Mapping Memory in Translation

Siobhan Brownlie

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781137408945
• eBook ISBN: 9781137408952
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book presents a map of the application of memory studies concepts to the study of translation. A range of types of memory from personal memory and electronic memory to national and transnational memory are discussed, and links with translation are illustrated by detailed case studies.

1

Translation and Memory

Language and memory are intimately bound together, for not only is language a memorial phenomenon passed down through generations, but memory of the past and traditions are embedded in language and in linguistic products. In her book on the complex historically changing life of cities and language use in urban contexts (focusing on Calcutta, Trieste, Barcelona and Montreal), Simon writes of how languages are vessels of historical memory: ‘They reanimate the ghosts of the past, they replay the stories of battles lost and won. They affirm entitlement or they speak of displacement’ (Simon 2012, 159). ‘Translation’ may be conceived of in different ways, but it usually involves language in some manner, and therefore will necessarily involve memory. Our starting point is that translation and memory seem to be an obvious combination for research purposes.

‘Translation’ is potentially a very broad concept and domain of study, if we take translation to mean any kind of transfer and transformation. Similarly, ‘memory’ can be taken very broadly as any kind of relation to the past. In this chapter I first consider how ‘translation’ will be dealt with in this monograph. I then introduce some memory concepts and approaches that have been adopted by translation studies and comparative literature researchers whose work is discussed here. Following this, I introduce the approach to memory that is taken in this work with an outline of the content of the chapters in the book.

Translation

Among the many conceptions of ‘translation’, I focus on three. A central meaning of the term ‘translation’ is interlingual translation, translation between languages. Of course, as Naoki Sakai (2006) points out, the way in which we commonly talk about translation between two languages masks the fact that the unity and stability of a single language are a myth. The common representation of the act of translation as communication between two languages contributes indeed to creating borders between languages, as signalled by the terminology ‘source language’ and ‘target language’. Sakai (2006, 71) argues that this regime of translation is a construct of modernity that valorized the national entity and therefore the concept of unified national languages. In reality linguistic borders are historically fluid and porous, and within what is recognized as a single language there is much heterogeneity that translators have to negotiate. Similarly, cultural knowledge is not unified or confined to one sphere, hence the commonly used terms ‘source culture’ and ‘target culture’ mask the reality of a complex and fluid heterogeneity. The inherent incommensurability of differences is smoothed over by discourse on the possibility of translation, and the concept of a single language/culture remains a powerful one with which we still work today as an idealized form. In this monograph all case studies have interlingual translation as their basis, but interlingual translation necessarily involves other senses of translation.

Translation can be understood as a fundamentally important process in human cultural endeavours. Bella Brodzki (2007, 2) defines translation as an act of ‘critical and dynamic displacement’:

an act of identification that is not imitation, translation hearkens back to the original or source text, and elicits what might otherwise remain recessed or unarticulated, enabling the source text to live beyond itself, to exceed its own limitations.

This approach is inspired by Walter Benjamin’s (2000) and Jacques Derrida’s (1985) thoughts on translation, whereby original and translation are in a relation of mutual debt: the translation depends on the original for its existence and the original depends on the translation for its survival, which necessarily involves transmutation. The process is potentially never-ending, since dynamic otherness and change are principles of language and history. Brodzki (2007, 189) sees such a process as not only being applicable to texts, but also informing our critical cultural operations and spheres of thought and practice. For want of a better term, we may call Brodzki’s perspective critical processual translation. The abstract process-focused definition allows Brodzki to understand translation as multiple types of cultural transaction involving transfer, interpretation and transformation, not only as the movement from one language to another and from one text to another. In her book Can These Bones Live? (2007), Brodzki discusses case studies that focus on various types of transfer involving critical processual translation: movement from one genre or medium to another, movement from personal experience of a past event to a text, and transmission from one generation of people to another. She discusses literary texts in different languages and contexts that have adopted and transformed an earlier genre, the American slave narrative; the writer Jorge Semprun transferring his autobiographical experiences into written accounts; and Claude Morhange-Bégué’s transposition of her mother’s oral account into a textual account, which is also a case of intergenerational transmission of knowledge (these last two cases will be discussed in more detail subsequently).

The term cultural translation has come to prominence in recent years in disciplines other than translation studies, and it is also used by translation studies specialists. Several definitions are useful in this book’s case studies. For translation specialist Maria Tymoczko (2007), ‘cultural translation’ means translating cultural aspects of source-text content into a target-language text; that is, dealing with the cultural issues involved in undertaking interlingual translation. Translators face significant challenges. First, there are varying degrees of cultural asymmetry between ‘source’ and ‘target’ cultures: environmental factors, behaviours, social organization, beliefs, values and knowledge may be very different in each cultural sphere, and thus the two languages may not provide ready linguistic equivalents for the translator to use. A second and more fundamental set of difficulties raised by Tymoczko (2007, 226–228) are the questions of understanding and interpretation. Drawing on Bourdieu’s theory of habitus, Tymoczko argues that cultural knowledge of a society is difficult for both insiders and outsiders of that social group. An outsider might not have the capacity to understand the set of social practices and attitudes of a very different group, and may impose inappropriate presuppositions; inside knowledge is required. However, an insider is in a sense too close to his or her own culture, thus takes many things for granted and is not necessarily the most perspicacious observer. There are no definite answers to this conundrum apart from the need for translators to undertake highly self-reflexive cultural comparisons and knowledge gathering.

The issue of the insider/outsider position of the translator and the tasks of understanding and explaining the alien display a clear affinity with the work of the ethnographer. And indeed, the term ‘cultural translation’ was coined from the mid-twentieth century in the field of anthropology. Talal Asad (1986) locates possibly the earliest use of the term ‘translation’ to describe the anthropologist’s role in the work of Godfrey Lienhardt:

The problem of describing to others how members of a remote tribe think then begins to appear largely as one of translation, of making the coherence primitive thought has in the languages it really lives in, as clear as possible in our own. (Lienhardt 1954, quoted in Asad 1986, 142)

The Waitangi case explained in the Preface actually involves the reverse scenario, whereby British concepts needed to be explained to the indigenous people. In either scenario, ‘translators’ act as intermediaries who may either contribute to imperialist agendas, or may also contribute to cultural enrichment through introducing newness. Newness evokes a more recent use of the term ‘cultural translation’ in cultural and postcolonial studies, initially by the well-known theorist Homi Bhabha (1994). Here it is a matter of migrants’ experience. The act of cultural translation consists of the relocation of cultural items/system/thought by repeating and reinscribing them in another cultural sphere. But this does not happen smoothly: migrant culture presents an element of resistance in the process of transformation, dramatizing untranslatability, and there is a moment of overwhelming and alienating of the migrant cultural tradition, but also negation as negotiation. The result of the process is an ambivalent state of continuous splitting and hybridity, an indeterminacy of diasporic identity as the result of cultural difference. Finally, though, this condition of hybridity allows survival and ‘newness comes into the world’ (Bhabha 1994, 227). Like other definitions of ‘cultural translation’ and also ‘critical processual translation’, emphasis is placed on dynamism and transformative force.

Finally, social theorist Gerard Delanty (2009) has used the term ‘cultural translation’ to describe the process of ‘critical cosmopolitanism’, which bears some similarity to Bhabha’s ideas. The core feature of critical cosmopolitanism is that contact with the other institutes change in both oneself and the other as a result of self-problematization and reflexivity; mutual newness is produced. This is theorized for both contact between the global and the local, and within multicultural societies. The painfulness and torturous complexity described by Bhabha are no longer present, but as with Bhabha there is a certain utopian spirit in such writing. Buden (2011) indeed worries that Bhabha’s theorization may romanticize migrants as catalysers of hybridity, failing to address their often underprivileged status. In summary, it seems to be important to retain four aspects with regard to translation and cultural spheres: the quasi-impossibility of translating in any fully satisfactory sense across cultural divergence; the fact that translation nevertheless occurs; the fact that translation occurs in specific historical and cultural contexts; and the fact that translation in itself is not inherently moral or positive: it can be a site of fruitful cultural learning and exciting hybridity, and it can also be a site of manipulation, domination and reinforcement of othering stereotypes.

Linking Memory and Translation

Memory studies is a necessarily immense and somewhat nebulous field, since it encompasses research with a wide range of disciplinary origins: namely, psychology, sociology, history, literary studies, cultural studies, media studies, heritage studies, archaeology, architecture studies and more. The researcher in translation studies must therefore choose concepts from the field that are useful for his or her particular research project. In this section I focus on the work of researchers primarily in translation studies and comparative literature who have engaged with memory approaches and concepts.

Traditionally, memory has been conceived of as a cognitive capacity of the individual person. Cognitive scientists have isolated different types of memory, notably long-term memory and short-term or working memory. Long-term memory includes ‘episodic memory’, the individual’s memory of past events; ‘semantic memory’, the memory of conceptual information; and ‘procedural memory’, the memory of skills learnt through practice. Since translators and interpreters are necessarily bilingual, one relevant topic of investigation has been to study to what extent episodic memory and semantic memory are linked to different languages. Other topics engaged in by psycholinguists concern the representation, organization and processing of words from two languages in bilingual memory (Kroll & de Groot 2005). Process-oriented translation researchers have shown an interest in procedural memory. Using experiment-based methodologies such as think-aloud protocols and more recently keystroke logging and eye-tracking, they have investigated whether there are different modes of operating depending on the level of a translator’s experience and skill; that is, in cases where the translator is an expert or a novice (Halverson 2009). Working memory is obviously of high importance for interpreters. Simultaneous interpreting is a fascinating activity for cognitive researchers: this type of interpreting places a great burden on working memory, because interpreters simultaneously store information and perform other mental operations such as comprehending, translating and producing speech (Kroll & de Groot 2005, 462).

From a personal point of view, the kind of memory that leaves its mark the most heavily in an individual is the memory of traumatic events. Interest in the effect of traumatic memory on behaviour can be traced back to the late nineteenth century, in particular the work of Freud. For Freud, what seems inexplicable in present behaviour can be interpreted by invoking painful and hitherto unacknowledged memories. Freud’s idea of the ‘talking cure’, whereby bringing repressed memories to consciousness is beneficial in order to diminish pathologies, has continued to be influential today in psychotherapy (Whitehead 2009). In the late twentieth century the proliferation of Holocaust memory writing was no doubt due in part to a therapeutic impulse. The academic field of Holocaust studies, however, tended to emphasize the unrepresentability of the Holocaust experience (cf. Caruth 1995). A burgeoning and productive area with respect to current research on translation and memory is that of the translation of Holocaust memoirs and fictional works. Peter Davies (2014) worries about perceiving translation uniquely in the context of early Holocaust studies because of the notion that accounts of the Holocaust are a distortion and a betrayal; in this perspective, translation could be viewed as a double betrayal. In her study of the translation of Robert Antelme’s well-known Holocaust memoir, Sharon Deane-Cox (2013) adopts a concept from Holocaust studies: the ‘secondary witness’. This term arose from the work of psychoanalyst and collector of video-recorded oral Holocaust testimonies, Dori Laub, to describe his role as an empathic listener and witness to the oral testimonies. The secondary witness plays a vital role as receiver, co-constructor and pre-server of memory. Laub notes the imperative need of survivors to tell their story, but also observes that ‘no amount of telling seems ever to do justice to this inner compulsion’ (Laub 1995, 63). It is an interesting and creative move to consider the translator as a ‘secondary witness’ with respect to the author’s recounted experience. Deane-Cox under-takes a close textual comparison of Robert Antelme’s seminal depiction of the concentrationary universe in L’Espèce humaine (1947) and its 1992 English translation. She finds that unfortunately the translation tends to ‘choke’ the memory conveyed by the original text, as it does not conserve its illocutionary force and the elusive and unstable meanings of the testimony. Perhaps Deane-Cox has been influenced in her analysis by the negativity surrounding thinking on translation from a Holocaust studies perspective, but no doubt it is an honest appraisal that the translation is somewhat damaging to the memory conveyed by the memoir, even enacting a kind of forgetting of the source text. Adopting an overtly prescriptive stance, Deane-Cox (2013, 321) calls for translators of such texts to listen with the utmost care to the testimony of the author and to pay close attention to the detailed choices of expression of the traumatic experiences, in order to transmit their illocutionary force in an act of memorial guardianship.

Comparative literature studies of Holocaust literature are not necessarily embedded in negativity. One type of translation context on which Brodzki (2007) focuses is where translation (in a broad sense) allows the survival of memory that is fragile through involving trauma. Brodzki does not stress the impossibility of translation – rather, she is aware of the enormous struggle involved – and in the end her vision is positive, since it is framed by her definition of what I have called critical processual translation, inspired by Benjamin’s notion of translation as survival from his famous preface ‘The Task of the Translator’ (2000). Benjamin’s text illuminates how translation enables the memory of a text or event to survive through providing an afterlife for the text or event. If there is no such iteration, the text or event may be forgotten. Brodzki studies several cases of memory of suffering experienced during World War II. The first case is the tortured transfer from personal memory of the journey to Buchenwald, life in the concentration camp and life afterwards into writing in the work of the well-known Franco-Spanish author Jorge Semprun. Brodzki (2007, 188) highlights the intertextuality of Semprun’s writings: each piece refers to previous works where memories and events are represented differently, signalling that past experiences and particularly trauma are never dealt with once and for all, since they are subject to profound rethinking over time and with changing circumstances. Semprun’s writing challenged the idea that survival was an achieved state. Rather than a frustrated inability to express the past, this view emphasizes the normal memorial process of ongoing reconstruction of the past into the future. Brodzki’s second case is the transfer from a traumatic oral account of a Holocaust survivor mother to the written account by her daughter Claude Morhange-Bégué in Chamberet, a result of secondary witnessing. The French original text has never been published, so the published English translation, Chamberet: Recollections from an Ordinary Childhood (1987), ensures the public survival of the account. The final case represents a line of transmission from Brodzki’s own Polish Holocaust survivor parents’ oral accounts to herself to the reader of her book, illustrating the inherent otherness and yet connectedness with other humans’ experience that make translation as transmutation and memorial survival necessary and possible.

The Benjaminian notion of a text allowing survival of memory has also been an important emphasis in translation studies and comparative literature with respect to memory beyond the World War II context. Bassnett (2003, 294) writes of translation as a bridge between a past text and a new text in future time, which extends the past text to a new readership in a new context. The time and contextual difference (a translation comes after the thing it translates and is necessarily in a different context) mean that translation is always a vehicle of both remembrance and transformation: the work of memory is both performed and diffracted (Brodzki 2007, 112). A translation embodies memory not only of the source text, but also possibly of previous critiques, of previous translations, and of a web of other readings and texts. Furthermore, through multiple different and ongoing translations and other types of rewriting, a diversity of diffracted afterlives is produced. Bassnett (2003) accentuates the state of the translation as encompassing both memorial repetition and newness by referring to its function as ‘re-membering’. The simultaneous memorialization and bodily renewal of ‘re-membering’ evoke Haroldo de Campos’s discussion of translation as dismemberment and cannibalism considered as destruction of, homage to and a living on of the original text (Bassnett 2003, 299). Brodzki (2007) discusses cases where translation allows memory to survive in urgent circumstances when a memory is fragile through being expressed in oral form, and/or through involving endangered cultural knowledge. The case of endangered cultural knowledge concerns an Igbo woman’s oral account of an important historical event, the 1929 ‘women’s war’ in Nigeria. In Echewa’s novel I Saw the Sky Catch Fire (1992), the grandmother recounts this memory to her only (Western-educated) grandson, who transforms the Igbo-language oral story into one written in English, interleaving it with his own experiences. In some cases ‘resistant translation’, maintaining elements of foreignness in the text such as untranslated Igbo words, is a means of retaining Igbo culture for the memory of future generations. Translation is seen as a vector for intercultural and intergenerational transmission and survival of memory, which is acutely important in a postcolonial context.

The case of transferring Igbo memory indicates that memory of past events and tradition as elements of cultural knowledge can be conceived as phenomena shared by a group (Igbo women or society) and transmitted to a group (future generations). In other words, memory can be considered not only as individual but as social. In fact, the individual and the social are intertwined with regard to memory. An early thinker to theorize the social aspects of individual memory was Maurice Halbwachs (1952 [1925]). Each individual belongs to many social groups, and each of those groups has a shared memory involving past events and habitual current practices, which the individual espouses and by which he or she is influenced. Halbwachs coined the term ‘mémoire collective’, ‘collective memory’, to express this group dimension, and since then other terms have been adopted, notably ‘social memory’ and ‘cultural memory’. Although certainly overlapping in meaning, the term ‘social memory’ puts more emphasis on the social processes of remembrance, whereas ‘cultural memory’ focuses more on cultural products. The main point is that memory of the past can be shared by members of a group. One issue that is important is whether shared memory is a matter of amalgamating the memory of all the individuals in the group. Olick (1999) argues that there is a difference between ‘collective’ and ‘collected’ memory that has methodological implications. ‘Collected’ involves studying the aggregation of a group of individuals’ ideas, whereas ‘collective’ focuses on cultural patterns such as shared myths, symbols, ideologies and representations conveyed by cultural products and practices. In her study focusing on Oradour-sur-Glane, Deane-Cox (2014) refers to ‘collective memory’. She also adopts another concept from memory studies, ‘prosthetic memory’ (Landsberg 2004), which challenges the strict notion of personal experience and memory. A vicarious experience, obtained from viewing or participating in an experientially rich mass-media production such as a film...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Preface – Case study: Two versions of the Treaty of Waitangi
• 1. Translation and Memory
• 2. Personal Memory
• 3. Group Memory and Electronic Memory
• 4. Textual Memory
• 5. National and Transnational Memory
• 6. Traditions
• 7. Institutional Memory
• 8. Cosmopolitan Connective Memory
• Final Words
• Notes
• References
• Index