by Tim Parks
So Calasso is not telling these stories for the reasons they were originally told, but to challenge the stories we are always telling ourselves, and that perhaps we do not even think of as stories, but reality. In doing so he becomes part of a modern Western tradition which seeks to expose the enchantment we live in, to ‘deconstruct’ as the postmodernists say, while always aware that there is no disenchanted place to be. Curiously, it’s a tradition that has simultaneously encouraged translation and made it impossible.
What I want to do now is to use a short text from a writer at the centre of that Western tradition to suggest the kind of antithetical impulses that run through much of modern literature – particularly with regard to the relationship between individual and community – and how problematic they are for translation. For if the intention of the original is to subvert the enchantment of its own language, to wake us up to the spell we lie under, how can the translation achieve this when the enchantment it translates into is different?
But here is Hemingway in ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’:
He thought about alone in Constantinople that time having quarrelled in Paris before he had gone out. He had whored the whole time and then, when that was over, and he had failed to kill his loneliness, but only made it worse, he had written her, the first one, the one who left him, a letter telling her how he had never been able to kill it. How when he thought he saw her outside the Regence one time it made him go all faint and sick inside, and that he would follow a woman who looked like her in some way, along the Boulevard, afraid to see it was not she, afraid to lose the feeling it gave him. How every one he had slept with had only made him miss her more.4
The place names mentioned here are immediately a little dis-orientating. Where is most of the passage taking place, in Constantinople or Paris? The story seems to be one at once of promiscuity and loneliness. Cut free from the enchantment of an intense love, the man succumbs to the tawdry chronicle of a frenetic series of couplings. He tries to kill the love that has brought about his unease but then admits that he is afraid of losing this unease.
But what most surprises us when we read the passage is the position of that first ‘alone’: ‘He thought about alone in Constantinople that time’. This is surely incorrect. One cannot put an adverb ‘alone’ after the expression ‘thought about’ which requires a noun or a gerund: He thought about love; he thought about being alone, or having been alone. The result is that the word ‘alone’ is heavily stressed precisely because it disorientates us. The rules of language, which are the rules of a community, are made to break up around this word ‘alone’, as if the experience of being alone threatened language, which is a shared thing.
Let me translate back into English the Italian translation of this first sentence to give you an impression of how it is experienced in the Italian:
He thought about that time when he was in Constantinople, alone, because they had quarrelled in Paris before his departure.
Here the aloneness is reintroduced into the community of language. While we notice in passing that the curiosity of the English ‘gone out’ has been eliminated by using the word ‘departure’ which now links Paris and Constantinople and gives us a feeling of security. We understand the narrator’s movements.
I have asked many Italian translators if they could reproduce this English. They try out the phrase: Pensò a solo – literally ‘He thought about alone’ – then they shake their heads and tell me, No, no you can’t do it. So why can it be done in English? In English, perhaps because the language has so few inflections, we have developed a habit of turning verbs and adjectives into nouns, as and when we choose, or nouns into verbs. We have: telephone, to telephone, to go, a go, and so on. Everyone knows this. So Hemingway can just about get away with it. It sounds ‘wrong’, it sounds ‘unusual’ but it sounds English, it is outside the usual community of speech, but still understood by speakers.
Let me give you another example from Lawrence. But I could quote hundreds. This is about a young woman who has just made love and is lying awake at night regretting it:5
Gudrun lay wide awake, destroyed into perfect consciousness.
Well, in English we cannot say destroyed ‘into’. Then it is standard in English to think of consciousness as a positive thing, not the result of a destruction. The word ‘perfect’ also seems provocative here. How can perfection be the product of the destruction of a person? Or if perfect is made in the sense of completed, in what way does it qualify consciousness? The Italian says: Gudrun remained awake, destroyed, in a state of perfect lucidity.
Again you could say, why does the Italian not keep the ‘into’ that links destruction and consciousness? Why is the word ‘consciousness’ not used? The second question is easily answered: the word cosciente in Italian has a different semantic range; cosciente can mean ‘responsible’ which would give the wrong idea.
As far as the ‘into’ is concerned, we must remember that there are many verbs in English which suggest a transformation using ‘into’ – transform into, change into, turn into. So the phrase doesn’t sound so strange in English. Lawrence has taken a standard English structure and subverted it, but again, although surprising, it is recognisably English.
These sentences and the problem of translating them I hope tell us something about the nature of modern writing, of individualism and translation. The sentence from Lawrence comes from a book where two couples try to form non-traditional love relationships; they try to live outside society, but in the end, they find they can only define their position against the society they are rejecting and of which they are still inevitably a part.
Similarly, Lawrence can reject many of the values implied by English, and fight against them. But at the same time he cannot escape the overall enchantment and community of Englishness. Needless to say he was aware of this. We thus reach a situation where his text begins to have meaning only if we understand the context of the society he rebels against, and the broader context of the language. The meaning of ‘she was destroyed into perfect consciousness’ is very much that it is subversive of English and yet submissive to some of its more hidden mechanisms. The same was true of Hemingway’s ‘he thought about alone’.
A paradox follows. Imagining themselves as breaking free of society, as becoming individuals no longer defined by their culture (notoriously they go and live abroad), the modernists become attractive international figures, gurus whose work must be translated everywhere and immediately, because it is presumed to have universal significance. Yet at the same time, the breaking free in their work can only be understood in the tradition and context they are breaking free from. This is not to say that translation is pointless. But however beautifully one might write Lawrence into another language, it will always be a more reassuring text linguistically than it was in English. Above all, it will intersect with an alien tradition, the provocations its content may cause become entirely unpredictable.
Enchantments are constantly dissolving and re-forming. Translation can play all kinds of roles in that process. It may be that a country which reads in translations that domesticate every foreign text to its own values and usages will be able to preserve its own linguistic spell far longer than a language whose writers are always busy wrestling with their own culture.
It may also be that many people like reading translations because they are less dangerous than original texts. However challenging the content of a book may be, if the medium of the language is reassuring then the reader perhaps can feel safe within his own world.
Alternatively, it can happen that a translation unleashes something quite new and strange into a culture. As I hope is the case with Calasso’s Ka.
In particular though, it seems to me that one of the lessons one learns from looking at a lot of translations is that the difference between experiencing a foreign culture and experiencing one’s own is a very great difference, and is greater still if we cannot know the foreign culture in the language of origin. These are truisms
.
But they should alert us to two things. That we must cultivate our own language, however commercially unfashionable that may be. In the case of India, for example, many anthologies of Indian writing turn out to be written not in one of the country’s native languages, but in English. Salman Rushdie in particular has spoken of English as being useful for allowing India to become known in the world. But is the purpose of literature to make ourselves known in the world? Isn’t it rather to tell ourselves the stories that create the world we live in? And in so far as we live in a language then it is that language that is important to us.
Similarly, Kazuo Ishiguro has criticised some English writers for using words and expressions that are too complicated for translation and that prevent the books from being understood worldwide. Again, this seems to suggest an impoverishment of language for commercial ends, or for the creation of a global culture, which of course would mean the death of many traditions.
J. M. Coetzee takes an opposite position to Rushdie in his novel Disgrace. Of the black farmer Petrus, a man who is taking over the life and land of the hero, David’s, daughter, we hear:
Petrus is a man of his generation. Doubtless Petrus has been through a lot, doubtless he has a story to tell. He [David] would not mind hearing Petrus’s story one day. But preferably not reduced to English. More and more he is convinced that English is an unfit medium for the truth of South Africa.6
But David does not speak Petrus’s language.
Walter Benjamin suggested that in each successive translation of a text, some mingling of languages was achieved, a process that ultimately and ideally, if the same text were translated over and over into all kinds of different languages, might lead us to rediscover the original sacred language lost with the destruction of the Tower of Babel. One wonders if such a language would bring the absolute enlightenment that certain philosophers of the early twentieth century hoped to achieve by expressing philosophical problems only in the terms of strict logic. Or would it create the ultimate universal enchantment, the exclusion of other influences in one single worldwide language?
Better, it seems to me, the Babel that defends us from a possibly totalitarian nightmare, that allows us if not to understand, then at least to be aware of the different ways we can enchant ourselves; and that keeps us constantly busy and perplexed with the exciting business of writing and rewriting each other’s stories.
Still Stirring
* * *
[Samuel Beckett]
‘OH ALL TO end.’1 Thus the Irish writer and Nobel Prize winner Samuel Beckett concluded his last work of fiction, Stirrings Still, making explicit once again, thirty years and more after Vladimir and Estragon first considered hanging themselves on the stage of Waiting for Godot, the powerful yearning behind so much of his work: for silence and extinction.
But while Beckett was granted his quietus in 1989, there is no closure for his readers and critics, nor would we want it; for if a death wish was central to his writing, no prose was ever livelier. So the hundredth anniversary of Beckett’s birth on 13 April of this year [2006] will be an occasion for loud celebration and fresh reflection. There is a handsome four-volume re-edition of his works, edited by Paul Auster and with introductions from, among others, J. M. Coetzee and Salman Rushdie, a new collection of academic essays from Florida University Press (Beckett After Beckett), a fascinating and detailed memoir from Anne Atik, whose artist husband was the author’s friend and drinking companion (How It Was), and a rich collection of memories taken from interviews with Beckett himself and with those who knew him (Beckett Remembering, Remembering Beckett).
The drift of many of those remembering Beckett is that admission to the literary canon isn’t recognition enough for ‘this separate man’2 as his friend the philosopher Emil Cioran called him.fn1 There are hints of sanctification. ‘Many have sensed’, remarks Harvard professor Robert Scanlan, who visited Beckett on his deathbed in 1989, ‘that Beckett’s serenity towards the end resembled the patience of a saint.’3 The Polish writer Antoni Libera feels he owes the success of his own work ‘to Beckett’s “blessing” and to his spirit, which was watching over everything’.4 The German actor Horst Bollman considers that his ‘encounter with Beckett is reward enough, in itself, for having been an actor all my life’.5 Many mention his ‘legendary generosity’ and love of children. Scanlan concludes his piece: ‘Here’s to you, Sam Beckett. God rest and bless your sweet and patient soul.’6
How curiously this valediction rings, addressed as it is to a man who satirised every form of metaphysics and renounced any mental comfort that might subtract him from the exhausting experience of being alone with his conviction that the world was without meaning and expression futile, yet that he was all the same duty-bound to express the fact. But perhaps it is precisely in Beckett’s repeated renunciations – of English for French, of a rich and traditional narrative facility for texts stripped of everything we would normally think of as plot or colour – that we can find a link between these sometimes sentimental centenary remembrances and the core of the author’s work, his special position in the literature of the twentieth century. ‘How easy’, writes Cioran, ‘to imagine him, some centuries back, in a naked cell, undisturbed by the least decoration, not even a crucifix.’7 With Beckett, it is the persistence of a ‘religious’ seriousness in the declared absence of any sustaining metaphysics that gives his work its special, for some saintly, pathos.
Born in 1906, Beckett was brought up in a well-to-do Protestant family in County Dublin. Educated at private schools, he excelled in both academic work and sport and, after graduating in French and Italian at Trinity College, Dublin, in 1927, went back and forth between teaching posts in Dublin and Paris, where he met James Joyce who was then writing Finnegans Wake. But Beckett soon decided he was not cut out for teaching and gave up his job, thus disappointing his parents. The ensuing and bitter arguments, with his mother in particular, plus what appear to have been a number of panic attacks, led to the decision to undergo psychoanalysis in London, where Beckett spent two years trying and failing to start a career as a literary reviewer. After an extended visit to Germany and another unhappy period in Dublin, he settled permanently in Paris in 1937.
In two essays written in his twenties Beckett declared his great admiration for Proust and Joyce, yet his first novel, Murphy, written shortly afterwards, suggests a different inspiration. While Proust and Joyce share a confident commitment to the evocation of complex psychological reality within a densely described world, Beckett seems embarrassed to present his story of a feckless, unemployed Irishman in London as ‘real’ at all. Despite, or perhaps because of, the novel’s evident autobiographical content, all kinds of strategies are used to prevent the reader from becoming immersed in plot and character in the traditional fashion. The book opens with a tone of mockery:
The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new. Murphy sat out of it as though he were free, in a mew in West Brompton. Here for what might have been six months he had eaten, drunk, slept and put his clothes on and off, in a medium-sized cage of north-western aspect commanding an unbroken view of medium-sized cages of south-eastern aspect. Soon he would have to make other arrangements, for the mew had been condemned. Soon he would have to buckle to and start eating, drinking, sleeping, and putting his clothes on and off, in quite alien surroundings.8 fn2
The very etymology of ‘novel’ suggests that the form brings newness. Echoing Ecclesiastes, Beckett renounces the idea. The solar system is a prison, ever the same, and the notion that Murphy might have achieved some freedom by sitting ‘out of it’ (out of the sunshine) is laughable. Nor is it the only prison. His room is a ‘cage’ in the rigid grid of London’s terraced streets. Even the language aligns itself with this imprisoning environment as groups of words are repeated as though to form the walls that close Murphy in: ‘eaten, drunk, slept and put his clothes on and off’ is mirrored by ‘eating, drinking, sleeping and putting his clothes on and off’, while in
between ‘a medium-sized cage of north-western aspect’ faces ‘medium-sized cages of south-eastern aspect’. Those compound, hyphenated adjectives reinforce the sense of entrapment making the irony that Murphy’s room might ‘command’ a view even heavier.
In Joyce Beckett had admired the fusion of word and sense. ‘When the idea is sleep, the words go to sleep’,9 he remarks, and he speaks of his compatriot as the heir to Shakespeare and Dickens in this regard, great masters of onomatopoeia and evocation. But a letter written to his friend Axel Kaun a year before the publication of Murphy suggests that Beckett’s sense of what could be achieved with language was changing radically:
It is indeed becoming more and more difficult, even senseless for me to write an official English. And more and more my own language appears to me like a veil that must be torn apart in order to get at the things (or the Nothingness) behind it. Grammar and Style. To me they seem to have become as irrelevant as a Victorian bathing suit or the imperturbability of a true gentleman. A mask. Let us hope the time will come … when language is most efficiently used where it is most efficiently misused. As we cannot eliminate language all at once, we should at least leave nothing undone that might contribute to its falling into disrepute. To bore one hole after another in it, until what lurks behind it – be it something or nothing – begins to seep through; I cannot imagine a higher goal for a writer today.10