May
16
Translating from the Gibberish
In my last post, I argued that translation involves a form of deep reading that can improve your foreign language skills and your writing.
In this post, I discuss a few practical examples as well as how “Translating from the Gibberish” serves as a metaphor for all human experience and expression. (I warned you it would get philosophical, didn’t I?)
Completing the Translation
Once the full literal and figurative meaning of the original is carried over into the target language, there’s still much work to be done. This first draft might capture every nuance of the source text, but it’s almost certainly a stylistic mess. It must be smoothed over to sound, itself, original. (For a translation is no good at all if it still seems borrowed.) The entire text must be recrafted to read as though it was initially written in the target language.*
Again, translating from a foreign language makes us all the more conscious of our own. We learn as much, if not more, about English when using it to re-create a passage in Spanish, Arabic, Swahili, or Mandarin† than we do by writing directly in English. Because if we’re proficient enough in the source language to identify its unique characteristics, this knowledge casts a light on English’s own advantages and shortcomings, strength and weaknesses. Such multilingual awareness, and the perspective it offers, is extremely valuable to the conscientious literary stylist.
* Like the author, the translator is a counterfeiter. Pulling off the details of the forgery is the most challenging part of translation, just as revision is harder than drafting. I struggle through every sentence to make a translation sound true, and yet I usually feel it has too much of a “borrowed” feel to it. But it’s a learning process…
† This presumes the original text is itself well written. Lucas Klein at Paper Republic presents the curious case of a translation that is better than the original.
Translation as a Tool for Writers (Part Deux)
In “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste,” Ezra Pound points out the benefits to “Rhythm and Rhyme” that translation provides (and what’s true of poetry applies equally to well-crafted prose). He advises the poet to
fill his mind with the finest cadences he can discover, preferably in a foreign language so that the meaning of the words may be less likely to divert his attention from the movement; e.g., Saxon charms, Hebridean Folk Songs, the verse of Dante, and the lyrics of Shakespeare—if he can dissociate the vocabulary from the cadence. Let him dissect the lyrics of Goethe coldly into their component sound values, syllables long and short, stressed and unstressed, into vowels and consonants.
(Sure, Pound was a mentally ill fascist sympathizer, but he still knew a thing or two about poetry.) A little further on in the same essay, he observes that this process of translation works both ways:
Translation is likewise good training, if you find that your original matter “wobbles” when you try to rewrite it. The meaning of the poem to be translated can not “wobble.”
In other words, you can work your own material through a foreign language to determine whether it has the clarity it should in the original.
In a practical sense, translation applies as well to our work within a single language, particularly if we consider that each character in a story speaks his or her own “tongue.”* The author should approach characterization as she would Chinese or Russian… Rather than trying to decipher her scene in the language of her character, she needs to think through his personal idiom. Once the first draft is complete, the real labor begins: the work of editing the “translation” as a conscientious reader of what she’s wrought in her character’s likeness.
All of this further applies to writing exercises such as paraphrase and imitation. Rewriting a passage in your own words or telling your own story in the style of a favorite author involves essentially the same process. Indeed, Saul Bellow suggested that every writer begins with pastiche when he said, “A writer is a reader moved to emulation.”
* Bakhtin shows that the novel is by definition “dialogic”: the author speaks in multiple voices to create realistic characters. “Speaking in tongues,” then, is the most elementary skill of the fiction writer.
Translation (and the World) as a Metaphor
Without consciousness there would, practically speaking, be no world, for the world exists for us only in so far as it is consciously reflected by a psyche.
—Carl Jung
Experience becomes light breaching the event horizon of a black hole, to be annihilated and reconstituted, emerging God knows how or where … As a starburst in another universe perhaps.
—from The Impediments to Joy
“Out there” the world is an undifferentiated mass, an uninterrupted stream of event (no s). Only consciousness is capable of cutting it all up into recognizable, useful pieces and arranging them in meaningful patterns: pictures of “the world.”
Consciousness not only transforms but quite literally makes reality—the world we experience consists in the metaphors we create to stand in for it in our minds. What Jung calls the “world-creating significance of the consciousness manifested in man” is manifested, specifically, in our symbolic representations, whether we’re grunting at each other and pointing into the darkness beyond the campfire, painting scenes from the hunt on a cave wall, singing and dancing in a round, doubting whether we exist while sitting alone in a poêle, composing a symphony, constructing a cathedral, or praying together in a place we collectively deem holy.
Without a lens to focus light, the world is a bright blur… Without consciousness, there is no inherent meaning in the world to be distinguished. Our experience, indeed the world, exists only as a narrative, a metaphor.
Thus, the writer is like a lens. Every word we write, every definition or explanation we offer, every emotion we evoke or irony we expose becomes that one thing, distinct now from all the rest for having been made conscious, for having been thought and reflected upon and shared. Using language, our primary tool for making sense of an otherwise endless series of meaningless details, we translate the meaning of experience from the Gibberish of existence.
Not only is writing a matter of translating an event, an idea, an emotion into images our reader can comprehend and experience as their own—of making that experience meaningful—if we are to write consciously, artfully, then we must do so with the translator’s attention to detail, to nuance, to the multivalent field of associations surrounding each word, with a deep desire to expose the story’s truth, which in turn creates that truth.
This, too, is no simple matter of decoding reality, but of thinking through experience. And just as that first draft of a translation must be revised, so must our initial artistic expression be cut and polished. We must strip it down to its essentials, cut away the meaningless excess to reveal the true form, just as Michelangelo found David in a block of marble. Once we‘ve hewn raw experience from the mass of being-in-the-world, we set it outside ourselves to look at it objectively. From there, we can reshape it with even greater consciousness than before. All the while, the work seems less and less like something we‘ve created and more like a form we have merely cut free.
I use this metaphor several times throughout The Impediments to Joy:
To see himself clearly, one must render foreign again the familiar internal elements that constitute him by projecting them outside himself. He must transform them and read himself in them, like a poem or a prophecy. This is the beginning of art—which has nothing at all to do with paints or pencils, chisels and brushes, instruments or notes. The tools and even the works themselves are irrelevant. What matters most is cultivating consciousness of everything within and without. Why lists and doodles that cover entire notebooks? Why Blue Books and poster boards that create as much as they purport to chronicle? Why journals and poems and stories? Why paintings and novels and song and dance and architecture? Why the entirety of human civilization? Because to close the loop of consciousness we need self-reflection, we must project again and again that show inside us, put what we have internalized back outside ourselves for a time—not only to allow it to be seen but also, and more essentially, to see it for ourselves.
Isn’t this what being human is all about? Isn’t this the human spirit’s highest striving? Whether it be through art or religion or politics, by focusing the world into a stable, meaningful image, we create the world as a metaphor. Not only to express but to expand our consciousness, to be reinvented through our inventions.*
*Invenio in Latin means “to come upon,” “to discover,” “to find.”
