God is my shepherd, therefore I can lose nothing;
he will cause me to repose myself in pastures full of grass,
and he will lead me unto calm waters.
The King James translators transformed this into:
The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures:
he leadeth me beside the still waters.
Officially the King James translation was supposed to clarify and restore meaning. Yet any successful translation is necessarily different from the original, since it assumes the original text as something already digested, divested of its fragile ambiguity, interpreted. It is in the translation that the innocence lost after the first reading is restored under another guise, since the reader is once again faced with a new text and its attendant mystery. That is the inescapable paradox of translation, and also its wealth.
Title-page of the first edition of the King James Bible. (photo credit 19.2)
For King James and his translators the purpose of the colossal enterprise was avowedly political: to produce a Bible that people could read singly and yet, because it was a common text, communally. Printing gave them the illusion of being able to produce the same book ad infinitum; the act of translation heightened that illusion, but seemed to replace different versions of the text with a single one, officially approved, nationally endorsed, religiously acceptable. The King James Bible, published after four years of hard labour in 1611, became the “authorized” version, the “Everyman’s Bible” in the English language, the same one that we, travelling in an English-speaking country today, find by our bedsides in our hotel rooms, in an ancient effort to create a commonwealth of readers through a unified text.
In their “Preface to the Reader”, the King James translators wrote, “Translation it is that openeth the window, to let in the light; that breaketh the shell, that we may eat the kernell; that putteth aside the curtain, that we may look into the most holy place; that removeth the cover of the well, that we may come by the water.” This meant not being afraid “of the light of Scripture” and entrusting the reader with the possibility of illumination; not proceeding archeologically to restore the text to an illusory pristine state, but to free it from the constraints of time and place; not simplifying for the sake of a shallow explanation, but allowing the depths of meaning to become apparent; not glossing the text in the scholastic manner, but constructing a new and equivalent text. “For is the kingdome of God become words or syllables?” asked the translators. “Why should we be in bondage to them if we may be free …?” The question was still being asked several centuries later.
As Rilke, in Burckhardt’s silent presence, became more and more engaged in literary chit-chat with the Odéon bookseller, an old man, obviously a habitual customer, entered the shop and, as readers are known to do when the subject is books, uninvitedly joined the conversation. Their talk soon turned to the poetic merits of Jean de La Fontaine, whose Fables Rilke admired, and to the Alsatian writer Johann Peter Hebel, whom the bookseller considered La Fontaine’s “sort of younger brother”. “Can Hebel be read in French translation?” asked Rilke, disingenuously. The old man pulled the book out of the poet’s hands. “A translation of Hebel!” he cried. “A French translation! Have you ever read a French translation of a German text that is even bearable? The two languages are diametrically opposed. The only Frenchman who could have translated Hebel, supposing he had known German, and then he would not have been the same man, was La Fontaine.”
“In paradise,” interrupted the bookseller, who had thus far remained silent, “they no doubt speak to one another in a language we have forgotten.”
To which the old man growled angrily, “Oh, to hell with paradise!”
But Rilke agreed with the bookseller. In the eleventh chapter of Genesis, the King James translators wrote that, before God confused the tongues of men to prevent the building of the Tower of Babel, “the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech.” This primordial language, which the cabbalists believed was also the language of paradise, has been ardently sought many times throughout our history — always unsuccessfully.
In 1836 the German scholar Alexander von Humboldt19 suggested that each language possesses an “inner linguistic shape” which expresses the particular universe of the people who speak it. This would imply that no word in any given language is exactly identical to any word in any other language, rendering translation an impossible task, like coining the face of the wind or braiding a cord of sand. Translation can only exist as the unruly and informal activity of understanding through the translator’s language that which lies irretrievably concealed within the original.
As we read a text in our own language, the text itself becomes a barrier. We can go into it as far as its words allow, embracing all their possible definitions; we can bring other texts to bear upon it and to reflect it, as in a hall of mirrors; we can construct another, critical text that will extend and illuminate the one we are reading; but we cannot escape the fact that its language is the limit of our universe. Translation proposes a sort of parallel universe, another space and time in which the text reveals other, extraordinary possible meanings. For these meanings, however, there are no words, since they exist in the intuitive no man’s land between the language of the original and the language of the translator.
According to Paul de Man, Rilke’s poetry promises a truth that, in the end, the poet must confess is but a lie. “Rilke,” said de Man, “can only be understood if one realizes the urgency of this promise together with the equally urgent, and equally poetic, need of retracting it at the very instant he seems to be on the point of offering it to us.”20 In this ambiguous place to which Rilke brings Labé’s verses, the words (Labé’s or Rilke’s — the possessive author no longer matters) become so brilliantly rich that no further translation is possible. The reader (I am that reader, sitting at my café table with the French and German poems open in front of me) must apprehend those words intimately, no longer through any explicatory language but as an overwhelming, immediate, wordless experience that both re-creates and redefines the world, through the page and far beyond it — what Nietzsche called “the movement of style” in a text. Translation may be an impossibility, a betrayal, a fraud, an invention, a hopeful lie — but in the process, it makes the reader a wiser, better listener: less certain, far more sensitive, seliglicher.
A rare photograph of a slave reading, taken c. 1856 in Aiken, South Carolina. (photo credit 19.3)
FORBIDDEN READING
n 1660, Charles II of England, son of the king who had so unfortunately consulted Virgil’s oracle, known to his subjects as the Merrie Monarch for his love of pleasure and loathing of business, decreed that the Council for Foreign Plantations should instruct natives, servants and slaves of the British colonies in the precepts of Christianity. Dr. Johnson, who from the vantage point of the following century admired the king, said that “he had the merit of endeavouring to do what he thought was for the salvation of the souls of his subjects, till he lost a great empire.”1 The historian Macaulay,2 who from a distance of two centuries did not, argued that for Charles “the love of God, the love of country, the love of family, the love of friends, were phrases of the same sort, delicate and convenient synonyms for the love of self.”3
It isn’t clear why Charles issued this decree in the first year of his reign, except that he imagined it to be a way of laying out new grounds for religious tolerance, which Parliament opposed. Charles, who in spite of his pro-Catholic tendencies proclaimed himself loyal to the Protestant faith, believed (as far as he believed anything) that, as Luther had taught, the salvation of the soul depended on each individual’s ability to read God’s word for himself or herself.4 But British slave-owners were not convinced. They feared the very idea of a “literate black population” who might find dangerous revolutionary ideas in books. They did not believe those who argued that a literacy restricted to the Bible would strengt
hen the bonds of society; they realized that if slaves could read the Bible, they could also read abolitionist tracts, and that even in the Scriptures the slaves might find inflammatory notions of revolt and freedom.5 The opposition to Charles’s decree was strongest in the American colonies, and strongest of all in South Carolina, where, a century later, strict laws were proclaimed forbidding all blacks, whether slaves or free men, to be taught to read. These laws were in effect until well into the mid-nineteenth century.
For centuries, Afro-American slaves learned to read against extraordinary odds, risking their lives in a process that, because of the difficulties set in their way, sometimes took several years. The accounts of their learning are many and heroic. Ninety-year-old Belle Myers Carothers — interviewed by the Federal Writers’ Project, a commission set up in the 1930s to record, among other things, the personal narratives of former slaves — recalled that she had learned her letters while looking after the plantation owner’s baby, who was playing with alphabet blocks. The owner, seeing what she was doing, kicked her with his boots. Myers persisted, secretly studying the child’s letters as well as a few words in a speller she had found. One day, she said, “I found a hymn book … and spelled out ‘When I Can Read My Title Clear’. I was so happy when I saw that I could really read, that I ran around telling all the other slaves.”6 Leonard Black’s master once found him with a book and whipped him so severely “that he overcame my thirst for knowledge, and I relinquished its pursuit until after I absconded”.7 Doc Daniel Dowdy recalled that “the first time you was caught trying to read or write you was whipped with a cow-hide, the next time with a cat-o-nine-tails and the third time they cut the first joint off your forefinger.”8 Throughout the South, it was common for plantation owners to hang any slave who tried to teach the others how to spell.9
Under these circumstances, slaves who wanted to be literate were forced to find devious methods of learning, either from other slaves or from sympathetic white teachers, or by inventing devices that allowed them to study unobserved. The American writer Frederick Douglass, who was born into slavery and became one of the most eloquent abolitionists of his day, as well as founder of several political journals, recalled in his autobiography: “The frequent hearing of my mistress reading the Bible aloud … awakened my curiosity in respect to this mystery of reading, and roused in me the desire to learn. Up to this time I had known nothing whatever of this wonderful art, and my ignorance and inexperience of what it could do for me, as well as my confidence in my mistress, emboldened me to ask her to teach me to read.… In an incredibly short time, by her kind assistance, I had mastered the alphabet and could spell words of three or four letters.… [My master] forbade her to give me any further instruction … [but] the determination which he expressed to keep me in ignorance only rendered me the more resolute to seek intelligence. In learning to read, therefore, I am not sure that I do not owe quite as much to the opposition of my master as to the kindly assistance of my amiable mistress.”10 Thomas Johnson, a slave who later became a well-known missionary preacher in England, explained that he had learned to read by studying the letters in a Bible he had stolen. Since his master read aloud a chapter from the New Testament every night, Johnson would coax him to read the same chapter over and over, until he knew it by heart and was able to find the same words on the printed page. Also, when the master’s son was studying, Johnson would suggest that the boy read part of his lesson out loud. “Lor’s over me,” Johnson would say to encourage him, “read that again,” which the boy often did, believing that Johnson was admiring his performance. Through repetition, he learned enough to be able to read the newspapers by the time the Civil War broke out, and later set up a school of his own to teach others to read.11
Learning to read was, for slaves, not an immediate passport to freedom but rather a way of gaining access to one of the powerful instruments of their oppressors: the book. The slave-owners (like dictators, tyrants, absolute monarchs and other illicit holders of power) were strong believers in the power of the written word. They knew, far better than some readers, that reading is a strength that requires barely a few first words to become overwhelming. Someone able to read one sentence is able to read all; more important, that reader has now the possibility of reflecting upon the sentence, of acting upon it, of giving it a meaning. “You can play dumb with a sentence,” said the Austrian playwright Peter Handke. “Assert yourself with the sentence against other sentences. Name everything that gets in your way and move it out of the way. Familiarize yourself with all objects. Make all objects into a sentence with the sentence. You can make all objects into your sentence. With this sentence, all objects belong to you. With this sentence, all objects are yours.”12 For all these reasons, reading had to be forbidden.
As centuries of dictators have known, an illiterate crowd is easiest to rule; since the craft of reading cannot be untaught once it has been acquired, the second-best recourse is to limit its scope. Therefore, like no other human creation, books have been the bane of dictatorships. Absolute power requires that all reading be official reading; instead of whole libraries of opinions, the ruler’s word should suffice. Books, wrote Voltaire in a satirical pamphlet called “Concerning the Horrible Danger of Reading”, “dissipate ignorance, the custodian and safeguard of well-policed states”.13 Censorship, therefore, in some form or another, is the corollary of all power, and the history of reading is lit by a seemingly endless line of censors’ bonfires, from the earliest papyrus scrolls to the books of our time. The works of Protagoras were burned in 411 BC in Athens. In the year 213 BC the Chinese emperor Shih Huang-ti tried to put an end to reading by burning all the books in his realm. In 168 BC, the Jewish Library in Jerusalem was deliberately destroyed during the Maccabean uprising. In the first century AD, Augustus exiled the poets Cornelius Gallus and Ovid and banned their works. The emperor Caligula ordered that all books by Homer, Virgil and Livy be burned (but his edict was not carried out). In 303, Diocletian condemned all Christian books to the fire. And these were only the beginning. The young Goethe, witnessing the burning of a book in Frankfurt, felt that he was attending an execution. “To see an inanimate object being punished,” he wrote, “is in and of itself something truly terrible.”14 The illusion cherished by those who burn books is that, in doing so, they are able to cancel history and abolish the past. On May 10, 1933, in Berlin, as the cameras rolled, propaganda minister Paul Joseph Goebbels spoke during the burning of more than twenty thousand books, in front of a cheering crowd of more than one hundred thousand people: “Tonight you do well to throw in the fire these obscenities from the past. This is a powerful, huge and symbolic action that will tell the entire world that the old spirit is dead. From these ashes will rise the phoenix of the new spirit.” A twelve-year-old boy, Hans Pauker, later head of the Leo Baeck Institute for Jewish Studies in London, was present at the burning, and recalled that, as the books were thrown into the flames, speeches were made to add solemnity to the occasion.15 “Against the exaggeration of unconscious urges based on destructive analysis of the psyche, for the nobility of the human soul, I commit to the flames the works of Sigmund Freud,” one of the censors would declaim before burning Freud’s books. Steinbeck, Marx, Zola, Hemingway, Einstein, Proust, H.G. Wells, Heinrich Mann, Jack London, Bertolt Brecht and hundreds of others received the homage of similar epitaphs.
A sixteenth-century Chinese woodblock depicting the burning of books by the First Emperor Shih Huang-ti. (photo credit 20.1)
The Nazi burning of books in Berlin, 10 May 1933. (photo credit 20.2)
In 1872, a little over two centuries after Charles II’s optimistic decree, Anthony Comstock — a descendant of the old colonialists who had objected to their sovereign’s educating urges — founded in New York the Society for the Suppression of Vice, the first effective censorship board in the United States. All things considered, Comstock would have preferred that reading had never been invented (“Our father Adam could not read in Paradise,” he once af
firmed), but since it had, he was determined to regulate its use. Comstock saw himself as a reader’s reader, who knew what was good literature and what was bad, and did everything in his power to impose his views on others. “As for me,” he wrote in his journal a year before the society’s founding, “I am resolved that I will not in God’s strength yield to other people’s opinion but will if I feel and believe I am right stand firm. Jesus was never moved from the path of duty, however hard, by public opinion. Why should I be?”16
Anthony Comstock was born in New Canaan, Connecticut, on March 7, 1844. He was a hefty man, and in the course of his censoring career he many times used his size to defeat his opponents physically. One of his contemporaries described him in these terms: “Standing about five feet in his shoes, he carries his two hundred and ten pounds of muscle and bone so well that you would judge him to weigh not over a hundred and eighty. His Atlas shoulders of enormous girth, surmounted by a bull-like neck, are in keeping with a biceps and a calf of exceptional size and iron solidarity. His legs are short, and remind one somewhat of tree trunks.”17
Comstock was in his twenties when he arrived in New York with $3.45 in his pocket. He found a job as a dry-goods salesman and was soon able to save the $500 necessary to buy a little house in Brooklyn. A few years later, he met the daughter of a Presbyterian minister, ten years his elder, and married her. In New York, Comstock discovered much that he found objectionable. In 1868, after a friend told him how he had been “led astray and corrupted and diseased” by a certain book (the title of this powerful work has not come down to us), Comstock bought a copy at the store and then, accompanied by a policeman, had the shopkeeper arrested and the stock seized. The success of his first raid was such that he decided to continue, regularly causing the arrest of small publishers and printers of titillating material.
A History of Reading Page 29