SENSE AND SENSIBILITY: TRANSLATING THE BODILY EXPERIENCE

Margaret Sankey, Peter Cowley

Serres the polymath and Renaissance man has the European literary, artistic and philosophical traditions at his command, as he does the world of science. The full extent of his intellectual reach is displayed in The Five Senses. His philosophical familiars are the ancient Greeks, Descartes and Leibniz are his bedrock; the Bible, the Catholic Mass and liturgy figure prominently; Montaigne and Pascal haunt the text, Stendhal, Diderot and Verne are more substantial apparitions. What is more, mythology, fables and fairy tales are deployed with the same analytical seriousness as their more disciplined conceptual counterparts. The text references the European visual arts, architecture and music. In short, the reader is left wondering if there is anything beyond the range of Serres’s erudition. In The Five Senses we read, for instance, about The Lady and the Unicorn, Bonnard’s veiled figures, Cinderella and her slipper, the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice . . . And at the heart of the book, in a sparkling analysis of the root meanings of sapience and sagacity, Serres conjures Don Juan, the Last Supper and Plato’s Symposium out of the contemplation of a fine Château d’Yquem.

This mingled patchwork is isomorphic with Serres’s overall philosophical project, which seeks to establish a topology, rather than a geometry, of knowledge. The manner in which, here as elsewhere in his writings, his analysis moves from the physical sciences to fable, for instance, or from philosophy to myth, stems from his belief that to operate within one field of knowledge alone is to remain landlocked. An intolerable situation for a sailor whose preferred navigational metaphor is the North-West Passage.

Serres, who was indeed a naval officer in his youth, is most easily categorized as a philosopher, although the label is one which sits ill with him, as the reader will discover. Nonetheless, this book presents as a philosophical text – its subtitle is A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies. It thus awakens certain expectations, such as the orderly and logical development of an argument leading towards certain clear-cut conclusions. However Serres’s project is to subvert philosophical discourse through a critique of the Cartesian world view. He does this on the one hand by arguing against the dualistic tradition and propounding the importance of empiricism and the senses as a means to knowledge, and on the other through the nature of his discourse where the association of ideas rather than logical development becomes the motor of his text. Like the human body he describes in it, Serres’s text is a hybrid; and its connectivity and cohesion is as much literary as philosophical.

The book’s five chapters do not represent a linear progress through the senses. ‘How could we see the compact capacity of the senses,’ he asks, ‘if we separated them?’ As the book develops its argument the reader quickly understands that no such separation can be possible. The hybrid body, basted together according to circumstance, is lovingly embraced, and turned inside out.

The skin hangs from the wall as if it were a flayed man: turn over the remains, you will touch the nerve threads and knots, a whole uprooted hanging jungle, like the inside wiring of an automaton. The five or six senses are entwined and attached, above and below the fabric that they form by weaving or splicing, plaits, balls, joins, planes, loops and bindings, slip or fixed knots.

This image of the receptive body (subtle, as he calls it – and the careful reader will seek out the etymology of that adjective in order to understand why) displays his preference for topology over geometry, confusion over analysis (two of the terms he picks over at length), for folds, tangles, pleats and knots. It further demonstrates the impossibility of treating the five senses in separate chapters – how could one do so, if they are indeed as inseparable as Serres would have us believe?

But this one image, which is emblematic of his entire philosophical project and condenses how seriously he takes the question of interdisciplinarity, also embodies his poetics. Intermingling and confusion inform his work structurally and stylistically, globally and locally. They underwrite the style of his text, in which ‘technical’ philosophical language alternates and blends with the poetic and the lyrical; where he constantly moves between registers; where the reader is by turns lulled, seduced and challenged. Serres’s contention is that music is the substratum of all meaningful language and his text is structured musically in terms of themes and variations, counterpoint and fugue. The reader will need to adapt to the rhythmic play of the text, which is indissociable from the conceptual moves it makes and to which, we hope, our translation has done justice.

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The translation of Les cinq sens has been a long time coming. In the more than twenty years since its publication Serres has achieved a prominence, both in France and internationally, which he did not have in 1985. In France his appearances on television in the nineties turned him into something of an overnight media sensation. Suddenly, members of the general public were turning up to his Saturday morning seminars, asking questions and receiving the same careful, pedagogical replies they had come to expect from his on-screen persona.

We can trace the lightening of his prose style back to the same period. His early theoretical output, dense, academic and disciplined, evolved into something more lyrical and discursive. That evolution continued throughout the following decade, to the point where Serres’s output today – aerated, playful, often supplemented with illustrations and clearly pitched to a more general readership – hardly seems the work of the same writer. His media presence continues also: on Sunday evenings now he presents a five-minute long radio programme on Radio France, in the form of a brief, topical excursus, often drawing on his writings and delivered in digestible, conversational style with the host Michel Polacco.

It might be said that Les cinq sens belongs to his middle period. Frequently lyrical and rhapsodic, it nonetheless owes much to his early work in its density and complexity. Like those earlier works, it has been waiting a very long time to be translated into English.

As it turns out, its transition to English is timely. When it was first published, Serres was criticized for his linguistic waywardness, in particular for his use of neologisms. In Chapter 2, for example, the recurring opposition between soft and hard leads Serres to contrast ‘douceur logicielle et dureté matérielle’. Our now widely-accepted ‘software’ and ‘hardware’ lend themselves perfectly and unproblematically to the translation of Serres’s analysis, but at the time of publication ‘logiciel’ (‘software’) was sufficiently newly-minted to raise eyebrows. Similarly (again in Chapter 2) the image of a disembodied Eurydice floating like a icon cannot but call to mind that of an icon on a computer screen, a mere representation. Serres insists that this was his original intention. Commonplace now, the metaphor must have been an opaque one in the mid eighties. These are rare and happy instances of the right interval in time allowing a translation to bring an element of the original to fruition, rather than introducing impediments.

The difficulties of any translation are manifold, and their enumeration often tedious. But some clarification is usually called for, if only to guide the reader through the complexities of the text at hand. Serres’s use of language is highly self-conscious, sometimes displaying surgical precision, frequently bewildering in its opacity and its tendency to play fast and loose with the rules of French syntax and scholarly prose. It poses problems to the translator for various reasons: Serres plays on the Greek and Latin etymological substrata of French, weaves intertextual references into his argument, mines technical and dialectal language and, inevitably, puns.

Etymology and word play

While we do not wish to catalogue the difficulties of translating Serres’s word play, a brief notice is called for in the cases of several recurring key terms. One of these is le sensible. Typically, ‘sensible’ means ‘sensitive’. It is a classic ‘faux-ami’ – a cognate or ‘false friend’ – the bane of the language learner. However it is used here as a noun to express everything pertaining to the senses, and we have rendered it as ‘the sensible’, in reference to the more specialized usage of the latter in English.

Similarly with le donné. It derives from the verb donner, to give, and is used by Serres to refer to the sensory experience we receive from the world – in essence, what we are given by the world, if only we will open ourselves up to that experience. While this is an acceptable, if specialized and often awkward, usage of the term in French, it is rather harder to pull off in English, at least as a noun, because of the primary substantive sense of ‘given’ as an established fact. However, due to the inordinately complex set of transformations to which ‘le donné’ is subjected in the text, we determined that the wisest course of action was to retain ‘the given’.

For the most part, where we have been able to do so with relative concision and elegance, we have attempted parallel puns and neologisms, and have only provided footnote explanations where (a) such a solution proved impossible and (b) the pun was not gratuitous, but integral to the development of the argument. This is the case, for instance, with ‘vair,’ in Chapter 1 (meaning ‘fur’ but a homophone for ‘verre’, meaning glass) and ‘percevoir’, at various points (a play on perception and taxation).

Serres draws upon etymology much more frequently than he resorts to puns; sometimes explicitly, but often implicitly. We are fortunate that English and French share so much etymological common ground. In most instances, therefore, the resonance has been preserved, and when merely implicit we have left it to the reader – as Serres himself does – to be attentive to that dimension of the text.

Intertextuality

Serres’s text, to return to the image of the hanging skin and its exposed nerve endings, is as much embroidered as written, to the extent that hardly a paragraph could be said to be free of intertextual references, often overt, frequently more obscure, consisting of a clin d’œil to the educated reader. They are woven through the warp and weft of both the argument and the language, sometimes over, sometimes under. It is likely that no one reader will detect them all. In addition to references to works of philosophy, science and literature, he alludes to his own, earlier texts (most frequently to the Hermes series and to Le parasite), to nursery rhymes, to proverbs, to half-remembered paintings . . . We have taken care to translate the philosophical terms using the accepted terminology in English. In the case of the more literary texts, and specifically where there is a variety of English translations, we have sometimes used existing translations, sometimes made our own, according both to the felicitousness of the translations available and to the context. Take for example Montaigne’s branle pérenne. Neither Florio’s curious ‘the world runnes on all wheeles’ (1613), nor Cotton’s ‘the world eternally turns round’ (1685–1686), nor Screech’s ‘the world is but a perennial see-saw’ (1991) seemed to capture the nuance we were seeking and we fixed on ‘eternal wobble’ hoping that the aware reader would make the connection with Montaigne.

Serres’s erudite text is almost entirely free from footnotes and we have considered it appropriate to preserve in the same way the free flow of the ideas and images. We have thus avoided footnoting most of the intertextual references, only providing explanations where the reference is so obscure, at least to the Anglophone reader, as to render the sense of the text difficult to determine.

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Serres’s contention is that the development of human language, and subsequently of the sciences, has veiled and militated against the glories of our initial sensuous perception of the world. Conscious of the paradox of expressing through words this transformation in man’s perceptions, the style of Serres’s writing seems to be a deliberate effort to combat the limitations of language which he turns against itself in order to make his points through suggestion and free association, as well as through philosophical argument. His style is thus on occasion elliptical and ambiguous and it has been necessary in the interest of comprehension sometimes to flesh out the meaning in translation, as well as providing connectives, absent in the French. On occasion this has solidified the meaning in English, as opposed to the looser, more fluid French construction which allowed a fuller semantic play. The introduction of carefully chosen punctuation has also served to clarify the text.

However we have, as a rule, attempted to preserve the stylistic peculiarities of Serres’s writing: the shifts of register from familiar and conversational to lyrical and exalted; the deliberating wandering sentences; the occasional jerkiness. All these things help to preserve the play of Serres’s consciousness. The text is, after all, a highly personal one in which the writer uses his sensuous experience to inflect his style and demonstrate the importance of the senses in the construction of human knowledge.

Les cinq sens might be called a homunculus. ‘I wager,’ writes Serres in Chapter 1,

that the small, monstrous homunculus, each part of which is proportional to the magnitude of the sensations it feels, increases in size and swells at these automorphic points, when the skin tissue folds in on itself. Skin on skin becomes conscious, as does skin on mucus membrane and mucus membrane on itself. Without this folding, without the contact of the self on itself, there would truly be no internal sense, no body properly speaking, cœnesthesia even less so, no real image of the body; we would live without consciousness; slippery smooth and on the point of fading away. Klein bottles are a model of identity. We are the bearers of skewed, not quite flat, unreplicated surfaces, deserts over which consciousness passes fleetingly, leaving no memory. Consciousness belongs to those singular moments when the body is tangential to itself.

If, as he argues, our skin is the site of a generalized, common sense, generative of identity in the places where pliability, the lack of inhibition and a willingness to leave the beaten path, bring it into contact with itself, then by extension his text is stylistically and conceptually most itself at precisely those points when seeming to practise the very arts he extols: viticulture, haute cuisine, embroidery, acrobatics – arts of confusion, contorsion and mingling, all.

Our translation is, no doubt, less likely to draw attention to itself than the homunculus, less likely to cause offence in polite company, less flexible – less sensible. Translation inevitably flattens out the folds in the language of a text, the points of contact where its identity is formed and formulated – where it is most interesting, and most itself. But that is the price of acceptability.