Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

To ask whether what Queneau did with Ronsard is a translation or something else is to ask a question about the meaning of words—specifically, the meaning of the word translation. That’s an inquiry that can lead us down many quaint historical, linguistic, and cultural back alleys. In medieval times, for example, a “translation” occurred when the relics of a saint were taken from one shrine to another (the Russian word перевод retains the same sense). In the ocean, a translation wave is one that transmits forward movement, and in law translation is the transfer of property. No end of other entertaining contexts for the word can be found: the way a ceiling crab walks (translation latérale, in French), direct passage from earth to heaven (the translation of Enoch), and so forth. Roman Jakobson, a linguist of great renown, tried to sort out the field by dividing it into three. He distinguished translation between media (“transposition”) from translation between different states of the same language (“intralingual translation”), and both of those from “translation proper”—translation between languages. Jakobson’s attempt at clarification actually introduced a great muddle that has to be tackled before the end of this book.

Many cultural practices have a broad structure that can be described, like translation, as consisting essentially of “before” and “after.” Knitting, cooking, and the production of automobiles are processes that start with some source material (a ball of wool, edible ingredients, or a range of separately manufactured parts) and end up with something that is radically different (a sweater, a meal, or a car). English is flexible enough to allow us to say without risk of being seriously misunderstood that our partner has translated a few dozen tubes of dried durum wheat into a plate of spaghetti—or to say that by putting on a tuxedo I have translated myself into a swell—but users of English are wise enough to know that such statements have no relevance to translation itself.

In like manner, what a playwright does when he adapts a narrative text for performance onstage has no more relevance to translation than knitting does. Jakobson’s proposal to regard switching media as a form of translation is a red herring, and it’s not clear to me why he should ever have come up with it. But his many readers over the past decades have swallowed the bait and treat stage and film adaptation of novels and other prose as particular instances of translation itself.

Making a movie calls on numerous skills and resources that have no connection with any of the things translators do or use. To call David Lean’s Doctor Zhivago a translation of Pasternak’s novel is not only to disregard the specificity of film art but to make such woolly use of the word translation as to fit it to refer to any kind of transformation at all. Knitting included.

The popularity of the idea that everything is translation is no doubt a contemporary reflection of an ancient tradition of thought—in fact, an ancient tradition of thought about thought. It was obvious even to the Greeks that if words began as the proper names of things, then the many words that do not name things that can be seen in the world must be the names of mental states. Call them ideas. In fact, even for things that can be seen, the word does not name any one of them but only that which allows all of them to be seen as instances of an idea. Thus tree is not the proper name of this oak or that aspen, it names the idea of a tree—a mental representation of treeness that allows all actual trees to be recognized as such. In this way of thinking, all linguistic expressions are the external form of thoughts. What we do when we speak to each other is to transmit mental images through a process of translation, thus:

This diagram of “telementation,” or thought transmission, is actually taken from Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics, which, despite its profound innovations, firmly maintained the long tradition of treating language as the dress of thought.