Comparative Literature: The Delay in Translation

STANLEY CORNGOLD

It is often claimed today that comparative literature is a kind of translation and, being a practice less transparent than translation, should take translation as its model. This claim feels avant-garde: it resonates with the “linguistic turn” that informed most of the humanistic disciplines during the last quarter of the last century and vividly survives today in neighboring disciplines, like English, foreign languages, history, and anthropology, with their concerns for globalization, the media, and the mentalities of postcolonialism. But whether the translation model for comparative literature is to be a step forward, a step back, or the source of a sort of productive delay very much depends on how translation is understood. What sort of understanding of translation is presupposed when comparative literature is compared with it?

Now, each translation has a way of producing its own theory of what it is about; this is unavoidable, since acts of translation may be seen as radically singular, involving, as is commonly agreed on, a certain surd irrationality as the “thing” that is always left out, the thing that is untranslatable in the representation of one particular piece of one particular language in another. And where the defining characteristic of each particular act of translation is always ineffable, one cannot say whether or not or to what extent this translation resembles any other. Nonetheless, in the effort to produce a general theory of translation, one type of metaphor persistently crops up, and that is the prosopopeia meant to picture the relation of the source text to the target text—the relation of “fidelity.” One translation must be as faithful as the next in the manner, let us say, that spouses, lovers, or friends are held to be.

Consider Walter Benjamin’s radical essay “The Task of the Translator” (Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers), which actually disrupts the two-text model in describing translation as a relation between two languages, the goal of which is to bring to light a third language—“pure language” [reine Sprache]. In this enterprise the translator’s task is least of all the salvaging of an original meaning through “accurate communication” (genaue Mitteilung), for “all information, all sense, and all intention finally encounter a stratum in which they are destined to be extinguished. This very stratum furnishes a new and higher justification for free translation; this justification does not derive from the sense of what is to be conveyed, for the emancipation from the sense is the task of fidelity.”1 This thesis is striking as much for the way it dislodges the customary translation paradigm of text-unto-text as for its employment of the kind of metaphor I have said is recurrent in theories of translation—figures of ethical intersubjective relation (here, again: “fidelity” [Treue]). The appearance of this metaphor in even so “inhuman” a description as Benjamin’s suggests the operations of the propadeutic identified by Goethe in his advertisement to his novel Elective Affinities (Die Wahlverwandtschaften): “The author … might have noticed that in the natural sciences ethical analogies are very often used to make things that are far remote from the circle of human knowledge more accessible.”² Consider, too, a more recent example—George Steiner’s reflections in After Babel on “translatability” as the enabling feature of cultural communication. For him the “far remote” character of translation lies less in its literal distance from human affairs than in the inscrutable ubiquity of its embeddedness: it cannot be directly identified because it always already indwells each attempt to understand it.³ Steiner puts the governing “postulate” of his work as follows: “Translation is formally and pragmatically implicit in every act of communication, in the emission and reception of each and every mode of meaning, be it in the widest semiotic sense or in more specifically verbal exchanges.”⁴ Interestingly, Steiner’s wide sense of the concept also includes the illuminations of “inadequate” moments of translation supplied by writers who “articulate the conventions of masked or failed understanding which have obtained between men and women, between women and men, in the lineaments of dialogue we call love or hatred.”⁵ Here, once again, translation falls under the head of intersubjective relation: “love or hatred.” If we include uninhibited sexuality under the head of such relations, then Goethe’s famous apothegm settles the matter: translators are those “industrious pimps who, in extolling the adorable charms of a partly-clothed beauty, excite in us an irresistible desire for the original.”⁶

Now, if comparative literature has come to be treated of late as the proper disciplinary context for discussions of translation—an association so seemingly natural that the discipline has itself been likened to translation itself—this privileged relation has, I believe, been strengthened by the subliminal view on translation as an affair of the communication of subjectivities. In this case the “linguistic turn” is also an “inward turn,” a “journey into the interior.” The view that the translator must above all maintain his or her “fidelity” to the other text would indeed prove attractive to a discipline whose self-conception has been indebted to models of dialogue, “influence,” colloquy—an affair not of the relation of languages but of characters and voices.

And yet, with all these provisions, translation can at the same time, though in a privative and cautionary sense, remain a model for comparative literature, on the logic of the Prison Chaplain in Kafka’s The Trial, who declares: “The correct understanding of a matter and misunderstanding the matter are not mutually exclusive.”7 To clarify this latter point of logic, one could also go to Paul de Man, writing on Martin Heidegger’s view of the great German poet Friedrich Hölderlin as a witness to the experience of Being. De Man declares that Heidegger writes on Hölderlin just because “Hölderlin says exactly the opposite of what Heidegger makes him say,” a statement that reads, for our purposes, as follows: I come to this question of translation as a model for comparative literature because “comparative literature” says exactly the opposite of what the claim to the efficacy of the translation model makes it say. But I should not like to be misunderstood. “Such an assertion”—so de Man continues—“is paradoxical only in appearance.” For “at this level of thought, it is difficult to distinguish between a proposition and that which constitutes its opposite. In fact, to state the opposite is still to talk of the same thing although in an opposite sense; and to have the two interlocutors [‘comparative literature,’ on the one hand, and ‘the translation model’ on the other] manage to speak of the same thing in a dialogue of this sort is already a major achievement.”⁸

I say that comparative literature is not translation because translation means carrying over a piece of foreign language into one’s native or “near-native” language—the target language. But the act that I call “comparison,” means, in fact, being, for one moment, without a language; it means being, not lost in translation but lost for translation: being at a place of thought where the target language is absent.

Doing comparative literature means studying works written in different languages without the benefit of translation. It means not needing to translate, on the claimed strength of being able to translate. So what we project as the specific competence of the comparativist is his or her ability to put in immediate relation things conjured by the words of different languages.

I hold together in my mind a piece of Kafka and a piece of Flaubert, and I think about them. Never has the “I think” been stranger. If I have been accustomed to say, “I think in English,” it is clear that for at least one nanosecond I am without English, and yet I am thinking or getting ready to think. I am not translating. I understand (I think) the German, and I understand (I think) the French—and if I am understanding, am I not thinking? I would seem to be, in French and in German: but when I compare these texts, intuiting the basis for comparison, what language, then, am I thinking in?

In what medium are such pieces compared? Each belongs to a different language; what language contains them both? Are we on the verge, the other verge of that “pure language” toward which, according to Walter Benjamin, all particular translations strive, yet only when they shun “communication or the imparting of information”?9

Whatever zone of being contains, suspends, enfolds the configurations of different languages, and moreover in its space produces the aftershocks of recognition, which for a tremulous instant stay ungathered into any single language, is sponsored, authorized, upheld by the discipline of comparative literature. This means: we will authorize a model of translation on the basis of “comparison” but not the other way around.

Comparative literature is not a matter of detecting analogies between literary objects, because configurations in different languages are never analogous; they may stand in “relationship,” which is an affair for investigation, for reason, and for law. But the law of their relationship is not readable on the surface; following Benjamin, that law is hidden “among [the] alien tongues in which that pure language is exiled”; and then again it is hidden in the unknown place in consciousness where comparison repeats this relationship.¹⁰

Comparative literature registers the products of a textual collision—a necessary embarrassment, for these products are without habitation and a name: they have no reference except as the mind abandons them for unsuitable analogies—as it sooner or later must. (The name of this abandonment is “translation.”) But for readers accustomed to assume the adequacy of correlations for literary entities in the mind, under the spell of hermeneutics, there is here a salutary arrest of the referencing function, for comparative literature brings about a higher order of indetermination (the relationship between disparate pieces of “literary” language); and any blockage of the referencing function—the uprush of clichés—is bound to do some good. There is complex pleasure in an attunement without conceptual clarification—there is even revelatory pleasure; here we are in the aesthetic-ethical universe of Kant’s Third Critique.

This play of languages issues forth into languagelessness and a patient abiding in the place where language-is-about-to-be. Comparison reacquaints us, might reacquaint us with the sense of the Ursprung or “origin” of articulated thought (about which we may not be too celebratory since “Ursprung” simultaneously means an “Ur-Sprung”—a rip or tear—in the texture of language). But this adventuresome place might also be the promise of a bliss, the advent of that happiness, perhaps, that Adorno mentions in Aesthetic Theory. This is not a hedonism, he declares. “Aesthetic hedonism,” I quote, “is to be confronted with the passage from Kant’s doctrine of the sublime, which he timidly excluded from art: Happiness in artworks would be the feeling they instill of standing firm.”11

Comparative literature asks you, too, to stand firm in the delay of translation. This holding two pieces together in the mind is a warrant against the violence of premature analogy, against improper association. Midwifing their conjunction, establishing the copula, calls for a patience exceeding even the greatest tact.

These disparate pieces are alike (in some nonsensuous way) and they are unlike, deeply, immeasurably unlike, because if there is something alike in the things they are about (they have a thematic similarity), they are profoundly, immeasurably unlike in the way they mean what they mean, what Benjamin calls their “Art des Meinens,” a “way” that traverses the whole of the discrete language in which they are at home.

The way they mean cannot be got at as what these texts commonly “express.” To paraphrase Benjamin on the relation of the phenomenal appearance—the shining semblance [Schein]—and truth in art—: their relation is determined by “the expressionless,” “that which arrests this shining semblance [of mere beauty], spellbinds the movement, and interrupts the harmony.”¹² The orders of truth and semblance are unlike, yet they belong together; they cannot be separated, and yet they cannot mingle. Benjamin gives the example of such a caesura, such interruption, in the falling star that shoots over the heads of the lovers in Goethe’s Elective Affinities.¹³ Is it possible that the very operation of this “expressionless” in individual works is sustained, induced in the force field of the delay in translation? What you then get is something like Novalis’s “geistige Elektrizität,” an astral-electrical mood of intelligibility.¹⁴

The moment I am trying to define has its structural counterpart—in the opposite sense!—in the nonbeing that de Man famously concluded from his reading of Shelley’s “The Triumph of Life”: “[The Triumph] … warns us that nothing, whether deed, word, thought, or text, ever happens in relation, positive or negative, to anything that precedes, follows, or exists elsewhere, but only as a random event whose power, like the power of death, is due to the randomness of its occurrence.”¹⁵ I could accept only one of these features for the structural moment of comparison I want to define, for mine has more in common with Benjamin’s “expressionless” than de Man’s “lifeless.” I want, most decidedly, a moment of relation, of “nonseparation” (Benjamin: shining and essence in art are not separate) in the comparison of nonequivalent texts, while granting that this moment cannot be mingled with the “deed, word, thought or text” that finally follows. But this movement, I believe, is not random (you can see that we are still very fundamentally in the conceptual universe of Kant’s Third Critique); it is necessarily produced from the collision of two pieces of “literary” language in the mind of the schooled comparer. “All are welcome,” but training is necessary.

Aside from Benjamin, models of the relationship of these two (or more) disparate pieces of literature exist: Kant gives us more than one. In the sense that they are incommensurable (unangemessen), we are at the precincts of the sublime. The pleasure of their conjunction includes the pain [negative Lust] of our “embarrassment [Verlegenheit].” How else except as negative pleasure are we to have the intimations of that pure language to which all discrete languages aspire, since it shuns communication? The moment has its siblings, as we will see, in (1) the silence in books; (2) the silence that lurks behind language; and (3) the silence that’s like a language. Proust criticized Ruskin’s “fetishistic respect for books” (respect fétichiste pour les livres), “an idolatry [in the words of Kevin McLauglin] that substantializes literary value and imagines it as comparable to ‘a material thing deposited between the leaves of books.’ “By contrast,” McLaughlin continues, “Proust insists that the conserving action of reading concentrates on ‘interstices’: ‘not only the sentences [of a text] … [but] between the sentences … in the interval separating them, there still remains today as in an inviolate burial chamber, filling the interstices, a silence centuries old.’ ”16 I think one is more nearly certain to detect that silence in the interstices between pieces of different languages.

In 1937 Samuel Beckett spoke of wanting “to bore one hole after another into it [language], until what lurks behind it—be it something or nothing—begins to seep through.” Mark Harman notes: “Beckett’s goal in ripping apart the veil of language is [quote] ‘to feel a whisper of that final music or that silence that underlies all.’ ”¹⁷

“A whisper of the silence?” I cite Törless, the adolescent aesthete-hero of Musil’s turn-of-the-century novella Perplexities of the Pupil Törless, who, in conversation with his poisonous friend, the mystic Beineberg, invokes the “sudden silence that’s like a language we can’t hear.”¹⁸

Comparative literature is the discipline of this mystic thing—like language, underlying language, in between language pieces—accounted audible and silent, archaic and new. Comparative literature is a disciplined mysticism.

How now—as I conclude—to connect this moment to futurity, to the future of comparative literature and indeed of the humanities? The moment I describe is packed with futurity, it is a moment of pure possibility. The “translation” I have in mind that one now makes is more nearly the leap from one field to another entirely unlike it, for the latter is the accustomed field of the target language, but here we are speaking of salvaging a moment of pure thought—the intuition of relationship. How could we? The moment is audible (whispered), and unheard, centuries old and an origin.

The situation is odd, shapeless, even “monstrous” in the nicest sense of the word. I am thinking of Kafka’s question: “What is literature? Where does it come from? What use is it? What questionable things! Add to this questionableness the further questionableness of what you say, and what you get is a monstrosity.”19

If literature is monstrous—and its questionableness, its way of provoking questions about its nature, is monstrous—then the questions it provokes will seem to have the same nature as the thing questioned—as literature: so what today we call theory is deeply part of the monstrosity. This monstrosity is the sign of the future—the future of comparative literature (“of ” as genitive, “of ” as ablative); and, indeed, of every such future we have heard another thinker, Derrida, say that it appears “only under the species of the nonspecies, in the formless, mute, infant and terrifying form of monstrosity.”²⁰ It is exactly this monster—comparative, untranslatable—that we should wish to protect.

I have written about a moment that has to take place if comparative literature is to have any effect whatsoever, including empirical effects on cities and nations and “the globe” and also conceptual effects on the project of bringing such terms into correlation. So I do not finally wish to stop at this mystic, “inside”-sounding moment, place, or thing.

How could we then move out from it—temporally, toward a future—spatially, toward another place, to other geographies, with persons in it without the leisure or the skill to compare literary texts. Take the radical case: this other person who has been named in many oral presentations by Gayatri Spivak, in the radical form of her human “otherness”—the subaltern, impoverished, woman of color whom we need to know and whom it is strange and difficult to know.

How should we begin to know such a person—and we must—otherwise than by becoming acquainted with dislocation, our own dislocation, outside language, outside competence? What room is there for this difficult strangeness, if we have not learned to stand firm in the midst of it, abiding a moment of inexpressibility, an incommunicable sense of otherness, of intimacy with a common human grain.

This is an attitude of scrupulous neutrality, an Augenblick of silence. Communication should not be figured as occurring only at the level of imparting information. The Augenblick of such silence is generally imputable. It does not exclude community. This moment that bespeaks a common human grain moves along the grain of its silence.

NOTES

1. Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” trans. Harry Zohn, in Selected Works, ed. Michael Jennings and Marcus Bullock (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 1:261

2. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Sämtliche Werke (Münchner Ausgabe, Band 9, Munich: Hanser, 1987), p. 285.

3. George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation, 2nd ed. (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).

4. Ibid., p. xii.

5. Ibid.

6. J.W.V. Goethe, Maximen und Reflexionen. Nach den Handschriften des Goethe- und Schiller Archivs, ed. Max Hecker (Weimar 1907), Nr. p. 299.

7. Franz Kafka, The Trial, trans. Breon Mitchell (New York: Schocken, 1998), p. 219.

8. Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2d ed., rev. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), p. 255.

9. Benjamin, “Task of the Translator,” 261, pp. 253.

10. Ibid., p. 261.

11. Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, eds. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, newly trans., ed., and with a trans. introduction by Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 15.

12. “Goethe’s Elective Affinities,” trans. Stanley Corngold, in Benjamin, Selected Works, p. 340.

13. Ibid., p. 355.

14. “Geistige Elektrizität,” for which “solid bodies [feste Körper] are necessary.” Novalis, Schriften, eds. F. Schlegel and L. Tieck (Berlin, 1802), p. 67. Cited under the entry “Witz” in Grimm’s Deutsches Wörterbuch (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1960), 14/2:874.

15. Paul de Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), p. 122.

16. Proust, “Journées de lecture,” Contre Saint-Beuve, Bilbiothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), pp. 183, 180, and 193; “On Reading,” On Reading Ruskin, trans. Jean Autet and William Burford (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), pp. 120, 118, and 128. Cited in Kevin McLaughlin, “The Coming of Paper: Aesthetic Value from Ruskin to Benjamin,” Modern Language Notes 114(5), Dec. 1999, p. 970.

17. Mark Harman, “Beckett and Kafka,” The Partisan Review 66(4), 1999, p. 576.

18. Young Törless, an English translation of Robert Musil’s Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törless, trans. Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser (New York: Pantheon, 1955), p. 26.

19. Franz Kafka, Dearest Father, trans. Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins (New York: Schocken, 1954), p. 246.

20. Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” in Critical Theory Since Plato, ed. Hazard Adams (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1992), p. 1126.