Read Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Online
Authors: David Bellos
Is That a Fish in Your Ear? (24 page)
is a translation, but if she hasn’t been told, she has no way of assessing—and no reason to ask—whether it is more or less poetical than Shakespeare’s “To be or not to be, that is the question.”We can grant that emotional relationships to things, including poems and forms of language, may be ultimately incommunicable. However, beliefs about the uniqueness and ineffability of emotional attachments have no relevance to the question of whether poetry is translatable. That is a much less abstruse matter.
Some people doubt that there are any affects or experiences that cannot be expressed, on the commonsensical grounds that we could say nothing about them and would therefore have no way of knowing if they existed for other people. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein presumably meant to adopt an agnostic position on this issue in the famous last line of his
Tractatus
when he wrote, “What one cannot talk about must be left in silence.”
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The infinite flexibility of language and our experience of shared emotion in reading novels and poems and at the movies must also cast doubt on whether there are any human experiences that cannot in principle be shared. On the other side of this thorny tangle is the intuitive knowledge that what we feel is unique to us and can never be fully identified with anything felt by anyone else. That inexpressible residue of the individual is ineffable—and the ineffable is precisely what cannot be translated.
Tractatus
when he wrote, “What one cannot talk about must be left in silence.”
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The infinite flexibility of language and our experience of shared emotion in reading novels and poems and at the movies must also cast doubt on whether there are any human experiences that cannot in principle be shared. On the other side of this thorny tangle is the intuitive knowledge that what we feel is unique to us and can never be fully identified with anything felt by anyone else. That inexpressible residue of the individual is ineffable—and the ineffable is precisely what cannot be translated.
Should translation studies pay any attention to the ineffable, or to notions, intuitions, feelings, and relations that are held to be unspeakable? Oddly enough, anguished engagement with the problem of ineffable essences is not at all characteristic of Bible translation, where you might expect to find mystical and religious issues taken seriously. Instead, it has preoccupied secular scholars of the twentieth century, from Walter Benjamin to George Steiner and Antoine Berman. I would rather approach this boundary of translation from the opposite direction, for it seems to me more important to realize not that the ineffable is a problem for translation, but that translation is one big problem for the ineffable.
Let’s imagine a crew returning from a space flight at some future point in time. They’ve visited a faraway Earth-like planet and are holding a press conference at NASA headquarters. They have something spectacular to announce. Yes,
KRX29
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is inhabited, they say, and, what’s more, the little green men that live on it have a language.
KRX29
1
is inhabited, they say, and, what’s more, the little green men that live on it have a language.
“How do you know that?” a journalist asks.
“Well, we learned to communicate with them,” the captain responds.
“And what did they say?”
“We can’t tell you that,” the captain answers coolly. “Their language is entirely untranslatable.”
It’s not hard to predict how our descendants would treat the captain and his crew. They would have the astronauts treated for flight-induced insanity, and, if that proved to be unjustified, treat them as liars, or as laughingstocks. Why so? Because if the inhabitants of the distant planet did have a language, and if the space crew had learned it, then it must be possible for them to say what the aliens had said. Must, not should: radically untranslatable sounds do not make a language simply because we could not know it was a language unless we could translate it, even if only roughly.
There are intermediate and problematic positions, of course. Not all utterances can be translated even when we are quite sure they are in a language. Egyptian hieroglyphs were indecipherable until two brilliant linguists, Thomas Young and Jean-François Champollion, worked out how to do it with the help of the Rosetta stone. More generally still, we can’t translate from languages we don’t know. But to claim that something is in a language is to posit that, with the appropriate knowledge, it can be translated.
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Translation presupposes not the loss of the ineffable in any given act of interlingual mediation such as the translation of poetry but the irrelevance of the ineffable to acts of communication. Any thought a person can have, the philosopher Jerrold Katz argued, can be expressed by some sentence in any natural language; and anything that can be expressed in one language can also be expressed in another. What cannot be expressed in any human language (opinions vary as to whether such things are delusional or foundational) lies outside the boundaries of translation and, for Katz, outside the field of language, too. This is his
axiom of effability
. One of the truths of translation—one of the truths that translation teaches—is that everything is effable.
axiom of effability
. One of the truths of translation—one of the truths that translation teaches—is that everything is effable.
Especially poetry. America and Britain are awash with poetry magazines, and every year small publishers put out hundreds of slim volumes containing poems in translation. Our present army of amateur poetry translators is keeping poetry alive. Poetry is not what is lost but what is gained from their work.
An individual poem may have a quality that, for any one of us, is so personal and unique that it might as well be ineffable, but the issue of unspeakable ideas arises much more obviously in a quite different domain. It is in our interactions not with works of genius but with other species that the ineffable looms before us like a brick wall.
On a short trip to South America, Romain Gary picked up a twenty-three-foot-long python, whom he called Pete the Strangler and then donated to a private zoo in California. When he was consul general in Los Angeles, Gary used to go and see Pete in his enclosure.
We would stare at each other in absolute astonishment, often for hours, deeply intrigued and wondering, awed and yet incapable of giving each other any kind of explanation about what had happened to us, and how and why it had happened, unable to help each other with some small flash of understanding drawn from our respective experiences. To find yourself in the skin of a python or in that of a man is such a mysterious and astonishing adventure that the bewilderment we shared had become a kind of fraternity, a brotherhood beyond and above our respective species.
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Maybe Gary was right to feel that a python can no more imagine what it is like to be one of us than we can imagine what the mental world of a reptile is like—and it’s typically generous of him to allow a fearful and pea-brained monster like Pete the Strangler a reciprocating intuition of the ineffability of human life. On the other hand, many nonhuman species—and perhaps all living things—do communicate with one another, and some most definitely communicate with us. Dog owners, to take the most obvious example, easily distinguish among the meanings of different kinds of bark. But the dog language we can access is a fairly limited thing. It consists of a small set of individual signals. Signals are generally treated as the isolated vehicles of specific pieces of information—“There’s an intruder in the house,” “Hello and welcome,” or “Take me for a walk.” They can’t be combined with one another to produce more complex meanings—as far as we know, dog language has no grammar. In addition, the set of signals possessed by domesticated dogs—like the signals used by monkeys or bees—is inherited and fixed. There’s no new word formation going on in dogs, just as the signaling system of traffic lights is incapable of producing more than “slow down,” “stop,” “get ready,” and “go.” (The green-and-orange “get ready” combination is used in the U.K., as a courtesy to drivers of ancient sports cars with gearshift sticks.) Those are the main criteria by which human language is distinguished from all other kinds of communication by most modern theorists of language. Monkeys can say only what they have to say, and nothing else; whereas human signaling systems are forever changing and always capable of adapting themselves to new circumstances and needs. These are fairly persuasive reasons for keeping animal language outside the field of “language proper” and far away from the concerns of translation. But we could try to be as generous and as imaginative as Romain Gary. From such a perspective, human language may well seem to a dog to be just as limited and inflexible a signaling system as linguists imperiously declare dog language to be.
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