Translating the Perception of Text

Literary Translation and Phenomenology

Clive Scott

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351538626
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Translation often proceeds as if languages already existed, as if the task of the translator were to make an appropriate selection from available resources. Clive Scott challenges this tacit assumption. If the translator is to do justice to himself/herself as a reader, if the translator is to become the creative writer of his/her reading, then the language of translation must be equal to the translators perceptual experience of, and bodily responses to, source texts. Each renewal of perceptual and physiological contact with a text involves a renewal of the ways we think language and use our expressive faculties (listening, speaking, writing). Phenomenology and particularly the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty underpins this new approach to translation. The task of the translator is tirelessly to develop new translational languages, ever to move beyond the bilingual into the multilingual, and always to remember that language is as much an active instrument of perception as an object of perception. Clive Scott is Professor Emeritus of European Literature at the University of East Anglia, and a Fellow of the British Academy.

PART I

Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology Of Language

CHAPTER 1

Merleau-Ponty: Language, Painting and Translation¹

The Possibility of Translation

What Merleau-Ponty has to say directly about the practice of translation is very little: his vision of language, and of languages, leads him to conclude that they are untranslatable. But this is a position which, judging by other comments he makes, he is not entirely happy to occupy; and besides, the views that he does express both about language and about painting, are richly suggestive for approaches to translation and the ways in which one might envisage the interaction of languages.

Like Gadamer, Merleau-Ponty seems to propose as axiomatic that the price of the true possession of a language is the impossibility of translation. To live our relationship with the world fully and fruitfully, we must live our relationship with language in an equally fundamental and ‘original’ (from our origins) way, and this means that there is only one language, our native language, which we can inhabit thoroughgoingly:

La prédominance des voyelles dans une langue, des consonnes dans une autre, les systèmes de construction et de syntaxe ne représenteraient pas autant de conventions arbitraires pour exprimer la même pensée, mais plusieurs manières pour le corps humain de célébrer le monde et finalement pour le vivre. De là viendrait que le sens plein d’une langue n’est jamais traduisible dans une autre. Nous pouvons parler plusieurs langues, mais l’une d’elles reste toujours celle dans laquelle nous vivons. Pour assimiler complètement une langue, il faudrait assumer le monde qu’elle exprime et l’on n’appartient jamais à deux mondes à la fois (2010: 228).

[The predominance of vowels in one language, or of consonants in another, and constructional and syntactical systems, do not represent so many arbitrary conventions for the expression of one and the same idea, but several ways for the human body to sing the world’s praises and in the last resort to live it. Hence the full meaning of a language is never translatable into another. We may speak several languages but one of them always remains the one in which we live. In order completely to assimilate a language, it would be necessary to make the world which it expresses one’s own, and one never does belong to two worlds at once (1962: 187)].

My own view, as it develops, will argue not only that it is translation’s business to open up differences, rather than defend an exclusive singularity, but that translation does enable the reader to inhabit several worlds at once.

Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis² has as its corollary that translation is possible, but only if the conventional meanings of language, rather than the deeper, ‘gestural’ meanings alluded to here, are engaged. But of course the outcome would only be an endorsement of that conventionality. This quotation also begins to reveal that there are, in fact, two aspects to Merleau-Ponty’s supposition of untranslatability: (i) individuals can only live their perceptual experience of the world to its limits in one language; (ii) the distinctive development of different languages and the acceptance of the Saussurean vision of language systems sustained by the unbreakable network of differentia (negative meaning) (1972: 163–69), make it impossible to build a bridge between them:

La plus exacte caractéristique d’un mot est d’être ‘ce que les autres ne sont pas’. Il n’y a pas de signification d’un mot, mais de tous les mots les uns par rapport aux autres; jamais notre présent ne pourra être le même que celui d’une langue sans futur; c’est pour cela qu’on ne peut jamais traduire exactement une langue dans une autre. Ainsi le phénomène linguistique est cette coexistence d’une multiplicité de signes, qui, pris individuellement, n’ont pas de sens, mais qui se définissent à partir d’une totalité dont ils sont eux-mêmes les constituants (2001, 83).

[The most exact characteristic of a word is ‘what the others are not’. Signification exists not for a word but for all words in relation to one another. Our present tense could never be the same as the present tense of a language without a future tense. It is for this reason that one can never exactly translate from one language to another. Thus the linguistic phenomenon is this coexistence of a multiplicity of signs. These signs have no meaning when taken individually but can be defined from a totality for which they themselves are the constituents (1973a, 98–99)].

My own refinement of this argument in relation to translation would be that text creates the conditions in which the totality is re-defined, not as the totality of the langue, but as the totality of the languages which the text makes available. And I would not want to say that the limits of text constitute the limits of that potential totality: the world of the text is in dialogue with the world of the reader. In such a dialectical totality, the differential mechanism can cross linguistic borders, since all languages, linguistic and typographic, are enjoyed in the same mutual, experiential effort of language (langage).

But we may begin to identify a slight opportunity to deflect Merleau-Ponty’s arguments from the finality of their conclusion, an opportunity provided by Merleau-Ponty himself. What can we gather about Merleau-Ponty’s more relenting and accommodating view of translation? Even in ‘Le Corps comme expression et la parole’ [The Body as Expression, and Speech] (Part One, Chapter 6 of Phénoménologie de la perception) [Phenomenology of Perception], in which the untranslatability of languages is, as we have seen, unequivocally asserted, he characterizes listening — ‘une reprise de la pensée d’autrui à travers la parole’ (2010: 218) [a taking up of others’ thought through speech (1962: 179)] — thus:

Et comme, en pays étranger, je commence à comprendre le sens des mots par leur place dans un contexte d’action et en participant à la vie commune, — de même un texte philosophique encore mal compris me révèle au moins un certain ‘style’ — soit un style spinoziste, criticiste ou phénoménologique, — qui est la première esquisse de son sens […] (2010: 219).

[And as, in a foreign country, I begin to understand the meaning of words through their place in a context of action, and by taking part in a communal life — in the same way an as yet imperfectly understood piece of philosophical writing discloses to me at least a certain ‘style’ — either a Spinozist, critical or phenomenological one — which is the first draft of its meaning (1962: 179).

By naturalizing ourselves into the foreign, by processes of existential empathy, by catching the ‘accent’, we can begin to find our way towards the new and unfamiliar. In this way, a foreign language is like any other new language, whether it be philosophy, painting or music: ‘Tout langage en somme s’enseigne lui-même et importe son sens dans l’esprit de l’auditeur’ (2010: 219) [In fact, every language conveys its own teaching and carries its meaning into the listener’s mind (1962: 179)].

Elsewhere, in La Conscience et l’acquisition du langage [Consciousness and the Acquisition of Language], he approvingly quotes from the work of Joseph Vendryes [Le Langage (Paris: La Renaissance du Livre, 1921); Language: A Linguistic Introduction to History, trans. Paul Radin (1951)]. With a view akin to that of Walter Benjamin expressed in ‘Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers’ [The Task of the Translator], Vendryes argues that languages are not in an achieved state, but are reaching beyond themselves. But while for Benjamin languages reach (back) for a pre-Babelian, edenic undividedness, for a ‘reine Sprache’ (Mallarmé’s ‘supreme’ language), Vendryes is more concerned with single languages reaching for the totality of their expressiveness in any particular instance of use: ‘Une langue est un idéal qui se cherche, une réalité en puissance, un devenir qui n’arrive jamais (quoted by Merleau-Ponty, 2001: 79) [A language is an ideal which can be sought, but never found; a potential reality never actually realized; a becoming which never comes (1973a: 93)]. French is a language which exists just beyond the reach of all French speakers, which is never fully present to itself. When Merleau-Ponty says that translation can never achieve the full meaning of the source language (SL)/source text (ST), or exactly translate from one language to another, one might suppose that the full or exact meaning is never in fact available: Saussure is all very well, but the synchronic language systems he posits are (a) not graspable in their totality — we cannot work from the system to specific instances, only from specific instances to a putative wholeness;³ and (b) never fully formed — indeed beneath Merleau-Ponty’s Saussureanism, we might suspect an Impressionist perceptual ethos. So perhaps, after all, Merleau-Ponty’s notion of translation adds up to the approximate/incomplete/unachieved in pursuit of the equally approximate/incomplete/unachieved:

Les linguistes disent quelquefois que, puisqu’il n’y a à la rigueur aucun moyen de marquer dans l’histoire la date où, par exemple, le latin cesse et le français commence, il n’y a qu’un seul langage et presque qu’une seule langue en travail continuel. Disons plus généralement que la tentative continue de l’expression fonde une seule histoire, — comme la prise de notre corps sur tout objet possible fonde un seul espace (1960a: 87).

[The linguists sometimes say that since there is strictly no means of marking the date in history when, for example, Latin ends and French begins, not only are specific tongues all forms of language in general, but there is almost only one specific tongue, constantly fermenting change within itself. Let us say more generally that the continued attempt at expression founds one single history, as the hold our body has upon every possible object founds one single space (1964b: 70)].

However much Merleau-Ponty opposes universalist notions of language, and in particular the proposal of a universal grammar, he does not rule out ‘sympathetic’ communications between languages.

The real question is how to redeem translation from operations of decoding and encoding,⁴ from purely mechanistic views of language, views that make language an available resource and repository, outside the translator (in dictionaries, grammars and thesauruses), ‘dans un circuit de phénomènes en troisième personne’ (2010: 214) [in a circuit of third person phenomena (1962: 175)], to be drawn on at will, in order to solve linguistic problems posed by the ST. This brand of translation uses words in ways that are already familiar to us and tends to make the ST, to its own detriment, more intelligible (more banal? more second order?). It is a process of matching: does what is supplied by X (target language (TL)) match what is given in Y (ST/SL)? In other words, it is difficult to imagine this kind of translation using language as a manifestation of the speaking subject, as the expression of psycho-physiological impulses/intentions. If translation’s function is indeed the renewal of language, the renewal of our apprehension of language and, through it, of the world, then how does one produce a translation if not by the thorough affirmation of one’s readerly being? Let us not forget that every typographical choice, every different disposition of text on the page, is a new mindset, a new perceptual landscape, a new apprehension of language, a new environment for reading.

When we speak of psycho-physiological impulses/intentions in the apprehension of language, of a language, what is it we have in mind? First, our understanding of language, or an instance of it (text), is driven by our desires for it, for what it might be/mean (where these two are indistinguishable). In this sense, any ST is a text which has made a particular choice about its own materials and is still incomplete in relation to what it means/wants to mean. Secondly and relatedly, reading is driven also by impulses of creative misapprehension (but our apprehension is also partly constituted by misapprehension): verbal hallucination, paronomasia, pun, misappropriation, private association. Translation criticism tends to be ruthless with mistranslation — what other criteria has it got at its disposal? — but it needs to be mindful of the possible ‘deeper’ sources of mistranslation, those that lie beyond ‘incompetence’. Thirdly, translation is a special manner of rewriting the ST, a rewriting which, as it were, emerges from within the translator, him/herself located within the ST’s genetic and disseminatory processes. This withinness is in part conferred by the reader of the translation who reconstructs the linguo-perceptual processes which occur in the translator. Reading, whether of ST or target text (TT), is like learning a language.

Inhabiting Language

To speak of being within language is to speak of the way in which one exercises language, the way in which language is a psycho-physiological faculty of the individual: ‘De la même manière, je n’ai pas besoin de me représenter le mot pour le savoir et pour le prononcer. Il suffit que j’en possède l’essence articulaire et sonore comme l’une des modulations, l’un des usages possibles de mon corps (2010: 220) [In the same way I do not need to visualize the word in order to know and pronounce it. It is enough that I possess its articulatory and acoustic style as one of the modulations, one of the possible uses of my body (1962: 180)]. That articulatory and acoustic essence/style is an ‘intervolvement’ of the word and my voice, what the word sounds like and how I hear it. And nobody hears it like me since it is individuated by my body. This is the word’s existential meaning. We must always think of language as ‘originating’, as the breaking of a primordial silence.

‘Ainsi, la parole, chez celui qui parle, ne traduit pas une pensée déjà faite, mais l’accomplit. A plus forte raison faut-il admettre que celui qui écoute reçoit la pensée de la parole elle-même’ (2010: 217–18) [Thus speech, in the speaker, does not translate ready-made thought but accomplishes it. A fortiori must it be recognized that the listener receives thought from speech itself (1962: 178)]. Merleau-Ponty is here speaking of a first-order ‘parole authentique’, an authentic speech ‘qui formule pour la première fois’ (2010: 217, footnote 2) [which formulates for the first time (1962: 178, footnote 1)]. The processing of language is thus sense-giving rather than sense-recuperating: meaning is a project of language. The danger is that translation concentrates on the recuperation of meaning and overlooks its own task of generating sense, of being part of a sense-generative dialogue.

What Merleau-Ponty’s vision of language presented in ‘Le Corps comme expression et la parole’ leaves crucially out of account is the written,⁵ crucially because it is the written as visible code (whether of speech or not hardly matters) which re-establishes in perception the separateness of language, the matricial rather than transcriptive potentiality of language, and makes possible the alienation of the human voice. Where in writing is the authentic to be discovered, particularly if it is not felt to be a transcription of speech? If one is Merleau-Pontian by persuasion then one needs to devise a practice with language that endows writing with an existential significance, as a mode of being-in-the-world. What I have in view is a bending of the written towards the graphic. For me this involves embracing and exacerbating the materiality of language, to both re-establish the connection between the written and the paralinguistic, but also to extend the paralanguage of the visible.

Merleau-Ponty finds attractive Saussure’s ‘negative’ semantics — in the discrete elements of language there are not so much meanings as differences of meaning⁶ — largely because, for Merleau-Ponty, the process of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• A Note on the Text
• List of Illustrations
• Preface: A Brief Declaration
• Introduction
• Part I: Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Language
• Part II: Literary Translation as Phenomenology
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index