Discussion question

1. Discuss the meaning of Benjamin’s vision of “the hallmark of bad translation”.

2. What is his concept of “inferior translation”?

3. What is his attitude to the “likeness to the original”?

4. Write a short essay focusing on his statement and providing your own observation on any translation you have analysed: ”even words with fixed meaning can undergo a maturing process”.

5. What is his approach to much discussed today concept of “fidelity”?

6. How do you understand his following statement in the context of translation issues: “kinship does not necessarily involve likeness”?

7. Enlarge on the statement “Translation is a mode”.

8. How does Benjamin view the “task of the translator”?

9. What is an “intended effect”?

10. How does Benjamin differentiate the intention of the poet and that of the translator?

1.1.1. JOSE ORTEGA Y GASSET

JOSE ORTEGA Y GASSET. The Misery and the Splendor of Translation (1937)[9]

1. The Misery

During a colloquium attended by professors and students from the College de France and other academic circles, someone spoke of the impossibility of translating certain German philosophers. Carrying the proposition further, he proposed a study that would determine the philosophers who could and those who could not be translated.

"This would be to suppose, with excessive conviction," I sug­gested, "that there are philosophers and, more generally speaking, writers who can, in fact, be translated. Isn't that an illusion? Isn't the act of translating necessarily a Utopian task? The truth is, I've become more and more convinced that everything Man does is Utopian. Although he is principally involved in trying to know, he never fully succeeds in knowing anything. When deciding what is fair, he inevitably falls into cunning. He thinks he loves and then discovers he only promised to. Don't misunderstand my words to be a satire on morals, as if I would criticize my colleagues because they don't do what they propose. My intention is, precisely, the opposite; rather than blame them for their failure, I would suggest that none of these things can be done, for they are impossible in their very essence, and they will always remain mere intention, vain aspiration, an invalid posture. Nature has simply endowed each creature with a specific program of actions he can execute satisfac­torily. That's why it's so unusual for an animal to be sad. Only occasionally may something akin to sadness be observed in a few higher species—the dog or the horse—and that's when they seem closest to us, seem most human. Perhaps Nature, in the mysterious depths of the jungle, offers its most surprising spectacle—surpris­ing because of its equivocal aspect—the melancholic orangutan. Animals are normally happy. We have been endowed with an op­posite nature. Always melancholic, frantic, manic, men are ill-nurtured by all those illnesses Hippocrates called divine. And the reason for this is that human tasks are unrealizable. The destiny of Man—his privilege and honor—is never to achieve what he pro­poses, and to remain merely an intention, a living Utopia. He is always marching toward failure, and even before entering the fray he already carries a wound in his temple.

"This is what occurs whenever we engage in that modest oc­cupation called translating. Among intellectual undertakings, there is no humbler one. Nevertheless, it is an excessively demanding task.

"To write well is to make continual incursions into grammar, into established usage, and into accepted linguistic norms. It is an act of permanent rebellion against the social environs, a subversion. To write well is to employ a certain radical courage. Fine, but the translator is usually a shy character. Because of his humility, he has chosen such an insignificant occupation. He finds himself facing an enormous controlling apparatus, composed of grammar and com­mon usage. What will he do with the rebellious text? Isn't it too much to ask that he also be rebellious, particularly since the text is someone else's? He will be ruled by cowardice, so instead of resist­ing grammatical restraints he will do just the opposite: he will place the translated author in the prison of normal expression; that is, he will betray him. Traduttore, traditore."

"And, nevertheless, books on the exact and natural sciences can be translated," my colleague responded.

"I don't deny that the difficulty is less, but I do deny that it doesn't exist. The branch of mathematics most in vogue in the last quarter century was Set Theory. Fine, but its creator, Cantor, bap­tized it with a term that has no possibility of being translated into our language. What we have had to call 'set' he called 'quantity' (Menge), a word whose meaning is not encompassed in 'set.' So, let's not exaggerate the translatability of the mathematical and physical sciences. But, with that proviso, I am disposed to recognize that a version of them may be more precise than one from another discipline."

"Do you, then, recognize that there are two classes of writings: those that can be translated and those that cannot?"

"Speaking grosso modo, we must accept that distinction, but when we do so we close the door on the real problem every trans­lation presents. For if we ask ourselves the reason certain scientific books are easier to translate, we will soon realize that in these the author himself has begun by translating from the authentic tongue in which he 'lives, moves and has his being' into a pseudolanguage formed by technical terms, linguistically artificial words which he himself must define in his book. In short, he translates himself from a language into a terminology."

"But a terminology is a language like any other! Furthermore, according to our Condillac, the best language, the language that is 'well constructed,' is science."

"Pardon me for differing radically from you and from the good father. A language is a system of verbal signs through which indi­viduals may understand each other without a previous accord, while a terminology is only intelligible if the one who is writing or speaking and the one who is reading or listening have previously and individually come to an agreement as to the meaning of the signs. For this reason, I call it pseudolanguage, and I say that the scientist has to begin by translating his own thoughts into it. It is a Volapuk, an Esperanto established by a deliberate convention be­tween those who cultivate that discipline. That is why these books are easier to translate from one language to another. Actually, in every country these are written almost entirely in the same lan­guage. That being the case, men who speak the authentic language in which they are apparently written often find these books to be hermetic, unintelligible, or at least very difficult to understand."

"In all fairness, I must admit you are right and also tell you I am beginning to perceive certain mysteries in the verbal relation­ships between individuals that I had not previously noticed."

"And I, in turn, perceive you to be the sole survivor of a van­ished species, like the last of the Abencerrajes, since when faced with another's belief you are capable of thinking him, rather than you, to be right. It is a fact that the discussion of translation, to whatever extent we may pursue it, will carry us into the most re­condite secrets of that marvelous phenomenon that we call speech Just examining questions that our topic obviously presents will be sufficient for now. In my comments up to this point, I have based the utopianism of translation on the fact that an author of a book— not of mathematics, physics, or even biology—is a writer in a pos­itive sense of the word. This is to imply that he has used his native tongue with prodigious skill, achieving two things that seem im­possible to reconcile: simply, to be intelligible and, at the same time, to modify the ordinary usage of language. This dual opera­tion is more difficult to achieve than walking a tightrope. How can we demand it of the average translator? Moreover, beyond this first dilemma that personal style presents to the translator, we perceive new layers of difficulties. An author's personal style, for example, is produced by his slight deviation from the habitual meaning of the word. The author forces it to an extraordinary usage so that the circle of objects it designates will not coincide exactly with the circle of objects which that same word customarily means in its habitual use. The general trend of these deviations in a writer is what we call his style. But, in fact, each language compared to any other also has its own linguistic style, what von Humboldt called its 'internal form.' Therefore, it is Utopian to believe that two words belonging to different languages, and which the dictionary gives us as translations of each other, refer to exactly the same objects. Since languages are formed in different landscapes, through different ex­periences, their incongruity is natural. It is false, for example, to suppose that the thing the Spaniard calls a bosque [forest] the Ger­man calls a Wald, yet the dictionary tells us that Wald means bosque. If the mood were appropriate this would be an excellent time to interpolate an aria di bravura describing the forest in Germany in contrast to the Spanish forest. I am jesting about the singing, but I proclaim the result to be intuitively clear, that is, that an enor­mous difference exists between the two realities. It is so great that not only are they exceedingly incongruous, but almost all their res­onances, both emotive and intellectual, are equally so.

"The shapes of the meanings of the two fail to coincide as do those of a person in a double-exposed photograph. This being the case, our perception shifts and wavers without actually identifying with either shape or forming a third; imagine the distressing vague­ness we experience when reading thousands of words affected in this manner. These are the same causes, then, that produce the phe­nomenon of flou [blur, haziness] in a visual image and in linguistic expression. Translation is the permanent literary flou, and since what we usually call nonsense is, on the other hand, but the flou of thoughts, we shouldn't be surprised that a translated author always seems somewhat foolish to us" […].

5. The Splendor

"Time is moving along," I said to the great linguist, "and this meeting must be concluded. But I would not like to leave without knowing what you think about the task of translating."

"I think as you do," he replied; "I think it's very difficult, it's unlikely, but, for the same reasons, it's very meaningful. Further­more, I think that for the first time we will be able to try it in depth and on a broad scale. One should note, in any case, that what is essential concerning the matter has been said more than a century ago by the dear theologian Schleiermacher in his essay 'On the Different Methods of Translating.' According to him, a translation can move in either of two directions: either the author is brought to the language of the reader, or the reader is carried to the lan­guage of the author. In the first case, we do not translate, in the proper sense of the word; we, in fact, do an imitation, or a para­phrase of the original text. It is only when we force the reader from his linguistic habits and oblige him to move within those of the author that there is actually translation. Until now there has been almost nothing but pseudotranslations.

"Proceeding from there, I would dare formulate certain prin­ciples that would define the new enterprise of translating. Later, ifthere is time, I will state the reasons why we must dedicate our­selves more than ever to this task.

"We must begin by correcting at the outset the idea of what a translation can and ought to be. Should we understand it as a magic manipulation through which the work written in one lan­guage suddenly emerges in another language? If so, we are lost, because this transubstantiation is impossible. Translation is not a duplicate of the original text; it is not—it shouldn't try to be—the work itself with a different vocabulary. I would say translation doesn't even belong to the same literary genre as the text that was translated. It would be appropriate to reiterate this and affirm that translation is a literary genre apart, different from the rest, with its own norms and own ends. The simple fact is that the translation is not the work, but a path toward the work. If this is a poetic work, the translation is no more than an apparatus, a technical device that brings us closer to the work without ever trying to repeat or re­place it.

"In an attempt to avoid confusion, let's consider what in my judgment is most urgent, the kind of translation that would be most important to us: that of the Greeks and Romans. For us these have lost the character of models. Perhaps one of the strangest and most serious symptoms of our time is that we live without models, that our faculty to perceive something as a model has atrophied. In the case of the Greeks and Romans, perhaps our present irrever­ence will become fruitful, because when they die as norms and guides they are reborn for us as the only case of civilizations radi­cally different from ours into which—thanks to the number of works that have been preserved—we can delve. The only definitive voyage into time that we can make is to Greece and Rome. And today this type of excursion is the most important that can be undertaken for the education of Western man. The effects of two centuries of pedagogy in mathematics, physics and biology have demonstrated that these disciplines are not sufficient to humanize man. We must integrate our education in mathematics and physics through an authentic education in history, which does not consist of knowing lists of kings and descriptions of battles or statistics of prices and daily wages in this or the other century, but requires a voyage to the foreign, to the absolutely foreign, which another very remote time and another very different civilization comprise.

"In order to confront the natural sciences today, the humanities must be reborn, although under a different sign than the one before. We need to approach the Greek and the Roman again, but not as models—on the contrary, as exemplary errors. Because Man is a historical entity and like every historical reality—not defini­tively, but for the time being—he is an error. To acquire a historical consciousness of oneself and to learn to see oneself as an error are the same thing. And since—for the time being and relatively speak­ing—always being an error is the truth of Man, only a historical consciousness can place him into his truth and rescue him. But it is useless to hope that present Man by simply looking at himself will discover himself as an error. One can only educate his optics for human truth, for authentic humanism, by making him look closely and well at the error that others were and, especially, at the error that the best ones were. That is why I have been obsessed, for many years, with the idea that it is necessary to make all Greco-Roman antiquity available for reading—and for that purpose a gi­gantic task of new translation is absolutely necessary. Because now it would not be a question of emptying into today's languages only literary pieces that were valued as models of their genres, but rather all works, without distinction. We are interested in them, they are important to us, I repeat, as errors, not as examples. We don't need to learn from Greeks and Romans because of what they said, thought, sang, but simply because they were, because they existed, because, like us, they were poor men who swam desperately as we do against the tides in the perennial disaster of living.

"With that in mind, it's important to provide orientation for the translation of the classics along those lines. Since I said before that a repetition of a work is impossible and that the translation is only an apparatus that carries us to it, it stands to reason that di­verse translations are fitting for the same text. It is, at least it almost always is, impossible to approximate all the dimensions of the orig­inal text at the same time. If we want to give an idea of its aesthetic qualities, we will have to relinquish almost all the substance of the text in order to carry over its formal graces. For that reason, it will be necessary to divide the work and make divergent translations of the same work according to the facets of it that we may wish to translate with precision. But, in general, the interest in those texts is so predominantly concerned with their significance in regard to ancient life that we can dispense with their other qualities without serious loss.

"Whenever a translation of Plato, even the most recent translation, is compared with the text, it will be surprising and irritating, not because the voluptuousness of the Platonic style has vanished on being translated but because of the loss of three-fourths of those very things in the philosopher's phrases that are compelling, that he has stumbled upon in his vigorous thinking, that he has in the back of his mind and insinuates along the way. For that reason— not, as is customarily believed, because of the amputation of its beauty—does it interest today's reader so little. How can it be in­teresting when the text has been emptied beforehand and all that remains is a thin profile without density or excitement? And let it be stated that what I am saying is not mere supposition. It is a notoriously well-known fact that only one translation of Plato has been really fruitful. This translation is, to be sure, Schleiermacher's, and it is so precisely because, with deliberate design, he refused to do a beautiful translation and tried, as a primary approach, to do what I have been saying. This famous version has been of great service even for philologists. It is false to believe that this kind of work serves only those who are ignorant of Greek and Latin.

"I imagine, then, a form of translation that is ugly, as science has always been; that does not intend to wear literary garb; that is not easy to read but is very clear indeed (although this clarity may demand copious footnotes). The reader must know beforehand that when reading a translation he will not be reading a literarily beautiful book but will be using an annoying apparatus. However, it will truly help him transmigrate within poor Plato, who twenty-four centuries ago, in his way, made an effort to stay afloat on the surface of life.

"Men of other times had need of the ancients in a pragmatic sense. They needed to learn many things from the ancients in order to apply those things to daily life. So it was understandable for translation to try to modernize the ancient text, to accommodate it to the present. But it is advisable for us to do otherwise. We need the ancients precisely to the degree they are dissimilar to us, and translation should emphasize their exotic, distant character, making it intelligible as such.

"I don't understand how any philologist can fail to consider himself obliged to leave some ancient work translated in this form. In general, no writer should denigrate the occupation of translat­ing, and he should complement his own work with some version of an ancient, medieval, or contemporary text. It is necessary to restore the prestige of this labor and value it as an intellectual work of the first order. Doing this would convert translating into a dis­cipline sui generis which, cultivated with continuity, would devise its own techniques that would augment our network of intellectual approaches considerably. And if I have paid special attention to the translations of Greek and Latin, it has only been because the gen­eral question is most obvious in their case. But in one way or an­other, the conclusions to be drawn are the same regarding any other epoch or people. What is imperative is that, in translating, we try to leave our language and go to the other—and not the reverse, which is what is usually done. Sometimes, especially in treating contemporary authors, it will be possible for the version to have, besides its virtues as translation, a certain aesthetic value. That will be icing on the cake or, as you Spaniards say, honey on top of hojuelas— probably without having an idea of what hojuelas are."

"I've been listening with considerable pleasure," I said, to bring the discussion to a conclusion. "It is clear that a country's reading public do not appreciate a translation made in the style of their own language. For this they have more than enough native au­thors. What is appreciated is the inverse: carrying the possibilities of their language to the extreme of the intelligible so that the ways of speaking appropriate to the translated author seem to cross into theirs. The German versions of my books are a good example of this. In just a few years, there have been more than fifteen editions. This would be inconceivable if one did not attribute four-fifths of the credit to the success of the translation. And it is successful be­cause my translator has forced the grammatical tolerance of the German language to its limits in order to carry over precisely what is not German in my way of speaking. In this way, the reader ef­fortlessly makes mental turns that are Spanish. He relaxes a bit and for a while is amused at being another.

"But this is very difficult to do in the French language. I regret that my last words at this meeting are involuntarily abrasive, but the subject of our talk forces them to be said. They are these: of all the European languages, the one that least facilitates the task of translating is French."

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