Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

by David Bellos

  What’s usually considered to be at issue in humor of this kind is the capacity that all languages have for referring to themselves, and thus for playing games with words. Metalinguistic expressions—sentences and phrases that refer to some aspect of their own linguistic form—carry meanings that are by definition internal to the language in which they are couched. “There ain’t no fuck in bagels” may be vulgar and silly, but it is a good-enough example of a metalinguistic expression. It is not about bagels, only about the spelling and pronunciation of a word of the English language seen exclusively as a word and not as a sign. “Plays on the signifier” are traditionally viewed as the dark corner of language, where translation becomes a paradoxical, impossible challenge.

  That would be a valid position if the criteria for an acceptable match obligatorily included matching the signifiers themselves. But they obviously do not. What a translation makes match never includes the signifiers themselves. It would not count as a translation if it did.

  Just as only some jokes exploit the metalinguistic function of language, so not all self-referring expressions are funny. Especially not those used as example sentences by philosophers of language, such as:

  1. There are seven words in this sentence.

  It is no trouble to find a matching sentence in German:

  2. Es gibt sieben Wörter in diesem Satz.

  However, that particular translinguistic match is regarded as a happenstance—an arbitrary and irrational coincidence in a particular case. What’s usually seen as problematic about sentences such as (1) is that they cannot reliably be translated into other tongues, and they thus appear to contradict the axiom of effability—that any thought a person can have can be expressed by some sentence in any natural language, and that anything that can be expressed in one language can also be expressed in another (see chapter 13).

  The real problem with a sentence such as (1) is that it can’t be translated into English, either. “This sentence consists of seven words” rephrases (“translates”) (1), but by doing so it becomes counterfactual, which (1) is not. Likewise, rephrasing it in French produces an untruth if you think that translation means matching signifiers one by one with equivalents provided by pocket dictionaries:

  3. Il y a sept mots dans cette phrase.

  The main cause of problems is solutions, an American wit once declared, and the conundrums created by rephrasing self-referring sentences taken out of any context seem to be good examples of that. That’s because (3) is not the only way you can express (1) in French. Indeed, it’s just about the least plausible version you could come up with. A better match would be:

  4. Cette phrase est constituée par sept mots.

  But because philosophy is written by philosophers and not translators, the clash between (1) and (3) is taken to be a demonstration of a wider, general truth:

  Translation between languages cannot preserve reference (what a sentence is about), self-reference (what a sentence says about itself) and truth-value(whether the sentence is right or wrong) at the same time.2

  This would explain in a nutshell why puns and plays on words and all those kinds of jokes that exploit specific features of the language in which they are expressed cannot be translated. Because this is presented as a general assertion, it can be disproved by a single persuasive counterexample. But the reason it is wrong is not contained in any counterexample. The flaw in the axiom lies in its failure to say what it means by “translate.” So here’s my idea of a better approximation to the truth about translation:

  Arduously head-scratching, intellectually agile wordsmiths may simultaneously preserve the reference, self-reference, and truth value of an utterance when fate smiles on them and allows them to come up with a multidimensional matching expression in their own language.

  In chapter 52 of Georges Perec’s Life A User’s Manual, a depressed young man called Grégoire Simpson wanders around Paris and stares for hours at shop windows. He saunters into a covered arcade and gazes at the display of a printer’s wares—dummy letterheads, wedding invitations, and joke visiting cards. Here’s one of them:

  Adolf Hitler

  Fourreur

  Fourreur is the French word for “furrier,” but it is also an approximate representation of the way the German word Führer is pronounced in French. The joke is a metalinguistic and self-referring one, provided you know who and what Hitler was, know in addition that a furrier and a dictator are different things, and are able to subvocalize the French word as if it were a German sound and vice versa. What needs matching to make a translation of this joke is not any one of these particular things in French but the relationship between them—the pattern of mismatched sounds and meanings between two tongues, one of which has to be German.

  I came up with this:

  Adolf Hitler

  German Lieder

  It took a while to find, and it took a stroke of luck. It may well be not the only or the best possible translation of Perec’s joke visiting card, but it matches well enough in the dimensions that matter. It plays a sound game between English and German, and it relies on the same general field of knowledge. It doesn’t preserve all dimensions of the original—what ever does?—but it matches enough of them, in my honest but not very humble opinion, to count as a satisfactory translation of a self-referring, metalinguistic, and interlingual joke.

  Humorous remarks, shaggy-dog tales, witty anecdotes, and silly jokes are untranslatable only if you insist on understanding “translation” as a low-level matching of the signifiers themselves. Translation is obviously not that. The matches it provides relate to those dimensions of an utterance that, taken together, account for its principal force in the context in which it is uttered.

  That still doesn’t tell us what we mean by “match.” But we’re getting closer.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Style and Translation

  Translations typically alter numerous features of the source in order to produce matches for those of its dimensions that count in the context it has. But there is one traditionally perceived quality of written and spoken language that is identified not with any particular dimension of an utterance but with the overall relationship between them—its style.

  Style is more than genre. Kitchen recipes are typically translated not into something as vague and undifferentiated as “English” but into “kitchen recipese,” the genre constituted by the conventional features that kitchen recipes have in our tongue.

  In like manner, you don’t translate French poetry into “English” but into poetry, as the American poet and translator C. K. Williams insists. Poetry is a characteristic social and cultural use of language and can therefore count as a genre in our sense, but it comes in many different forms. Beyond the genre, a poetry translator has to choose the particular style that he is going to use.

  Twenty years ago, Eliot Weinberger and Octavio Paz brought out a curious essay-cum-anthology titled Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei—nineteen different English translations of a poem by a Chinese poet of the eighth century C.E., . Setting aside all their arguments about which of these “ways of Wei” is to be preferred, what is quite obvious is that they represent nineteen different ways of writing poetry in English, nineteen “styles” of fairly recognizable kinds (Eliot-ish, Ashbery-ish, free verse–ish, and so forth). Ten years later, Hiroaki Sato brought out One Hundred Frogs, a compilation of actually rather more than a hundred already published English versions of a famous haiku by Matsuo Bash:

  Furu ike ya

  kawazu tobikomu

  mizu no oto

  I

  The old pond

  A frog jumped in,

  Kerplunk!

  II

  pond

  frog

  plop!

  III

  A lonely pond in age-old stillness sleeps …

  Apart, unstirred by sound or motion … till

  Suddenly into it a lithe frog leaps.

  If “style” is the term that names th
e principal means of distinguishing the differences among these three versions of Bash’s haiku, then it means something that is not an individual property of, say, the poetry of Allen Ginsberg, John Masefield, and Ogden Nash but a collective property of poetry written in that style—in Ginsberg-ish, Masefield-ish, and Nash-ish, so to speak (one of them was written by Ginsberg, in fact). Style in this sense is eminently imitable, and not just for comic effect. Students of musical composition develop their skills by writing in the manner of Mozart or Bach, and writers also practice at writing like Flaubert, 1 or writing like Proust.2 The following pieces are not by William Wordsworth, T. S. Eliot, or J. D. Salinger—but it does not take much more than vague memories of school to know which among them is Eliot-ish, Salinger-ish, and Lake Poet–ish, respectively:

  There is a river clear and fair

  ’Tis neither broad nor narrow

  It winds a little here and there—

  It winds about like any hare;

  And then it holds as straight a course

  As, on the turnpike road, a horse,

  Or, through the air an arrow

  and

  Sunday is the dullest day, treating

  Laughter as a profane sound, mixing

  Worship and despair, killing

  New thought with dead forms.

  Weekdays give us hope, tempering

  Work with reviving play, promising

  A future life within this one

  and

  Boy, when I saw old Eve I thought I was going to flip. I mean it isn’t that Eve is good-looking or anything like that, it’s just that she’s different. I don’t know what the hell it is exactly—but you always know when she’s around. All of a sudden I knew there was something wrong with old Eve the minute I saw her. She looked nervous as hell. I kinda felt sorry for her—even though she’s got one of my goddam ribs, so I went over to talk to old Eve.

  “You look very, very nice, Adam,” she said to me in a funny way, like she was ashamed of something. “Why don’t you join me in some apple?”

  These examples could lead us to believe that the translation of style is an exercise in pastiche, the translator’s task being the choice of an existing style in the target culture to serve as a rough match for the “other.” Many literary translators go about their job in just that way. On reading a new work in French, for example, I certainly do run through in my mind the kinds of English style that might fit, and when starting on a new job, I often rifle through the books on my shelf to remind myself of the particularities of the “style match” I have in my head. But this idea of style as a culturally constituted set of linguistic resources characteristic of an author, period, literary genre, or school clashes with another widespread idea of what a “style” is: the irreducible difference of any individual’s unique forms of language. In brief: If style is “inimitable,” how come it can be imitated?

  The muddle about what style is began in the gilded halls of the Académie Française, an institution set up by Louis XIV to promote and defend the French language. In 1753, a natural scientist was invited to take his place as one of the forty “immortals,” as members are called. Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, an eminent botanist, mathematician, and natural historian, gave an extraordinary acceptance speech that has since become known as the “Discourse on Style.” In it he sought to reassure his audience—the thirty-nine academicians who had just elected him—that the promotion of a mere scientist to such elevated rank would not topple rhetoric from its proper place at the pinnacle of French culture. He may even have been sincere—but I wouldn’t count on it. In his much-quoted but mostly misunderstood conclusion, Buffon emphasized that what matter above all are the arts of language. Scientific discoveries, he declared, are really quite easy to make, and will quickly perish unless they are explained with elegance and grace. That is because mere facts are not human achievements—they belong to the natural word and are therefore hors de l’homme, “outside of humankind.” Eloquence, by contrast, is the highest evidence of human agency and genius: le style est l’homme même.

  This meaning of style, as a synonym for elegance and distinction, continues to motivate most modern uses of the word and its cognates. Stylish clothes are those considered elegant by some group of people; to ski or to dance or to serve cucumber sandwiches in style is likewise to do these things with fashionable grace. Buffon’s style is a social value. Nobody is free to construct his or her own idea of what is stylish, save by getting other people to agree. Similarly, stylish writing conforms to a shared notion, however vague, of what is fashionable, appropriate, socially elevated, and so on in the way you speak and write.

  Matching posh for posh in translating between languages used by cultures with linguistic forms that correspond to hierarchical social structures is no sweat. Where the social structures of the source culture are more elaborate than those of the target, a degree of flattening occurs: the different social implications of Estimado señor and Apreciado señor at the start of a formal letter in Spanish, for example, can’t be represented in English, which can say only “Dear Sir.” To compensate for losses of this kind, which can be far more substantial when translating between cultures as unrelated to each other as Japanese and French, for example, the translator may invent target-language analogues for distinctions that belong to the social world of the original, and be accused variously of quaintness, condescension, or fidelity to the source. But there are even less tractable issues involved when the social register of the language used in the source is low. There is a seemingly inevitable bias against representing forms of language recognized in the source culture as regional, uncouth, ill-educated, or taboo by socially matching forms in the target tongue—presumably because doing so risks identifying the translator as a member of just such a marginal or subordinated class. As a result, translation usually takes the social register of the source up a notch or two. The social dimension of “style” doesn’t flow easily from tongue to tongue.

  The novelist Adam Thirlwell has argued that the meaning of the word style changed in 1857.3 In the convincing story he tells, style flipped over, almost in one go, from being a description of the elegance of a whole manner of expression to being about just one subelement in the composition of prose—the sentence. The culprits for this radical reduction of style were Gustave Flaubert, his novel Madame Bovary, and the many comments Flaubert made about sentences in his partly teasing letters to his girlfriend, Louise Colet. Since 1857 or thereabouts, Thirlwell argues, critics and readers have needlessly restricted their idea of a writer’s style to those low-level features of grammar and prosody that can be exhaustively identified between a capital letter and a period. Henri Godin, writing about “the stylistic resources of French” just after the Second World War, was quite certain that style and syntax are the same thing and reach their point of perfect harmony in the writing of … Flaubert.4

  Because the grammatical forms, the sounds of individual words, and the characteristic voice rhythms of any two languages do not match (if they did we would call them the same language), the “Flaubert shift” made style instantly untranslatable. Thirlwell’s main aim is to show that this is nonsense—and that the novel is a truly international and translinguistic form of art.

  At some point in the course of the nineteenth century, the idea of style as “the aesthetics of the sentence” got thoroughly muddled up with a completely different tradition that came to France and Britain from German universities. Scholars in departments of Romance philology tended to justify the attention they paid to canonical writers on the grounds that their works represented special, innovative uses of language, distinct from the norms of the speech community, and were therefore important factors in the course of linguistic change. Poets, they argued, were not simply users of language but the creators of it; a language was not a smooth and rounded whole but a gnarled old potato marked by bumps and dents that speak the history of its creation. “Style research,” or Stilistik, pursued with fervor for
a hundred years, and reaching its brilliant peak in the essays of Leo Spitzer (1887–1960), was an exciting but quite circular pursuit: the language of a “great work” becomes a fine-grained map of the ineffable individuality of some great writer’s “self”; but the “self” or the essence of, let us say, Racine is entirely constituted by what can be mapped through his language, subjected to a particular kind of analysis of his style. Style in this sense is inimitable by definition—that’s the point of it. And if it can’t be imitated in the same language, it’s not even worth trying to translate it.

  But it isn’t true. Most of the features of language use that Spitzer identified as significant aspects of Racine’s “self,” for example, can also be found in the language of Racine’s contemporaries writing in the same literary genres. Yet the remarkable tenacity of the philologists’ principle that every great writer has a manner that is unique and inimitable led people to reinvent the very history of the idea of “style.” They went back to Buffon’s famous “Discourse,” took his maxim that le style c’est l’homme même (“style is what makes us human”), lopped off the last word, and recycled the remainder—le style, c’est l’homme—so as to prove that “the style is the man.” As the noted Oxford scholar R. A. Sayce put it in his 1953 study Style in French Prose, “details of style … reveal the deeper intentions and characteristics of a writer, and they must be dictated by some inner reason.”5