PART V
Everything I read is a translation. Some cosmic ether reshapes everything I receive.
Certainly, when I read anything written in a language other than the one I learned in infancy, I rely on the work of some intermediary, someone who has made the myriad decisions about words, figures of speech, things that are important in one place to one people, and what an equivalence would be to a target audience. It’s not easy and there’s an eternal debate on the matter.
Should the translation convey the original words and nothing else? What if there’s no equivalent word—should the translator “explain” the word? For instance, “he said blah, a curse” (or further, “a curse on men,” or women, or foreigners, or different racial or ethnic groups). Or in a particular passage, does the word explain itself? (“She slapped his face, calling him a blahblah.”) Notice that, as written, we know “blahblah” is some kind of insult or bad word, but we want to know more.
What if the word has direct correspondence in the target language but it doesn’t have the same emotional impact? To be called a dog in the English I know or knew meant to be unattractive, applied especially by adolescent boys to girls. (Yet I heard a younger girl of my clan once refer to a boy as “so doggy.”) In another sense, to “dog it” is to hold back full effort, to slack, to let other people put out necessary effort.
English does inherit the sense of “a dog of a person” as someone lacking in morals, pride, or ethics, but even decades ago I’d say I rarely if ever heard it “alive,” that is, spoken.
Yet even that sense didn’t have the disdain, or even hatred, of the epithet in other cultures, where dogs aren’t just ignoble creatures but dirty, vile scavengers. Our idea of the dog is a companion, a buddy; many people permit a favorite dog to lick their faces. This dog is not that dog, the lowdown despised creature with a tendency to eat shit. (We tend to overlook that behavior, us in the West. I’ve seen it several times but we don’t talk about it.) Therefore, when a Westerner hears a Moslem call someone a dog, a lot of meaning doesn’t cross the chasm.
Then there are idioms and figures of speech. In French, a self-defeating action is <<C’est a mettre la puce en oeil>> —“It’s [like] putting the [your] thumb in [your own] eye.” That’s my “word-for-word” translation of the term—with three insertions and the original “to put” changed to “putting,”
But how should it really be given? Do we want to read people using their actual words, which would make people seem to us who read, as stumblers, unable to speak plain English? Or should we try to give the “real meaning,” the equivalent sense in the target language? So “jabbing your thumb in your own eye” would become “It’s like cutting off your nose to spite your own face.” Frankly, I’d rather know people in their own minds. I don’t want to live in a landscape composed of mirrors, endlessly confining a self in itself.
On the other hand the reader has to recognize. If everything is foreign or alien it will remain foreign and alien. The growth of a self depends on what exists outside it as an extent into which it is possible to become. I am you as you are me and we are all barley in a boiling pot.
Attitudes change over time, as everybody knows, especially language. We know this: Shakespeare grows steadily distant from us, his allusions to nunneries and coney-catchers more and more mysterious. A lot of the words on his pages look familiar, but they get thrown together with so much that isn’t, it’s not hard to get very, very lost. Sometimes I think he used as much slang as modern speakers of English—sometimes I think also that each succeeding generation of Americans feels an urge to distinguish itself from all that have gone before, right to the point of not being understood by older people. That may be the unspoken intention. American English is a panful of kernels of corn, awash in oil, sitting on a hot stove.
Translation became necessary for me long ago, in order to understand better my own life, rooted in times preceding me. In speaking of dogs just now, I recall a hatred toward cats. Despite being self-housebreaking (not “breaking into a house”, but “housebroken”), and despite their more obvious and frequent grooming, cats were disliked and distrusted. They ranked below dogs. There was something about them that could be used to illustrate disgust:
A cousin ten or fifteen years older than me, when she was only ten years old herself, was once dispatched from the family car on its way home from church, to get some baloney for her father’s work week. They were in a different neighborhood, somewhere between their own house and the half-mile to church. When R walked into the little neighborhood store—an ethnic store in an ethnic neighborhood—there sat a cat atop a counter, licking a block of cheese. She turned and left, and the family never entered that door again.
A certain kind of boy might feel seized, given possession of a cat, to do something cruel. I stood in witness to some conversations about the tortures one could inflict on cats—I’m glad to say I never witnessed anything in fact. But some trace of that foulness remains; as I write, I think this phrase still sounds “alive”: Go like a cat shot in the ass.
This strikes some mean and dark notes doesn’t it. From the point of view of this day, this person I am, I find it difficult to talk about—but then this is the first I ever have. It’s shameful. But it was an attitude embedded in a larger social order. Let me tell you this story:
I spent two years at Penn State before transferring to New College in Sarasota. In the library there one day my scanning eye fetched on an unexpected title: “Penn State Yankee.” I snatched it and opened, finding it was the autobiography of Fred Lewis Pattee—the man whose name is chiseled over the library’s entrance in University Park! I remember two things from what I read in the following spell: First Pattee was born in New Hampshire, a New England Yankee.* Second, Pattee told a story of a well-loved professor who would strap a pistol about his waist of an evening and stroll among the buildings of campus shooting stray cats.
Same places, same people, different times, different heads. Different souls.
******
Peter Brown, historian of early Christianity and late antiquity, for a new edition looked back thirty-three years at his earlier biography of St. Augustine. He commented on the effort of seeing that ancient, holy man as a person. Brown approved of his early effort, written in a spirit that “seemingly unapproachable thoughts on topics which either repelled modern persons or had ceased to interest them could be ‘translated.’ They could be rendered accessible in such a way that the average, cultivated reader…could relieve something at least of their original intensity, and recapture something of the urgent relevance that these ideas once had for persons of a far-distant age.”
Spouses, siblings and all family members, neighbors, co-religionists, people of different areas and distant lands, our selves of earlier time, then distant and more distant times, all come to me through a dynamic of translation, a shimmering. Without translation I understand nothing. To speak in a foreign tongue I must alter if not completely remodel myself.
* Final note: I have just learned in the last month that “To people in the South [of the USA] a Yankee is anyone from the North. To Northerners a Yankee is someone from the Northeast. To people in the Northeast a Yankee is someone from New England. To New Englanders a Yankee is someone from Northern New England. To Northern New Englanders a Yankee is someone who eats pie for breakfast.”
END