The Fighter_Literary Essays

by Tim Parks

  The formula was simple: the ageing widower is allowed a glimpse of his wife as she was when they first met so long ago. So we have the moment of first love and, simultaneously, the sad relief of afterwards, with nothing in between but a poignant forty-year gap. Here is ‘The Voice’:

  Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,

  Saying that now you are not as you were

  When you had changed from the one who was all to me

  But as at first, when our day was fair.

  Can it be you that I hear? Let me view you, then,

  Standing as when I drew near to the town

  Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then,

  Even to the original air-blue gown!

  Or is it only the breeze, in its listlessness

  Travelling across the wet mead to me here,

  You being ever dissolved to wan wistlessness,

  Heard no more again far or near?

  Thus I; faltering forward,

  Leaves around me falling,

  Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward

  And the woman calling.52

  Real ghost and would-be ghost dissolve together into mist and verse. Florence was furious. ‘I expect the idea of the general reader will be that T. H.’s second marriage is a most disastrous one and that his sole wish is to find refuge in the grave with her with whom he found happiness.’53 Once again Hardy had taken revenge on those whose protection he needed. Once again he could protest it was only art, spectral, inconsequential. What reality could one ever ascribe to such a beautiful word as ‘wistlessness’?

  Any biographer of Hardy faces the problem that he lived long after there was anything to report. It is hard to interest the reader in a list of public honours and the many titles of his fine poetry collections. Still, his death in 1928 affords a good anecdote. Hardy’s wish was to be buried in the local churchyard at Stinsford: home. His literary friends wanted him at Westminster Abbey: town. In life he had been able to go back and forth between the two, but for a corpse this was impossible. The problem was solved with a gruesome bit of surgery: his heart was buried at Stinsford and his body cremated and interred in the Abbey. The decision as to which part should go where was definitely right, but it was a compromise that left everyone dissatisfied.

  And afterwards? Hardy had had the epitaph ready for decades. It is a poem in which he imagines himself being remembered as a man attentive to the most subtle phenomena of nature. Thus he takes refuge simultaneously in the collective memory and in landscape, indeed he links the two. These are verses from which all the turmoils of narrative are scrupulously absent, as if, in his long life he had had the great good fortune never to have been involved in action of any kind, the only positive effort mentioned being a failed attempt to help small defenceless animals. Most of all, there are no women.

  Afterwards

  When the Present has latched its postern behind my

  tremulous stay,

  And the May month flaps its glad green leaves like wings,

  Delicate-filmed as new-spun silk, will the neighbours say,

  ‘He was a man who used to notice such things’?

  If it be in the dusk when, like an eyelid’s soundless blink,

  The dewfall-hawk comes crossing the shades to alight

  Upon the wind-warped upland thorn, a gazer may think,

  ‘To him this must have been a familiar sight.’

  If I pass during some nocturnal blackness, mothy and

  warm,

  When the hedgehog travels furtively over the lawn,

  One may say, ‘He strove that such innocent creatures

  should come to no harm,

  But he could do little for them; and now he is gone.’

  If, when hearing that I have been stilled at last, they stand

  at the door,

  Watching the full-starred heavens that winter sees,

  Will this thought rise on those who will meet my face no

  more,

  ‘He was one who had an eye for such mysteries’?

  And will any say when my bell of quittance is heard in the

  gloom,

  And a crossing breeze cuts a pause in its outrollings,

  Till they swell again, as they were a new bell’s boom,

  ‘He hears it not now, but used to notice such things’?54

  The Disenchantment of Translation

  * * *

  [A lecture delivered to Katha Utsah in Delhi, India]

  WHAT A STRANGE moment when I opened the invitation to come here to Katha and saw the title of the session I was to lead: ‘The Disenchantment of Translation’. Only a week before, I had given a talk on translation entitled ‘Translating Enchantment’. As so often, one realises that far from being a lonely individual mind exploring new ideas, one is part of a larger, shared endeavour, even if it is not always clear what one’s relationship with the collective mind behind that endeavour might be.

  Enchantment, disenchantment. What do we mean by these most unscientific words? Why are they particularly appropriate to the practice of translation, its rewards and frustrations?

  I think we’d all agree that the word disenchantment has negative connotations. It suggests a disappointment, a loss of pleasure. And yet the positive word enchantment is not one widely used in the West. As I said, it seems anti-scientific. More and more it is spoken and written with a certain embarrassment. Its use is restricted, for example, to refer to moments of childish innocence, pleasures that depend on ingenuousness. We use ‘enchantment’ or ‘enchanting’ to enthuse about such things as a white Christmas, a fairy story for children (and so much Western literature is for children, or rather, for the infantile). Or in Verona, where I live, the word enchantment might be used when speaking of the tradition of Santa Lucia, a blind martyr of many centuries ago, who, on the night before 13 December, is supposed to bring the local children their seasonal presents. If they have been well behaved, that is. If not, she brings them only a piece of coal. By the time they are seven or eight years old most children have started asking their parents why Santa Lucia only operates in the Verona area, while Father Christmas is more ubiquitous. With their growing curiosity, the period of disenchantment has begun.

  At most, enchantment might stretch to first love, or the word is used in tourist brochures to describe the pleasures of some exotic location, deploying a rhetoric that no one is really expected to believe. In short, ‘enchantment’ is not considered part of serious life. Hence disenchantment becomes simply a necessary part of growing up. We might almost say that disenchantment is synonymous with enlightenment, a word that has an extremely positive connotation. Childish reassurance and rapture are put aside to confront the so-called real world.

  But surely, when we talk of the disenchantment of translation we are not suggesting that a translation is something more realistic, less childish, more enlightening than the original.

  Let us concentrate for a moment on this curiosity: we have two words, that would appear to share, at least to some extent, the same meaning – disenchantment, enlightenment – but one with a negative connotation and one with a positive, one stressing a loss, the other a gain. To grasp what we mean when we speak of the disenchantment of translation, we must try to understand this curiosity a little better.

  The narrower and ever more superficial use of the word enchantment in English and other Western languages, as indeed the devaluing of the word myth (mitico is a common and almost meaningless expression of approbation among Italian youngsters), tells us a lot about the modern world and its uneasiness with the language it has inherited from the past. It suggests a desire to repress and deny an area of experience. Or rather, that experience is admitted – the word, like the experience, won’t go away – but within a hierarchy of values where it is decidedly on one of the lower levels. ‘Enchantment’ is allowed to exist, but must not intrude into ‘reality’ – science and economics and politics, the territory of enlightenmen
t. In short, it is allowed to exist in art, in books, paintings, sculptures, Disney films. Art becomes a ghetto where all kinds of things with which our modern world is uncomfortable are allowed a sort of shadowy existence.

  Let us try to understand why this process of relegation and trivialisation was necessary with ‘enchantment’. The answer of course is that the word refers to something that threatens our modern view of the world. Here we need to look closely at the roots of the word. This is easier perhaps in Italian. In-canto, the Italians say. In song. An enchantment is an entering into song. I could give two very literal examples in my own life.

  I grew up in an extremely evangelical household. I sang in a choir. I sang a part. I was part of a whole larger than myself. The hymns came from the English Wesleyan tradition, or there were anthems from the tradition of German sacred music. The individual accepted the yoke of the community. The en-chantment happens within a group. It is not something you experience alone. And it is not just the contemporary community you become part of but one that stretches back into the past. My youthful enthusiasm was harnessed by something older and larger than myself. Many of the words were archaic, the devotion ancient. I entered into song.

  This was very beautiful until my parents became involved in the so-called charismatic movement. I was in my early teens. There was speaking in tongues, prophesy, ecstatic singing, with arms raised to God, etc. To enter into song now meant a much greater sacrifice of self. The reasoning mind had to be sacrificed entirely and constantly.

  It’s interesting that the English use the word chant, en-chant-ment, rather than the word song. The chant is rhythmical, repetitive, captivating, coercive. To be enchanted is to lose a little control. It is to subject the mind to the community, to the past. Individual curiosity is replaced by collective devotion. I left the group when the charismatic movement became too coercive. From then on, group singing was always a problem for me, I felt its attraction and pleasures, the pleasures of belonging to a tight community, and I felt resistance to it. In short, I experienced what is a very modern state of mind, the nostalgia for community and the fear of being defined and possessed by it.

  I didn’t accept another enchantment of this simple form until years later I became a regular supporter of my local football club in Verona. Here too there is a strong sense of community. Here too, in the frenetic atmosphere of the stadium, you throw your weight behind the collective chant to urge on your team. Here too the past is present. Many of the chants name old stars whom most of those in the stadium never saw. But there is something different now. The whole experience is undercut and controlled by a pervasive irony. We sing about battles and victories and hatreds and loves, but we know that when we leave the stadium we will return to our disenchanted lives. We are playing with enchantment. We believe in our community and we don’t believe in it. It satisfies our nostalgia for collective delirium without demanding our souls. We have a pleasurable loss of control, for carefully controlled periods.

  Much of modern literature in the West could be characterised in terms of its ambiguous relationship to enchantment, to the submergence of the individual mind in the collective. Inevitably, this is reflected in the relationship of each individual style to the community’s collective use of language. And this is where the relationship between translation and enchantment comes in. The translator of modern literature is above all involved in capturing and seeking to reproduce the complicity and tension between the writer and his language.

  In my religious childhood, enchantment didn’t just mean the moment of maximum collective ecstasy, the hymn. It also meant the rhythmic cadences of the liturgy, the prayers (morning and evening), the gospel stories, the life my parents expected me to live. All of this was enshrined in the language we used, and above all in the language of the 1666 prayer book, the Authorised Version of the Bible.

  In a novel I wrote about this period of my life, I tried to express my love of that language, and my eagerness to be free of its enchantment. When the novel was translated into Italian it became clear that to a large extent that enchantment didn’t exist in this other language; the Italians have an entirely different relationship with the Bible. Their liturgical and Christian rhetoric draws on other lexical sources and is not anchored to one particular historical period. Unable to evoke the spell of biblical language which was so important in the original they were then unable to convey the urgency of breaking that spell.

  Here it might be objected that I am simply talking about problems of cultural specificity that inevitably arise in any translation. How can we describe English interior decorating in Italian, or vice versa? It’s time to recall Wittgenstein’s contention that philosophy was a battle against the ‘bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language’,1 and his more general concern that all thinking lies under ‘the enchantments of language’.2 With this statement, our idea of enchantment is radically extended. And the whole presumption of the Enlightenment, that thinking is the instrument through which we dispense with such childish things as enchantment, is challenged. Now we have the troubling idea that in order to think, we must be enchanted. By what? By language, a language. The very word enlightenment, then, and all it stands for is actually part of a larger enchantment. Our clearest thinking lies under a linguistic spell. We are never outside language.

  Let us then bring alongside this claim Paul Celan’s bitter reflection on admitting defeat in his attempt to translate a poem by Baudelaire, that ‘poetry is the fatal uniqueness of language’.3 As the highest expression of verbal art, poetry presents us with the most intense enchantment, a heady cocktail of meaning, emotion, beauty, that can only be generated by these words, this linguistic performance, and hence can only be experienced by speakers of this language.

  If we accept this view of language and enchantment, then translation inevitably involves dis-enchantment; we must cast off the spell under which these thoughts were produced. One of the things I do with my students is to look at a lot of literary texts in English and Italian without telling them which is the original. Very quickly they learn, by considering the content, the relationship of content to style, the internal coherence of the two texts, semantic, and auditory too, to identify which is the original. Even the best translations lack the same level of cohesion, the meshing between the writer’s mind and the language it moves in.

  But of course, if our language is a form of enchantment, that must also mean that the translation, while at once a disenchantment, is also a re-enchantment. It is here that translation becomes truly fascinating. In a world where so much is now translated, where there is so much enthusiasm about pooling our different cultures, about achieving perhaps some international literary language (such claims have been made for English), what is the status of translation? Does reading mostly in translation change the nature of the reading experience?

  One of the reasons I was invited to this conference is because I translated the book Ka by Roberto Calasso, a book, as you know, that retells the ancient myths of India and tries to explore their deepest meaning. Before working on Ka I had translated The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, a book that does much the same thing with the Greek myths. Very often in The Marriage, Calasso was obliged to settle on some Greek word, to quote it in the original language to reflect on its meaning, because there was no equivalent in Italian. Like the exposed tip of the iceberg, the word suggested a mass of submerged and unsuspected cultural differences. It is obvious that for a Greek of 3,000 years ago to listen to the stories which formed his world was a completely different experience than for a modern Italian to read about them. He understood the world only, wonderfully, in those terms; we savour the enchantment, while believing we remain outside it, a very modern state of mind.

  The experience becomes different again, of course, when the stories are translated from Italian into English, where layers and layers of culture have been built up through interpretation and appropriation of the classical world. Sometimes when Calasso quoted in Italian from the
Iliad or the Odyssey I would go to an English translation to quote the same lines, only to find that the English version was so different that I was obliged to work from Calasso’s Italian.

  Yet the Greek stories made sense to me. It was as if one were exploring one’s own subconscious. Chords were immediately struck. My own language had already had long dealings with those gods and ideas.

  This was not true for me of Ka. The Indian myths seemed far stranger than any stories I had ever read. I was disorientated (a comic word to use for this experience, since this was probably as close to the Orient as I ever got). Once again Calasso settled on key words, in Sanskrit this time, words whose ambiguity or complexity of meaning made them touchstones. Once again he used quotations. Often there were no existing English translations to draw on, which was a relief. But whereas with the Greek myth I felt there was an existing rhetoric, an existing lexicon, a tradition, into which I could translate the stories, with Ka this was not the case.

  More and more, then, I wondered about the intimate connection between the content of the story and the language of the culture that created it, more and more I felt the pull of the English to impose concepts linked to other traditions, above all the Christian. It is hard to use a word like sin, or repentance, in English, without imposing an alien, that is English, enchantment on a foreign text. More and more I was struggling to find neutral words. But the original stories were not written with neutral words. A story is not the same experience when told to a different audience in a different language in a different time. Why then does a writer go back to the stories of different times and cultures? What is the point?

  I felt very strongly with both of Calasso’s books that one of the underlying intentions of his work was to subvert contemporary Italian, or more generally Western, certainties by building up an alien pattern of thought that, at a certain point, would become recognisable to the reader as a plausible and indeed beautiful way of understanding experience. He might show us, for examples, how the ancient Greeks had offered an aesthetic justification of existence 2,500 years before Nietzsche formulated similar ideas. He might show how an ancient Indian rsi had elaborated thoughts which we consider the greatest achievements of our modern philosophy. The recuperation, that is, of the enchantment under which ancient India lived was an operation aimed to subvert the enchantment under which we live today and which, precisely because we are in its thrall, we never consider an enchantment at all. In this sense the introduction of a foreign word, rather than mystification, is an operation of demystification, it questions the way our language organises experience.