Translating Others (Volume 2)

Theo Hermans

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317640417
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Both in the sheer breadth and in the detail of their coverage the essays in these two volumes challenge hegemonic thinking on the subject of translation. Engaging throughout with issues of representation in a postmodern and postcolonial world, Translating Others investigates the complex processes of projection, recognition, displacement and 'othering' effected not only by translation practices but also by translation studies as developed in the West. At the same time, the volumes document the increasing awareness the the world is peopled by others who also translate, often in ways radically different from and hitherto largely ignored by the modes of translating conceptualized in Western discourses.

The languages covered in individual contributions include Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, Hindi, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Latin, Rajasthani, Somali, Swahili, Tamil, Tibetan and Turkish as well as the Europhone literatures of Africa, the tongues of medieval Europe, and some major languages of Egypt's five thousand year history. Neighbouring disciplines invoked include anthropology, semiotics, museum and folklore studies, librarianship and the history of writing systems.

Contributors to Volume 2: Paul Bandia, Red Chan, Sukanta Chaudhuri, Annmarie Drury, Ruth Evans, Fabrizio Ferrari, Daniel Gallimore, Hephzibah Israel, John Tszpang Lai, Kenneth Liu-Szu-han, Ibrahim Muhawi, Martin Orwin, Carol O'Sullivan, Saliha Parker, Stephen Quirke and Kate Sturge.

4 Memory and Emergence

Translation Choices across Five Thousand Years

Egyptian, Greek and Arabic Libraries in a Land of Many Languages

STEPHEN QUIRKE

University College London (UCL), UK

Abstract: The encyclopaedic and multilinguistic embrace of the newly launched Biblioteca Alexandrina presents a radical contrast to its Greek-dominated predecessors in Hellenistic and Roman Period Alexandria. These in turn belong to a five thousand year history of book collections in Egypt. This paper addresses the potential for exploring translation choices in the longue durée offered by the history of writing on the Nile, from the invention of paper around 3000 BCE to the vibrant culture of the book in contemporary Egypt. Although archaeological and historical evidence is limited, research questions may be raised on the number of scripts and languages present in ancient and medieval libraries, and factors influencing the decisions by the keepers of cultural memory in each period, faced with the following choices: which writings to keep, and from which languages, and which of three options to pursue within the spectrum of communicating content from other languages – (1) direct, to retain the original, (2) indirect, to translate each single original, or (3) reductive, to produce a summary out of multiple original sources.

This paper was prompted in part from the observation in Saliha Paker’s abstract, elsewhere in these volumes, on non-translation in Ottoman Turkey. The empty set is often omitted from research results, but seems to me crucial to definitions of practice, and for this reason the option of not translating, alongside translating, attracted me in considering the universal library in its Egyptian setting. The ancient Egyptian material relevant to translation provides few outright answers, but, in an echo of the aspirations expressed by Doris Bachmann-Medick (in these volumes), it offers some promising shock therapy for the cultural seismographers.

Library myths

Alexandria is one of the great cities of modern Egypt and the Mediterranean, but, as represented in Western scholarship, its most famous institution is more fiction than fact. This notion may appall both Europeans and Egyptians. How can the Alexandria library not exist? Surely Athenaeus of Naukratis told us 1800 years ago: “Why need I even speak, concerning the number of books, the establishment of libraries, and the collection in the Hall of the Muses, since they are all in men’s memories?” I came across a citation of this passage on a webpage of notes by Gregory Crane, a page on which he adds his own observation that: “There is scant data about the whereabouts, layout, holdings, organization, administration, and physical structure of the place”. In other words, the Alexandria library of Western myth has no existence of any tangible substance in the material world. Certainly, the spectacular, stormy marriage of Pharaonic palace institutions and ancient Greek polis may have produced one of the greatest libraries in recorded history. Yet, in contrast to the modern library, this ancient book store was not an independent institution, but an adjunct to the Alexandria Mouseion, which, in turn, was not a store and gallery of objects, but an academy of philologists (Fraser 1972: 312–19). The colossal achievements of the Mouseion and its library seem to me tarnished by misrepresentation, most particularly by the negative impact of certain assumptions constantly rewoven into the Western myth: that the scope of the library was encyclopaedic; that its size was unprecedented; that it was of essentially Greek inspiration; that it was essential to the Greek world of learning for a millennium; and that it was destroyed at the Arab conquest of Egypt – the last of these being the most dearly held in the West, including among its academic élites, and the most objectionable and dangerous in our contemporary political climate.

The surviving evidence from Hellenistic Alexandria is mainly indirect, often preserved only in manuscript copies from periods substantially later than date of composition. Nevertheless, the intense interest in Alexandria encourages research questions relevant to the study of all ancient and medieval libraries, on the numbers of scripts and languages present, and on the factors influencing decisions by the keepers of cultural memory in each period. Those tacitly political keepers faced specific choices: which writings to keep, and from which languages, and which of three options to pursue within the spectrum of communicating content from other languages – (1) direct, to retain the original, (2) indirect, to translate each single original, or (3) reductive, to produce a new version out of plural original sources. In the Hellenistic and Roman libraries of Alexandria the following choices appear to have been made for each of those three generalized options:

(1) There seems to be no evidence that the direct option was ever taken: languages other than the Greek of the ruling family and class may have been absent.

(2) The indirect option is known to have been taken, in the case of Hebrew, with the Septuagint version of scripture, translated by committee on commission for the Alexandria Mouseion library, according to the ‘Letter of Aristeas’ (a pseudepigraphical work, perhaps to be dated to the second century BCE (Honigman 2003)).

(3) The Egyptian language seems to have fared less well, Egyptian writings being subjected only to the reductive option, with the com missioning of Greek language compendia of Egyptian knowledge for the Alexandria library, in the histories and geographies attributed to an Egyptian named in Greek sources as Manetho (Waddell 1940).

These very different reactions to plural language communities reveal specific political and cultural attitudes, with powerful effects on the cultural memory of each linguistic group both regarding itself and regarding the others.

Egypt appears today, and seems always to have been, a cosmopolitan land. In white mythologies we might mythopoetically claim Egypt as the ‘and’ of East and West, of Africa and Asia, of North and South, or as a supreme example of multilingual society and of the heteroglot character of stratified societies. I would not encourage such claims, because I consider it a more productive aim not to move the center but to abolish it. Still, in Western thought the image of Egypt might, on the model of late twentieth-century reception of the Bakhtin circle, constitute the supreme instance of the public square (Hirschkop 1999: 249–271). I interpret that square as a space where everyone has and expresses what they think is their own opinion, without any one of them imposing their particular hierarchy of value on the rest, and each in awareness of the other perspectives. Egypt is both cosmopolitan, with its own continuing Muslim, Christian and Jewish histories, and, in contemporary Western debate, contested territory between Eurocentric, Afrocentric and nationalist representations of the past and present (Meskell 1998; Scham 2003). In other words, Egypt operates in the contemporary imagination as a hotly active forum of competing stances, its conceptual boundaries even more tightly drawn than the stark line between Nile Valley and Sahara desert. Together, then, the full series of competing claimants can join at the Nile, just as Pushkin opens the Copper Horseman with Peter the Great looking over the Neva and beyond, declaiming “здесь запируем на просторе…”, ‘here let us fasten on space..’; and, as the course of the poem implies, on the expanse of time.

Egypt has a written history extending back five thousand years, a century short of the longest history of writing, that of Iraq. This history invites into the square classicist, Egyptologist, prehistorian and medievalist, alongside the ‘popular cultural’ imagination. Such a vast, popular and therefore stridently politicized chronotope ought to offer excellent potential for probing the political dimension in translation – from Egypt in itself first, and then, secondarily, in its often violent encounter with another long duration, that of the ancient, medieval and modern Europes.

Political selections and agendas may reveal themselves in the overlap between two objects of study: (1) absences of translation, taking the empty set to be as powerfully definitional as the category of ‘mistake’, and (2) institutionalization, as one thematic plane of human history.

The library presents verbalizing communication in its most institutionalized form. Although there are six issues cited at the end of my abstract, all arise from the single practical question, that of library scope: what was in the libraries of Egypt as a nation, as the first nation-state, down the fifty centuries, the dozen long periods of this history, and especially in the three longer epochs defined by the единый язык, hegemonic language (Hirschkop 1999: 254–58), of the day – first Egyptian, then Greek, finally Arabic? The dates of these three successive long durations may be rounded off as follows:

language of government	Date
Egyptian	3000 – 332 BCE
Greek	332 BCE – 642 CE
Arabic	642 CE – present

Two observations may be made on such a chronological summary:

(1) it is simplified for the purpose of identifying dominance, so it elides the trilingualism of Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine and Early Islamic Egypt, and it risks reinforcing generalized, but generally literally read, caesuras in historiography; and

(2) it places Greek, and so that set of presumed norms in genres evoked yesterday, in a sequence of variables – you need neither start with Plato and Aristotle, nor continue with them, but instead you can choose a place or no place for them: we can go excavating alternative histories for displacing evil powers.

Typologies of chronotopes

The combined archaeology and history of part-literate societies is conditioned by the chronically imperfect preservation of its source material. Partial preservation foregrounds not only the fragment, but also its materiality, producing a different disciplinary habitus, one without which, arguably, the combination of archaeology and history is not useful. This part-historical part-archaeological mode of enquiry involves above all a specific sense of time, and the relation of the enquirer to time. This produces a different hierarchy of objects of study, imposed by their condition, typically more than less fragmentary, by comparison with the subject-matter dominant in other disciplines. By way of example, my landscape for translating a literary narrative from 1800 BCE bears the double imprint of the fragmentary condition of the work and the place of that fragmentary work in a fragmented and glaringly incomplete corpus. In addition, on a plainly quantitative level, the blocks of time in this historical-archaeological study tend to be forced to be different in size from those in geology and prehistory on the one hand, and more recent history and sociology on the other. Hopefully no-one would claim that histories of better documented places and times do not also enjoy the option of studying ‘long duration’. However, the historical-archaeological material brings, not the option, but the necessity of studying the fragment and its inscription in longer durations. The necessity fosters a certain regular difference in consciousness, in academic practice (the Bourdieu ‘habitus’, if that term is not mainly a cloak to protect those shy of overtly Marxist terminology). If an historical-archaeological mode has a distinctive contribution to offer, I see it in the regularity of this type of place-time block.

In the first of the three blocks, the ‘Egyptian language period’, major developments in the spoken language led, with some time-lag, to new versions in the written language, and, though only rarely in the surviving written sources, to translation of earlier writings into a later language phase. Such updatings include translations of Old Egyptian religious rituals into Middle Egyptian, when Middle Egyptian became considered appropriate for most of the more formal and sacred content. These rituals survive over two thousand years, with the script, because they are still used: active life, not archiving, here determines survival (Assmann 1990). Outside the religious domain, there are ‘translations’ of Middle Egyptian literature into Late Egyptian: sometimes the Late Egyptian is written alongside the Middle Egyptian phrase by phrase (Quack 1999). These might only be translatable adequately as Old and modern English, or Latin and Italian, or classical and colloquial Arabic, written side by side. Evidently, the accumulation of blocks of differently patterned time into strata had its effect on ancient Egyptian self-consciousness.

Foreignness and newness

The most extended comment from ancient Egypt on the question of the new in literary writing occurs in a series of excerpts from a Teaching attributed to a man named Khakheperraseneb Ankhu:

If only I had unknown phrases

Sayings that are strange

New and untested words

free of repetition:

not sayings handed down,

spoken by predecessors.

I wring out my body of what it holds,

in releasing all my words.

yet what has been said is repetition

if what w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• 4 Memory and Emergence
• 5 Hearing Voices
• 6 Image and Agency
• Notes on Contributors
• Index