Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
Logue
Matthew Reynolds
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199605712.003.0001
Translation does not happen only between languages. For as long as the
word has been in English, other kinds of translation have occurred. In
his 1578 bestseller, Euphues, John Lyly warned that, if you have a crabbe
tree, you can translate (i.e. transplant) it as much as you like but it will
never beare sweete apple.1 Two centuries later, Dr Johnson recorded in
his Dictionary a cuttingedge bit of medical jargon: the regimen must be to
translate the morbifick matter upon the extremities of the body.2 Back in
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the fourteenth century, when the words translate and translation were just
beginning to settle into English, we find in the Wycliffite Bible that Solomon
translatide Pharaoh's daughter from the city of David to the house he had
prepared for her. Translacioun, too, was what jumped Enoch miraculously
from earth to heavena usage that has just about survived into modern
English, thanks to the timetravelling properties of the Bible.3
These old, physical senses of translation make visible the word's derivation
from the Latin transferre (roughly, to transfer or carry across as well
as to translate). They have helped keep alive the idea that translation
between languages is, like moving an object through space, a process which
leaves something fundamentally unaltered, a change into another language
retaining the sense, as Dr Johnson defined it.4 The idea of movement,
obvious when Lyly talks of the translation of a crabbe tree, lurks within
the word when it is used of languages. Just like poem or play or novel,
translation names a kind of text with a distinguishable role (or rather,
cluster of roles) in culture. But, unlike those other words, translation also
projects a picture of how the texts it names have come to be the way they
are: they must have done some sort of carrying across.
As a linguistic or philosophical description of what happens in translation,
carrying across has obvious shortcomings. In 1965 J. C. Catford attacked
the idea that translation might involve the transference of meaning from
one set of patterned symbolsinto another.5 Jacques Derrida, too, argues
sharply against what he calls the classical model of translation as a
transfer of pure signifiedsa conception which, he (p. 4 ) suggests,
underlies the whole endeavour of philosophy in Western culture, and which
he claims prevailed up until Benjamin perhaps (i.e. until the publication
of Walter Benjamin's essay Die Aufgabe des bersetzers in 1923).6 Many
other thinkers have followed similar lines, and I will return to their arguments
in later chapters. Yet, as we will see, the image of carrying across is
remarkably difficult to shake off: even theorists who reject it (even Derrida
himself) rely on it at other points in their arguments.
This habit of selfcontradiction is not as stymieing as it may seem. For
the idea of translation as carrying across needs to be framed, not as a
proposition that defines translation, but as a metaphor for it. And metaphors,
of course, offer only provisional and angled images of what they are
metaphors for. When Andrew Marvell hears Times winged Charriot hurrying
near he is not claiming that time is really in a winged chariot, only that
that is how it seems to him for the purposes of his poem.7 Likewise, the
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picture that lurks within the word translation offers a way of looking at
what happens in translation between languages. And that picture is only
partial and pragmatic, in some ways illuminating, in others not. The word
translation, then, includes within itself a metaphor for translation, the
metaphor of carrying across.
As we will see, translation between languages is a complex, varied, and
unpredictable imaginative enterprise which cannot satisfactorily be reduced
to theoretical description. But it can partially and loosely be grasped with
metaphors: carrying across is by no means the only one available, though
it is the most insistent. Discussions of the translation of literatureand
especially of poetryhave, throughout history, been remarkably fertile
in metaphors for translation. Derrida's classical model has not been so
dominant as, in the fury of argument, he perhaps makes it seem.
For the partial misfit between translation and the image of carrying across
has registered even in how the word translation is habitually used. People
do not generally speak of signifieds or even meaning being translated
out of one text into another; and they never have done. What we say is
translated is a poem or a book or a speech or a word. Obviously the
whole poem or book or speech or word is not carried across unchanged: this
everyday usage, then, rebuts the classical model. Equally, people's flexible
way with the word seems to recognize that translation operates on more
than Catford's meaning or Derrida's pure signifieds. In the Wycliffite Bible,
for instance, translatide and translacioun themselves translate the Latin
words transtulit and translationem.8 What sort of translation has been
accomplished here? Perhaps something that might looselymetaphorically
be called the carrying across of a meaning or sense (I will return to the
question); but certainly (p. 5 ) also the carryingacross of several letters. A
word is transmuted as it is brought overin this translationinto a different
language, becoming in some respects but not wholly a different word. And
English too is altered as it is pulled back in the opposite direction and made
to mingle a little more closely with Latin.
In most other European languages, the words for translation include a similar
latent metaphor. In some, however, the sorts of rewriting that English
speakers call translation are imagined in other terms. Douglas Robinson
points out that, in Finnish, the main idea is of turning between languages
(this thought finds an echo in the English word version, from the Latin
vertere).9 Elsewhere in the worldas Maria Tymoczko has emphasized
many of the words indicating the practices and products of translationdo
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not actually mean translation as such, in the sense implied by the English
term.10 These other terms, she rightly says, offer new ways of thinking
about what translation might be. But the English tradition can do that
too if we open our eyes to the mobility of its definitions. Those elderly,
physical usages of the word translation can serve, not as illustrations
of the classical model, but as distinct instances of meaning, charged
with metaphorical possibility. Might translation between languages be
in some way like the development of morbifick matter through a body,
whether as cure or as infection? Dryden sometimes felt it was, as we will
see in Chapters 11 and 15. Or could it somehow resemble translation into
heaven? Sir Francis Kynaston thought so when, in 1635, he hoped that
by translating Chaucer's Troilus and Criseide into Latin he had made it
stable and unmovingthroughout all time (per omnia seculastabilem &
immotum).11 Or perhaps translation between languages might involve a sort
of marriage (between translator and source, perhaps) like the translation
of Pharoah's daughter? Even Lyly's horticultural usage associates translation
with change as much as with transference: what is exasperating about the
crabbe tree is that when translated it does not alter as one might expect.
All these usages point away from the classical model as much as towards
it. The same is true of that most startling of English literary utterances of
the word, Quince's, in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream (c.1595),
when his friend Bottom's head (at least) has been changed for that of an
ass: Bless thee, Bottom, bless thee! / Thou art translated.12 How much
of the rest of Bottom is assifiedvoice? gait? penis?will depend on the
production. This uncertain image of translation reflects searchingly upon
translation between languages, for the play within a play that Bottom goes
on to act in derives from a translation, The XV Bookes of P. Ovidius Naso,
Entytled Metamorphosis, done by Arthur Golding (1567)a text whose own
metamorphic tendencies I will discuss in Chapter 25. In none (p. 6 ) of these
cases is carrying across all or only or exactly what occurs; in each of them it
is fretted or dislodged by other energies.
The complexities latent in such usages of translation and translate have
long been recognized in discussions of literary translation. The assumptions
identified by Catford, the classical model attacked by Derrida, never held
much sway over this field. Granted, writers did often describe translations
as being sense for sense or, like Johnson, as retaining the sense; but
what was meant by for, by sense, or by retaining was not a simple
matter. Dryden, for instance, thought that sense, could be amplified in
translation, though not altered: not for him, evidently, the transfer of
pure signifieds.13 But what counted as amplification and how did it differ
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other verse has been infected by the habit of translation so that it, too, is
not pure poetry. For Coleridge, then, translation can describe a kind of
writing that involves the transformation of words into other words as part of
a continuous, if misguided, process of composition.
Other writers during Coleridge's lifetime used the word for various different
ways in which thoughts might come out into language: the trend was fuelled
(as Antoine Berman has shown in L'preuve de l'tranger [1984]) by much
speculation on the part of the German romantics.16 For William Hazlitt, not
unusually taking the opposite line from Coleridge, translation was a mark
of genius: Shakespeare's language, he says, is hieroglyphical. It translates
thoughts into visible images.17 Thomas Carlyle addressed the same topic
twenty years later but took translation to suggest creative compromise.
Shakespeare was constrained by having to write for the Globe: he was like
a sculptor who cannot set his own free Thought before us; but his Thought
as he could translate it into the stone that was given.18 When Walter Pater
adopted the word, in 1889, he used it in a looser sense again: translation
was what happened when anyone uttered anything: all language involves
translation from inward to outward.19
Though it loosens as it spreads, the word retains some flavour of translation
between languages. But it is hard to judge how much of one. In Pater's
case, translation cannot be used so vaguely as to mean just change or
movement: if it were, the remark would be inane. But neither can it mean
exactly the same as when we talk of translation from English to Italian: if it
did, it would commit Pater to denying the existence of any difference at all
between language and thought. The French word traduction was developing
in a similar way at about the same time: Paul Valry, writing in his Cahiers
a decade or so after Pater, probed the slippages of meaning which resulted.
What we usually call thought, he said, is still only a language, although a
very unusual one (ce qu'on appelle ordinairement pense n'est encore
qu'une langue. vrai dire trs particulire). But where does translation
in and out of it start? And what is translated? (mais o commence la
traduction? et quoi est traduit?)20 Valry's questions are still relevant to
cultural theory today, whereas Sherry Simon has remarkedtranslation
is most often used as a metaphorto stand for the difficulty of access
to language, of a sense of exclusion from the codes of the powerful. So,
migrants strive to translate their past into the (p. 9 ) present, and
women to translate themselves into the language of patriarchy.21 These
recent usages convey an awareness that culture is text and that identity
is contructed through language; but they tend not, any more than their
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Notes:
(1.) John Lyly, Euphues: The Anatomy of Wyt (1578), 5v.
(2.) Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language: The First and
Fourth Editions, ed. Anne McDermott. CDROM (Cambridge, 1996), ad loc.
(3.) The Holy Biblein the Earliest English Versions made from the Latin
Vulgate by John Wycliffe and his Followers, ed. Rev. Josiah Forshall and Sir
Frederic Madden, 4 vols (Oxford, 1850), ii, 403 (Paralipomenon 8.11) and iv,
498 (Hebrews 11.5).
(4.) Johnson, A Dictionary.
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