The Disenchantment of Translation
[A lecture delivered to Katha Utsah in Delhi, India]
WHAT A STRANGE moment when I opened the invitation to come here to Katha and saw the title of the session I was to lead: ‘The Disenchantment of Translation’. Only a week before, I had given a talk on translation entitled ‘Translating Enchantment’. As so often, one realises that far from being a lonely individual mind exploring new ideas, one is part of a larger, shared endeavour, even if it is not always clear what one’s relationship with the collective mind behind that endeavour might be.
Enchantment, disenchantment. What do we mean by these most unscientific words? Why are they particularly appropriate to the practice of translation, its rewards and frustrations?
I think we’d all agree that the word disenchantment has negative connotations. It suggests a disappointment, a loss of pleasure. And yet the positive word enchantment is not one widely used in the West. As I said, it seems anti-scientific. More and more it is spoken and written with a certain embarrassment. Its use is restricted, for example, to refer to moments of childish innocence, pleasures that depend on ingenuousness. We use ‘enchantment’ or ‘enchanting’ to enthuse about such things as a white Christmas, a fairy story for children (and so much Western literature is for children, or rather, for the infantile). Or in Verona, where I live, the word enchantment might be used when speaking of the tradition of Santa Lucia, a blind martyr of many centuries ago, who, on the night before 13 December, is supposed to bring the local children their seasonal presents. If they have been well behaved, that is. If not, she brings them only a piece of coal. By the time they are seven or eight years old most children have started asking their parents why Santa Lucia only operates in the Verona area, while Father Christmas is more ubiquitous. With their growing curiosity, the period of disenchantment has begun.
At most, enchantment might stretch to first love, or the word is used in tourist brochures to describe the pleasures of some exotic location, deploying a rhetoric that no one is really expected to believe. In short, ‘enchantment’ is not considered part of serious life. Hence disenchantment becomes simply a necessary part of growing up. We might almost say that disenchantment is synonymous with enlightenment, a word that has an extremely positive connotation. Childish reassurance and rapture are put aside to confront the so-called real world.
But surely, when we talk of the disenchantment of translation we are not suggesting that a translation is something more realistic, less childish, more enlightening than the original.
Let us concentrate for a moment on this curiosity: we have two words, that would appear to share, at least to some extent, the same meaning – disenchantment, enlightenment – but one with a negative connotation and one with a positive, one stressing a loss, the other a gain. To grasp what we mean when we speak of the disenchantment of translation, we must try to understand this curiosity a little better.
The narrower and ever more superficial use of the word enchantment in English and other Western languages, as indeed the devaluing of the word myth (mitico is a common and almost meaningless expression of approbation among Italian youngsters), tells us a lot about the modern world and its uneasiness with the language it has inherited from the past. It suggests a desire to repress and deny an area of experience. Or rather, that experience is admitted – the word, like the experience, won’t go away – but within a hierarchy of values where it is decidedly on one of the lower levels. ‘Enchantment’ is allowed to exist, but must not intrude into ‘reality’ – science and economics and politics, the territory of enlightenment. In short, it is allowed to exist in art, in books, paintings, sculptures, Disney films. Art becomes a ghetto where all kinds of things with which our modern world is uncomfortable are allowed a sort of shadowy existence.
Let us try to understand why this process of relegation and trivialisation was necessary with ‘enchantment’. The answer of course is that the word refers to something that threatens our modern view of the world. Here we need to look closely at the roots of the word. This is easier perhaps in Italian. In-canto, the Italians say. In song. An enchantment is an entering into song. I could give two very literal examples in my own life.
I grew up in an extremely evangelical household. I sang in a choir. I sang a part. I was part of a whole larger than myself. The hymns came from the English Wesleyan tradition, or there were anthems from the tradition of German sacred music. The individual accepted the yoke of the community. The en-chantment happens within a group. It is not something you experience alone. And it is not just the contemporary community you become part of but one that stretches back into the past. My youthful enthusiasm was harnessed by something older and larger than myself. Many of the words were archaic, the devotion ancient. I entered into song.
This was very beautiful until my parents became involved in the so-called charismatic movement. I was in my early teens. There was speaking in tongues, prophesy, ecstatic singing, with arms raised to God, etc. To enter into song now meant a much greater sacrifice of self. The reasoning mind had to be sacrificed entirely and constantly.
It’s interesting that the English use the word chant, en-chant-ment, rather than the word song. The chant is rhythmical, repetitive, captivating, coercive. To be enchanted is to lose a little control. It is to subject the mind to the community, to the past. Individual curiosity is replaced by collective devotion. I left the group when the charismatic movement became too coercive. From then on, group singing was always a problem for me, I felt its attraction and pleasures, the pleasures of belonging to a tight community, and I felt resistance to it. In short, I experienced what is a very modern state of mind, the nostalgia for community and the fear of being defined and possessed by it.
I didn’t accept another enchantment of this simple form until years later I became a regular supporter of my local football club in Verona. Here too there is a strong sense of community. Here too, in the frenetic atmosphere of the stadium, you throw your weight behind the collective chant to urge on your team. Here too the past is present. Many of the chants name old stars whom most of those in the stadium never saw. But there is something different now. The whole experience is undercut and controlled by a pervasive irony. We sing about battles and victories and hatreds and loves, but we know that when we leave the stadium we will return to our disenchanted lives. We are playing with enchantment. We believe in our community and we don’t believe in it. It satisfies our nostalgia for collective delirium without demanding our souls. We have a pleasurable loss of control, for carefully controlled periods.
Much of modern literature in the West could be characterised in terms of its ambiguous relationship to enchantment, to the submergence of the individual mind in the collective. Inevitably, this is reflected in the relationship of each individual style to the community’s collective use of language. And this is where the relationship between translation and enchantment comes in. The translator of modern literature is above all involved in capturing and seeking to reproduce the complicity and tension between the writer and his language.
In my religious childhood, enchantment didn’t just mean the moment of maximum collective ecstasy, the hymn. It also meant the rhythmic cadences of the liturgy, the prayers (morning and evening), the gospel stories, the life my parents expected me to live. All of this was enshrined in the language we used, and above all in the language of the 1666 prayer book, the Authorised Version of the Bible.
In a novel I wrote about this period of my life, I tried to express my love of that language, and my eagerness to be free of its enchantment. When the novel was translated into Italian it became clear that to a large extent that enchantment didn’t exist in this other language; the Italians have an entirely different relationship with the Bible. Their liturgical and Christian rhetoric draws on other lexical sources and is not anchored to one particular historical period. Unable to evoke the spell of biblical language which was so important in the original they were then unable to convey the urgency of breaking that spell.
Here it might be objected that I am simply talking about problems of cultural specificity that inevitably arise in any translation. How can we describe English interior decorating in Italian, or vice versa? It’s time to recall Wittgenstein’s contention that philosophy was a battle against the ‘bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language’,1 and his more general concern that all thinking lies under ‘the enchantments of language’.2 With this statement, our idea of enchantment is radically extended. And the whole presumption of the Enlightenment, that thinking is the instrument through which we dispense with such childish things as enchantment, is challenged. Now we have the troubling idea that in order to think, we must be enchanted. By what? By language, a language. The very word enlightenment, then, and all it stands for is actually part of a larger enchantment. Our clearest thinking lies under a linguistic spell. We are never outside language.
Let us then bring alongside this claim Paul Celan’s bitter reflection on admitting defeat in his attempt to translate a poem by Baudelaire, that ‘poetry is the fatal uniqueness of language’.3 As the highest expression of verbal art, poetry presents us with the most intense enchantment, a heady cocktail of meaning, emotion, beauty, that can only be generated by these words, this linguistic performance, and hence can only be experienced by speakers of this language.
If we accept this view of language and enchantment, then translation inevitably involves dis-enchantment; we must cast off the spell under which these thoughts were produced. One of the things I do with my students is to look at a lot of literary texts in English and Italian without telling them which is the original. Very quickly they learn, by considering the content, the relationship of content to style, the internal coherence of the two texts, semantic, and auditory too, to identify which is the original. Even the best translations lack the same level of cohesion, the meshing between the writer’s mind and the language it moves in.
But of course, if our language is a form of enchantment, that must also mean that the translation, while at once a disenchantment, is also a re-enchantment. It is here that translation becomes truly fascinating. In a world where so much is now translated, where there is so much enthusiasm about pooling our different cultures, about achieving perhaps some international literary language (such claims have been made for English), what is the status of translation? Does reading mostly in translation change the nature of the reading experience?
One of the reasons I was invited to this conference is because I translated the book Ka by Roberto Calasso, a book, as you know, that retells the ancient myths of India and tries to explore their deepest meaning. Before working on Ka I had translated The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, a book that does much the same thing with the Greek myths. Very often in The Marriage, Calasso was obliged to settle on some Greek word, to quote it in the original language to reflect on its meaning, because there was no equivalent in Italian. Like the exposed tip of the iceberg, the word suggested a mass of submerged and unsuspected cultural differences. It is obvious that for a Greek of 3,000 years ago to listen to the stories which formed his world was a completely different experience than for a modern Italian to read about them. He understood the world only, wonderfully, in those terms; we savour the enchantment, while believing we remain outside it, a very modern state of mind.
The experience becomes different again, of course, when the stories are translated from Italian into English, where layers and layers of culture have been built up through interpretation and appropriation of the classical world. Sometimes when Calasso quoted in Italian from the Iliad or the Odyssey I would go to an English translation to quote the same lines, only to find that the English version was so different that I was obliged to work from Calasso’s Italian.
Yet the Greek stories made sense to me. It was as if one were exploring one’s own subconscious. Chords were immediately struck. My own language had already had long dealings with those gods and ideas.
This was not true for me of Ka. The Indian myths seemed far stranger than any stories I had ever read. I was disorientated (a comic word to use for this experience, since this was probably as close to the Orient as I ever got). Once again Calasso settled on key words, in Sanskrit this time, words whose ambiguity or complexity of meaning made them touchstones. Once again he used quotations. Often there were no existing English translations to draw on, which was a relief. But whereas with the Greek myth I felt there was an existing rhetoric, an existing lexicon, a tradition, into which I could translate the stories, with Ka this was not the case.
More and more, then, I wondered about the intimate connection between the content of the story and the language of the culture that created it, more and more I felt the pull of the English to impose concepts linked to other traditions, above all the Christian. It is hard to use a word like sin, or repentance, in English, without imposing an alien, that is English, enchantment on a foreign text. More and more I was struggling to find neutral words. But the original stories were not written with neutral words. A story is not the same experience when told to a different audience in a different language in a different time. Why then does a writer go back to the stories of different times and cultures? What is the point?
I felt very strongly with both of Calasso’s books that one of the underlying intentions of his work was to subvert contemporary Italian, or more generally Western, certainties by building up an alien pattern of thought that, at a certain point, would become recognisable to the reader as a plausible and indeed beautiful way of understanding experience. He might show us, for examples, how the ancient Greeks had offered an aesthetic justification of existence 2,500 years before Nietzsche formulated similar ideas. He might show how an ancient Indian rsi had elaborated thoughts which we consider the greatest achievements of our modern philosophy. The recuperation, that is, of the enchantment under which ancient India lived was an operation aimed to subvert the enchantment under which we live today and which, precisely because we are in its thrall, we never consider an enchantment at all. In this sense the introduction of a foreign word, rather than mystification, is an operation of demystification, it questions the way our language organises experience.
So Calasso is not telling these stories for the reasons they were originally told, but to challenge the stories we are always telling ourselves, and that perhaps we do not even think of as stories, but reality. In doing so he becomes part of a modern Western tradition which seeks to expose the enchantment we live in, to ‘deconstruct’ as the postmodernists say, while always aware that there is no disenchanted place to be. Curiously, it’s a tradition that has simultaneously encouraged translation and made it impossible.
What I want to do now is to use a short text from a writer at the centre of that Western tradition to suggest the kind of antithetical impulses that run through much of modern literature – particularly with regard to the relationship between individual and community – and how problematic they are for translation. For if the intention of the original is to subvert the enchantment of its own language, to wake us up to the spell we lie under, how can the translation achieve this when the enchantment it translates into is different?
But here is Hemingway in ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’:
He thought about alone in Constantinople that time having quarrelled in Paris before he had gone out. He had whored the whole time and then, when that was over, and he had failed to kill his loneliness, but only made it worse, he had written her, the first one, the one who left him, a letter telling her how he had never been able to kill it. How when he thought he saw her outside the Regence one time it made him go all faint and sick inside, and that he would follow a woman who looked like her in some way, along the Boulevard, afraid to see it was not she, afraid to lose the feeling it gave him. How every one he had slept with had only made him miss her more.4
The place names mentioned here are immediately a little dis-orientating. Where is most of the passage taking place, in Constantinople or Paris? The story seems to be one at once of promiscuity and loneliness. Cut free from the enchantment of an intense love, the man succumbs to the tawdry chronicle of a frenetic series of couplings. He tries to kill the love that has brought about his unease but then admits that he is afraid of losing this unease.
But what most surprises us when we read the passage is the position of that first ‘alone’: ‘He thought about alone in Constantinople that time’. This is surely incorrect. One cannot put an adverb ‘alone’ after the expression ‘thought about’ which requires a noun or a gerund: He thought about love; he thought about being alone, or having been alone. The result is that the word ‘alone’ is heavily stressed precisely because it disorientates us. The rules of language, which are the rules of a community, are made to break up around this word ‘alone’, as if the experience of being alone threatened language, which is a shared thing.
Let me translate back into English the Italian translation of this first sentence to give you an impression of how it is experienced in the Italian:
He thought about that time when he was in Constantinople, alone, because they had quarrelled in Paris before his departure.
Here the aloneness is reintroduced into the community of language. While we notice in passing that the curiosity of the English ‘gone out’ has been eliminated by using the word ‘departure’ which now links Paris and Constantinople and gives us a feeling of security. We understand the narrator’s movements.
I have asked many Italian translators if they could reproduce this English. They try out the phrase: Pensò a solo – literally ‘He thought about alone’ – then they shake their heads and tell me, No, no you can’t do it. So why can it be done in English? In English, perhaps because the language has so few inflections, we have developed a habit of turning verbs and adjectives into nouns, as and when we choose, or nouns into verbs. We have: telephone, to telephone, to go, a go, and so on. Everyone knows this. So Hemingway can just about get away with it. It sounds ‘wrong’, it sounds ‘unusual’ but it sounds English, it is outside the usual community of speech, but still understood by speakers.
Let me give you another example from Lawrence. But I could quote hundreds. This is about a young woman who has just made love and is lying awake at night regretting it:5
Gudrun lay wide awake, destroyed into perfect consciousness.
Well, in English we cannot say destroyed ‘into’. Then it is standard in English to think of consciousness as a positive thing, not the result of a destruction. The word ‘perfect’ also seems provocative here. How can perfection be the product of the destruction of a person? Or if perfect is made in the sense of completed, in what way does it qualify consciousness? The Italian says: Gudrun remained awake, destroyed, in a state of perfect lucidity.
Again you could say, why does the Italian not keep the ‘into’ that links destruction and consciousness? Why is the word ‘consciousness’ not used? The second question is easily answered: the word cosciente in Italian has a different semantic range; cosciente can mean ‘responsible’ which would give the wrong idea.
As far as the ‘into’ is concerned, we must remember that there are many verbs in English which suggest a transformation using ‘into’ – transform into, change into, turn into. So the phrase doesn’t sound so strange in English. Lawrence has taken a standard English structure and subverted it, but again, although surprising, it is recognisably English.
These sentences and the problem of translating them I hope tell us something about the nature of modern writing, of individualism and translation. The sentence from Lawrence comes from a book where two couples try to form non-traditional love relationships; they try to live outside society, but in the end, they find they can only define their position against the society they are rejecting and of which they are still inevitably a part.
Similarly, Lawrence can reject many of the values implied by English, and fight against them. But at the same time he cannot escape the overall enchantment and community of Englishness. Needless to say he was aware of this. We thus reach a situation where his text begins to have meaning only if we understand the context of the society he rebels against, and the broader context of the language. The meaning of ‘she was destroyed into perfect consciousness’ is very much that it is subversive of English and yet submissive to some of its more hidden mechanisms. The same was true of Hemingway’s ‘he thought about alone’.
A paradox follows. Imagining themselves as breaking free of society, as becoming individuals no longer defined by their culture (notoriously they go and live abroad), the modernists become attractive international figures, gurus whose work must be translated everywhere and immediately, because it is presumed to have universal significance. Yet at the same time, the breaking free in their work can only be understood in the tradition and context they are breaking free from. This is not to say that translation is pointless. But however beautifully one might write Lawrence into another language, it will always be a more reassuring text linguistically than it was in English. Above all, it will intersect with an alien tradition, the provocations its content may cause become entirely unpredictable.
Enchantments are constantly dissolving and re-forming. Translation can play all kinds of roles in that process. It may be that a country which reads in translations that domesticate every foreign text to its own values and usages will be able to preserve its own linguistic spell far longer than a language whose writers are always busy wrestling with their own culture.
It may also be that many people like reading translations because they are less dangerous than original texts. However challenging the content of a book may be, if the medium of the language is reassuring then the reader perhaps can feel safe within his own world.
Alternatively, it can happen that a translation unleashes something quite new and strange into a culture. As I hope is the case with Calasso’s Ka.
In particular though, it seems to me that one of the lessons one learns from looking at a lot of translations is that the difference between experiencing a foreign culture and experiencing one’s own is a very great difference, and is greater still if we cannot know the foreign culture in the language of origin. These are truisms.
But they should alert us to two things. That we must cultivate our own language, however commercially unfashionable that may be. In the case of India, for example, many anthologies of Indian writing turn out to be written not in one of the country’s native languages, but in English. Salman Rushdie in particular has spoken of English as being useful for allowing India to become known in the world. But is the purpose of literature to make ourselves known in the world? Isn’t it rather to tell ourselves the stories that create the world we live in? And in so far as we live in a language then it is that language that is important to us.
Similarly, Kazuo Ishiguro has criticised some English writers for using words and expressions that are too complicated for translation and that prevent the books from being understood worldwide. Again, this seems to suggest an impoverishment of language for commercial ends, or for the creation of a global culture, which of course would mean the death of many traditions.
J. M. Coetzee takes an opposite position to Rushdie in his novel Disgrace. Of the black farmer Petrus, a man who is taking over the life and land of the hero, David’s, daughter, we hear:
Petrus is a man of his generation. Doubtless Petrus has been through a lot, doubtless he has a story to tell. He [David] would not mind hearing Petrus’s story one day. But preferably not reduced to English. More and more he is convinced that English is an unfit medium for the truth of South Africa.6
But David does not speak Petrus’s language.
Walter Benjamin suggested that in each successive translation of a text, some mingling of languages was achieved, a process that ultimately and ideally, if the same text were translated over and over into all kinds of different languages, might lead us to rediscover the original sacred language lost with the destruction of the Tower of Babel. One wonders if such a language would bring the absolute enlightenment that certain philosophers of the early twentieth century hoped to achieve by expressing philosophical problems only in the terms of strict logic. Or would it create the ultimate universal enchantment, the exclusion of other influences in one single worldwide language?
Better, it seems to me, the Babel that defends us from a possibly totalitarian nightmare, that allows us if not to understand, then at least to be aware of the different ways we can enchant ourselves; and that keeps us constantly busy and perplexed with the exciting business of writing and rewriting each other’s stories.