Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

by David Bellos

  “Improvement” and “assertion” may seem to go hand in hand, but those locked hands are really engaged in an arm-wrestling match. The first alphabetical lists of words in vernacular languages were extensions of traditional language-teaching tools: Robert Estienne’s Les Mots francois selon l’ordre des let-tres ainsi que les fault escrire; tournez en latin, pour les enfans, first published in 1544, helped French-speaking children learn the rudiments of their language of culture, namely Latin, but incidentally gave them a tool for writing the vernacular correctly. (Spelling in French was quite variable in the sixteenth century. As Estienne was a printer, he had a stake in the standardization of the written language.) Over the following century, as both English and French absorbed more words from each other and from classical languages, alphabetical listings of technical, philosophical, and foreign words became quite popular. In 1604, a Coventry schoolmaster, Robert Cawdrey, brought out a work whose lengthy title explains the social and cultural basis for dictionary making ever since: A Table Alphabeticall of hard usual English wordes, with the interpretation thereof by plaine English words, gathered for the benefit & help of Ladies, gentlewomen, or any other unskilful person. Whereby they more eas-ilie and better understand many hard English wordes, which they shall heare or read in the Scriptures, Sermons, or elsewhere, and also be made able to do the same aptly themselves.

  The step from compiling such socially useful works for the improvement of the undereducated classes to making dictionaries of all words may seem natural. It could be accounted for by the spread of literacy, the growth of the book trade, an obsession with the making of more and more specialized glossaries, and the wish to bring all this language lore together in one place. But that would be a retrospective illusion. Intellectually, there is a huge gulf between works, however extensive, that lay down the meanings of “hard” or technical or foreign terms to help less well-educated folk, and an attempt to list all the words that are spoken by the speakers of a given language. To make that leap you have to think of the language you speak as a finite entity. “The English language” has to be conceptualized not as a social practice but as a thing in itself. That is why the history of the English dictionary is the history of the invention of a “language” in the sense that we now understand that word.

  Dictionaries alone aren’t responsible for the thingification of natural languages, but they crystallized a peculiar modern view of what it means to have a language. The spread of the printed book is also a major factor in the converging circumstances and technologies that gave us the ideas that have dominated modern language study ever since, and profoundly affected our understanding of what translators do.

  GPDs, from Samuel Johnson’s to Webster’s and from Brock-haus to Robert, list the words that are part of the language. In so doing they also tell us that the language we speak is a list of words. From its origin in the Hebrew Bible, the nomenclaturist understanding of what a language is was given a huge, definitive boost by the emergence of the modern typographical mind.

  Which words are entitled to be listed in a dictionary that gives not a field-restricted set of words but the words of a whole language? Well, the words that people use. All of them? To the extent that is even possible, GPDs forfeit their historical claim to be instruments of improvement. That’s the arm wrestling. Laying down what words mean and how they should best be used, as was Cawdrey’s laudable plan, runs directly counter to the wider project of listing all the words people actually use with the varied meanings they may give to them. That’s why monolingual reference dictionaries have grown so impractically large. The solution to that problem is vividly illustrated by the career of one of Georges Perec’s fictional characters:

  Cinoc … pursued a curious profession. As he said himself, he was a “word-killer”: he worked at keeping Larousse dictionaries up to date. But while other compilers sought out new words and meanings, his job was to make room for them by eliminating all the words and meanings that had fallen into disuse.

  When he retired … he had disposed of hundreds and thousands of tools, techniques, customs, beliefs, sayings, dishes, games, nicknames, weights and measures … He had returned to taxonomic anonymity hundreds of varieties of cattle, species of birds, insects and snakes, rather special sorts of fish, kinds of crustaceans, slightly dissimilar plants and particular breeds of vegetables and fruit; and cohorts of geographers, missionaries, entomologists, Church Fathers, men of letters, generals, Gods & Demons had been swept by his hand into eternal obscurity.5

  GPDs of any language, and quite especially those using an alphabetical script, are always of potentially infinite size, because no language can have fixed boundaries in time or space, and there can be no ultimate, definitive division of a social practice into a finite set of components. To escape from this dilemma while pursuing the broad project of mapping a particular language, Peter Mark Roget devised his Thesaurus (“treasure” in Greek), which uses not the arbitrary order of the alphabet but the natural order of the world as its organizing principle. He established six general classes of “real things,” which are not material things but ideas: Abstract Relations, Space, Matter, Intellectual Faculties, Voluntary Power, and Sentient and Moral Powers. These he divided into categories, then broke down each category into lesser groups of ideas, and only at this point does he list all the words and expressions that may be used to communicate the idea. “Sentient and Moral Powers,” for example, incorporates the category of “Personal Affections,” one of whose groups is constituted by “Discriminative Affections,” among which figures the subgroup “Aggravation.” That’s where you find a raft of words and phrases including anger, ire, fury, to get up someone’s nose, to piss someone off, and to get someone’s goat—a long list of synonyms all of which express some quality or variety of aggravation. Roget’s Thesaurus is an extraordinary achievement. Its structure harks back to those Sumerian word hoards on clay tablets sorted by thematic category, but as it contains very few words like polyester, recitative, or crankset, it offers no support at all to those who would like to see a language as a list of the names of things. Rather, it displays to a spectacular degree the sheer redundancy of the vocabulary set that we have, with dozens of words giving only minutely different shades of meaning for almost exactly the same thing (anger, ire, fury …). Roget shows language to be a rich, illogical, and complicated tool for making fine and often arbitrary distinctions—for discriminating, separating out, and saying the same thing in different ways.

  The thesaurus was not designed as a resource for translators, but it serves translation in two distinct and equally important ways. The first is eminently practical. Browsing Roget’s lists of quasi-synonyms and cognate words helps a writer—who may also be a translator at that point—to identify a term to express a more precise shade of meaning than the word that first came to mind. In the second place, however, a thesaurus says on every page that to know a language is to know how to say the same thing in different words. That is precisely what translators seek to do. Roget’s wonderful Thesaurus reminds them that in one language as well as between any two, all words are translations of others.

  TEN

  The Myth of Literal Translation

  With bilingual dictionaries to get them started and Roget’s Thesaurus to help them polish their work to a nice finish, translators ought not to find it too hard to tell us what the words on the page really mean. In practice, however, it’s the words on the page that hang like a dark veil over what a piece of written language means. Words taken one by one obscure the force and meaning of a text, which is why a word-for-word translation is almost never a good job. This isn’t a new insight: arguments against literal translation go back almost as far as written translation itself.1

  After immersing himself for several years in the history of translation, George Steiner discovered that it consisted very largely of repeated arguments over this same point. “Over some two thousand years of argument and precept,” he wrote with perceptible frustration, “the bel
iefs and disagreements voiced about the nature of translation have been almost the same.”2

  When Don Quixote’s favorite bedtime book, Amadis de Gaula, appeared in French, for example, the translator gave his patron two reasons for not having stuck to the literal meanings of the Spanish words:

  I beg you to believe I did it both because many things appeared to me to be inappropriate for people in courtly circles with respect to the customs and standards of our day, and on the advice of some of my friends who saw fit for me to free myself from the usual punctiliousness of translators, precisely because [this book] doesn’t deal with material where such persnickety observance is necessary.3

  These twin justifications for “free” translation—literal translation just isn’t appropriate for the target audience and isn’t suited to the original, either—were familiar themes in the sixteenth century, as they had been for many centuries already. In fact, few commentators on translation have ever come out in favor of a literal or word-for-word style. Literal translation is precisely what translators in the broad Western tradition don’t do. But if literal translation is not a widespread practice, why do so many translators feel a need to shoot it down—often with overwhelming force? Octavio Paz, the Mexican poet and man of letters, stated the standard view in more recent times: No digo que la traducción literal sea imposible, sino que no es una traducción: “I’m not saying a literal translation is impossible, only that it’s not a translation.”4

  How back far does it go? There are references to the issue in the writings of Cicero (106–43 B.C.E.) and Horace (65–8B.C.E.), but a long sentence written by Saint Jerome, the first translator of the Bible into Latin and subsequently the patron saint of translators, can be taken as the first full formulation of the lopsided dispute between “literal” and “free.” In 346 C.E., when he was near the end of his labors, Jerome wrote a letter to his friend Pammachius to counter the criticisms that had been made of the translations he had done so far. Jerome said this about how he had gone about his task:

  Ego enim non solum fateor, sed libera voce profiteor me in interpretatione Graecorum absque scripturis sanctis ubi et verborum ordo mysterium est non verbum e verbo sed sensum exprimere de sensu.

  A provisional translation would give the following sense: “Thus I not only confess but of my own free voice proclaim that apart from translations of sacred scriptures from the Greek, where even the order of the words is a mysterium, I express not the word for the word but the sense for the sense.”

  Jerome’s expression verbum e verbo, “the word … for the word,” can be considered synonymous with “literal” translation, and his sensum exprimere de sensu, “to express the sense for the sense,” corresponds to the idea of “free” translation. He proclaims that he doesn’t do “literal” except when translating “sacred scriptures from the Greek.” That seems clear until you realize that the exception clause drives a cart and horses through the main claim, because what Jerome did throughout his long life was to translate sacred scripture, more than half of which he translated from Greek.

  Jerome also says he abandons sense-for-sense translation not just when translating scripture from Greek but specifically ubi et verborum ordo mysterium est, in those places “where even the order of the words is a mysterium.” As the meaning of the word mysterium is uncertain, there’s no final agreement as to what Jerome was really talking about. At the root of Western arguments about how best to translate lies a mystery word that nobody is quite sure how to translate.

  In late Latin written by Christians, mysterium most often means a holy sacrament. Jerome’s sentence therefore seems to recommend sticking to the exact order of the words of the Greek New Testament because its word order is sacred. Louis Kelly understands Jerome to be saying:

  Not only do I admit, but I proclaim at the top of my voice, that in translating from Greek, except from Sacred Scripture, where even the order of the words is of God’s doing, I have not translated word for word, but sense for sense.5

  This reading supports the view that Jerome is not really defending “sense for sense” translation, as he first seems to be doing, but “word for word.” But why would Jerome treat Greek word order as sacrosanct and not do the same for the scriptures he translated from Hebrew and Aramaic? The “Greek exception” doesn’t make a lot of sense if holiness is the dominant reason for mimicking the word order of the source.

  However, Jerome may have meant something else by mysterium. He may have wanted to explain his approach to an issue that confronts every translator at some point: what to do with expressions that you don’t understand. It’s a real problem for all translators, because every utterance ever made in speech or writing has something blank or fuzzy or uncertain about it.

  In ordinary speaking, listening, and reading, we cope with the gaps in various ways. An impenetrable phrase may be treated as a transmission error—a mispronunciation, a typo, a scribal glitch. We have no trouble replacing it with what we instantly guess to be the true form, and in spoken interaction we do this automatically, without noticing the corrections that we bring to what we hear. When reading, we use the context to prompt a meaning that fits. Where the context isn’t good enough to allow this, we just skip it. We skip-read all the time! Nobody knows the meanings of all the French words in Les Misérables, but that’s never stopped anyone from enjoying Hugo’s novel. However, translators are not granted the right to skip. That’s a serious constraint. It hardly arises in most kinds of language use; it’s one of the few things that sets a problem for translation that is almost unique to it.

  Jerome was working with many different sources, but his main text for the Old Testament was the Greek Septuagint, translated from now lost Hebrew sources several centuries earlier. According to legend, it had been commissioned around 236 B.C.E. by Ptolemy II, the Greek-speaking ruler of Egypt, for his new library in Alexandria. He had sent men to Judea to round up learned Jews who understood the source text, then wined and dined them and set them up at Paphos (on the island of Cyprus) to get down to work. There were seventy (or seventy-two) participants in this foundational translation workshop, which is why the text they produced is called the Septuagint—a way of writing (not translating) the Greek word meaning “seventy.”

  The Seventy wrote not in the language of Homer and Sophocles but in koiné, the popular spoken language of the Hellenistic cultures dotted around the Middle East. They also wrote it in a peculiar way, perhaps because koiné was their vehicular language and not completely native to them. So it would hardly be surprising if some words, phrases, and sentences in it baffled Saint Jerome seven centuries later. One telltale sign of the Seventy’s difficulty with Greek is the way they handled Hebrew words referring to Jewish religious mysteries. For example, they represented the Hebrew as Xερoυβ µ, which is not a translation, but just the same word sounded out in a different alphabet. Jerome followed style—he wrote out approximately the same sounds in Latin script, making cherubim. English Bible translators have done the same, giving us a Hebrew masculine plural form (-im) for a concept that has stumped all translators since the third century B.C.E. In addition, the transfer of letters through three scripts and four languages has altered the sound of the word almost beyond recognition, from “kheruvím” to “cherubim.”

  This way of dealing with an untranslatable by not translating it while making it pronounceable (sound translation, homophonic translation: see here) could be considered the primary, original meaning of the term literal translation. It represents a foreign word by putting in place of the letters of which it is made the corresponding letters of the script of the target language. But we do not call that literal translation nowadays—we call it transliteration. And it probably wasn’t what Jerome had in mind in the famous passage from his letter to Pammachius.

  What, then, did Jerome mean by mysterium? Here’s an alternative translation of the mystery passage by a canon of Canterbury Cathedral:

  For I myself not only admit but freely proclaim that i
n translating from the Greek (except in the case of the holy scriptures where even the order of the words is a mystery) I render sense for sense and not word for word.

  To put it in a slacker style, “I translate word for word only where the original—even its word order—is completely impenetrable to me.” That is, of course, what translators have always done. For the most part, they transmit the sense; where the sense is obscure, the best they can do—because unlike ordinary readers they are not allowed to skip—is to offer a representation of the separate words of the original. This may even explain the style of the translation of the extract quoted here. Maybe Derrida’s translator, far from trying to sound foreign, was simply baffled.

  What, then, is a literal translation? Not a substitution of letters, since we call that transliteration. A one-for-one substitution of the separated written words? Maybe. When confronted with a decidedly loose French translation of “The Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” Mark Twain decided to back-translate his story into English using a single-word substitution device intended as the opposite of his French translator’s overuse of rephrasing.

  THE FROG JUMPING OF THE COUNTY OF CALAVERAS

  It there was one time here an individual known under the name of Jim Smiley; it was in the winter of ’49, possibly well at the spring of ’50, I no me recollect not exactly. This which me makes to believe that it was the one or the other, it is that I shall remember that the grand flume is not achieved when he arrives at the camp for the first time, but of all sides he was the man the most fond of to bet which one have seen, betting upon all that which is presented, when he could find an adversary; and when he not of it could not, he passed to the side opposed.6