Translation and Difference
Social groups both fear and need difference, and three of the essays in this section are linked by this double preoccupation. The other essays explore difference from a slightly different angle: within the very concepts of translation and naming, and across the line, if there is such a line, which divides lived history from memory.
Translation, paradoxically, has often been used to build national identity by means of organized borrowing from different languages and cultures. In this “specular process,” as Lawrence Venuti aptly calls it, one becomes more one’s self by selectively becoming another. Or rather by openly trying and secretly failing in the attempt. Venuti’s essay lucidly lays out the theory of this project, and offers precise case studies. There are forms of nationalism, he suggests, where “the national status of a language and culture is simultaneously presupposed and created through translation,” and Schleiermacher’s argument about German and Germany is precisely this: “Our language can thrive in all its freshness and completely develop its own power only by means of the most many-sided contacts with what is foreign.” Yopie Prins shows how a whole generation of scholars, poets, and educators in Britain tried to become more truly English by becoming more Greek than the Greeks. Matthew Arnold, Prins says, thought “modernity was the demand for the right measure and … England was a nation in need of measure,” and the Homeric hexameter offered itself as the haunting and implausible solution to a problem both of poetry and culture. The hexameter, Prins shrewdly adds “was invoked by Arnold as a metrical imaginary,” a way of getting the “native genius” of English to speak in tones that mere native forms did not allow. It measured, as she says, “the distance between culture and anarchy”—always a little further than Arnold wanted to think.
Azade Seyhan also notes, in her study of German exiles in Turkey during World War II, “the coexistence of an extensive practice of translation with a passionately articulated uniqueness and moral superiority of Turkish nation and national identity.” The paradox returns, and looks less paradoxical each time. Her essay is a study in what she calls “cultural geography,” the formation of “cities of refuge,” places where exiled modes of thought and teaching could both be preserved for their own future and rather different life and have a very large effect on the local culture. “In a certain sense,” she writes, “the best intentions of the Enlightenment paradigm survived in a self-reflexive, reinterpreted or reimagined mode in pockets and margins of exile.”
“Globalization has taken our tongues from us,” Jacques Lezra’s essay begins, but the process started much earlier than we most often assume. For Lezra the common modern concept of the nation, associated with Renan, is a matter of a people’s will, or more precisely a settled relation between will and language. But there is an earlier idea, which troubles just this relation, and Lezra subtly explores its manifestations in Renaissance grammarians, translators, and theorists of translation. In Covarrubias’s dictionary, for example, to translate is both to take something from one place to another and to set something on the road—the first a complete action, a transaction between nations, the second a sort of unfinished adventure, a step into a space beyond the nation of departure. What Lezra calls an “insecure subjectivity” develops, and “upon this torn lexical ground, this broken, translated culture, early modern internationalism flourishes, like sown dragon’s teeth.”
“This torn spot is where a particular social freedom can be located,” Lezra says, a thought echoed by Stathis Gourgouris’s reading of Don DeLillo’s novel The Names as an exploration of “the transgressive legacy of the Tower of Babel.” “Our second chance at Babel,” Gourgouris writes, “is to recognize … the force that enables societies to dare imagine themselves otherwise, beyond the Name.” Beyond the name and beyond the nation, we might say. Language, no longer the instrument of a domineering policy or purpose, no longer single-minded enough to command or receive commands, becomes the place where we slip away from the tyranny of the will.
Everywhere beneath these complex project and antiprojects, these large schemes for translating the world into various models of desire, lurks the notion of experience, which is the central focus of Sandra Bermann’s essay on René Char. If we can translate within a language as well as from language to language, we can also translate from what Bermann calls the “lived historical event” to the legible trace of that event, and from starkly present experience to the spectral permanence of memory. No one understood the difficulty of this task better than Char, and through Bermann’s delicate essay we understand precisely what is lost and gained in the writing and reading of these luminous fragments.