Translation as Medium and Across Media
In the very last note of Minima Moralia, Adorno suggests that the only responsible philosophical answer to despair is “to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption.”1 The essays in the first section of this book all situate themselves at some distance from despair, but they do consistently register difficulty, and they do have redemption firmly in mind. The essays concern the role of the intellectual as translator of what gets forgotten in the contemporary world, the possibility of translating law from culture to culture, the actual practice of simultaneous translation, the translatability and untranslatability of film as a medium, and the problematic but indispensable notion of “origin” in the theory of translation.
“For whom then does one write,” Edward Said asks, “if it is difficult to specify the audience with any sort of precision?” The answer is that one writes for the audience one needs, the audience who must be there if we are not to despair. “The idea of an imagined community,” Said continues, “has suddenly acquired a very literal, if virtual, dimension,” and it is through our participation in this community, our willingness to imagine it into reality, that we can best serve those “less powerful interests threatened with frustration, silence, incorporation, or extinction by the powerful.” If music for Adorno is a “silent witness to the inhumanity all around,” then for Said the intellectual is the unsilenced translator, the person who lends voice to the unvoiced and half-voiced needs of the oppressed. He points out too that “film and photography, along with all the arts of writing, can be aspects of this activity.”
Pierre Legrand argues eloquently against the “strategies of simplification” at work in the integrationist view of European law, which rests on the blunt or naive claim that “there is very little difference between European laws,” that is, very little difference from culture to culture and nation to nation. This view is “irredeemably suburban,” Legrand says, a violent refusal of “contextual knowledge,” but all is not lost, and he himself shows us how to “redeem local knowledge,” which is best described, he says, “in terms of its plasticity, pliability, diversity, and adaptability.” Indeed, he suggests that justice itself can be redeemed if we respect the gaps between laws, just as literary translation respects the gaps between languages, a process that “inscribes alterity at the heart of identity through the new forms it creates,” and reveals thereby, as Legrand subtly says, “the genuine nature of hospitality,” which cannot exist without risks. We are close again to the imagined community of intellectuals.
Continuing this line of thought, but in an intensely practical context, Lynn Visson reminds us that “words which characterize the life, culture and historical development of any given country often have no precise equivalents in other languages.” She offers a detailed list (often amusing) of elusive words and phrases in Russian, and describes in lucid detail the preferred rhetorical instruments of the simultaneous interpreter: “condensation, deliberate omission and addition, synecdoche and metonymy, antonymic constructions, grammatical inversion and the use of semantic equivalents,” and other devices. Her crucial point, though, is that the interpreter is just that: a translator not only of language but of context, a person who, if she cannot redeem local knowledge, can give it all the depth that time allows. Visson too writes of difficulty and its overcoming. “Hardest of all is the search for cultural rather than for purely linguistic or semantic equivalents, for though these are often vastly different in the two languages, the role of an interpreter of culture is the interpreter’s most important and most difficult function.”
Samuel Weber makes an important distinction between “language” and “instance”: “translation always involves not merely the movement from one language to another, but from one instance—a text already existing in one language—to another instance, that does not previously exist, but that is brought into being in the other language.” This phrasing allows for translation of instances both within a single language and between different ones, and Weber has some subtle thoughts on these topics. His main project, however, is to display creation as it is described in Genesis as “almost a translation,” because on close reading it appears as neither “an absolute beginning nor a pure performance”—only “almost a translation” because there is as yet only one place and only one language. Translation becomes “inevitable but also impossible” with the building and ruin of the Tower of Babel, and Weber now brilliantly glosses Walter Benjamin’s conception of an origin as “the insistent but unachievable attempt to restore an anterior state.” From the standpoint of redemption the attempt would still perhaps be unachievable but it would look toward the future rather than the past, toward the world it remains for us to imagine.
Michael Wood’s essay seeks to understand, through a study of sound and silence in films from very different cultures, something of what translation can mean in the cinema: which images seem to travel without need of translation and which images do not, what visual translation looks like when it happens, how national film cultures separate and intersect, and what is the role of music in the language of film. We get a clear sense of the importance of translation in this medium when, prompted by Sergei Eisenstein,2 we remember that what in English is called a close-up is in other languages called a shot in large scale. In both cases a visual perception is translated into words, but the implied story is very different. English-speaking cultures emphasize the mimetic effect of the technique, the apparent shortening of a distance. Other cultures stress the technical fact, the actual alteration in the size of the figures or objects in the frame. Many implications lurk in such a difference.
NOTES
1. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia (Frankfurt: Suhrhamp, 1951, 1993), p. 333; trans. E.F.N Jephcott (London: Verso, 1974, 1996), p. 247.
2. Sergei Eisenstein, Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, ed. and trans. Jan Leyda (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1949, 1977), pp. 237–38.