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.
b. Literary language as foreshortening
Everyday language differs from the language of letters in
the nature of the "vision" it conveys. In everyday language, the
vision is objective, and in literary language, subjective ¾ which means that in literature,
greater importance attaches to the implications and suggestions of the words
than to what actually is said. Intention has precedence over expression. The
desire to be challenged, so to speak, is stronger than the search for
clarity. Effectiveness is achieved in redundancy, in the aura created around
the text. In literature, sense is significance.
What is foreshortening?
Going into a gothic cathedral, the profusion of side
chapels, arches, columns and windows give the impression of plurality,
creating as many cathedrals ¾ identical in design, though differing in structure ¾ as the standpoints taken up by
the observer. The gothic cathedral seeks to transform time into space. To
suggest an escape from the temporal, even as human life is destined
ultimately to enter the serene uniformity of the City of God. The essential
purpose of foreshortening, therefore, is that it should stylize the
fundamental elements of the subject matter so that they can be freely
recombined and juxtaposed. If we consider our individual and collective
memory as the space encompassed by a cathedral, we will at once be in the
dimension that best reflects an ideal psychology for the translator.
Why?
In effect, this is a process that underlies any creative
enterprise in literature.
The most emblematic example is that gothic cathedral of
words erected by Proust in his Recherche, where the selfsame objects
described ¾
bell-towers, seascapes, curtains, faces, discourses ¾ all take on new meanings
according to the connections in space that the memory establishes between
them, starting from two initial points of view: du cote de chez Swann, du
cote de chez Guermantes. Two roads, one leading to the home of the
Swanns, the other to the home of the Guermantes. But it is around the
divergence between these two areas of thought that the different points of
view in the narrative are articulated. "Of our body, where incessant
pleasures and many pains come together, we do not have a precise vision like
that of a tree or of a house or of a passer-by";, writes Proust, who
makes a theatre of the body, a stage on which to project events, like the
Chinese shadows of Li Po.
Thus, the first quality of the foreshortened view is its
density. The second is reversibility, whereby a detail formerly unremarkable
in character can take on a revelatory significance. Thinking of The Pit
and the Pendulum, by Edgar Allan Poe, the ticking that strikes the
consciousness of the protagonist ¾ the only sound perceived
¾ has no
significance at first on reawakening. Everything is in darkness. The fact
that the ticking denotes the inexorable descent of a chopper is understood
only as the character becomes conscious of the situation. In retrospect,
accordingly, we come to see that Death is the sound of time, and the ticking
takes on the expressive and deceptive force of a metaphysical symbol, though
without in any way losing its graphic and sensory impact. In Poe's tale, we
discover the external space from within the conscious of the protagonist.
The third quality of foreshortening is that it is related
to a point of view.
c. Subjectivity and objectivity of literary language
In his Tolstoy and Dostojevsky, Mereskovski advances the
theory of a primary difference in approach between points of view. There are
narrators who live the scene from within the person of the protagonist, and
narrators who describe emotions and states of mind by visualizing them through
the person's modes of dress, gesticulation and expression. The two Russian
writers in question are archetypes of these two methods, which the translator
must know how to distinguish if the poetical differences implicit in the two
techniques are not to be spoiled by confusing one with the other. To describe
the last night of a condemned man, we might put ourselves in the mind of the
individual, relating that only now he understands the destiny marked out for
him, reflecting how nature continues on remorselessly, indifferent to
individuals, perhaps recalling the figure of some philosopher friend, a token
anarchist who had influenced his life and way of thinking (a kind of suicide
prompted by niezschean philosophy, or who knows what), or we might ponder the
shadows of the trees cast on the wall of the cell, likening them to the hands of
the executioner about to carry off another victim. In the first instance, one
has the notion principally of narration as a "cultural" code, gaining
substance with the number of relations it is able to establish with the world of
ideas that give shape to a people and a civilization; and in the second, the
conception of life as changeable, a thing of which the significance is
impossible to grasp and which cannot be reduced to a system.
This is a question subtending the entire history of literature,
and illustrated to advantage in Moby Dick, given that when Melville
describes the hunt for the great white whale, he is perhaps speaking not so much
of a mammal roaming the ocean, but rather of the meaning of life itself.
Together with Melville, Conrad, Flaubert, Hemingway and Camus are perfect
examples of the "objective" persuasion, whereas Thomas Mann, Henry
James and Sartre belong to the "subjective". Generally speaking,
objectivity is found more in the Anglo-Saxon tradition, and hardly ever in the
middle-european (with the notable exceptions of Doeblin and Schnitzler).
This distinction might also be rationalized as the contrast
between "denotation" and "connotation". Writers who
describe, and writers who comment. The interesting aspect of the problem for the
translator concerns the nature of the language. In effect, a language like
English tends naturally to denote, whereas Germanic languages tend more toward
connotation, based as they are on subordinating conjunctions, on a reduction of
temporal distinctions to spatial distinctions, and on a tendency to articulate
"hierarchically"; within single structures of expression.
English is an idiom spawned by a daily intercourse between
migrant peoples faced with the necessity for a means of communication that would
enable them to perform countless tasks and satisfy innumerable needs from day to
day. What emerged indeed was an "idiolect", developing primarily as a
vehicle for legal and business transactions. German on the other hand came in a
rush from the genius of Luther, confined out of necessity to the castle of
Warburg after being exiled by Rome, as he set about translating the Bible. Hence
the logic and analytical structure of the language, as if cast in a mould.
As for French and Italian, these are the sum of various
idiolects originating from different sectors ¾ the language of the court and of
the curia, of noblemen and craftsmen, of cosmopolitan artists ¾ given rules and structures
determined by special academies to ensure a "monumental" character,
albeit the pedigree has been bought at a price, since these are languages with a
limited flexibility of expression.
From whatever angle one approaches literary translation, these
distinctions have first to be recognized and understood.
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