The interpretation of language is a function of recognition. It was Noam Chomsky who theorized on the innate character of linguistic structures in the human consciousness. The corollary to his theory is the absolute 'permeability' of linguistic codes, predicated on the basis of a conative intention that underpins sign language. Any sign, be it written, visual, audible, is a sign of expression. Given the universality of these signs, in terms of meaning, one need only extract ¾ as it were ¾ the quintessence of their historical and cultural concretions to develop a fundamental grammar that will serve as an interface not only between national languages but also between different linguistic codes. According to Jacques Derrida, communication is a conative act tending to disunite, whereby the ego seeks to break down the 'monumental' nature of language. For Michel Foucault it is an act of transgression, an attempt ('conation') to shift the boundaries of what is permissible. For Roland Barthes, it is an erotic impulse of which the appeal passes through seductiveness, an effect of the aesthetic aura that words generate around themselves. In his Dialectical Reason Sartre reworks the phenomenology of Husserl and the ideas of Heidegger on Being as a state of consciousness defined by the parameter of 'time' in a philosophy of language where the written sign is a 'projection of interior experience', a theatrical strategy whereby words lodge themselves in the conscious according to social rituals, to the spaces through which all individuals carry on their relationships with the world at large. The poetry of Mallarmé, with his programmatic blank page, marks the limit of this breakdown from semantic density to aphasia

Many will be familiar with Raymond Queneau's Exercises in Style, in which an inconsequential occurrence is related in ninety nine different ways, adopting different standpoints, parodies of style, uses of metaphor and sensorial visions, also the coded languages of music and mathematics. According to Wittgenstein, language attests only to its own self ¾ a theory which here celebrates its own carnivalesque demise. Queneau, himself a mathematician, addresses all of the problems concerning the relationship between expression and meaning discussed up to this point, and distils them into pure narrative pleasure.

Neuropsychology studies the way in which the objectivity of perception is altered by the characteristics of the human consciousness: the processes whereby the mind, when observing something, in reality perceives its own self in the act of observing something. Language has always been one of the loci sacri of neuropsychology, ever since Piaget and Laborit began to draw a parallel between a child's comprehension of the world outside and an ability to establish subordinative links in discourse. According to their theory, a child three years of age sees every name, or noun, as associated with a reward: the magic word with which wishes are fulfilled. Picking up on what was said previously, we might try this formula: for a child of three, the first level of language is the ritual; at this level, the primary code is the conative, whereas the function of expression is the driving force of desire. The word riverrun with which Joyce ends Finnegan's Wake falls into this system of variables. Anyone attempting to translate that verbal enigma which is late Joyce, without being resigned to dirtying their hands with soil as would a child playing with creation, has no chance whatever of getting it right.

The next step in the formation of linguistic consciousness is the appropriation of territory. Finno-Ugric languages see linguistic territory as space, as a system of relations between co-presences, rather than the chronological sequence typical of neo-latin languages. The fixity of the weather, the unfailing alternation of the seasons with their unchanging moods characteristic of the Finnish climate' doubtless these have had their effect on the genesis of Finnic language, with its tendency to group terms together by assonance, to create unadulterable linguistic stocks that seem to recall both the sacred ancient oaks and the clan structure of the social fabric. Likewise Hungarian, a language in which the stem, the heart of the word, holds the connotation of every term, a language that can belong to the code of the emotional, or the scientific, or the legal, or whatever else; the way in which a Hungarian word conserves in its root the bond with tradition, yet having inflections that can be moulded to every kind of individual expressive feeling, seems bound up with the story of the people themselves, who have managed to preserve cultural roots intact throughout their history only by developing an increasingly subtle ductility in the face of so many foreign dominations. Hungarian belongs to that category of languages able to employ the behavioural tactics of certain microorganisms, which escape their enemies by assuming similar genetic traits.

An Italian scholar, Luciano Mecacci, has analyzed the way in which pictographic languages like Chinese and Japanese describe the world as an expression of ideas rather than of concepts. For a Chinese, an idea is an idea only if it can be depicted. A limit of no little consequence: if applied to the German language, there would be no more Nietzsche. The fact is that western languages are based on a principle of what one might call 'satisfying expectations'. Only if we know beforehand where the reasoning is likely to lead can we be certain of understanding what is written.

The popularity of Mishima in the West during the nineteen seventies stems from a misunderstanding. His suicide by seppuku during a television programme made him a heroic figure in the tortured western conscience. With that single act of thrusting a knife into his own stomach, performed by a man who in the aftermath of Hiroshima had recruited a private army of samurai in a bid to resist the penetration of American technological culture into Japanese life, a myth was created overnight. As it turns out, western translations of Misihima's novels have been taken largely from French versions. Musical instruments 'à cordes' are rendered slavishly as 'stringed' even in languages where the customary expression would be 'bowed'. And there is Pa Chin, Chinese author of Cold Nights, who in translation reads like Balzac. To Westerners, ideograms are a dead letter. According to Mecacci, the reason lies in the fact that for 'figurative' languages, a concept remains a concept by virtue of its being related to something else, not of its own self. In Chinese, terms like 'absolute', 'infinite' and 'immortality' are used as indeterminate extensions of the concepts of 'limit', 'time' and 'life': they amplify and enlarge as footnotes, on the fringe, but do not exist as 'concepts'. And besides, the nonsense against which Wittgenstein waged war all his life was precisely the fact that the most important concepts, in western languages, are those which mean nothing.

One of the most brilliant neuropsychologists of our time, Oliver Sachs, dedicated an extraordinary work, Seeing Voices, to the language of the deaf. Among the deaf, one finds the paradox that every metalinguistic interpretation is reduced, for physiological reasons, to its purely conative and need-driven mode, the gesture. In the sixteenth century, the humanist Cesare Ripa published an Iconology, in which he drew parallels between the figurative archetypes of plastic art and translations in literary language intended to relate the emotions of the characters portrayed. Similarly, in the same period, Giovo published a Trattato delle Imprese Amorose e Guerresche which describes the psychological character of those mythological figures with which the Great and Good of the time decorated their seals. For the literary translator, knowledge of these two treatises will open up new ways to an understanding of the text: and this, one can never tire of repeating, implies the notion of an interrelation of terms within an enclosed space (theatre, in effect, as an ecosystem). To return to Sachs, his basic intuition, when studying the deaf, was that language is communicated by Signs, and that once these signs are activated in the consciousness they become Symbols, i.e. linguistic expressions decoded conventionally by a predetermined grammar. And straight away one is up against a paradox: how can a spontaneous form of expression like sign language be interpreted a priori according to a tradition generated by historical and cultural experiences ? How can the universal objectivity of impulse become expressive subjectivity ?

Some readers will have asked themselves why translators are so fascinated by music. The first reason is that, in Music, all is Symbolic ("Everything impermanent is but a symbol", Goethe would have it: and what could be more fleeting than sounds ?). The second reason will be clear to anyone who has ever watched the conductor of an orchestra. With a single gesture, a vague and ambiguous direction written on the score becomes a sound. And how ? Through the act of breathing. Conducting is the seductive art of getting a hundred instrumentalists to breathe in syntony ¾ tuned to the same frequency ¾ as the conductor. In the same way, the literary translator needs to breathe as one with the author being translated. Hence one of the few dogmas we will pronounce here: it is impossible to translate a text without being tuned to the same frequency.

In his Mind and Nature, Gregory Bateson summarizes every error of interpretation in a series of automatic and erroneous presuppositions: