Beyond Their Aspect

Amid the reams of public health information, travel guidelines, and vaccine mythbusting, the World Health Organisation issues guidelines for the translation of its resources: translators should strive for cross-cultural, conceptual equivalence, rather than literal linguistic imitation. The recommended method is forward- and back-translation, whereby a translation is re-translated into the original language, to try and ascertain its level of accuracy and intelligibility.

One literary example of ‘back-translation’ is recounted by Mark Twain in a reissue of his short story, ‘The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County’, first published in 1865. A decade later, Thérèse Bentzon, taking issue with the work of certain “Humoristes Americains”, translated Twain’s story in the magazine Revue des Deux Mondes to prove “that there is nothing so extravagantly funny about it”. Some thirty years later, news of this snub reached Twain, and he republished the story in 1903 with the subtitle: “In English, then in French, then clawed back into a civilised language once more by patient, unremunerated toil.” Twain, with the slightly suspect claim that “I cannot speak the French language, but I can translate it very well”, proceeded to then translate his story back into English to show how the French writer had “simply mixed it all up”. His complaint that Bentzon had “riddled the grammar” is thrown into doubt by Twain’s very literal translation style, which leads to such sentences as: “this no is nothing of such, it not is but a frog”.

Twain’s verbum pro verbum (word for word) attempts aside, different roots of the word ‘translation’ bring some light to its slippery modes and means. The Greek root, metaphrasis, gives rise to terms used for two approaches to translation: ‘meta-phrase’, word-for-word translation, and ‘paraphrase’, sense-for-sense translation. Most efforts, however, involve a blending of these modes. Besides, many factors that contribute to the feeling of a text are not literally translatable, and a translator must creatively mould equivalences. These paralinguistic considerations include style, tone, idiom; verse form, rhyme schemes, and the musicality of language.

In English, we take our word from the Latin trans (across) and latio, derived from ferre (to carry or bring): words are carried from one language to another. Translation scholar Matthew Reynolds writes of this metaphorical sense of translation as “the action of moving back and forth between language and these variously inchoate processes”. A translation can be close or free, ‘domesticating’ or ‘foreigning’. Of course, it is always a mixture, a mediation, between these planes, the translator navigating this shaky space of “between-ness”. Away from European languages, other patterns emerge. Reynolds explains that in Igbo, the language of South East Nigeria, there are two words close to ‘translation’ which have a sense of both narration and deconstruction: tapia and kowa. The roots ta (tell, narrate) and pia (destruction, to tell in a different form); and ko (narrate, talk about) and wa (break in pieces) reveal an etymology that is less about bringing language from a to b and more about (de)composing and (re)arranging language: the text undergoes destruction and is reconstructed in a new form.

Drawing from the history of translation, Reynolds writes of ancient Chinese assemblies who, through a “concatenation” of multifarious activities, would together generate a translated text of the Buddhist sutra. Roles included the zhŭyi, a monk tasked with reciting and interpreting the sutra, but without being required to know Chinese. The dùyŭ, literally a ‘word-measurer’, transmitted this recitation into Chinese, and the bĭshoù – literally ‘received by brush’ – composed the text with brush and ink. Analogous contemporary examples of this collective process can be found in online crowdsourcing translation platforms, including the activist co-operative, GuerrillaTranslation, whereby a small group work on a single text, with roles including translator, copyeditor, and web designer.

Elsewhere, ‘translation’ diverges from the solely linguistic realm. 16th-century writer John Lyly writes of ‘translating’ trees, where today we would say ‘transplanting’. There, the sense of carrying or being led is evident, while in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, it is the weaver’s physical metamorphosis which is hailed with the cry: “Bless thee, Bottom, bless thee! Thou art translated”. His form has been altered from man to beast through a dissembling charm; he has changed state.

In art history, ‘translation’ is sometimes used in discussion of the visual representation of the immaterial, as in religious paintings. In Dissemblance and Figuration (1995), the French art historian Georges Didi-Huberman explores 15th-century devotional frescoes by Fra Angelico which make visible the mystery of the Incarnation (the Christian belief of God assuming human form through Jesus Christ). The frescoes do this through imagery both representational – the body of Christ depicted figuratively – and through non-representational, uncanny forms and enigmatic marks, valued “for what they show visually, beyond their aspect, as indexes of the mystery”. These non-representational marks – which Didi-Huberman describes as signs or operators of conversion – both displace and subvert Fra Angelico’s ‘translation’ of word (scripture) to image (fresco) in “a game of equivocal meanings”, as in, open to multiple interpretations. Such signs include the simple red marks of terra rossa, in the green background of a scene of Jesus and Mary (Noli Me Tangere – see figures 1 and 2). The viewer understands the traces of red to represent flowers in a springtime field, yet in their simplified form they recall the stigmata on Jesus’s hands and feet. These signs act somewhat like metaphors, but are unstable and changeable, readily moving between icons, symbols, and association rather than defining or identifying. These signs go on a translatory journey between the invisible, the visible and lisible (readable).

Other practices come close to translation in the sense of dissembling form and altering states. The poet Stevie Smith said of her poem ‘I Remember’, from her 1957 collection Not Waving but Drowning, that it wasn’t really hers but rather “practically a transcript” of an anecdote she read in Llewelyn Powys’s autobiography. In fact, it was Littleton C. Powys’s autobiography, and the poem is quite different to that text, becoming very much her own:

"It was my bridal night I remember,

An old man of seventy-three

I lay with my young bride in my arms,

A girl with t.b.

It was wartime, and overhead

The Germans were making a particularly heavy raid on Hampstead.

Harry, do they ever collide?

I do not think it has ever happened,

Oh my bride, my bride."

'I Remember', Stevie Smith

On Thursday, October 7th, we were married in the little Roman

Catholic church of St. Mary’s at Hampstead [...] Our wedding night

coincided with the most spirited German air raid that had been

experienced in London for a long time; and the confusion was

increased by a very large fleet of our own bombers passing over

London on their way to Germany at the same time.

From Still the Joy of It, Littleton C. Powys, 1956

The short story writer and translator Lydia Davis practices something similar when she translates, and slightly edits, anecdotes from Gustave Flaubert’s letters so that they stand almost as short stories, in a style similar to her own: brief and clear, sparse yet telling. Both examples blur the lines between translation and adaptation, and between fact and fiction. It’s more a question of inspiration with Smith, and a creative framing from Davis; but lends an interesting take on the ambiguity of meaning of a source text, and its fictitious potential particularly when in the hands of a poet and short story-writer.

This malleability of form, context, and meaning also nod to the changing life of a text. As the German philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin finds in ‘The Task of the Translator’ (1923), a translation is a living artefact which in turn helps the original to have an afterlife, “a renewal of something living”. A translation reaches across languages but also across time; there can never be a definitive translation, since individual words have a lifespan that will alter or run out eventually. One translator of Benjamin’s essay, Stephen Rendall, chooses the word “unfolding” to describe the renewal that a translation offers not only to the original text but also to its previous translations, collective project that can span centuries.

Grace Crabtree is an artist and a founding member of Chasing Cow Productions. She graduated from the Ruskin School of Art in 2019 and is doing the Correspondence Course 20/21 at Turps Banana Art School.