Is That a Fish in Your Ear? (18 page)

Authors: David Bellos

BOOK: Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

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This schoolboy prank mocks French, French grammar, the school teaching of French, and so forth. But the main thing it demonstrates is Octavio Paz’s point: “literal translation” is not impossible, but it is not a translation. You can only understand the target text if you can do a reverse substitution of the words of the source and read the French through its representation in English. In other words, to make any sense of “The Frog Jumping” you have to know French, whereas the whole purpose of translation of any kind is to make the source available to those readers of the target who do not know the source language. A translation that makes no sense without recourse to the original is not a translation. This axiom incidentally explains why the meaning of
cherub
will forever remain a speculation.

The term
literal
also hides other mysteries. It is used to refer not only to a translation style that barely exists but to say something about the way an expression is supposed to be understood.

The distinction between the literal and figurative meanings of words has been at the heart of Western education for more than two millennia. The literal meaning of an expression is supposed to be its meaning prior to any act of interpretation, its natural, given, standard, shared, neutral, plain meaning.

However, when we say, “It was literally raining cats and dogs last night,” we mean the adverb
literally
in a figurative sense. Studies of large corpora of recorded speech have shown that the majority of the uses of
literal
and
literally
in English are figurative; similar results would no doubt be extracted from written texts in all European languages.
⁷This is a curious irony, because expressions that mean one thing and its opposite were a thorn in the flesh of precisely those Greek thinkers who invented the distinction between literal and figurative in the first place. But language is like putty. The figurative use of
literal
is one among a thousand cases of expressions meaning this and its opposite, depending on what you use them to mean.

Literal
is an adjective formed from the noun
littera
, meaning “letter” in Latin. A letter in this sense is a written sign that belongs to a set of signs, some subsets of which can be used to communicate meanings. Speech communicates meaning, writing communicates meaning—but letters on their own do not have any meaning. That’s what a letter is—a sign that is meaningless except when used as part of a string. The expression “literal meaning,” taken literally, is a contradiction in terms, an oxymoron, and a nonsense.

What we probably meant in the distant past when we asserted that something was “literally true” in order to emphasize that it was really true, true to a higher degree than just being true, was that it was among those rare things that were worthy of being “put into letters,” of being written down. All the uses of
literal
with respect to meaning and translation implicitly value writtenness more highly than oral speech. They are now among the surviving linguistic traces of the fantastic change in social and cultural hierarchies that the invention of writing brought about. They carry the shadow of the early stages of literacy in the Mediterranean basin between the third and first millennia B.C.E., when alphabetic scripts first arose together with the texts that through translation and retranslation have shaped and fed Western civilization ever since. This is presumably why the same words and the same terms still persist in debates about how best to translate.

Yet even in the modern era we do not always know quite what we mean when we claim that something is literally true, and even less when we call a translation a literal one.

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, a Franco-Egyptian mountebank with a medical degree and a talent for social climbing and free composition in French published a new version of
The Arabian Nights
. It was a commercial and cultural success, feeding a wave of interest in the Sexy Orient among the elite, and it impressed many writers of the day, including Marcel Proust. The translator, Joseph-Charles Mardrus, knew Arabic, and he used some Arabic texts as the basis of his rewriting of the collection of ancient Eastern tales, which he titled, in a daring Arab-ism in French,
Les Mille Nuits et Une Nuit
, with a subtitle as clear as can be:
Traduction littérale et complète du texte arabe
, “The Thousand Nights and One Night: A Complete and Literal Translation of the Arabic Text.”
⁸

The subtitle is less a description than an assertion of status. Calling the work “complete” is obviously intended to give it a higher value than previous versions—but why should “literal” have seemed to Mardrus an effective way of enhancing the status of his work?

It wasn’t a slip: Mardrus’s preface emphasizes and magnifies the meaning of his subtitle:

Only one honest and logical method of translation exists: impersonal, barely modulated literalism … It is the greatest guarantee of truth … The reader will find here a pure, inflexible word-for-word version. The Arabic text has simply changed alphabet: here it is in French writing, that’s all …
⁹

Mardrus was not a conventional translation theorist, and scholars of Middle Eastern languages claimed that he was not a translator, either. A professor of Arabic at the Sorbonne demonstrated that there were no textual sources for many passages and stories in Mardrus’s entertaining and readable compilation. But Mardrus was a personage on the Parisian cultural scene and would not suffer such slings and arrows without returning fire. Friends came to his defense: André Gide argued that despite the demonstrations of Professor Gaudefroy-Demombynes, Mardrus’s work was “more authentic than the original.”
¹⁰The translator’s own riposte built on Gide’s extraordinary claim. Academic critics learned Arabic in the classroom, not from living in the Middle East.

To carry out a translation of this kind properly, to give a definitive reflection of the Arabic mind and its genius … you must be born and you must have lived in the Arabic world; … to translate decently the spirit and the letter of stories of this kind, you must have heard them spoken out loud in a local accent, with ethnic gestures and appropriate intonation by storytellers in full possession of their material.
¹¹

Mardrus’s translation was therefore the “literal” version of an essentially oral source. His written word in French stands for the spoken word of Arabic culture. If academic critics insist on having a textual source for the authentic
Arabian Nights
, which he wrote, well, no problem: “One day, in order to please M. Demombynes, I want to settle once and for all the Arabic text of
The Arabian Nights
by translating my French translation into Arabic.”

What stands out from this literary squabble is that the idea of what a literal translation consists of is culturally conditioned to a high degree. Mardrus wanted to say that his work was authentic, that it gave the true voice of the Arabic culture that he rightly or wrongly regarded as his special native privilege to possess. His solution to the argument—to manufacture a source to give textual scholars the evidence they demanded—may appear quite nutty, but it is not illogical from Mardrus’s point of view.

What all other Western commentators mean by “literal translation,” on the other hand, is unrelated to authenticity, truthfulness, or plainness of expression. It really refers only to the written form of words, and even more particularly to the representation of words in an alphabetic script. When that technology for the preservation of thought was still relatively new, and for those many centuries when it was not widely shared and was used for a restricted range of needs and pursuits (law, religion, philosophy, mathematics, astronomy, and, occasionally, the entertainment of the elite), it made sense to attach high prestige to the writtenness of written texts.

But in a world of near-universal literacy, that’s to say, for the last two or three generations, where alphabetic script is used for entirely ordinary tasks (to label packaged food; to advertise underwear; and to write blogs, horror comics, and pulp fiction), the fact that something is worthy of being written down in letters gives it no added value at all. “Literal” isn’t “Word Magic” anymore, it’s just a hangover from the past. The terms of debate about translation and meaning need to be updated, and the long-lasting scrap between literal and free should now be laid to rest.

However, there is one important area where the transposition of meanings at the level of individual words is a valuable, inescapable tool: in school and, more particularly, in foreign-language lessons.

There are many different ways of teaching languages. The Ottomans rounded up youngsters in conquered lands and brought them back as slaves to be trained as
dil o

lan
, or “language boys,” in Istanbul. Modern direct methods are gentler but rely on the same understanding of how languages are best learned—through total immersion in a
bain linguistique
, a kind of baptism of the brain.

Throughout the period of learned Latin in Western Europe, immersion was not an option. There was no environment in which everybody spoke Latin as a native tongue, and so the language had to be taught by teachers, in classrooms, through writing. Reprising Roman methods in the teaching of Greek, the European language-teaching tradition was heavily skewed toward the use of translation as the means of imparting written skills in the foreign tongue, and also as a means of assessing students’ progress toward that aim. The teaching of modern European languages in schools and universities got off the ground toward the end of the nineteenth century and borrowed its methods from the translation-based traditions in the teaching of Latin and Greek. It is generally reckoned to have been a disaster. However, if the aim of learning Latin (or French, or German) is to be able to read texts in that language fluently and also perhaps to be able to compose and thus to correspond with other users of Latin or French or German (whose native languages may be quite varied), then translation and composition skills are quite appropriate educational aims.

Translation-based language teaching is no longer in fashion, but its ghost still inhabits a number of misconceptions about what translation is or should be.

Teaching a foreign language when an actual linguistic environment is not available and in the absence of technologies that allow a linguistic environment to be simulated (television, radio, film, sound recording, and the Web) was obliged to rely on writing—on slates or on chalkboards, in exercise books or in print. With only those tools available it’s not obvious how to explain that the expression y