Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

THIRTY-TWO Avatar: A Parable of Translation

On a recent visit to India, where I was trying to learn more about translation, I took an afternoon off to go to the movies and watched a faded copy of what I believe is the most expensive film ever made. To my delight and surprise, Avatar turned out to be a parable about translation, and that’s why I bring it in at the end of this book.

The hero of James Cameron’s science-fiction fantasy is a human transformed by a laboratory technique into another being—nine feet tall, with a prehensile tail and amazing skydiving skills. His task is to penetrate the society of same-looking beasts causing trouble for a galactic mining company, and then to send back to his controllers the information they need to get the local inhabitants out of their way. He is still a human being under his impressive new shape.

But now that he has become a Pandoran in outward appearance, our hero becomes Pandoran in other ways, too. He goes native, so to speak, and becomes loyal to the community that has now accepted him as one of its own. These strange beings are fighting to remain themselves and to pursue the lives they have always had. Our hero makes their right to be different his own.

But respect for difference is clearly intended in the film to be an expression of a human value. So is our hero one of them, or still, at bottom, one of us? Is the mining company the vector of humanity—or are the awkward beasts in its way the true embodiment of our aspirations and souls?

The movie doesn’t quite answer the question at the end. It is the question that translation sets and must also leave open. How can a hugely modified transmogrification of some utterance—incorporating on occasions the verbal equivalent of a nine-foot-long tail—still remain, at some fundamental level, what it was?

Like Cameron’s fantasy, the practice of translation rests on two presuppositions. The first is that we are all different—we speak different tongues and see the world in ways that are deeply influenced by the particular features of the tongue that we speak. The second is that we are all the same—that we can share the same broad and narrow kinds of feelings, information, understandings, and so forth. Without both of these suppositions, translation could not exist.

Nor could anything we would like to call social life.

Translation is another name for the human condition.