N’importe nawak

The other day I happened to come across a long quotation, in English, from the most famous passage in Proust. Here it is:

My mother sent for one of those squat, plump little cakes called “petites madeleines,” which look as though they had been molded in the fluted valve of a scallop shell. And soon, mechanically dispirited after a dreary day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory—this new sensation had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me, it was me. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, contingent, mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy?

What surprised me as I was reading this passage about the summoning up of memory was that despite having recently read the volume from which it is taken, I had no memory at all of some of the things that now leapt out at me: the contrast between the dreariness of the present, for example, and the pleasure of the madeleine (representing the richness of the remembered past). Had I really not noticed that before or had I noticed and forgotten?

Of course both possibilities—not noticing and forgetting—are probable. Whenever you read something more than once you notice different things, and that’s especially true with a text as rich as Proust. You can’t possibly take it all in at once; inevitably, you notice selectively. Likewise, unless you’ve really studied a passage, it is hardly surprising that you’d forget even important aspects of it. And the madeleine passage is so celebrated that it’s a bit like a famous painting whose reproduction you’ve seen a thousand times; you might even skip over it.

But there is another factor. My previous reading of the passage had been in French, and French simply leaves less of an impression on me than my native language; the words have less weight. For me, as a non-native speaker, French inevitably has a kind of lightness.

Profanity provides the most familiar demonstration of this quality. Think how easily the nastiest, filthiest thing you can think of slides off your tongue in a foreign language. Connard, for example, is pretty rude, but I know that only in a more or less abstract way, whereas as a native English speaker the insult asshole has an immediate, visceral impact; I almost wince as I type it. Asshole has a lot more weight for me than connard, and the reasons are obvious. I’ve had very little direct experience with connard. I can only recall one time when it was said to me directly, and I’ve probably heard it more often in the movies than in real life; I haven’t often seen it in print. On the other hand, how many hundreds of times have I heard (and said and thought) asshole? A lifetime of exposure has attached a remarkable affective weight to these words, to the point where they provoke a Pavlovian response.

The effect is the same, if less dramatic, with ordinary, inoffensive language. I particularly notice it with adjectives. Consider the French adjective leste. Not a particularly common adjective, not one that I’ve had much experience with: I know what it means because I looked it up in the dictionary. Eventually, if I come across it often enough, I’ll have more of a sense of it, but for now, it is so lightly anchored in my mind that it threatens to drift away altogether. Now consider a couple of the possible English translations of leste, namely agile and nimble. My intuitions about these words are so strong that not only do I not need a dictionary to tell me what they mean, I can judge whether the dictionary definitions accurately capture their meaning (at least for me). I know that someone can have nimble fingers, but that it would normally be odd to say they have nimble legs (though perhaps a soccer player or dancer might have them). The sound of nimble (the signifier, in semiotic terminology) is so tightly bound to the concept of nimbleness (the signified) in my mind that it seems they are one and the same: what else could nimble mean but nimble? The word is instantly, effortlessly evocative. It will be a long time before leste can produce an equal effect in me; and probably it never will. Words in a foreign language are like distant relatives or exchange students: their exoticism may be charming, but ultimately they count for less; they are just visitors, passersby. Even if they settle down and you get to know them well, they remain latecomers. Words in your native language, assuming you speak it all of your life (and don’t renounce it for another), are your life, or at least what you can share of it with others; they are its symbolic encoding and when summoned can decode spontaneously to conjure up images, memories, a network of associations. In your native language, every word is a potential madeleine.

All of this is relevant to the question, Is it better to read a work of literature in one’s native language or in the original language, assuming you’re able? Is it better for me to read Proust, for example, in English or in French? Needless to say, reading a text in the language in which it was written is the choice that is normally valorized. Serious students of a work read it in the original. Translations are secondary, second best. The question tends to be to what extent a translation is adequate to the original text, with the implication of inescapable inadequacy. Translation is loss. The only reason not to read the original is pragmatic: you’re just not able to.

One of the problems with this sacralization of the original is precisely that it overlooks the lightness of foreign language. It assumes that once non-native speakers can read a text with reasonable ease, their access to it is not significantly different from native speakers’ and that the problem of language has been taken care of. But a good translation arguably provides non-native speakers with an experience much closer to that of native speakers: native language always retains an evocative power, a vividness and a richness of connotation acquired over a lifetime’s experience — in short, a weight — that non-native language can never match. Granted, a translation is not precisely the same as the original, just as nimble and agile are not exact equivalents of leste. But neither is the original text exactly the same for a non-native speaker. Given this choice, between a pale, blurry experience of the original and a more vivid, focused translation, the translation is often the better choice. In his recent essay, Le rideau (The Curtain), Milan Kundera makes the point that most of the great novels of world literature are read and sometimes best appreciated in translation:

Rabelais n’a jamais été mieux compris que par un Russe : Bakhtine ; Dostoïevski que par un Français : Gide ; Ibsen que par un Irlandais : G.B. Shaw ; James Joyce que par un Autrichien : Hermann Broch ; l’importance universelle de la génération des grands Nord-Américains, Hemingway, Faulkner, Dos Passos a été révélée en premier lieu par des écrivains français…

Est-ce que je veux dire par là que pour juger un roman on peut se passer de la connaissance de sa langue originale ? Bien sûr, c’est exactement ce que je veux dire ! Gide ne connaissait pas le russe, G.B. Shaw ne connaissait pas le norvégien, Sartre n’a pas lu Dos Passos dans le texte. Si les livres de Witold Gombrowicz et de Danilo Kis avaient dépendu uniquement du jugement de ceux qui connaissaient le polonais et le serbo-croate, leur radicale nouveauté esthétique n’aurait jamais été découverte. (50-51).

[Rabelais was never better understood than by a Russian: Bakhtin; Dostoyevsky than by a Frenchman: Gide; Ibsen than by an Irishman: G.B. Shaw; James Joyce than by an Austrian: Hermann Broch; the universal importance of the great North Americans, Hemingway, Faulkner, Dos Passos was first revealed by French writers…

Do I mean by that that to judge a novel one can do without knowing its original language? Of course, that’s exactly what I mean! Gide didn’t know Russian, G.B. Shaw didn’t know Norwegian, Sartre didn’t read Dos Passos in the original. If the books of Witold Gombrowicz and Danilo Kis had depended only on the judgment of those who knew Polish and Serbo-Croatian, their radical aesthetic novelty would never have been discovered.]

And yet, if I’m aware that reading a work like A la recherche du temps perdu in the original has disadvantages, the fact is I like reading Proust in French. Indeed, I generally enjoy reading almost any novel in French, even a mediocre one that I probably wouldn’t put up with for ten minutes in English. One reason for this, I think, is that French provides the pleasure of dépaysement – estrangement, unfamiliarity. Foreign language makes things foreign; the everyday becomes exotic. The Russian formalist critic Viktor Shklovsky claimed that this effect is one of the goals of art and used the term ostranenie, usually translated as “defamiliarization,” to describe it. He wrote:

The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar,’ to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important. (cited in the Viktor Shklovsky article on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viktor_Shklovsky)

What else does foreign language do but “make forms difficult”? The forms and sounds of foreign language are more difficult than those of native language and so we are inevitably much more conscious of them. In this sense, foreign language breaks the spell of language, the equivalence that we normally unconsciously make between signifier and signified, that sense that nimble doesn’t just mean nimble, but is nimble. In a foreign language, it is as if we can observe the process of representation through language in slow motion, as we grope for understanding. We may perceive the arbitrary strangeness of an utterance or be seized by a vertiginous intuition of its rickety inadequacy. Paradoxically, the work we do to endow foreign words with meaning may also give them the superhuman weight of Delphic oracles. Thus, for example, the two-line poem by Catullus known as Carmen 85 seems more profound in Latin than English:  Odi et amo. Quare id faciam, fortasse requiris. / Nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior. (I hate and I love. Why do I do this, you might ask. / I don’t know, but I feel it happening, and am tormented.). Odi et amo has the simplicity, yet somehow none of the banality, of “I hate and I love.” It has the power — the weight — of an ancient incantation.

I just reread Michel de Certeau’s essay “Walking in the City” (“Marches dans la ville”) for my reading group, and I happened to have the original French as well as two different translations at hand, so I decided to compare them. To give you an idea, here are the first couple of sentences of the essay, in French first of all:

Depuis le 110e étage du World Trade Center, voir Manhattan. Sous la brume brassée par les vents, l’île urbaine, mer au milieu de la mer, lève les gratte-ciel de Wall Street, se creuse à Greenwich, dresse de nouveau les crêtes de Midtown, s’apaise à Central Park et moutonne enfin au-delà de Harlem.

Now here is Steven Rendall’s translation (from The Practice of Everyday Life) :

Seeing Manhattan from the 110th floor of the World Trade Center. Beneath the haze stirred up by the winds, the urban island, a sea in the middle of the sea, lifts up the skyscrapers over Wall Street, sinks down at Greenwich, then rises again to the crests of Midtown, quietly passes over Central Park and finally undulates off into the distance beyond Harlem.

And the translation by Richard Miller and Edward Schneider (from The Certeau Reader and the anthology On Signs):

To see Manhattan from the 107th floor of the World Trade Center. Below the wind-stirred haze, the urban island, a sea upon a sea rises on the crested swell of Wall Street, falls into the trough of Greenwich Village, flows into the renewed crests of midtown and the calm of Central Park, before breaking into distant whitecaps up beyond Harlem.

What do you think? Miller and Schneider’s first sentence is, for me, indisputably better, even if the World Trade Center does lose a few stories (the WTC had 110). It preserves the punch of the original and shows that converting the original infinitive to a participle is not only ineffective but unnecessary. The second sentence is harder to call, but I’d give the nod to Rendall, largely because he stays very close to the original. Miller and Schneider, on the other hand, decide to show off their literary prowess. They begin with the “wind-stirred haze,” which sets the tone already, followed by “a sea upon a sea” for the more prosaic “sea in the middle of a sea”; the plain “gratte-ciel de Wall Street”, literally “the skyscrapers of Wall Street,” becomes “the crested swell of Wall Street.” It’s not that all this lyricism is bad in itself; it’s just that it isn’t in the original. (On the other hand, Miller and Schneider do fix a small error in the original: no one calls Greenwich Village “Greenwich,” (possibly because Greenwich, Connecticut is not far away); it’s either Greenwich Village or the Village.) Rendall, for his part, drops the ball with “passes over Central Park”: what could it mean for the island (or the sea that is the island) to pass over the park? Is it passing over itself?

So much for the first couple of sentences. Kind of a draw between the two translations, you might conclude. Unfortunately, Miller and Schneider’s tendency to translate a bit loosely becomes increasingly fatal. As the essay becomes more technical, their translation just gets muddier. Reading it, I thought of the claim made by Alan Sokal and others that postmodern theory is nonsense, with the proof being that nonsense sentences can be inserted into texts without anyone noticing. That is in fact exactly what Miller and Schneider do: their translation simply makes nonsense out of some of Certeau’s sentences (or at the very least utterly mistranslates them). Here is the beginning of the essay’s third paragraph, according to Miller and Schneider:

To be lifted to the summit of the World Trade Center is to be carried away by the city’s hold. One’s body is no longer criss-crossed by the streets that bind and re-bind it following some law of their own; it is not possessed – either as user or used – by the sounds of all its many contrasts or by the frantic New York traffic.

A very trippy second sentence! What could it mean for the body to be “criss-crossed by the streets that bind and re-bind it”? And what is the connection between the first sentence and the second? How does it follow that if you’re “carried away by the city’s hold” your body is no longer criss-crossed? Shouldn’t it be the opposite (you’re carried away, you’re criss-crossed, you’re bound…)? Rather than ponder these mysteries further, let’s consider the French:

Etre élevé au sommet du World Trade Center, c’est être enlevé à l’emprise de la ville. Le corps n’est plus enlacé par les rues qui le tournent et le retournent selon une loi anonyme ; ni possédé, joueur ou joué, par la rumeur de tant de différences et par la nervosité du trafic new-yorkais.

First, note that Miller and Schneider’s mistranslation of the first sentence is 180 degrees wrong: one isn’t “carried away by the city’s hold”; rather one is not carried away; one is (as Rendall translates it), “lifted out of the city’s grasp,” a notion which, not surprisingly, fits much better with the contrast Certeau is making between the view of the city from above and being in the city. As for Certeau’s second sentence, how strangely clear it seems, and how distant from the baroque, sado-masochistic fantasy of Miller and Schneider.

Their main mistake is to take enlacé to be equivalent to the English cognate enlaced (meaning “intertwined,” “interlaced”) which is indeed the most common sense, but not the appropriate one here; this error then leads them to translate tournent and retournent as “bind and rebind.” Another problem is the ambiguity of “its” in the phrase: “it is not possessed … by the sounds of all its many contrasts.” The reader would expect “its” to have the same referent as the “it” that precedes it – namely the referent “one’s body.” But “the sounds of all [one’s body’s] many contrasts” doesn’t make much sense. Certeau’s meaning is clear enough in the French. Rendall’s translation gets it right:

To be lifted to the summit of the World Trade Center is to be lifted out of the city’s grasp. One’s body is no longer clasped by the streets that turn and return it according to an anonymous law; nor is it possessed, whether as player or played, by the rumble of so many differences and by the nervousness of New York traffic.

The veil is lifted from one’s eyes: even a French theorist with a taste for literary language can make sense!

One more example. This one’s from the essay’s first paragraph. Here’s the French:

Ville faite de lieux paroxystiques en reliefs monumentaux. Le spectateur peut y lire un univers qui s’envoie en l’air.

The second sentence is difficult to translate because of s’envoie en l’air, which could be glossed as “to get off ” on either drugs or sex. (The Stephen Frears movie Sammy and Rosie Get Laid is known as Sammy et Rosie s’envoient en l’air in French.) Certeau titles this section of his essay “Voyeurs ou marcheurs,” and voyeur has the same primary sense in French as it does in English: in a playful way, Certeau is comparing the pleasure he gets from the view on top of the World Trade Center to a voyeur’s pleasure in watching a sexual act. So s’envoie en l’air is clearly meant sexually here, and is an important support for Certeau’s analogy. A possible translation might be “The spectator can read there a whole universe getting off.” Would the English-speaking reader get the sexual reference? I’m not sure. In French, it’s set up to some degree by the previous sentence: the lieux paroxystiques can be read to suggest paroxysms of pleasure and reliefs monumentaux can take on phallic connotations. But how to capture that in English? Perhaps: “A city made of places in paroxysm, in monumental reliefs.” In any case, here’s what Miller and Schneider do with the passage:

Paroxystic sites with monumental reliefs. The spectator can even read the fading urban universe.

I suppose they interpret s’envoie en l’air as meaning something like “send itself up in smoke” (hence the “fading” as the smoke dissipates). Who knows. For what it’s worth, Rendall doesn’t quite get it either (though he certainly does better);

A city composed of paroxysmal places in monumental reliefs. The spectator can read in it a universe that is constantly exploding.

***

Anyone who has studied a foreign language has had the experience of reading a text – it could be anything, a newspaper article, a street sign – and struggling to make sense of it. Perhaps Miller and Schneider’s translation represents their own experience of reading Certeau: they assumed that what was obscure for them was inherent to the essay; and they took care to reproduce this same delightful, suggestive, “literary” obscurity in their translation.

While Certeau’s writing is not as strange as Miller and Schneider make it, there’s no denying that it is sometimes difficult and is full of metaphor and allusion that complicate the translator’s task. A style like this – far from uncommon among French theorists! – is clearly more “at risk” for bad translation than a straightforward expository style in which obscurities or illogicalities in the translation would stand out as probable mistranslations (and therefore be corrected) rather than appear as instances of the author’s taste for paradox and abstraction. I wonder how Lacan has fared in translation. Then again, would it even matter? Maybe Sokal had a point.