Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

TWENTY-NINE Beating the Bounds: What Translation Is Not

What translators do includes all the things that speakers normally do when speaking their own tongues. But just because translation involves everything of that kind, not everything of that kind is usefully thought of as translation. Beyond its ability to call on all and any among the resources of natural languages, translation has features that are specific to it. What they are and what they have been is what this book tries to say.

Like language itself, translation has no rigidly fixed limits, and similarly fuzzy borderlines can be found in many other arts. A violinist may add his own cadenza, or modify a cadenza written by someone else, and still without question be the performer of Mendelssohn’s Concerto in E. An actor may modify the lines of his role on some occasions and not others and still be performing the same part. In translation, likewise, the point where a reformulation ceases to count as a match for the source is open to negotiation within frameworks that vary widely among different traditions and genres.

In India, where average West European ideas about translation have no roots, stories, myths, legends, and religious texts have moved for millennia between different languages—under the guise of adaptations or retellings of the source. In the West, poets have frequently taken possession of a source by using it as a springboard for a new creation in the same or another tongue. The lyrics Raymond Queneau wrote for a song that was sung by Juliette Gréco—“Si tu crois, fillette, fillette …”—have a source in a poem by Pierre de Ronsard and could count as a translation from French into French, just as Robert Lowell’s Imitations, explicitly modeled on poems in other tongues, can count as translations, too, without ceasing to be genuinely new things.

To ask whether what Queneau did with Ronsard is a translation or something else is to ask a question about the meaning of words—specifically, the meaning of the word translation. That’s an inquiry that can lead us down many quaint historical, linguistic, and cultural back alleys. In medieval times, for example, a “translation” occurred when the relics of a saint were taken from one shrine to another (the Russian word перевод retains the same sense). In the ocean, a translation wave is one that transmits forward movement, and in law translation is the transfer of property. No end of other entertaining contexts for the word can be found: the way a ceiling crab walks (translation latérale, in French), direct passage from earth to heaven (the translation of Enoch), and so forth. Roman Jakobson, a linguist of great renown, tried to sort out the field by dividing it into three. He distinguished translation between media (“transposition”) from translation between different states of the same language (“intralingual translation”), and both of those from “translation proper”—translation between languages. Jakobson’s attempt at clarification actually introduced a great muddle that has to be tackled before the end of this book.

Many cultural practices have a broad structure that can be described, like translation, as consisting essentially of “before” and “after.” Knitting, cooking, and the production of automobiles are processes that start with some source material (a ball of wool, edible ingredients, or a range of separately manufactured parts) and end up with something that is radically different (a sweater, a meal, or a car). English is flexible enough to allow us to say without risk of being seriously misunderstood that our partner has translated a few dozen tubes of dried durum wheat into a plate of spaghetti—or to say that by putting on a tuxedo I have translated myself into a swell—but users of English are wise enough to know that such statements have no relevance to translation itself.

In like manner, what a playwright does when he adapts a narrative text for performance onstage has no more relevance to translation than knitting does. Jakobson’s proposal to regard switching media as a form of translation is a red herring, and it’s not clear to me why he should ever have come up with it. But his many readers over the past decades have swallowed the bait and treat stage and film adaptation of novels and other prose as particular instances of translation itself.

Making a movie calls on numerous skills and resources that have no connection with any of the things translators do or use. To call David Lean’s Doctor Zhivago a translation of Pasternak’s novel is not only to disregard the specificity of film art but to make such woolly use of the word translation as to fit it to refer to any kind of transformation at all. Knitting included.

The popularity of the idea that everything is translation is no doubt a contemporary reflection of an ancient tradition of thought—in fact, an ancient tradition of thought about thought. It was obvious even to the Greeks that if words began as the proper names of things, then the many words that do not name things that can be seen in the world must be the names of mental states. Call them ideas. In fact, even for things that can be seen, the word does not name any one of them but only that which allows all of them to be seen as instances of an idea. Thus tree is not the proper name of this oak or that aspen, it names the idea of a tree—a mental representation of treeness that allows all actual trees to be recognized as such. In this way of thinking, all linguistic expressions are the external form of thoughts. What we do when we speak to each other is to transmit mental images through a process of translation, thus:

This diagram of “telementation,” or thought transmission, is actually taken from Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics, which, despite its profound innovations, firmly maintained the long tradition of treating language as the dress of thought.

This visual representation of linguistic interaction does not, in fact, require A and B to be speaking the same language. As long as both A and B know languages L1 and L2, then the process of understanding speech that is displayed—translating a sound stream into a mental image, then producing a sound stream to represent a mental image for the interlocutor to translate inwardly in turn—would be exactly the same. You come to the same conclusion that language is thought in translation and thought is language translated if you extend the diagram to introduce person C, a translator mediating between A and B speaking in different tongues. C would look exactly the same, with identical lines of transmission between mouth, ear, and brain. Adding translation makes no difference to the model because the model already says that everything is translation already. As a consequence, Saussure’s Course, as well as the bulk of work on language that has taken place in its shadow, pays no attention to translation between languages at all.

I don’t know whether language is possible without thought—on the face of it, it must be, since so many people speak without thinking—and I wouldn’t dare contribute to the unending argument about whether thought is possible without words. The sole contribution I feel confident of making is to say that assimilating all uses of language to translation on the grounds that all speech is a mental translation of thought seriously diminishes our capacity to understand what the practice of translation between languages is about.

To avoid such objections, some scholars use the term transcoding to refer to the transformation of work in one medium into an altogether different thing (a play into a movie, a musical into a film, but most often a novel into anything else). It’s a tactic that has even more damaging effects, since it leads people into thinking that all expressions can be treated as instances of some kind of code. Codes are clever and useful things, but as early adventures in machine translation proved without appeal, languages don’t behave like codes at all. Turning a play into a movie has not the slightest analogy to or connection with turning a coded message into another code, and to call it transcoding is to use a figure of speech based on not bothering to think what you might mean by “code.”[173]

The fellows of Oxford colleges inspect the properties the colleges own in various parts of the country by annual outings when (in principle if not in fact) they process around the perimeter. It’s called “beating the bounds,” and that’s what we’ve now done with translation.

One of its sides is as unbounded as the line of a shore—tides rise and fall, and coasts can change shape. But other boundaries are clearly marked. Translation does not extend in every direction. Its own field is quite large enough.