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ANALOGY AND
TRANSLATION
1.
We can never escape analogy, comparison, translation, even in our
most ticking-over, unthinking, automatic states.
Even when immersed in compelling actions, driving a car, climbing
a rock face, arguing, fighting, running away.
The world we occupy is one we must assume is the way we see it,
since the structure of body-mind activity precedes experience and
interprets it. How can we
interpret the taste of a fruit, or the next move in a melée, or
another’s smile, or the symbols we glide over on a page, unless we
make use of a constant stream of models, blurred and melting?
2. We are
trapped in, can never escape from, a feeling that one of the many
sensations when eating an orange is closer to chewing berries than a
mouthful of nails.
3. There is no
safe baseline of concepts. There
is no primal string of ideas that is a guide in existing.
We must constantly compare one thing with another in order to
understand and get by.
4. The speed
with which we compare is such that we only seldom catch ourselves in the
act. Living is largely a
non-linguistic matter. Were
we asked to find words for what is, at this very moment, or even what
was, just a moment ago, occurring, we would be pushed into comparison.
5. Do I really
mean that, for instance, walking or sitting or lying down involves
analogy, and fundamentally? Yes.
6. But one
might argue that even very conscious activities require the attention of
the autonomic system. This directs
what we do without conscious control, such as breathing, blinking,
digesting.
7. Yet take
breathing as an example: it is an extremely complicated process made up,
as all nature is, of a chain of processes becoming, on the whole, more
and more simple as one descends. A
link in the breathing chain is the chemical combination in the blood of
oxygen with the iron compound haemoglobin.
This releases carbon dioxide from the blood plasma.
Haemoglobin is able to do this because it has an affinity (the
tendency to combine with another substance) for oxygen.
8. Now this
business of chemical affinity, that is the tendency of certain molecules
to combine, is not a one-off characteristic.
Nature abounds in chemical affinities.
The sensing organs also abounds in receptors.
Nature copies itself prolifically.
It has invented the eye several different times from scratch.
9. Often of
course chemical affinity and sense receptors have evolved into their
modern forms from a common ancestry.
But a fluid to circulate oxygen developed as insect blood and
independently as a different but similar plasma in animals.
In respiration Nature has copied itself because there were only
so many paths that breathing could take.
10. Everything our body does automatically is a complex of
systems inherited from previous models or ‘invented’ again according
to a limited number of possible options.
The options are models. We
breathe and perceive and digest in ways similar to those practised by
other creatures.
11. When we send other robots to wander Mars, they will be
like something we know. First
we tried wheels. The next
automata are more likely to resemble insects, or so trials have
suggested. We copy from
what we know. How could it
be otherwise?
12. The limited number of possibilities has to do with the
way planetary environments are, and the sort of fix life is in, and can
only be in, between the small and large.
Even if protons grow to the size of galaxies, or if stage III
civilisations outlast the death of suns, there are limitations to the
way things can be done, to the way Nature is.
13. The most important of these limitations, and the one
easiest to grasp, is scale. There
is a limit to the energy available to break particles apart.
There is a limit to the extent of our universe that radio, light
and other wavelengths of electromagnetic photons can show us.
14. We know most about what is on our own scale, which we
may well feel is a specially privileged one, but there’s no evidence
that it is. One conceit of
ours used to be that we were the custodians of Nature, but it now looks
as if we are a barely detectable a blip on the screen.
15. I come, in one leap now, to the business that we, in
our conceit, put so much store by, namely the workings of attentive
thinking, and of the fragments of language which occasionally accompany
it. In what we call
‘consciousness’, analogy is supreme.
16. ‘A dark
smell of brewing tea hung strong in the air.’
A sentence from a novel, deceptively simple.
There is not a single word in it which is not an analogy. That sounds a strong claim, so let me explain.
It will prepare us for what I have to say later.
Isn’t ‘tea’ direct enough, you might ask?
It’s not a metaphor for anything.
Am I arguing that, in the context of this novel, tea has more
than naïve significance?
17. Does tea, in the context of an American university
campus, where most of the novel is set, signify rituals which are
historically determined and different from tea in a Polish miner’s
kitchen or in a nineteenth-century Japanese tea ceremony?
Probably, but I am
pointing to the much simpler and obvious fact that a word is not the
thing itself.
18. We don’t drink the letters t-e-a. The word is a sign we can use to picture a beverage, a word
never translated in quite the same in any two minds.
19. I am not saying there is an ideal, non-earthly essence,
some pure, perfect and eternal tea of which all the cooks, languages and
speakers in the world make their physical and semiotic copies. There is no ethereal ideal tea, but there is an enormously
complex of similar but different ideas of tea in people’s brains:
ideas we have copied from life, language, people, books and pictures.
20. ‘A dark
smell of brewing tea hung strong in the air.’
Smelling is like tasting; dark is like night; air is like fog;
hanging is like floating in the depths; strength is like the power of
engines; brewing is like fermenting; ‘in’ is like interiors; ‘a’
and ‘the’ are like pointers.
21. I am not pretending that notions such as these flit
through a mind as it races over such a sentence.
What is conjured up is an impression.
An experience is suggested, and many readers would be affected by
the words ‘dark smell’ and ‘hung strong’.
22. We are not by some magic transported in body to a real
place. The scene is a
fiction. Even if it were
not we would be debarred from it. If
this tea drinking event was one at which we were once present, we cannot
return to it. That is
obvious.
23. We are given a mental experience which is so much like
a current, real, contingent one that some readers will have a fleeting
sensation of a palpable presence.
24. So fiction is analogous to reality. Tell us something new. Well,
I am more than halfway to my point about translation if I have reminded
you of this fact.
25. Before I get on to translation, however, I would like
to try your patience a little further by a stronger claim. Reality never is, for us, a something: it is always like
something. And what it is
like is itself. In
mathematical language, talking figuratively (for what other way of
talking is there?), our experiences are not mapped upon the world but
upon themselves.
26. After writing that I took a long time off to work out
what I meant. I must return
to paragraph 1: ‘the structure of body-mind activity precedes
experience and interprets it.’ A
baby is hard-wired to copy faces, and can do so just a few hours after
birth. It copies and stores what is expedient for survival: human
faces, family voices. The
world maps impressions upon the mind, there is no doubt about that, but
there is only a small number of ways, quite distorted at that, in which
our minds can receive that mapping.
A face is not a field of atoms, or pores, or skin flakes, or hair
follicles: it is eyes and a smile and a voice and a smell.
As we grow up we refine and sharpen our impressions, yet they get
no closer to resembling the ‘real thing’, what ever that is.
We build our private dictionaries of structures with which we
translate experience.
27. So when it comes to reading our own language we are
picturing things not as they are but as we have been innately schooled
to see them. We translate
the pictures in the words into usages we have fallen into.
28. Our reading may, as some artists claim, put us closer
in touch with things as they are, or it may—by dint of current mores,
private prejudice, or the genre itself—deflect us further away from
the truth.
29. What is our task as translators of texts from one
language into another? First
we must disregard the kind of truth to which I alluded in that last
sentence. If we, with the
help of the original author, succeed in making a reader here or there
feel closer to, have a better intuition of, the way things are, that is
a bonus but not our aim. Instead,
we must enter into the truth or spirit of the game that the original
text is playing.
30. All art is a game.
The rules are so complicated that in translating we must
constantly invent equivalents.
31. Texts play the game of analogising. In poetry especially just consider the many sorts of
comparison. Here is an
alphabetical list of some of the more common technical terms used for
analogical tropes which seem to contrast with ‘simplicity’, though
they may also aid and abet it.
32. Allegory. Allusion.
Ambiguity (plural meanings).
Archetypes (especially male and female).
Comparison. Corporeality. Description (tendentious ‘observation’ of people,
landscapes, actions). Elaboration.
Emulation. Fable
(often beast fable). Figure
and referent (signifier and signified). Hyperbole. Icons.
Imagery (from animals, buildings, colours, geographical features
and locations, settlements, thoroughfares, war, weather.
). Irony.
Mannerism (such as a fondness for archaicisms, compounds,
ornament). Metaphor. Minimalism
(which need not imply simplicity or directness). Myth. Nonsense.
Obliquity. Obscurity.
Pastiche. Personification. Private usages. Puns.
Statement (inevitably concealing something).
Subtlety. Suggestiveness. Surrealism. Symbolism.
33. There are many other terms, with definitions, to be
found in books on rhetoric. I
had no special reason to omit the following.
Conceit.
Hyperbole. Litotes.
Metonymy. Paradox.
Simile. Synecdoche.—And
diligence should not ignore the growth industry in the jargon of media
studies, one small but important pool of words centring on diegesis
(‘dye-a-JEE-sis’), a film narrative.
Everywhere the effort is to build lexicons to take on the
indirection of discourse in all its forms.
34. This
is my point, that poetry, like all the arts, even architecture, is
playing a bouncing game of comparison: it aims at the world and skid off
it at an angle. A literal
translation only very seldom conveys the spirit of the original game.
Translating has to be bold and inventive. Not every word is essential in the original anyway.
35. It
is not even the case that there is a definitive original. As soon as a poet dispenses a work he surrenders ownership.
What I call a work’s essence is its many-faceted,
ever-changing, never perfected potential to influence people’s minds.
36. It
is augmented with every reading, commentary and translation.
No on has anything like total access to this essence, for how can
I know what other people have made of their readings?
Yet those readings can steer the reputation of a work, and that
reputation has the power to predispose my feelings before I even see a
piece.
37. What
my translation, or yours, or hers, whether good or bad, will succeed in
doing is augmenting the essence of the original.
That we cannot avoid doing.
Good translators forget this accreting that they are about,
adding barnacles to a sunken Titanic, and play a game to please
themselves. If I cannot produce a poem which is in my own judgment every
bit as good in English as the original is in its own tongue, I get no
pleasure from what I have done and will not publish it.
38. Conceitedness
has nothing to do with this game, and this is no place for false modesty
either. For most foreign
authors I, like everyone else, must depend on translators. For a small corpus I have been able to find the time and
inclination over the years to dig into other languages and into a very
few poems in those languages and come up with versions I can read more
easily than I can read the original and with more pleasure than I can
read other people’s versions.
39. Finally
I must mention, as I suppose every translator does in an introduction
like this, the harmony business.
Find a good equivalent to a foreign and perhaps ancient locution,
changing with good reason camels into goats, wine into tea, a gulf into
an inlet, being very pleased with yourself as you do so, and you will
fail, however apt your semantics, to get the game right if you don’t
get the tune right too.
40. This might mean straining English into forms that some
critics will disparage as uncouth, archaic, or, Lord help us, even too
plain, if they don’t have a subtle ear.
Never mind, we do what we have to.
It is said that the hardest aspect of prosody is rhyme, and even
with recourse to assonance that’s probably true.
41. There is seldom a good reason for not representing a
classic Italian hendecasyllabic line, or the French hexameter, with the
good old British iambic pentameter, though one need not make a fetish of
these correspondences. I’ve
used both syllabic lines and accentual lines, and have invented my own
line with specifically placed anapaests to translate Latin. Every time I have done what seemed to me to be the right
thing to help weave a satisfying texture.
42. Our age has called for, or lazily allowed, a great deal
of blank and even free verse to translate rhymed poetry, and this will
seem as dated to future readers as eighteenth century translations of
Homer into heroic couplets. But
if readers are pleased for a while, why not?
We map one vision (or illusion) upon another.
We see only our own faces in the glass.
Alan
Marshfield
This
essay also appears at http://www.brindin.com/vb2intro.htm
where
it introduces a group of Alan Marshfield’s translations
as
a virtual book published by Brindin Press (www.brindin.com),
an
excellent translation facility run by Brian and Anna Cole.
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