Every
time I am invited to a seminar on translation studies, I am both tempted and panic-stricken.
I recall the long days spent in reading theories of translation and find myself
facing, once again, blank intellectual spaces caused by my own incomprehension
of theory and lack of sophistication. Each theorist of translation, I remember,
brought his/her own "horizon of expectation" to a translated text, and
everyone wanted to give a "call to action" against this or that practice
of translators in order to save the original from a variety of violations'. The
translator, I thought, was always the object of jehadi rage of the theorists who
insisted that there must be some fundamental rules for translation. And they all
believed that the translator was nearly always a guilty thing who had to be surprised
as he either did or did not reveal, deform, explain, improve, expand, rationalise,
eroticise, clarify, infect, simplify, defer, ennoble, rewrite, nativise, destroy,
exoticise, feminise, domesticate, minoritise, foreignise, impoverish, colonise,
subvert or misrepresent the meaning of the original text. And to confuse things
further, one theorist even argued that every time one writes critically about
another text one is doing nothing but translating. We are told, for instance,
that Helen Vendler was actually translating, not interpreting, Keats's "Ode
to Autumn" in her analysis of the poem, just as Keats himself was translating
scenes from his own earlier poems into the images of his ode, and, in turn, the
season of autumn was translating the earth into "mellow fruitfulness."
At the end of all my theoretical reading,
I often wondered if under the vast network of words spun-out with impressive complexity
and skill, there was only emptiness; that theories of translation, especially
the more post-modern ones, were another way of thinking about the absurdity and
the futility of being in the world. Should a translator, I remember asking myself,
be made to carry such a heavy ontological burden? Should he not protest, and cry
out, "No, I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was I meant to be?" Is he not,
like Wordsworth's poet, merely a common and an ordinary man, wrestling with words
and meanings, and speaking to other common and ordinary human beings? I must,
however, confess that my despondency after reading theorists of translation has
always been accompanied by a sense of guilt both about my own lack of theoretical
erudition and the absence of any "dogma driven" (Tagore's phrase) convictions
as a translator. And I have found myself making yet another effort -- always against
my better instincts -- to reread the theoretical texts I had already struggled
with earlier or read the ones I know I should read for my own salvation as an
intellectual. But, invariably, at the end of all my academic effort, and contrary
to what Yeats meant by an intellectual quest, my mind, like "a long-legged
fly upon a stream," merely hovers over misty nothingness. And overcome by
despair, I begin to wonder if the act of translation is really not about imagining
another language and hence imagining other forms of living and being; and if a
translator is no better than a ventriloquist's dummy who has no language of his
own and whose truth is his silence.
Initially, theories of translation seem make sense. They are even exciting to
read for, instead of information, they offer sophisticated wit. I even find myself
gracefully acknowledging that, even if my own practice as translator might have
been naïve or simple-minded, I have been troubled by the similar questions
and have sometimes even been tempted to offer similar solutions. There is pleasure
in the acknowledgement and recognition of agreement with others who have thought
about the necessity of translation and its difficulties. After all, my own claim
to intellectual cosmopolitanism depends upon the labour of a community of translators,
as does my claim that in order to recognize our selfhood we need to understand
the ways in which all of us belong to the human plurality. But soon after, I realise
that theoretical reading inevitably becomes contentious and factitious. I find
myself in a nightmare of words, prescriptions and the ruins of logic. I am bewildered.
First by the stern lawgivers who lay down scientific rules for translation which
tell me, a bit tautologically, that I must notice every shadow and trace of every
word and, then, by the narcissism of the deconstructionists who assert that words
only reflect other words in a sad and endless regression into nothingness. Translation,
thereby, becomes a descent into a labyrinth of dictionaries -- not the enchanted
labyrinth of stories Jorge Luis Borges leads us into -- and every syllable ever
recorded in time carries within it an echo of some other syllable from another
time. Finally, irritated, bewildered and depressed, I reach out for a line from
one of the letters Robert Frost wrote in his old age and use it as a talisman:
"I am weary of all these considerations."
It is heartening
to note that of late, even amongst the theorists of translation, there are some
who are as tired as I am of theoretical wars which take place more often amongst
theorists of language than amongst translators They are trying to assert once
again that the act of translation is a kind of imaginative and existentially serious
dialogue which happens because, as the philosopher Jurgen Habermas says, we assume
that "linguistically-articulated worldviews are interwoven with everyday
forms of life." A translator lives amongst words which have a human voice
and a social purpose; a translator is a person who invites us to establish a relationship
with a culture and a community, a life of the mind and a society of deeds, which
are markedly different from the civilizational history to which one belongs.
I
had always assumed, with the assuredness of the innocent, that translation enabled
one to make the difficult effort to know the other. It was with the help of translation,
I was sure; that one fell into conversation with the other and so reaffirmed one's
existence in the world beside the other. Still influenced by the concerns of the
humanists -- concerns which, in our times, seem like phantom shadows in a fragile
glass -- I believed that translation was a way of renewing the old dream of communitas
where the self could behold itself in the other's eyes (or in "one's brother's
eyes" as Blake would have said), and so be reassured of its similarity to
and difference from the other. I should add here that I understood communitas
as that condition where human beings, unbounded by conventions or sanctions or
prejudices of social structures, succeeded in establishing a basic or a primal
'I and Thou' relationship with each other, and confronted each other, not as players
in melodramas of confrontation, but as 'human totals', as integral beings who
recognizably shared the same humanity. The act of translation, then, was a way
of creating a habitat where other samskaras -- other myths and longings -- different
from those of the isolated self could also resonate with meaning.
Now,
however, I have to contend with recent trends in European and American criticism,
which argue (renewing, perhaps, Dr Johnson's suspicion about translations in a
different idiom and within an angst-ridden metaphysics) that translation, far
from being a knowledge-making activity, is a threat to meaning and knowledge.
Taking its cue, perhaps, from Arthur Rimbaud's sad declaration, "I am always
the other," recent scholarship has surrounded the word 'translation' with
anxious and brooding scepticism. Critics like Walter Benjamin, Paul de Man, Jacques
Derrida, Lawrence Venuti and others, writing in varying shades of grey foreboding
and differing registers of irony, declare that translation is an impossibility
(a 'necessary impossibility,' as Derrida would have it), and that, if critically
undertaken, translation makes the self aware of the blank spaces which separate
it from the other; that translation is only a charade of meaning-making by the
self and always an act of betrayal of the other.
Thus, Patrick Mahoney, moving across
multilingual etymologies, wittily hears in the word 'translation' echoes of words
like 'transport', 'transference', 'entrance' and, finally, 'traduttor' and 'traitor.'
If this cross-border tracking of verbal movement, which spies a relation between
translation and treason, is right then translation is a dangerous James Bondish
game of contraband cultural goods and betrayal, and the ignorant translator of
words deserves, as Maurice Blanchot, in another place insists, a "death-sentence"
which would release him quite mercifully from "the fatal solitude of writing"
(The Space of Literature). Of course, the only other options for a translator-turned-traitor,
who does not want to die a sudden death, is either to adopt the strategy of the
master spy and remain stubbornly silent or to imitate the master strategist Odysseus
and, refusing to divulge his real name, call himself Nemo - Nobody.
In a brilliant series of essays on translation, often punningly entitled as The
Ear of the Other, "Des Tours de Babel," or Dissemination, Jacques Derrida
thinks that since humanity is 'condemned' to a multiplicity languages each one
of which is a fragment of the original, it is difficult to believe that translation
can contribute something which is meaningfully communicable in the literary or
social habitat, or clarify the ways in which the self can establish a unity with
the world outside. He makes a series of shifting analogies between the act of
translation and the Biblical story about the tower of Babel, Plato's 'Pharmakos',
and Freud's theories of hysteria and phobic disorders. In an attempt to show why
translation is both impossible and necessary, Derrida says that a translator is
like Plato's apothecary who knows that in his pharmacy he can not, with any certainty,
label any potion so as to "distinguish the medicine from the poison, the
good from the evil, the true from the false…the vital from the mortal…"
Each of these analogies is used to suggest
that human beings are tragically fated to enact forever the hopeless task of remembering
and forgetting a pure kernel of language, a primal intactness of being, a pre-historic
feeling of belonging to a place called home to which they once belonged -- the
"terrible necessity," as he puts it, "to forget that there is nothing
to forget, that there has been nothing to forget". Unfortunately, we can
think about a pure of language only after it has been shattered into a multiplicity
of languages; we can remember that we once had an integrated self only after we
have become aware of its disintegration; and, we can being to dream of communitas
only after we have been exiled from the original habitat.
But for Plato, the assumption that there was a changeless and eternal realm was
a "moral need," and the main purpose of knowledge, including that of
the apothecary's, was to direct all intellectual energies towards its discovery.
All the Platonic dialogues in the market square about language and truth are conducted
not to reveal the abyss beneath the feet, but to show everyone that it is always
possible to take small steps in the ordinary realm towards truth. Derrida's translator,
in contrast, is doomed to stand eternally with suspended step, in a sort of 'paralysed
motion', at the liminal border that separates the original, the pure language
-- what Derrida calls "the being-language of language" -- from its infinite
fragments. He asserts that the plurality of languages have a kinship with each
other which makes translation possible. But, simultaneously, he argues that, since
before or beyond these languages there is a 'pure' language, it is the "messianic"
task of the translator to push each linguistic fragment towards reconstituting
the original wholeness, a task which is simultaneously necessary and hopelessly
impossible.
Through a process,
which Derrida calls "associative confusion" (a phrase which is at once
clear and mystifying), he slides away from the sacred to the terrible necessity
of earthly law and finally to the self's inner labyrinths, and calls upon the
works of Freud to suggest that in the relation between the original text and its
translation there is always a slippage, which is similar to the failure of the
analysand to make a complete 'transference' of all his psychological associations
to the analyst. The best the analysand can hope for in the process of the 'transportation'
of all the images in his psyche is a tranche-fert, a series of "false connections,"
and he is condemned to live in a semiotically blind space that separates him from
the analyst. All translations, he says, are "interminable" approximations
of the original idiom. One could, perhaps, imitating the punning manoeuvres of
Derrida, say that for him there is no erotic charge between the original and its
translation, no copula, no copulation, and, hence, to use a word Frank Kermode
used to describe the desire of all readers, there is no pleroma, no sense of fulfilment.
A translator, in this account, may be in love with the original, but to misuse
T.S Eliot, his "love is always the love of the wrong thing." No matter
what strategies a translator employs, language always betrays him, and the translated
work slips and falls into the 'rift' or the 'fault-line' that exists between the
original language and the language into which it is translated. Shifting his metaphor,
Derrida thinks of the translated text and the original as antagonists lost in
the infinite endgame of chess, where any move that a translator may make is simultaneously
wrong and futile, possible and impossible. Since Samuel Beckett has been invoked
here, one could, perhaps, carry the invocation further and say that for Derrida,
in the final analysis (the psychoanalytic pun is intended) both the original and
its translation turn out to be Texts for Nothing (the title of a major collection
of writings by Beckett). And to carry on with Beckett, all a translator can do
is to say to himself: "Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail
again. Fail better."
While Derrida still thinks of translation as a ludic play of difference, différance
and deferral, in which despite the inevitable tragedy there is still the possibility
of wit as a sort of saving grace, De Man deploys the metaphor of chess (i.e. endgame)
and asserts that translation is yet another move in a game whose meaning is always
annihilated, and where, as one moves across the graveyard of words, one discovers
that there never was any meaning to start with. He begins by quoting Derrida's
argument that a translation is a game with "Being" on a "bottomless
chessboards." As if this were not dreadful enough, De Man, with his usual
nihilistic grimness, argues that translation, like all other human gestures, "kills
the original, by discovering that the original was already dead." Unlike
the humanists, who think that language is the product of human beings who use
it to make meaning, de Man believes that language is "not human, it is God-given:
it is the logos, as that which God gives to man. Not specifically to man, but
God gives, as such." Pushing the argument further, he asserts that the relation
between the original language that God gives and the languages that human beings
speak is "inhuman." In order to speak about the Being of things, including
language, and its relation to the shattered and contaminated world ordinary human
beings inhabit, he invokes Walter Benjamin's famous metaphor of the 'amphora'
- the Kabbalistic vessel, which in its unbroken form, represents the plenitude
of the original. For Benjamin, our historical world is formed when the vessel
breaks and the oneness of Being is scattered. A writer, any writer in any language,
can only speak about the fragments of the amphora for he cannot ever have the
knowledge of the whole unbroken vessel. And if he ever succeeds in putting together
all the fragments, he cannot restore the vessel to its original unbroken shape,
but can only recreate something resembling the original out of all the broken
parts. It follows, then, that the translator, who, by definition, can only have
a fragmentary understanding of the original work which is in itself constructed
out of the fragments of language, is always engaged in the task of translating
"the fragment of a fragment," and, hence, in "breaking the fragment"
further. If this is right, then de Man's translator is a tomb-raider who is perpetually
busy dismembering the 'corpus' of texts so that he can satisfy his necrophilic
desires in some literary night of the living dead.
I hope that by now you will sympathise with me if I confess that by the time I
finished reading these phantasmal texts I began to feel sorry for myself. Euro-American
criticism, it seemed to me, was now a new Malleus Maleficarum (or, The Witch's
Hammer -- a text written in the fifteenth century by Heinrich Kramer and James
Sprenger in the days of Pope Innocent VII to catch witches) subtly crafted to
trap someone like me who had already translated too much. Before I read the post-modern
critics, I didn't know that I was so deeply entangled in a strange semiotic crime
for which there was no atonement. After I read them, I suddenly realized, like
one of the ordinary victims in a Hitchcock film, that, unknowingly, I already
knew too much and had been a bit of a simpleton for revealing the secrets of a
culture to anyone who had cared to listen to my translated tales. But then, just
as I was ready to surrender all that I had known earlier and give in to despair,
I recalled a few motley words of the Fool's song in King Lear, and found there
a companion -- a fellow fool -- who could teach me a few talismanic lines. "Hey
nony, nony," I said to myself, I am but a poor, naïve translator who
should follow the Fool's advice and 'let go of my hold of the great wheel of theory
that runs down a hill, lest it break my neck with following.' I translate texts
and read translations because, for me, both are continuous forms of discovering
other modes of knowing; translations are the achievements of the ordinary where
the conversation of the self with the other is always possible. And so now like
the wise Fool in Lear, I can always say with some confidence:
"The
fool will stay,
And let the wise fly.
The knave turns fool that runs
away,
The fool no knave, perdy."
-
King Lear, II, iv, lines, 79-82.
This leads
me to assert that no language is untranslatable. A translator may find that there
are some texts for which it is easier to find another language in which they can
feel at home - another language, which already has the ideas, words, idioms, or
rhythms, which respond to the experiences, however complex, the original texts,
seek to convey. Otherwise how can people who speak a different language ever be
able to acknowledge the pain of others or their joy, respond to others with magnanimous
regard or with mean spiritedness, repose in faith or betray them? The translatability
of languages is a part of the comedy of being human. There may, of course, be
other texts that are more complexly articulated or more extensively and intricately
woven into the texture of a particular culture. Such texts may require, what Kwame
Anthony Appiah calls, a "thick translation" - a translation, which enables
one to be aware of and explore cultural or historical differences. The argument
of untranslatability is sometimes based on the assumption that words are like
the Cheshire cat in Alice in Wonderland - they fade the moment the translator's
gaze falls upon them leaving behind only the traces of their presence. And, at
other times, the suggestion that texts are impossible to translate is based on
a tautology. The argument is that eminent works do not record the poverty of the
contingent world, but let thought roam in ever-widening circles, searching for
ways of making this world into a habitation shared with others; the questing mind
makes the infinite seem like an "achievement of the ordinary." But,
since no one has ever disputed this -- not even translators -- it is difficult
to see why so much of the effort of translation theory is spent on spinning verbal
labyrinths out of this assumption. Whenever I find myself being drawn into one
these cul-de-sacs, I recall the following commonsensical statement by Plotinus
which St. Augustine used to keep by himself to draw comfort from: "He is
no great man who thinks it a great thing that sticks and stones should fall, and
that man, who must die, should die."
If languages were untranslatable, then
we would have either been living in a world of cacophonies or have become hopelessly
mute in a world of silences. Anything that can be imagined, known or said in one
language can be translated into any other language. I take my cue from the Hebraic
tradition in which the original plenitude of the Word of Jehovah was 'translated'
or transfigured into a variety of things and the "cognate splendour"
(the phrase is from a poem by Richard Wilbur) of the languages of men. I need
to point out here that this version of God's creative joyousness is quite distinct
from Derrida's JHWH who, in anger, creates fragments of languages so as to create
confusion among the tribes of men and "annuls the gift of tongues."
In the context of my present meditation on the creative act of translation, one
can, perhaps, reformulate the Jehovahist tradition and, cleansing it of its brooding
narcissism, say that, because God could imagine languages he could imagine forms
of life. The original, confident and creative utterance of God ("And God
said…") immediately splintered into an infinite variety of alphabets,
words, sentences, grammars, languages and cultures. And since, in the beginning,
when God spoke the words light, sun, moon, earth, stars, water, birds, beats,
fish, man, woman there were no concrete referents for any of them, it was His
act of speech which brought them into existence. If, mythically at least, words
"call" the world into existence (the Biblical word for this "calling
out" is kara and its equivalent in another language is Koran), then it is
difficult to believe that a translator cannot find the equivalences for words,
tone, rhythms or structures of texts imagined in one language in any other language.
Unless, of course, one is willing to assert that it is possible to fabulate some
things only in one language and not in any other. This position would be morally
and politically difficult to maintain. One will, for the sake of our democratic
and ethical selfhood, have to argue, instead, that the possibility of translation
is inherent in God's original utterance.
Men may have lost their Edenic confidence, but they fell into the grace of words
and so acquired "the creative omnipotence of language." The paradox
is that, even as men fell into languages and lost the intuitive sense of being
a part of the divine, they acquired a two-fold power. They found the shadow of
Jehovah in language, but instead of trying to recover their old and lost paradise,
they realized that they could create, through the 'word-honouring' rituals of
friendship, knowledge and work, a new world of imagination and culture out of
language and work. This means that men could simultaneously remain devoted to
the original Word, and yet extend, enrich or supplement it with their memories,
experiences, dilemmas and solutions. Their ability to translate their knowledge
of things into the languages they spoke may not have enabled them to recover fullness
of the original Word, but it made it possible for them to replenish their world
with the eloquence of speech. Through translations of what each of them knew,
they could draw the original word into their conversations and, at the same time,
test their own claims to reason or better political sense or greater moral clarity.
Lest this sounds too idealistic to our sceptical ears, let me quickly add that
I am quite aware of the fact that in Eden dialogue was the Serpent's gift, and
since he spoke with a forked tongue, along with "knowledge and wisdom,"
he also showed us "the possibility of lies and dissimulation." But,
then, without Satan's dialogic intervention, how could our stories and our translations
have had a beginning? After all, God had worked hard enough for seven days to
create the world, and having declared it to be a goodly place, taken a well-earned
sabbatical!
What
this means for the practice of translation, I think, is that a good translator
of significant texts does not try to imitate the original; he does not offer a
mirror reflection of the original which records the likeness of the original but
is doomed to remain only a phantom. By 'significant texts' I mean - following
Hans-Georg Gadamar -- texts which speak to us tirelessly, which constantly ask
questions, offer possible answers, suggest different ways of looking at the world
again and again, and so stay with us to become partners in a conversation that
we conduct either with ourselves or with others about questions that matter. And
questions that matter are questions that we don't fully understand but which insist
on being perpetually reformulated for greater clarity. They are questions that
we can only answer partially, and that require another effort at posing the question
and finding an answer. Instead, a translator crafts a new work which respects
the integrity of the original (this is the minimum that all translations must
have) and yet exists beside it, on its own terms, and sometimes even challenges
the claim to priority of the original (the English Bible is a good case in point).
In order to do so, a translator tries to find a language and a rhythm, which will
enable the original thought to emerge in the language of the translation, guide
the reader to think through the ideas being refined and feel the emotions being
described. Only then will the translation acquire a cultural meaning for people
who have no access to the language of the original text and so become a part of
their realms of aesthetic and moral being.
If
no translation is a faithful likeness of the original, it is entirely legitimate
for each age to have its own translations of Homer (from Chapman and Pope to Fitzgerald
and Lattimore), or of Dante (from Carey to Singleton and Pinsky), or of the Bible
and the Gita, and, dare I say, the Koran which is forever wary of satanic verses.
For each new translation of a significant or eminent text creates a place for
itself in our literary habitat because it reflects the expectations, conventions
or propositions of the times. In none of these, or in other similar cases, is
one tempted to ask if the translation is faithful to the original, for one acknowledges
that the mechanics of faithfulness in the translations of significant texts can
turn the loveliest of phrases and the profoundest of ideas into dull prattle.
The right test for the translation of any of these eminent texts is whether the
new text crafted in another language is counterfeit or no; whether it respects
the integrity of the original, and at the same time urges us to think in new ways
about the cultural or intellectual resources that lie beyond the boundaries of
one's own mental maps. The most important test, however, is whether the presence
of the text, in its new incarnation in a different language, seems to be utterly
inevitable in the literary habitat of the language into which it has been translated
(this point is in part derived from Walter Benjamin) . It is difficult, for example,
to imagine a European literary history without the translations of Homer or the
Arabian Nights. Indeed one can move backwards and forwards along the chronological
history of any literary culture and find examples of an intimate and reciprocal
relationship between significant translations and eminent writers.
I am suggesting that one of the preconditions
for the formation of any civil, political and literary habitat is the possibility
of translation; just as one of the preconditions for translation is the existence
of civil, political and literary habitats. Indeed, it is because of the human
gift of translation that a respectful civility between different ways of constructing
reality and valuing the things of the world by diverse communities can be maintained.
I am, of course, not suggesting that because we can translate other languages
we can evade conflicts, grudges, deceptions or sorrow. We do not live in transcendental
paradises, but "in the midst of life," where action, feeling and beliefs
of people can always come into conflict with each other. But, I am suggesting,
that because there is a vast 'community of translated texts,' we begin to see
others as "social beings" like ourselves "puzzling out, in time
of great moral difficulty, what might be, for us, the best way to live…"
This goes against the grain of a large body of contemporary translation theory
that claims that translation is impossible, hence, that any coherent social formation
too is impossible. One can find in Paul de Man, for instance, a radical distrust
of language and communicative societies. Given that the original meaning can never
be fully recovered, a translation, he says, must concede even before it begins
that its desire for communication and understanding must always be defeated. For
critics like de Man, no translation can escape from being entrapped in a circle
of silence, for its meaning is forever lost in "the bottomless depths of
language." Therefore, far from renewing language and extending its meanings,
a translation can only conduct a post-mortem of language; and, of course, far
from helping men to recreate or renovate a social order, it can only lead them
further into distraction and distrust. It is worth noticing that de Man's version
is similar to that of Hobbes who, too, thinks that both language and society are
dangerously untrustworthy and can only offer a treacherous ground for understanding
and community making. After all, Hobbes' famous formulation in Leviathan, that
nature has condemned every man to live in fear of every man is, in part, derived
from his belief that words are untrustworthy and, unless they are carefully ordered,
man "will find himself entangled in words, as a bird in lime-twiggs; the
more he struggles, the more belimed."
It
has been nobody's brief that languages are so completely transparent that meaning
can be transported from one linguistic structure to another or from one civilizational
condition to another, without change, or loss, or even enrichment. It does not,
however, follow from this that transferral of meaning from one language to another
is impossible, or that all languages are totally opaque to each other. Indeed,
I suspect that the idea that words are opaque is either platitudinous or merely
rhetorical; an empty gesture, which sometimes seems to disguise, beneath its melodramatic
excess, an elitist rejection of others as creatures worthy of a conversation,
and, at other times, a pessimistic assessment of man's continuing desire to find
a common ground to stand on.
It is true that we can never understand
each other completely, but it would be a fatal error to assume that we should
either do so or entertain the desire to do so. Indeed, it would be tragic for
human relationships if we were fully transparent to each other. Not only would
our languages then acquire the hard certainty of machines, but also we would become
helplessly available to each other for use and coercive manipulation. Such clear
visibility, as we know, is the dream of every totalitarian thinker. What saves
us as autonomous individuals is precisely the untranslatable residue in each of
us, which is inaccessible even to ourselves. At the end of his long investigation
into the mysterious selfhood of the main protagonist, the journalist in Orson
Wells's film, Citizen Kane, wisely concludes, "I don't think any word can
explain a man's life." It is, indeed, a blessing that after the blinding
clarity of the first words of God ("Let there be light…"), the
rest of our lives with each other have retained some of the enigma of being human.
It is this degree of ambiguity that persuades us to both conduct a dialogue with
ourselves and engage in a conversation with those who are different.
Another
consequence of the assertion that languages are translatable is that while each
language retains its distinctive characteristic and reveals its own unique entanglement
with the complex acts of world-making, it also ceases to exist in a pure, enchanted
space of its own, free from all the influences of historical change. Instead,
each language exists beside another language in a continuum. It is possible, then,
to imagine that each language so borrows from, distorts, transforms or slides
into any other language that every society is continuously engaged in the transformative
process of world making and knowledge-making. One can, for example, think of the
way in which Hindi/Urdu/Punjabi/English have existed side by side over a long
period and have utterly changed, through their co-mingling, the world-views reflected
in each, and opened up spaces of knowledge for each other which they may not have
found in their isolation.
Thus, saint-poets of India like Kabir,
Nanak or Farid do not exist in the solitude of their own languages. They take,
without self-consciousness or apology, words from Urdu, Avadhi, Bhojpuri, Punjabi
or Rajasthani to sing about their Gods. They wander freely through languages in
the same way as they make their own distinctive pilgrim-paths across the vast
territories of the Indian subcontinent. It is, therefore, not surprising that
for Nanak the word (or shabd or boli) which stands for God's command is hukum
taken from Arabic, and the word for divine grace is prashad from Devnagari. I
should like to add that the visual translation of his ministry too arises out
of his realization that his own sense of inward holiness is a result of his location
within a plurality of languages and traditions. That is why he wears the saffron
robes of a Hindu ascetic and the turban of a Sufi fakir.
One major political and literary advantage of thinking about languages as being
translatable and hopelessly contaminated is that one can set-up easy defences
against the arrogance of linguistic chauvinists and tribal purists, and refuse
to take cognizance of the snivelling defensiveness of the 'nativists.' Claude
Levi-Strauss may be right in asserting that for every tribal group concerned about
its safety in a hostile world the notion of "Mankind stops at the boundaries
of the tribe, the linguistic group, sometimes even of the village…"
Beyond that boundary there are spaces occupied by barbarians, phantoms and apparitions
against whom there are taboos, ritual chants and talismans. Maybe, translators
can help us cross those boundaries of suspicion and make the very act of boundary-making
more neighbourly.
There
are, however, moments when the movement from one linguistic or cultural boundary
to another comes up against words and ideas, which do seem to be difficult to
translate. I am thinking of culture-specific words like dharma, nirvana or catharsis.
These words, nevertheless, do not bring us to the abyss of incomprehension. They
only call for a greater degree of "hermeneutic alertness" on the part
of the translator. And, inevitably, his absorbedness (a favourite word of Ezra
Pound's) with the word or idea enables him to find a kind of solution, however
tentative, so that the process of understanding, which seemed to stop, can begin
again. This may help us transcend many of the cantankerous literary and critical
battles we sometimes get involved in.
To those who say that translation is
not possible, who negate the possibility of conversation, and hence the very selfhood
of others, I should like to quote the following lines from Emerson's "Self-Reliance":
"Well, most men have bound their eyes with one or another handkerchief and
attached themselves to some of these communities of opinion. This conformity makes
them not false in a few particulars, authors of a few lies, but false in all particulars.
Their very truth is not quite true. Their two is not the real two; their four
is not the real four; so that every word they say chagrins us, and we know not
where to begin to set them right."
Finally,
let me end with a small piece of advice and prayer for the translator because,
in this post-modern world which is now playful and now grim, he is a poor and
vulnerable creature on whom we should not place too much faith in leading us to
the fullness of meaning and being we may desire. A translator is only a small
craftsman who uses the words he knows to give his respect to and reveal, on our
behalf and for us, other ways of knowledge-making and other betrayals than our
own, other ideas and beliefs, other mansions and fields, pathways and forests,
ruins, denials and sexual longings, nostalgias, exiles, cruelties, poems, stories,
hopes, pilgrimages, ecstasies, and disenchantments. The advice is from Emerson's
aptly-entitled essay, "Self-Help": "Leave your theory, as Joseph
his coat in the hand of the harlot, and flee." And the prayer is a variation
of a line from one of the Psalms:
So
teach us, O Lord,
To translate our texts
That we may apply
Our hearts
into wisdom…