Preliminary definitions
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a. The concept of "field"
The path leading from perception to sensation, and thence
to conceptualization, is complex and for the most part remains a mystery.
Ancient cultures made use of ideograms to express image and thought at one
and the same time. The word "idea" derives from the Greek
eidolon, which has to do with visualized images. Sight gives place to
thought. Repeated images create expectations to which we attribute the value
of substantial things by giving names. If value, as Max Weber suggests, is
that which gives direction to hopes and dreams, then every linguistic
culture is an organization of values influencing the discovery of the world.
It follows that every language is the expression of a different way of
understanding the world. This is not a philosophical question, given that it
is the senses first and foremost which are involved. When Homer describes
the sea as being the "colour of wine", he is not being poetic, but
simply giving expression to the way his contemporaries perceived the effect
produced by the reflection of the sun on the water. Similarly, a crystalline
structure is one that evolves slowly as perceived by the human eye. To the
Attic perception, the transparencies and translucencies of a Monet would
appear uniform, black, violet...
But literary languages do not take shape only through the
sensations and physiological characteristics of a people. Customs and usages
are also an important factor. When, in the Song of Songs, the breasts
of the beloved are likened to fawns, we cannot identify any erotic urge in
the metaphor without first considering how, in the ancient nomadic
civilizations, the main role of the women was to draw water and bring it to
the village in jars which they would balance on their heads, so that the
origin of this vision of beauty lies in the profile of the swaying breasts
silhouetted against the horizon. Hence, the idea of envisaging a flock of
fawns in the line of approaching women, with the youngest tending to drift
off and then being brought back into line, and the notion of comparing the
breasts of the beloved to such an image... these things take us along
the path that distinguishes everyday language from literary language. Our
vision of beauty on the other hand has its roots in Renaissance
representations of the Virgin, set motionless against a stylized natural
landscape, or in Raphaelite portraits, with those profiles delineated as
margins interfacing the light of the incarnate with the relaxed serenity of
far-off horizons.
This "dynamic" vision of beauty implies a
perspective different to ours, in the theatre of the mind where life
experiences determine how things are perceived. Another example: in a poem
by the Chinese Li Po, a group of young people are depicted drinking and
making merry in a pagoda. The idea (eidolon) would seem to be one of
carefree abandon, were it not for the reflection of their images being drawn
by the current of the river toward an inevitable demise... A stylized
culture like that of the Chinese, all profiles, intent on outline rather
than perspective, cannot help but see the truth as a shadow cast onto a
wall. Chinese culture is the culture of the Sosie, the Double ¾ the Other Self concealed behind
the social mask imposed by Confucianism.
Likewise in the West, romanticism reflected the beginnings
of an obsession with the idea of this Other Self as a revealer of hidden
truths. In Heinrich Heine's famous poem Der Doppelganger, a traveller
obsessed by the moon passes by the house where he had formerly known
happiness in love. The light of the moon is reflected in a window, behind
which the man sees himself as he once was. He experiences a deep jealousy as
the moon casts his own shadow on the ground. Are we in the same
"field" as Li Po? Not really. Here the truth of the Other Self is
a shadow cast over time, rather than in space. On the other hand, there is a
certain logic in finding the poetry of Li Po in The Chinese Flute, a
Buddhist anthology compiled by the German Hans Bethge in the late nineteenth
century.
Staying with things German, in the Nibelungslied,
gold and purple symbolize the human desire for power, whilst the sword and
the ash tree are symbols of liberation. In a culture where the social order
was determined principally by Sippe, clans bound by feudal
relationships, the gold of the crown was synonymous with civil war. The
arrival of Charlemagne and the Holy Roman Empire would turn this whole
symbolic framework upside down. Changing the field, in our eyes. In effect,
we find in the Baroque period ¾ the necessary transition to "modern" civilization
¾ that gold and
purple have come to symbolize the redeeming power of Faith. Similarly, at
the height of the Mediaeval era when relations between the sexes were
conditioned by a totally rigid class structure and erotic passion was
necessarily adulterous, the "dramaturgy" of the dawn is a
representation of death, not resurrection. The late Middle Ages show us a
culture of Night, albeit the separation of light and darkness has not yet
become representative of the struggle between good and evil. A
secular" culture, as it were. And, following a historical hiatus,
it was another German, Richard Wagner, who took up the threads and wove
another panel into the tapestry when in Tristan and Isolde he used the
nocturnal duet of the lovers to define a moment in which life triumphs over
the masks of social pretence ¾ masks of the daytime. We have seen it already in Heine:
Romanticism, reaching out toward alien and/or ancient cultures in an attempt
to recapture a secular dimension to human existence.
So what significance has all this, in practice, for the
translator of literary texts?
First and foremost an awareness of the prejudices, the
original perspectives, the symbologies, indeed the "cultures" on
which the powers of imagination are to be exercised, and on which any
judgement of the source text is bound to depend. This judgement is
necessarily an a prioriconception. A
personal "field" of observation in and with which the translator's
own experiences are also placed, stored and interconnected.
And what is this thing we are referring to as
"field"? An assemblage of parameters relating to perspective,
formulated from perceptive data attributable to the physiological
constitution, the cultural learning, the emotional temperament and the life
experience of the individual translator. Every "field" has
collective and individual elements. Each is unique and incompatible with
others, charged with a mixture of allusions, evocations and references to an
inner world that is by its very nature untranslatable.
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