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4. Morphological analysis of linguistic logic: centripetal languages and centrifugal languages. Root, thematic assonance, morpheme, phoneme, semanteme: organization of meaning in literary languages

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b) The death of meaning

Every reading is a conversation. The first level of a translation is the individual reorganization of the meaning around the ‘stream of consciousness’ which exists within every consciousness as a mnemonic flow, before and after every discourse. Whenever one reads, one reads Joyce’s Finnegans' Wake. Every reading is a stream of consciousness. Thus, every translation involves a dual level of aporia: with consciousness as a centripetal discourse, and the text the centrifugal expression – in being ‘narrative’ – of ‘another’ centripetal discourse, every translation clearly involves the reduction of a self-sufficient system to a system (semantic alteration). Similarly, the reading of a translation is a raising of this aporia to the second degree. If we compare a text to an electrical circuit, the question of the accuracy of every translation will appear in all its unmistakable connotation. Thus, as we do not look at a wiring diagram in the same impartial way we would observe a work of art, when it concerns the translation of a text we will be interested in its functioning, or the way in which a translator manages to arrange the elements of the text along an ‘electric’ axis. Every translation is an ‘ionization’ of the text; and, like in an electrical circuit, where the energy’s heat chemically alters its components, the need to resolve the dual aporia described above must lead the translator to reshape the meaning conveyed by its organization in a different, self-sufficient, centripetal system of signs. If we add that human thought is a chemical process of cerebral ionization, it becomes clear that every translation draws a map of thought, as a diachronic system of signs made synchronic by a metamorphic action occurring within the limits of its ecosystem. This action, called ‘interpretation’, is a vital act: the introduction of the potential organism in a given time and space. Since the moment of death (the ‘ nondescript’ of every existential adventure) is innate in the act of birth, cleary, in every translation the error – the loss of meaning – is implicit in the very decision from which the act of translating derives. What we have discussed resolves the picture of systematic incompatibility between languages that we outlined in the first part of our discourse.

 


 



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