PART ONE
The principles of language in the human consciousness
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Literary language as the expression of national cultures |
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c) The "plastic" tradition
We find another important distinction between national linguistic cultures in
the concept of "canons". There are cultures apparently convinced that
their national linguistic identity must be shaped by a "theology of
models", and cultures in which transgression of the canon is the statutory
poetic element. This contrast cannot easily be systematized. Take the French
model, for example, with Boileau the arbiter of the Beautiful, and Racine with
his tragedies compiling a veritable "liturgy" of arguments sustaining
that language should remain impermeable to the distractions of sentiment. The
inevitable consequence is that one has had a proliferation of subversive
movements, and schools of disobedience, tending to characterize the evolution of
French literature: from de Sade to Lautrémont, through Nerval and
Baudelaire, then Mallarmé, Breton, and so on... But transgression
signifies the existence of an accepted standard, and translators must know the
standards if they are to avoid superimposing their own creative urges over the
purely imitative, "acting" skills that the process of translation
involves. Thus, anyone wanting to translate Verlaine must necessarily know
something about the Parnassians in order to recognize and understand the codes
parenthesized by the poet in pursuing his personal aesthetic revolution.
Similarly, to translate Jean Paul one needs to be fully conversant with the
jargon of notaries, theologians and practitioners of the law, permanent victims
of that sharp irony employed by the German writer with the controversially
French name. For Heine, the translator must explore the Volkslied, those
lengthy ballads which conjure up the pietistic Germany of the Rhine. The stone
to overturn for clues in this instance will be Des Knaben Wunderhorn, the
collection of popular poetry compiled by Brentano and von Armin.
The problem is the same for theatre: in the Elizabethan masque one has
a tradition based on a fusion of words and music, with prosodists adopting
metres and rhythms in which devices such as the play on words and the nonsense
lyric are taken to the limit. In Germany on the other hand, the prevailing form
is the Puppenspiel: the puppet theatre, dominant since the Baroque era;
consequently, the linguistic context reflects an experimentalism involving the
exploration of many and various idiolects, often as a vehicle for caricature.
Lessing would attempt to restore order to the situation, but Goethe's
Urfaust with its cheerful linguistic anarchy shows how, for a German
writer, the approach to drama could be one of drinking anew from the untainted
springs of nature. In France, by contrast, the theatre is courtly, academic,
with linguistic connotations centred on the tradition of lively debate,
propositions, and the conversation of amorous intrigue ¾ a language characterized by
elision: that whole ritual whereby words serve as status symbols and at the same
time as instruments of consensus, a ritual parodied by Molière in his
Bourgeois Gentilhomme.
Along with the problems relating to differences between national traditions,
one has the problem of codes in an overall sense. Not even punctuation marks are
subject to universal rules. The translator taking on Nietzsche comes up against
a whole system of "unwritten" language, a proliferation of abstruse
indications that include double dashes, and single words stranded between full
stops, or left as if to vibrate between two sets of suspension periods...
Another example: in translations of Kafka, the short and figurative sentences of
the original are often merged to produce a more fluid and "neo-latin"
form, perhaps on the basis that the German used by the praguian Kafka was not a
living language but a jumble of bookish substrata. True enough, but Kafka gives
expression to that power which is the history of language: the high-sounding
tones of "sublime" utterance are bent to serve the purposes of
caricature, "concealed by too much light", that produces the
sulphurous aftertaste of his prose. Kafka's punctuation includes commas placed
to interrupt the continuity of his prosody, and semicolons that introduce no new
clauses but leave inert descriptions of enclosed places hanging in the air:
devices used as if colours by a painter, or rests by a composer, a medium for
countless moods and figures employed in connotation which ¾ if we acknowledge that literature
is the art of the unsaid ¾ is far more important than denotation. Now, given that German had
its origins in the translation of the Bible, undertaken by Luther while hidden
away in the castle of Warburg to escape being burned as a heretic, it is clear
enough that this sententiously economical procedure adopted by Kafka is
designed, as Luther would have it, to "paint the devil on the
wall"... Hemingway too, in The Old Man and the Sea, plays with
the style of biblical sayings, suspended out of time, using caesurae and
scansions in such a way that punctuation marks become tone colours, like the
voices of organ pipes. The level of connotation is altogether different,
however. In this instance we are presented with an Ethical notion ¾ the Calvinistic idea of sacrifice,
in the contact between hands and hard matter as conduit to a state of grace
¾ and at the same time
with an Aesthetic notion of the sea as a mother gathering up tears and redeeming
them from their insignificance, quite the opposite of that Gnostic challenge
directed at God-the-Father by Kafka.
In short, every page of literature is a score, denoted according to the
conventions of national language. The process of transposing autoreferential
signs from one linguistic system to another is exegesis, at once the premiss and
consequence of every interpretation. In the next chapter we will look at the
opposing ways in which inclusive and exclusive languages respond to foreign
cultures and their creations, indeed to what Spengler would call the different
quality of "culture" and
"civilization".
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