearuntranslatable. In a measure the same is true of prose. My biggest translation project in prose was the translation, at the behest of the Soros family, of two autobiographical works by George Soros’s father, Tivadar, one on his adventures in World War I and the other about his survival, and that of his family, in Nazi-occupied Budapest (Tonkin 2000). The latter was published in Britain with its Esperanto title Maskerado and in the United States as Masquerade. Perhaps the most difficult aspect of the translation was Soros’s relative lack of skill in writing in Esperanto. I often found that I knew what he wanted to say, but that his rendering of his thoughts was accompanied by stylistic awkwardness. Was it my task faithfully to reproduce that awkwardness in my translation, or to produce a fluid text that carried its message with reasonable elegance? I elected, traditore, to do the latter, reasoning that Soros’s message was more important than his linguistic skills or lack of them. Need I say that my decision raises ethical issues of some complexity? But, retournons à nos moutons, or, more precisely, our stuffed animals…. I want to end where I began – with my quotation from Winnie-the-Pooh. It encapsulates some of the problems and the pleasures of translation into Esperanto. One day, when Christopher Robin and Winnie-the-Pooh and Piglet were all talking together, Christopher Robin finished the mouthful he was eating and said carelessly:



Chapter 10.  Translation into Esperanto 

“I saw a Heffalump to-day, Piglet.” “What was it doing?” asked Piglet. “Just lumping along,” said Christopher Robin. “ I don’t think it saw me.” “I saw one once,” said Piglet, “At least, I think I did,” he said. “Only perhaps it wasn’t.” A. A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh, p. 56 Unu tagon, kiam Kristoforo Robin kaj Winnie-la-Pu kaj Porketo kune konversaciis, Kristoforo Robin finmanĝis buŝplenon kaj diris kvazaŭ indiferente: “Mi vidis Hefelanton hodiaŭ, Porketo.” “Kion ĝi faris?” demandis Porketo. “Ĝi nur hefelis laŭ la vojo,” diris Kristoforo Robin, “Mi kredas ke ĝi ne vidis min.” “Mi iam vidis Hefelanton,” diris Porketo. “Almenaŭ mi kredas ke jes,” li diris. “Aŭ eble ĝi ne estis tio.” A. A. Milne, Winnie-la-Pu, p. 48

The heart of the matter is the Heffalump, whose reversed consonants and aspirated beginning are combined with the lumpish characteristics of what Pooh might have called, on some other occasion, a Very Large Animal.  Ivy Kellerman Reed had chosen to translate it as Hefalumpo, but that would really not do. To begin with, I had no reason to suppose that an Esperanto-speaking child would choose to aspirate the opening <e> of elephant as a British child might well do. Secondly, the word for lump in Esperanto is bulo, and lumpo carries no particular significance (though lumpio is a spring roll…). I decided to stay with the aspiration, reasoning that, since it would convey rather successfully Piglet’s terror later in the book at encountering Pooh with a honey pot on his head and mistaking him for the dreaded Heffalump, it would have its uses. Then I focused on Christopher Robin’s metacoinage “lumping along.” How could I create a noun that would easily generate an appropriate verb? The solution lay before me in the structure of Esperanto. The term Esperanto, as everyone acquainted with the history knows well, is derived from the pseudonym that Zamenhof used when he first published the language, Doktoro Esperanto, Dr. One-who-hopes. Originally, Esperanto was known as “the language of Dr. Esperanto,” which in due course was reduced to “the language of Esperanto” and then simply to “Esperanto.” The word esper-ant-o derives from the root for “hope” (esper) plus the present participial form –ant, plus the substantival affix –o. As a noun, the participial form denotes a person who engages in the action represented by the participle: thus “hoping” (esperanta) becomes “one-who-hopes” (esperanto). Now the word for “elephant” is elefanto, which, quite coincidentally, looks like the word for “one-who-elephs,” whatever that may mean. Any child, applying the rule that he or she has learned about the ending –anto (and, in any language, young children tend, as experts on language acquisition will tell us, and

 Humphrey Tonkin

as we have perhaps observed in our own children, to over-apply such rules11), would naturally come to that conclusion. If we then reverse the consonants, as children (or so I judged) might do, we get efelanto. Add an and we have “one who hephels” and “Just lumping along” becomes nur hefelis (in the translation we avoid the participial form of the imperfect tense, since that would bury the joke). Our Heffalump is no longer a lump, to be sure, but he perambulates in a fashion even more resonant than in the original. What we lose on the roundabouts we gain on the swings. After my recent Polish questioner had asked me about mediating between cultures and the session had come to an end, a fellow-Esperantist came out of the crowd to commiserate with me for what seemed to him a somewhat unfair question about language and culture. I suggested that that was a mere occupational hazard, of no great moment. He replied with a quotation from Winnie-the-Pooh which, I noted to my considerable pleasure, had passed into the language by way of the Pooh translation: I had heard it not infrequently before, in equally unexpected contexts. “Oni neniam scias kiam temas pri abeloj,” “You never can tell with bees.” Indeed you can’t. References Auld, William. 1997. Pajleroj kaj stoploj. Rotterdam: Universala Esperanto-Asocio. Auld, William, ed. & trans. 1987. Omaĝoj. Chapecó, Brazil: Fonto. Auld, William. 1986. Kulturo kaj internacia lingvo. Chapecó, Brazil: Fonto. Auld, William. 1978. Pri lingvo kaj aliaj artoj. Antwerp / La Laguna: TK / Stafeto. Auld, William. 1976. Facetoj de Esperanto. London: Brita Esperanto-Asocio. Benjamin, Walter. 1968 [1955]. Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Berman, Antoine. 2000 [1986]. “Translation and the Trials of the Foreign”. Venuti 2000: 284–297. Blanke, Detlev. 1987. “The Term ‘Planned Language’”. Language Problems and Language Planning 11:335–349. Boulton, Marjorie. 1960. Zamenhof, Creator of Esperanto. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Brower, Reuben, ed. 1959. On Translation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Corsetti, Renato, Maria Antonietta Pinto & Maria Tolomeo. 2004. “Regularizing the Regular: The Phenomenon of Overregularization in Esperanto-Speaking Children”. Language Problems and Language Planning 28:261–282. Crews, Frederick C. 1963. The Pooh Perplex: A Freshman Casebook. New York: Dutton. Crews, Frederick C. 2001. Postmodern Pooh. New York: North Point Press. Eco, Umberto. 1995. The Search for the Perfect Language, trans. James Fentress. Oxford & Cambridge MA: Blackwell.

11. On this overregularizing tendency in children’s Esperanto, see Corsetti, Pinto & Tolomeo 2004.



Chapter 10.  Translation into Esperanto  Even-Zohar, Itamar. 1990. “The Position of Translated Literature within the Literary Polysystem”. Poetics Today 11:45–51. Reprinted in Venuti 2000: 192–197. Friel, Brian. 1981. Translations. London & Boston: Faber & Faber. Harper, T. N. 2002. “Empire, Diaspora, and the Languages of Globalism 1850–1914”. Globalization in World History ed. by A. G. Hopkins, 141–166. New York & London: Norton. Hobsbawm, Eric & Terence Ranger, ed. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press. Jakobson, Roman. 1959. “On Linguistic Aspects of Translation”. Brower 1959: 232–239. Also in Venuti 2000: 113–118. Janton, Pierre. 1993. Esperanto: Language, Literature, and Community, ed. Humphrey Tonkin, trans. Humphrey Tonkin, Jane Edwards & Karen Johnson-Weiner. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Kalocsay, Kálmán. 1985. Dek prelegoj. Budapest: Hungara Esperanto-Asocio. Kalocsay, Kálmán, Gaston Waringhien & Roger Bernard. 1968. Parnasa Gvidlibro. 2nd ed. Warsaw: Pola Esperanto-Asocio & Heroldo de Esperanto. Korĵenkov, Aleksander. 2009. Homarano: La vivo, verkoj kaj ideoj de d-ro L. L. Zamenhof. Kaliningrad: Sezonoj / Kaunas: Litova Esperanto-Asocio. Korzhenkov [Korĵenkov], Aleksander. 2010 (forthcoming). Zamenhof: The Life, Works and Ideas of the Author of Esperanto, trans. Ian Richmond. New York: Mondial. (Abridged translation of Korĵenkov 2009) Lenard, Alexander, trans. 1960. Winnie ille Pu by A. A. Milne. New York: Dutton. Ludovikito [Ito Kanzi], ed. 1991. Destino de ludovika dinastio 1907–1917. Iom reviziita plena verkaro de L. L. Zamenhof, originalaro 3. Kyoto: Eldonejo Ludovikito. McKay, Girvan. 2009. William Auld – Master Poet of Esperanto. Tullamore, Ireland: Polyglot. Milne, A. A. 1961 [1926]. Winnie-the-Pooh. New York: Dutton. Newell, L. N. M., trans. 1964. Hamleto, Princo de Danujo by William Shakespeare. La Laguna: Stafeto. Okrent, Arika. 2009. In the Land of Invented Languages. New York: Spiegel & Grau. Ortega y Gasset, José. 2000 [1937]. “The Misery and the Splendor of Translation”. Venuti 2000: 49–63. Parkvall, Mikael. 2010. “How European Is Esperanto?” Language Problems and Language Planning 34:1.63–79. Pleadin, Josip. 2006. Ordeno de verda plumo: Leksikono pri Esperantlingvaj verkistoj. Durdevac, Croatia: Grafokom. Reed, Ivy Kellerman, trans. 1910. Kiel plaĉas al vi by William Shakespeare. Washington: Sesa Internacia Kongreso de Esperanto. Romaine, Suzanne. 2000. Language and Society. 2nd ed. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press. Sadler, Victor. 1991. “Machine Translation Project Reaches Watershed”. Language Problems and Language Planning 15:78–83. Schor, Esther. 2010. “Zamenhof and the Shadow People”. Language Problems and Language Planning 34:2.183–192. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1993. “The Politics of Translation”. Outside in the Teaching Machine. London & New York: Routledge. Reprinted in Venuti 2000: 397–416. Stříbrný, Zdeněk. 2000. Shakespeare in Eastern Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sutton, Geoffrey. 2008. Concise Encyclopedia of the Original Literature of Esperanto. New York: Mondial.

 Humphrey Tonkin Tonkin, Humphrey, ed. 1972. Winnie-la-Pu: An Esperanto Version of A. A. Milne’s Winnie-thePooh, trans. Ivy Kellerman Reed & Ralph A. Lewin. New York: Dutton. Tonkin, Humphrey. 1993. “Esperanto Poetry”. The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics ed. by Alex Preminger & T. V. F. Brogan, 381–382. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Tonkin, Humphrey, ed. & trans. 2000. Maskerado: Dancing Around Death in Nazi Hungary by Tivadar Soros. Edinburgh: Canongate. (Published in the USA as Masquerade: Dancing Around Death in Nazi-occupied Hungary. New York: Arcade Publishers, 2001) Tonkin, Humphrey. 2002a. “The Role of Literary Language in Esperanto”. Planned Languages: From Concept to Reality. ed. by Klaus Schubert, 11–35. Brussels: Hogeschool voor Wetenschap en Kunst. Tonkin, Humphrey. 2002b. “La Espero: Esperanto-poetoj pri Esperanto”. Internacia Kongresa Universitato, Fortalezo, Brazilo 3–10 aŭgusto 2002 ed. by Roy McCoy, 46–67. Rotterdam: Universala Esperanto-Asocio. Tonkin, Humphrey, trans. 2003. La vivo de Henriko Kvina by William Shakespeare. Rotterdam: Universala Esperanto-Asocio. Tonkin, Humphrey, trans. 2006a. La vintra fabelo by William Shakespeare. Rotterdam: Universala Esperanto-Asocio. Tonkin, Humphrey. 2006b. “Postparolo”. Zamenhof 2006: 207–223. Venuti, Lawrence, ed. 2000. The Translation Studies Reader. London & New York: Routledge. Waringhien, Gaston. 1987 [1956]. Beletro sed ne el katedro. Antwerp: Flandra Esperanto-Ligo. (Originally published as Eseoj 1: Beletro. La Laguna: Stafeto, 1956) Waringhien, Gaston. 1983. Kaj la ceter’ – nur literaturo. Antwerp/La Laguna: TK/Stafeto. Zamenhof, L. L. 1961 [1910]. Proverbaro Esperanta ed. by C. Rogister, intro. by Gaston Waringhien. La Laguna: Stafeto. Zamenhof, L. L., trans. 2006. Hamleto, Reĝido de Danujo, 9th ed., ed. by D. B. Gregor. Rotterdam: Universala Esperanto-Asocio.

Contributors Vincent Colapietro is a Liberal Arts Research Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Pennsylvania State University. He has published extensively on American pragmatism and, in particular, C. S. Peirce. The philosophy of literature, semiotics, and aesthetics are among the fields to which he has devoted his attention. The intersections of various traditions, movements, and cultures (e.g., the intersection of pragmatism and psychoanalysis or that of hermeneutics and deconstruction) continue to be one of his central preoccupations. This contributes to his efforts to articulate a thicker account of human practices than anything available in any of even the most adequate thinkers, theories, or traditions. Thomas Cooper, after completing his doctorate in comparative literature at Indiana University in 2003, taught for two years at the University of North Carolina before accepting positions as research fellow at Columbia University and the University of Vienna. He was a fellow at the Collegium Budapest Institute for Advanced Studies, where he contributed to a project on East European literature in exile. He currently lives in Budapest, Hungary and teaches at the Károly Eszterházy College in Eger. He research interests include translation theory, multi-lingual literatures, and the Hungarian, German, and Romanian literatures of Central Europe. Probal Dasgupta teaches linguistics at the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, has written about ten books and a little over two hundred articles in Bangla, English, and Esperanto (in formal linguistics, sociolinguistics, literature, literary translation, and philosophy), is an honorary member of the Linguistic Society of America, is vice-chairman of the Akademio de Esperanto, has edited Indian Linguistics, and co-edits Language Problems and Language Planning. His books include Kathar Kriyakarmo (1987, a collection of linguistics articles in Bangla), English at the Crossroads: The Postcolonial Situation (2002, with Amares Datta and Udayon Misra), After Etymology: Towards a Substantivist Linguistics (2000, with Alan Ford and Rajendra Singh), Explorations in Indian Sociolinguistics (1995, with Jayant Lele and Rajendra Singh), The Otherness of English: India’s Auntie Tongue Syndrome (1993), and Primico (1977), his translations of some of Tagore’s poems into Esperanto. John Edwards was born in England, worked in Ireland, and moved to Nova Scotia in 1978. His research focuses on the constituents of group identity, with particular attention to language in its many social aspects. He has lectured and

 The Translator as Mediator of Cultures

presented papers on this topic in some thirty countries, and his work has been translated into half a dozen languages. He is editor of the Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development and also edits a companion series of books. His own books include Language Diversity in the Classroom (2010), Language and Identity (2009), Un mon de lenguas (2009), Language in Canada (1998), Multilingualism (1995), Language, Society and Identity (1985) and The Irish Language (1983). He is a fellow of the British Psychological Society, the Canadian Psychological Association, and the Royal Society of Canada and is a member of several psychological and linguistic societies, as well as scholarly organizations for the study of ethnicity and nationalism. Maria Esposito Frank is Professor of Italian Studies at the University of Hartford. Her scholarly interests are in late medieval and Renaissance culture and in contemporary poetry. She is the author of a book on Renaissance humanism (Le insidie dell’allegoria – The Snares of Allegory, Venice, 1999), and several articles published in European and North American journals on Dante’s Divine Comedy, L.B. Alberti’s moral treatises, Renaissance demonology, and Ficino’s vernacular translations. She has also published essays on twentieth-century Italian poets, and is currently involved in translation projects of Italian poems into English. K. David Jackson is professor of Portuguese and Brazilian literatures at Yale University.  He is co-translator of two Brazilian novels, Industrial Park (1993) by Patrícia Galvão and Seraphim Grosse Pointe (1979) by Oswald de Andrade, and editor of the Oxford Anthology of the Brazilian Short Story (2006). He has studied and collaborated with the Campos brothers since 1968 and edited the volume Haroldo de Campos: A Dialogue with the Brazilian Concrete Poet (2005). Antjie Krog is widely regarded as one of South Africa’s leading Afrikaans poets. She has published a dozen collections of poetry – her first highly controversial collection (Dogter van Jefta 1970) coming at the height of the apartheid era when she was seventeen years old – three collections of children’s verse, and numerous other prose writings in Afrikaans, many of them dealing with current affairs. She has also translated from Dutch and English into Afrikaans. Of late she has produced an increasing number of self-translated works in English, including two poetry collections, Down to My Last Skin (2000) and Body Bereft (2006), and three critically acclaimed prose works, Country of My Skull (1998), A Change of Tongue (2003) and Begging to Be Black (2009). This trilogy deals, among other things, with the transformations happening in South Africa and the role of translation in facing the past. She teaches at the University of the Western Cape. Rosalind Morris is Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University. She is former director of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, and former Associate Director of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at



Contributors 

Columbia. Professor Morris focuses her fieldwork in two main areas, South Africa and mainland Southeast Asia, and has written widely on questions of representation, mass mediation and discontents of modernity. Her most recent books are Photographies East: The Camera and its Histories in East and Southeast Asia (2009) and Can the Subaltern Speak? Reflections on the History of an Idea (2010). She is presently working on an ethnography of South Africa’s gold mining communities in the aftermath of apartheid. Jonathan Pool (http://utilika.org/info/pool.html), of Berkeley, California, is president of Utilika Foundation. He guides its research and development on controlled languages, disambiguation, computational lexicography, and the development of systems for panlingual communication and translation. Much of this work is done in collaboration with the Turing Center of the University of Washington. Pool formerly taught political science at SUNY at Stony Brook and the University of Washington, where he conducted research on individual and collective choices about language. His published articles include “Panlingual Globalization” (2010), “Lemmatic Machine Translation” (2009), “The Official Language Problem” (1991), “The World Language Problem” (1991), “Whose Russian Language? Problems in the Definition of a Linguistic Identity” (1980), and “Language Planning and Identity Planning” (1979). Timothy Reagan (PhD, University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana) is Professor of Education at Central Connecticut State University.  He was formerly Professor of Linguistics and Dean of the Faculty of Humanities at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. Professor Reagan’s main areas of interest include foreign language education, language planning and policy studies, and the linguistics of sign languages (especially South African Sign Language and American Sign Language). Publications include: Language Matters: Reflections on Educational Linguistics (2009), Critical Questions, Critical Perspectives: Language and the Second Language Educator (2005), Non-Western Educational Traditions (3rd edition, 2005) and Language, Education and Ideology (2002). Nancy Schweda Nicholson is Professor of Linguistics and Cognitive Science with a Joint Appointment in the Legal Studies Program at the University of Delaware.  She is widely published in the areas of interpreting theory and practice, interpreter training, and language planning for court interpreter services.  She was appointed to the Federal Court Interpreters Advisory Board by the late William H. Rehnquist, Chief Justice of the United States. She is a member of the Committee on Court Interpreters and Legal Translation of the Fédération Internationale des Traducteurs (FIT).   Her current research interests include: (1) interviews with surviving Nuremberg Trials interpreters; (2) language issues in the Thomas Lubanga Dyilo, Germain Katanga and Mathieu Chui trials at the International Criminal Court (ICC); (3) discourse analysis of convicted murderers’ leniency pleas at sen-

 The Translator as Mediator of Cultures

tencing hearings; and (4) legal and language policy development for the provision of interpreter services in criminal matters throughout the European Union. Humphrey Tonkin is University Professor of the Humanities and President Emeritus at the University of Hartford. A former Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania and visiting professor at Columbia University, he teaches and publishes both in early modern English literature and in language policy and planning and is the author of two books on the poetry of Edmund Spenser, two books on higher education, and numerous edited and translated volumes, including (with Timothy Reagan) Language in the 21st Century (2003), and Esperanto, Interlinguistics and Planned Language (1997). He is co-editor (with Probal Dasgupta) of the journal Language Problems and Language Planning. Marie-José Tramuta is University Maître de Conférences in the Department of Italian Literature and Civilization at the University of Caen Basse Normandie (France). She teaches contemporary prose, poetry and theatre. She has published over forty articles on Italian authors, including Savinio, Montale, Saba, Svevo, Debenedetti and Gadda. Her translations from Italian to French include some twenty volumes. She is the author of Le destin du passeur: lectures italiennes 1991–2008 (2009) and editor of three recent volumes Le difforme et l’informe au théâtre (2010), France-Italie: un dialogue théâtral depuis 1950 (2008), D’Italie en France: poètes et passeurs (2005).

Index A Aarons, Debra  57 Abel, Rekha  2 Adams, Bernard  136 Adams, Douglas  76 Adelphi (publisher)  163 ad verbum translation  vii, 97 adversarial system (see common law) Afrikaans language  17–23, 27, 29, 31–32, 34 Aguilar, Gonzalo  140, 147 Akach, Philemon  57 Akinsulure-Smith, Adeyinka  46 Albanian language  44 Alechem, Sholem  174 Alexandru, Ioan  133 American Sign Language (ASL)  54–56, 58–60, 62 ANC (African National Congress)  19, 21, 30 Andersen, Hans  173–174 Andrade, Mário de  140 Andrade, Oswald de  140, 143, 153 Angelelli, Claudia  55 Anglo-Boer War  31 Anglo-Saxon language  33 Antoons, Iris  56 apartheid  21, 25, 31, 57 Apollinaire, Guillaume  132 Apollo  164 Arabic language  8 Arany, János  128 Aristotle  162 Armenian language  131 Arshack, Daniel  37–38 artificial language(s)  74, 80; see also planned language Ashkenazi Jews  174 Asokan inscriptions  8 aspectual phased translation  76, 78 Asser Instituut  38

Association of Defense Counsel (ADC)  37–38, 47–48 Auld, William  171, 175, 181–182, 184, 186 Australia  27, 38 Austria  136 Austro-Hungarian Monarchy  130 automated translation  74, 78–79; see also machine translation Azerbaijani language  101 B Ba Jin  181 Babeţi, Adriana  129 Baer, Anne Marie  55 baggageless travel  4 Bahan, Ben  54, 62 Bahasa Malay  45 Ball, Stephen  60 Banat region (Romania, Serbia, Hungary)  131, 135 Bandia, Paul  viii Barbosa, João Alexandre  144– 145 Barthes, Roland  115 Basotho people  34 Baudelaire, Charles  165, 181 Baudouin de Courtenay, Jan  180 Baudrillard, Jean  100 Bayley, Robert  56 BCS; see Serbo-Croatian language Beckett, Samuel  118 Behler, Ernest  142 Belmont, Leo (Leopold Blumenthal)  173 Ben-Yehuda, Eliezer  174 Bender, Emily  79 Beniuc, Mihai  132 Benjamin, Walter  107, 110, 113, 118–119, 121, 169, 175, 177 Benmaman, Virginia  40

Bense, Max  140 Bergman, Brita  56 Berman, Antoine  185 Bernard, Roger  179 Berners-Lee, Tim  80 Bernstein, Abraham  81 Bessenyei, György  130 Bhabha, Homi  121 Bhartrihari  3 Bible  103, 139, 174, 178 bilingualism  32, 60, 74, 89–96, 104; see also multilingualism Blake, William  153 blank verse  178 Blanke, Detlev  80 blogosphere  75 Boccaccio, Giovanni  181 Bodor, Ádám  128, 135–136 Boonen, Diane  56 border identity  93 Borges, Jorge Luis  7, 121 Bornstein, Harry  58 Bosnia-Herzegovina  46 Bosnian language  43 Boulez, Pierre  142 Boulton, Marjorie  171, 173 Bourdieu, Pierre  116 Boza, J.  64 Bragg, Bernard  54, 65 Bragg, Lois  62 Branson, Jan  54, 57 Brasília  140 Brazil (and Brazilian literature)  139–158 Brook, Peter  101 Brown, Dan  12 Browne, Wayles  43 Bruni, Leonardo  vii BSO software company  175 Bulgaria  129 C Cage, John  140, 142, 144, 147 Camões, Luis de  181

 The Translator as Mediator of Cultures Campos, Augusto de  139–145, 147–153, 155–158 Campos, Haroldo de  139–147, 149, 151, 153–158 Canada  4, 27, 38 Cândido, Antônio  143 canonicalization in translation  81 Cape Coloured South Africans  17, 21, 31 Caribbean literature  28 Carroll, Lewis  147 Cartwright, Brenda  58 Catalan language  13 Cavalcanti, Guido  147 Ceausescu, Nicolae  136 Center for the Study of Nationalism  128 Central European University  128 Centre for the Study of Nationalism in Europe  128 Cervantes  181 Cézanne, Paul  112–113 Chinese language (and writing system)  7, 75, 141–142 Chinese poetry  139 Christie, Agatha  102 Christie, Karen  54 Cicero  97, 100 civil law  37–39, 47–48 Clark, Peter  74, 81 cochlear implants  63 code and language  114–115, 120 Cokely, Dennis  54 Colapietro, Vincent  ix, 107–124, 191 Cold War  127 Colli, Giorgio  161–168 Collins-Ahlgren, Marianne  56 common law  37–39, 47 communism  127, 163 Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages  128 comparative literature  vii, 6, 175 Comparative Literature Association, International  128 Concrete poetry, Concretism  139–159 Conrad, Joseph  95 constructed language  178 contact sign languages  57–58

controlled natural languages  80 Cooper, Thomas  ix, 127–137, 191 Corazza, Serena  56 Corrado, Alfred  54 cost of translation  74 court interpreting  40–42, 49–50 Croatian language  43 Crooker, Constance E.  40 Culic, Irina  129 Cullen, Kevin  46–47 cultural translation  73, 77–78 cummings, e.e.  139, 144–145, 151 Czech language  102, 130 Czech Republic  129 D Daniel, Arnaut  147 Daniel, E. Valentine  109–110 Dănilă, Dan  132 Danish language  20 Dante Alighieri  110–111, 144–145, 147, 178, 181 Dasgupta, Probal  ix, 1–14, 191 Daurenga, Raimbaut  147 Davis, Miles  112 De Gruyter (publisher)  163 de Jongh, Elena  40 de Quadros, Roncie  56 de Swaan, Abram  vii De Weerdt, Kristof  56 deaf culture  60–63 DEAF-WORLD  53–72 deconstruction  100 Defoe, Daniel  184–185 DeMatteo, Asa  64 Der-Kevorkian, Isabelle  43 Derrida, Jacques  19, 100 Desnos, Robert  167 Dickens, Charles  97 Dickinson, Emily  101, 147, 152–153 dictionaries  82, 92 Diderot, Denis  9 Diels, Hermann Alexander  164 Dionysus  164 Dirks, Nicholas B.  110 Dively, Valerie  55 diversity  73–74, 82 DLT (Distributed Language Translation)  175 Dolnick, Edward  60 Donnan, Hastings  93 Donne, John  28, 147

Draženović-Carrieri, Maja  43, 45–46 Dreiser, Theodore  101–102 Dryden, John  98 du Bellay, Joachim  97–98 Duchamp, Marcel  147 Duncan  75 Duprat, Rogério  140 Dutch language  18, 20, 45, 75 Dutton, E. P. (publisher)  170– 171 E Eastern Bloc   127 Eco, Umberto  115, 175, 177 education as translation  107– 108 Edwards, Alicia Betsy  40 Edwards, John  ix, 89–105, 191–192 Einaudi (publisher)  163 Einstein, Albert  165 Eleusinian mysteries  164 Eliot, Thomas Stearns  95 élite bilingualism  91 élite closure  30 Ellington, Duke  112 Elton, Frances  55 Emmorey, Karen  55 encyclopedias  9–10 Engberg-Pedersen, Elisabeth  56 English language (and literature)  viii, 4, 10–13, 17–23, 26–34, 38, 43–45, 48, 63, 75, 90, 110–111, 132, 135–136, 147, 172, 176, 181, 183, 186 Enlightenment  9–11 equivalence in translation  117 Erasmus, Desiderius  vii Esperanto language (and literature)  11, 169–190 Esposito, Joseph  115 Esterházy, Péter  129–130, 135 ethnicity and language  19–20, 27 Ethnicity and Nationalism, Association for the Study of  128 Europe, Central  127–137 European Union  4, 40 Even-Zohar, Itamar  178 extraterritoriality  95 F fascism  163



Index  Feld, Steven  24 Fenollosa, Ernest  141–142 Fermat, Pierre de  165 Film  112 Finnish language (and literature)  12, 178 folk bilingualism  91–92 Ford, Alan  2 foreignization  185 formalism  2–3 Foucault, Michel  60, 100 Frank, Maria Esposito  vii–ix, 192 French language (and literature)  10, 28, 43–44, 75, 92, 101–102, 163, 172, 178, 183 French symbolism  147 Freud, Sigmund  117–118 Frishberg, Nancy  54, 59 Fuchs, Norbert E.  81 Fullerton, Robert  103 G Gadamer, Hans-Georg  114, 116 Gallimard (publisher)  163 Gambino, Giuseppe  56 Gasille, Willem Jan  40, 50 Genesis  139 German language (and literature)  10, 18, 20, 33, 45, 55, 75, 118, 130–133, 135–136, 146–147, 172, 176, 178 Germany  153, 176 Gerwel, Jakes  19 Ghosh, Rajat  2 Ghosh, Sanjukta  2 Gibbons, John  38–39 Giuranna, Enza  56 global integration  73, 78 global language  74–75 Global WordNet Association  82 globalization  vii, 5–6, 11 Globescan  73 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von  95, 132, 147, 174 Goga, Octavian  132 Gogol, Nikolai Vasilievich  174 Goldoni, Carlo  181 González, Roseann D.  40 Google  82 Gordon, Raymond G., Jr.  74 Gorlée, Dinda  117 Grabowski, Antoni  178, 180–181 Graf, Fritz  164

Greek language  vii, 7, 139, 141, 147, 162–164, 166 Grehan, Carmel  56 Grenoble, Lenore  56 Grillparzer, Franz  136 Grotius Centre  47 Gustason, Gerilee  58 Gutt, Ernst-August  121 H Habsburgs  136 haiku  139, 145, 147 Hakusuisha (publisher)  163 Hale, Sandra  40 Hampl, Patricia  112 Hankins, James  vii Harper, T. N.  175 Harris, Roy  115 Hartford, University of  viii Harvey, Van A.  162 Hebrew language  7, 34, 172, 174 Heidegger, Martin  116 Heim, Michael  129 Heine, Heinrich  173–174, 178 Hemming, Sarah  101 Heraclitus  162, 166–167 Herman, Madelynn  41 Hewitt, William E.  40–41 Hinduism  8 History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe  129 Hobsbawm, Eric  178 Hodges, Johnny  112 Hoffmeister, Robert  54, 62 Hohenberger, Annette  56 Hölderlin, Friedrich  147 Holz, Arno  147 Homer  139, 147, 154 Horváth, István  129 Hoyer, Karin  56 Hrabal, Bohumil  129–130 human rights  22 Human Rights, Universal Declaration of  82 human-machine collaboration  78 Humphries, Tom  54, 61 Hungarian language (and literature)  130–133, 135 Hungary  128–131, 135–136, 186 I Ibsen, Henrik  181

ICTY (International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia)  37–52 identity and language  89–90, 93, 102–104, 127–137 Ihara, Saikaku  181 Iliad  139, 147, 154 India  3, 8, 12, 22, 27–28 Indo-European languages  179 Indonesia  45 Indonesian language  34 inquisitorial system (see civil law) integration  91 interlinguas  77, 79–81, 175 International Criminal Court (ICC)  37, 49 International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda  49 International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU)  170 interpretation  32, 37–50, 96–102 interpretation of sign languages  54, 58–65 invented language  170 invisible translator  54, 65 Ireland  90 Irish language  103 Italian language (and literature)  10–11, 45, 75, 92, 110–111, 147, 162–163, 165 J Jackson, K. David  ix, 139–159, 192 Jacobowitz, E. Lynn  54 Jakobson, Roman  108, 111, 141, 144, 177 James, William  120 Janesick, Valerie  62 Janton, Pierre  179 Japan  140 Japanese language (and literature)  75, 140, 147 Javanese language  34 jazz  142 Jepson, Jill  54 Johns Hopkins University  162 Johnson, Kristen  64 Johnston, Trevor  56 Jones, William  8 Joseph, John  104

 The Translator as Mediator of Cultures Joyce, James  140–141, 144, 150–151 K Kalevala  178 Kalidasa  8 Kalocsay, Kálmán  172, 178–179, 183–184 Kaluli (people)  24 Kannappel, Barbara  62 Kányádi, Sándor  128, 132–135 Katona, József  136 Kaufmann, Esther  81 Kayser, Albrecht Christoph  130 Kazinczy, Ferenc  130 Keijzer-Lambooy, Heleen  40, 50 Keller, Jörg  56 Kellman, Steven  95 Kelly, Arlene  40 Kita, Sotaro  56 Kitasono, Katue  140, 147 knowledge-representation languages  80 Koran  181 Korean language  75 Korĵenkov, Aleksander  174 Kosovo  44 Koulish, Robert E.  129 Kranz, Walther  164 Krentz, Christopher  54 Kristeva, Julia  109 Krog, Antjie ix, 17–35, 192 Kundera, Milan  95 Kurtz, Paul  73 L Ladd, Paddy  54 LaGuardia, Fiorello  170 Lane, Harlan  54, 60–63 language barriers  83 language change  179 language death  74 Language Line Services  74 language policy  viii, 21–22, 30, 35, 43–44 language revival  90 Latin language  vii, 7–8, 10–13, 33, 107, 121, 141, 171, 178 Lazár, Marius  129 Lee, Robert Joe  40 Lee, Seungyong  64 Leeson, Lorraine  56 Leiden University  38 Leith, Alex  80

Lenard, Alexander  171–172 Leopardi, Giacomo  147, 165 Leppaköski, Johan Edvard  178 Lescure, Karine  42 Leuninger, Helen  56 Lévi-Strauss, Claude  143 Lewin, Ralph  170 Li Tai-Po  144 Lillo-Martin, Diane  55 Lincoln, Sieglinde Lug Lindsay, Virginia  46 literacy  78 literary language  76–78, 80–82 logos  103 London School of Economics  128 London Zoo  171 Low, W.   54 Lowe-Porter, H. T.  55 Lowney, Robert  41 Lucas, Ceil  55–57 Ludovikito (Itô Kanzi)  180 Lyotard, Jean-François  100 M Maat, Jaap  80 Machiavelli, Niccolò  165 machine translation  74, 78, 80, 175; see also automated translation MacIntyre, Alasdair  111 Macrae, Elliot  170–171 Magyari, Nándor  129 Mahabharata  8 Maiakovsky, Vladimir  139, 141, 144, 147 Malcolm, Janet  117–118 Mallarmé, Stéphane  139–140, 145, 177 Malle, Louis  112 Malraux, André  144 Mann, Thomas  55 manual sign codes  58 Marjanska, Ludmilla  165–166 Marshall, Catherine C.  81 Marvell, Andrew  28 Matlin, Marlee  65 McGuinness, Deborah L.  80 McIntire, Marina  54 McKay, Girvan  186 Meir, Irit  56 Melo Neto, João Cabral de  144 Mendes, Gilberto  140 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice  112–113

Metaphysical poets  147 Metzger, Melanie  54–55, 64–65 Mickiewicz, Adam  178, 181 Mikkelson, Holly  40 Miller, Don  54, 57 Milne, A. A. (Winnie-thePooh)  169–172, 181, 186–188 Milošević, Slobodan  44 Milton, John  viii minority languages  104 Mitamura, Teruko  80 Moen, Marcia  ix, 96 Mofolo, Thomas  34 Molière, Jean-Baptiste (Poquelin)  174 Monmonnier, Mark  117 monolingualism  74 Montale, Eugenio  166–167 Montinari, Mazzino  161–162, 164–165 Moores, Donald  62 Morgenstern, Christian  145–147 Morris, Rosalind  ix, 17–35, 192–193 Mufwene, Salikoko S.  74 Müller, Herta  128, 135 multiculturalism  4 multilingualism  22, 30, 127–137; see also bilingualism Muong language  76 Murray, James  92–94 Murray, Katharine  92–93 music (and translation)  108, 140, 142 N Nabokov, Vladimir  95, 100–101 NAJIT (National Association of Judiciary Interpreters and Translators)  40–41 Nakamura, Karen  56 National Party (South Africa)  31 nationalism  95, 174, 184; and nationhood  127–128, 131, 137 nation-states  5–6 Ndebele, Njabulo  27 Neisser, Arden  62 New Guinea  24 New Zealand  38 Newell, Leonard N. M.  181–182, 184 Newton, Isaac  165 Ngugi wa Thiong’o  26



Index  Nietzsche, Friedrich  161–164 Nikolić, Marijana  42 Northern Cape  20 Norvig, Peter  80 Norwegian language  13, 45 Nöth, Winfried  114 novel, the  27–29, 98–102, 130, 184–186 Noy, Natalya F.  80 Nuremberg Trials  42 O O’Donoghue, Dennis  103 O’Neill, Thomas Phillip (“Tip”)  103 Ogilvy, Dale  57 Ogilvy-Foreman, Dale  57 Oiticica, Hélio  140 Okrent, Arika  175 Olchvary, Paul  136 ontologies  80 oral poetry  25 Ortega y Gasset, José  114, 121–122, 176 Orzeszko, Eliza  174 Oviedo, Alejandro  56 Oxford English Dictionary  92, 112 Oxford University  143 Özyürek, Asli  56 P Pa:nini  3 Padden, Carol  54, 61 Pali language  7 panlingual transparency  75–76, 82 Pannwitz, Rudolf  118–119 Paris, Treaty of  131 Parkvall, Mikael  180 Pascal, Blaise  165 PCFD (Proposal for a Council Framework Decision)  40 Peirce, Charles S.  110, 114–120, 141 Penn, Claire  56–57 Peters, Cynthia  54 Petőfi, Sándor  132, 181 philosophical languages  80 philosophy, translation of  161–168 Picchio, Luciana  140 Pietrosemoli, Lourdes  56 Pignatari, Décio  139, 141, 157

Pindar  147 Pizzuto, Elena  56 planned language  170, 178, 180; see also artificial language Plato (and Platonism)  162, 164–165 Pleadin, Josip  181 Poe, Edgar Allan  147 poetry and language  24–26, 132–135, 139–160, 178 Pokorny, D.  64 Poland  129, 176 Polish Esperanto Association  180 Polish language  45, 172, 176 Pollitt, Kyra  5 polysemy  113 Ponge, Francis  140–141 Pool, Jonathan  ix, 73–85, 193 Popper, Karl  102 Portuguese language (and literature)  45, 75, 139–158 Postif, Louis  102 postmodernist theory  100 Pound, Ezra  139–140, 144–145, 149–150 pre-Socratic philosophers  162, 164 Prete, Antonio  165 prosody  178–179 Provençal poetry  139, 147, 149 proverbs  178 Q Quebec  92 R Ramayana  8 Ranger, Terence  178 Ravanam, Anita  2 Reagan, Timothy  ix, 53–72, 193–194 Reed, Ivy Kellerman  170, 187 Reilly, Judy  55 Remick, Lee  112 Renaissance translation  vii Reynolds, Louise  57 Rieu, Emile  99 Riley, Philip  104 Rilke, Rainer Maria  119–120, 132 Rivarol, Antoine de  101 Roberts, Roda P.  40 Roma people  129 Romaine, Suzanne  175

Romance languages  179 Romania  128–132, 135 Romanian language (and literature)  130–133, 135 Rosa, Guimarães  144 Rossetti, Reto  171, 181–182 Roth, Hermann  133 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques  9 Rowling, J. K.  12 Roy, Cynthia  54 Rushdie, Salman  77, 121–122 Russell, Stuart J.  80 Russia  176 Russian language  75, 172 Ruttkay, Kalman  136 S Sadler, Victor  171, 175 Sandler, Wendy  55–56 Sanskrit  8, 33 São Paulo, Brazil  140 Saussure, Ferdinand de  114–116, 141, 180 Saussure, René de  180 Saxon language (and literature)  130–133 Scheibe, K.  64 Schein, Jerome  58, 62 Schembri, Adam  56 Schermer, Trude  56 Schiffman, Harold  74 Schiller, Friedrich  174 Schlegel, August Wilhelm von  176 Schmaling, Constanze  56 Schnaiderman, Boris  144 Schneiderman, Ellen  64 Schor, Esther  174 Schwabian language  131 Schweda Nicholson, Nancy  ix, 37–52, 193 science and language  18–20 Scotland  93–94 Seal, Brenda  58 Segal, James  34 Semantic Web Initiative  80 semiology  116 semiotics  111, 114–117, 153 Sena, Jorge de  144 Senghas, Ann  56 Sepedi language  22 Serbia  129–130 Serbian language (and literature)  43–44, 130–131

 The Translator as Mediator of Cultures Serbo-Croatian language (BCS)  43–44 Sesotho language  21–22, 26, 29 Shakespeare, William  101, 169–170, 174, 176–179, 181–184 Shapiro, Michael  116 Shaw, Risa  59 Sherr, Daniel  40 Shiva, Vandana  74 Short, T. L.  119 Sifry, Dave  75 sight translation  41 sign languages  53–72 Signing Exact English  58 Simic, Charles  112 Singh, Rajendra  2 Skutnabb-Kangas, Tove  56 Škvorecký, Josef  101–102 slang and translation  99 Slovak language  13 Slovakia  129 Słowacki, Juliusz  178 Smith, John E.  112 Smith, Michael J.  74 Sohar, Paul  132–135 Soros, George  186 Soros, Tivadar  186 Sousândrade (Joaquim de Sousa Andrade)  155 South Africa  ix, 17–35 South African Sign Language  56–57, 63 Sowa, John F.  81 Spanish language  45, 75, 181 Spiridon, Monica  136 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty  30, 121, 176 Srebrenica massacre  42 standardization  79 Stanford University Press  162 Starr, Mark  170 Stavans, Ilan  95 Stein, Gertrude  147 Steiner, George  89, 94–98, 100, 103, 109, 112, 121, 166 Stellenbosch University, South Africa  19, 32 Stendhal (Henri Beyle)  165 Stewart, David  58 Stockhausen, Karlheinz  142 Stojanovic, Dusan  42 Stoppard, Tom  95 Stříbrný, Zdeněk  176 structuralism  180

Subrahmanyam, Prakya Sreesaila  3 substantivism  1–4 Sutton, Geoffrey  180 Sutton-Spence, Rachel  55–56 Swedish language  172 symbolism  147 Sze, Yim Binh Felix  56 T Talleyrand, Charles Maurice de  102 Tancock, Leonard  98–100 Tang, Gladys  56 Tanizaki, Junichiro  181 Taub, Sarah  55 Thailand  19 Thibault, Paul J.  114–116 Tibetan language  7 Toer, Pramoedya Ananta  34 Tokyo Trials  42 Tonkin, Humphrey  ix, 17–35, 91–92, 96, 101, 169–190, 194 Trabing, Eta M.  40 Tramuta, Marie-José  ix, 161–168, 194 Transcriação / Transcreation  139–159 transculturation  143 translation theory  1–14, 144, 148, 175 Transylvania  128, 130–132, 135 Trianon, Treaty of  130–131 Trintignac, Florence  42 Trujillo, Arturo  78, 80 Truth and Reconciliation Commission  22, 32 Tsonga language  26 Tswana language  33 Turgenev, Ivan Sergeevich  176 U Ungaretti, Giuseppe  147 Ungureanu, Cornel  129 Unicode  79 unitary identity  94–95 United Nations  42 United States  25, 40–41, 140 Universal Declaration of Human Rights  82 University College London  128 V Valla, Lorenzo  vii

Valli, Clayton  56–57 Vallienne, Henri  178 van der Heide, Marijke  41 van der Kooij, Els  56 Vanhecke, Eline  56 Vasquez, Victoria  40 Veloso, Caetano  140 Veltri, Daniel  64 Venuti, Lawrence  ix, 107–111, 113–114, 117–119, 121 Vesler, Igor  40 Vico, Giambattista  9 Vietnam  76–77 Virgil  178 volk, concept of  18 Volpi, Alfredo  140 Voltaire, François Marie Arouet de  165 von Aichelberg, Wolf  128, 132 von Bonin, June  81 Vyadi (Dakshayana)  3 W Wales  90 Wallin, Lars  56 Waringhien, Gaston  174–175, 179 Washington, University of  161–162 Waswo, Richard  vii Webern  142 Welby, Lady Victoria  120 Wellbery, Dave E.  162 Wells, John C.  171 Welsh language  183 Western Cape  20, 31 Western Cape, University of the  32 Wheatland Prize  161 Wikimedia  82 Wiktionary  82 Wilcox, Sherman  62 Wilkins, Dorothy  54 Wilson, Thomas  93 Winston, Elizabeth  58 Wittgenstein, Ludwig  12, 115–117 Wittstock, Joachim  132 Woll, Bencie  55–56 women’s rights  22 Woodbury, Anthony C.  74 Woodward, James  55–56 wordnets  82 Wordsworth, William  28



Index  World Congress of Esperanto  170 world language system  vii World Values Survey  73 World Wide Web  75 writing systems  79 X Xhosa language  18–19, 21–22, 26 Y Yao language  76–77, 80

Yiddish language (and literature)  131–132, 172 Yoel, Judith  56 Yugoslavia, former Yugoslavia  37–50, 127 Z Zamenhof, L. L.  169–170, 172–181, 187 Zawolkow, Esther  58 Zé, Tom  140 zero, concept of  23

Zeshan, Ulrike  56 Zinnecker, Hans  18 Zola, Emile  98–99 Zorn, Harry  118 Zulu language  18–22, 26–27, 29, 33

In the series Studies in World Language Problems the following titles have been published thus far or are scheduled for publication: 3 2 1

TONKIN, Humphrey and Maria Esposito FRANK (eds.): The Translator as Mediator of Cultures. 2010. x, 201 pp. ARZOZ, Xabier (ed.): Respecting Linguistic Diversity in the European Union. 2008. viii, 269 pp. TONKIN, Humphrey and Timothy REAGAN (eds.): Language in the Twenty-First Century. Selected papers of the millennial conferences of the Center for Research and Documentation on World Language Problems, held at the University of Hartford and Yale University. 2003. vi, 209 pp.