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Culture and civilization: original elements and foreign assimilations in the historical progress of languages |
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c) Acquisition strategies
The strategies adopted in national languages when addressing foreign
traditions are essentially four in number:
1) Inclusion
The canonical example is provided by French, in which every foreign model is
rendered applying the grammatical and cultural codes of the target language.
Every French language specialist should get to know the translation of Goethe's
Faust attempted by Gérard de Nerval. Here, the philosophical
content of the text has been distilled into pure lyrical form. Unheimlich
becomes étonnant. Mikrokosmos is le ciel infini.
Everything is experienced through contemplation, rather than conception. Italian
too has an inclusive approach. In Italian, the apodictic phraseology of Kafka
becomes an organization of subordinates. One enlightening case is that of the
Greek Lyric Poets as translated by Salvatore Quasimodo, who handles the
subjectless sayings of Archilochus by adding the interjections "tu
dici" (thou sayest), "così è il tuo
dire" (so sayest thou). Similarly, Pavese's translation of Moby
Dick reflects an approach of the same type, given the
'dramaturgical' way in which the translator renders the references
to the Psalms, and to biblical sayings in general, which in his hands become
visual metaphors.
2) Allusion
In certain cultures characterized by the struggle to achieve a recognizable
national identity, use is made of foreign stylistic conventions to mark the
introduction of a parody or the definition of particular historical and social
contexts. In Russian literature, there is Tolstoy's instructive device of
employing French dialogue in War and Peace to illustrate the isolation of
the Russian nobility from that European revolution in which the story of
Napoleon was unfolding with such shattering force. In Dostoevsky's Idiot,
Polish is the language used to convey marginalization and diversity. The way
Nastasia Filippovna makes fun of the Poles, imitating their way of speech, is a
mark of her mean-mindedness. Likewise in The Inspector General, Gogol
uses the dialects of provincial Russia as theatrical sets affording backdrops on
which the bureaucratization of the System casts its sinister shadows. In German,
the introduction of foreign expressions takes on a parodistic aspect. Jean
Paul's parodying of the Latin used by lawyers and notaries, in the spirited
testaments of the Flegejare, has a connotation at once sinister and
merry. Heine has the Devil speak in eight-line rhyming stanzas ¾ an Italian Humanist. In the case of
'peripheral' writers like Mörike or Keller, by contrast,
foreign language interpolations become the utterances of indolent poets and
drifters enlightened by some long-lost popular wisdom. Mozart on the Way to
Prague and Spiegel the Cat (the Keller original) are
'submerged' works of great importance in this regard.
3) Integration
This is a somewhat rare circumstance occurring between allotropic languages,
whereas borrowing from a language of the same stock is a common occurrence.
Nonetheless, the practice of borrowing in this context is typified by a tendency
to convey clearly definable distinctions. In Italian, for example, the French
expressions arriére-pensée and cul de sac are used
to indicate states of mind rather than objective situations, as in the original
tongue, whereas in neo-latin languages anglicisms are subsumed with the intent,
generally, of characterizing mass movements and psychological situations (such
as melting-pot or background). In the opposite direction, the
familiar Italian expressions used by composers of music are used to depict the
spirit, or character, of an event (a crescendo of excitement, agitation,
protest... or Presto con Fuoco indicating high passion). Whilst in
Slavic languages one finds only autoreference to lexical variants of the same
semantic root, in languages other than neo-latin this type of occurrence is
unknown. In literary translation a foreign term will be left as it is, unless it
happens to be in the translator's own language, in which case the translator
will look for a different foreign expression providing the same
characterization.
4) Rhetorical emphasis
In Thomas Mann's novel Doctor Faustus, the guest called up by the
protagonist Adrian Leverkühn, hallucinating in a syphilis-induced fever,
assumes different national masks one after the other: from a Luther speaking
counter-reformation Saxon to a French impresario whose only language is the
jargon of vaudeville. Similarly, in Pasticciaccio by Gadda, the Roman and
Venetian dialects become conduits for 'philosophical' conclusions
(the gloomy thoughts of Inspector Ingravallo) on the intentionally inconsistent
aspects of the case. This way of intensifying the 'rhetorical accent' of a
character or of a situation by using foreign technicalisms reaches its zenith in
the language of criticism and formal analysis. Terms like plot, pattern,
cluster, in Literature, ground bass, Urlinie, continuo, in
Music, or feedback and spin in Physics ¾ to mention just a few examples
¾ show how every
national language, for reasons connected with historical contingencies or with
the circulation of ideas, is able to dissociate itself in given disciplines from
the normal context of will and sentiment and adopt 'neutral' modes
of description, explanatory and denotative, serving to underscore the intended
meaning when addressing different art fields. In Literature, this
'meta-language' can sometimes be the vehicle for exercises in
alienation and parody (another example, in addition to those already mentioned,
would be the linguistic melting-pot of a writer such as Sanguineti, who
employs terms from Physics and Mathematics alongside archaisms and
neologisms).
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