Caracol Translators Notes

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peggy kamuf

Caracol: Translator’s Notes

“A

kind of, umm, insect, it has shell on its back,” and he made a small, curling gesture with two fingers and a thumb. “Caracol, in Spanish.” “Snail,” I said. “Yes, yes, snail, caracol.” “Caracol,” I repeated and let the three syllables curl around my tongue and lips as I tasted their pleasing strangeness mingled with some ancient familiarity. I savored the striking, palindromic pattern of consonants and vowels, c-a-r-a-c, that plunged like a cataract toward the narrow neck, the col of the ravine. “It is what the Zapatistas call their villages, caracoles, there are many of them, and they practice autonomy together.” I heard then saw the word align with the thing. There was the strangely familiar sensation associated with translation, when two tongues seem to touch each other just there, at the junction/disjunction of snail with caracol. It started me thinking in an unexpected direction about translation, which was the subject that I had just been asked to address a few weeks later. This snail crossing my path led me to wonder about the affect, perhaps even Volume 25, Number 3  doi 10.1215/10407391-2847937 © 2015 by Brown University and d i f f e r e n c e s : A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies

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the erotics, of translation, and about a desire that translation calls up and disappoints, its always tantalizing impossibility. All the same, a snail as the figure for translation or even the translator, that slowest of readers? Was that figure going to work? Would it do any work? I didn’t know, of course, and could only follow it to find out.

From “Old English snegel, snægel, etc., = Middle Low German sneil (Low German snäl, sniel, etc.), Old High German snegil (Middle High German snegel, German schnägel, now dialect with variants schnäl, schnel, etc.)” (oed), snails are called gastropods, which means pretty much “stomach-feet.” Wikipedia, on which I faithfully rely, calls this taxonomic name “an anthropomorphic misnomer” since snails and slugs do not move on their stomachs, as had been surmised earlier, but rather on what specialists (are they called gastropodologists?) refer to as a foot. Yet, given that this muscle of locomotion is also an organ of digestion, being covered in microscopic teeth that shred whatever the snail passes over, one may also think of it as a large tongue with which the snail licks, as it were, earthbound surfaces (and I should specify that my snail is a land snail, for there are also sea snails, which are indeed far more numerous). In this way, pulling its rough tongue-foot across leaves and stems, the snail feeds, gets nutrition, whereby to build up its shell into further whorls, which, by the way, always turn clockwise from the center. And of course there is the shiny trail of slime or mucus that the snail leaves behind. It’s actually a lubricant that allows the animal to slide safely even over razor blades.1 Perhaps its slimy trail is like the trace of the translator’s passage over the text to be translated, that is, to be shredded, digested, and turned into, among other things, more slime. Another thing about snails: they are hermaphrodites, which means that each has both a penis and a vagina. Nevertheless, it takes two to reproduce. I confess it took me a moment to grasp the picture of snail copulation and gestation as described here by Wikipedia: “Prolific breeders, pulmonate land snails inseminate each other in pairs to internally fertilize their ova via a reproductive opening on one side of the body, near the front, through which the outer reproductive organs are extruded so that exchange of sperm can take place. Fertilization then occurs and the eggs develop.” Each snail inseminates and is inseminated; each fertilizes and is fertilized by the other. Each tongue-foot touches and is touched by the other. Which is a little like what I said a moment ago about the sensation of translation:

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tongues touching and withdrawing from each other, coiling into the whorls of a shell just like a snail or a caracol when you pick it up. One last thing to mention about snails is that some believe they provide the prototype for Cupid’s arrow in classical mythology, for, as part of their courtship behavior, they are known to shoot so-called love darts into one another. It must be a tricky maneuver because only some snails succeed in actually lodging these tiny projectiles in the bodies of their would-be mates. The specialists (I just learned they are called malacologists, mollusk experts) believe the snails who manage to successfully plant their darts somehow get a leg up in the selection of their genes over the genes of less adroit Cupid-snails. Well, good for them, I thought. But have I drifted away yet from the subject of translation? It’s hard to say.

Translators are for the most part a modest lot. They are wont to disappear without complaint or resistance into the texts they produce, their translations, which are not even always attributed once they are in print. Their labor of interpretation and invention is easily anonymized, its value canceled by the standard fee-for-service structure of translation contracts that assign rights to the publisher rather than to the author of the translation. Universities likewise discount the travail of translation as worthy academic labor, even as our disciplines and interdisciplines, in the humanities at least, rely more and more extensively on translation to make available (in English) canons of literary theory, cultural studies, film and media studies, gender studies, queer studies, and so on. If, however, translators are wont to disappear without complaint, it is also because they have largely been taught—whether formally or not—that their aim should be to achieve a fluidity in the target language sufficient to foster a certain illusion in the reader: that he or she is reading the original language, which is also his or her own language. The disappearance of the fact and the act of translation functions as a prime measure of its worth, of its being a “good” or “bad” translation according to the current standards of the profession as well as the standard expectations of the general reading public. To the extent that translators try to adhere to these standards or meet these expectations, they become enablers of the collective illusion that the world speaks and writes in one’s own language. They are thus the (trained) agents of their own marginalization and disappearance as labor in the globalizing market that, increasingly, conducts its trades in English.

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This is the condition that Lawrence Venuti has dubbed “the translator’s invisibility,” which he wants to see challenged through more visible practices by the translator (see Venuti, Translator’s). He thus calls for translations that jar against current American or British English (i.e., “standard dialect”), wagering: “An English translation that makes readers aware of its abuses, namely its transformation of the current standard dialect in its interrogative work on a particular foreign text, will expose the limitations and exclusions of the translating language, showing that ‘English’ is an idealist notion that conceals a panoply of Englishes ranged in a hierarchical order of value and power among themselves and over every other language in the world” (“Translating” 259). No doubt he is right: abusive rather than fluid translation reserves the capacity to split any one language into always more than one, at least two.2 And yet by becoming visible or sensible in this way, a translation also exposes itself to more than one misunderstanding, including the misprision that deliberate abuses are simply awkward mistakes. Venuti recognizes that to prevent or correct this misapprehension, the translator (for example, himself) can write a commentary on his or her own translation, such as the one he is here unfolding that relates to his translation of Jacques Derrida’s essay “What Is a ‘Relevant’ Translation?” But such a commentary, he recognizes, will always risk sounding self-explanatory, self-justifying, and ultimately self-indulgent. And indeed, Venuti’s essay takes this risk repeatedly with its account of his calculations as a translator who aims to denounce and renounce his own invisibility. By enumerating and unveiling his own strategies, however, Venuti also models translation in the mode primarily of calculation. To be sure, every translator calculates, and on numerous levels, but if it is inventive work, a translation cannot depend only on calculation or strategy. Venuti doubtless knows this, but perhaps for reasons of, precisely, strategy, he does not want to go there. And yet, when he tries to give a concrete example of a specific translation strategy, his language acknowledges the space of some uncalculated exchange that happens beyond or behind the translator’s ken. He writes: “In other instances, however, I was able to imitate the wordplay in English. Thus, the French ‘marche’/‘marché’ (step/purchase) became the English ‘tread’/‘trade,’ while in an alliterative series that required an English choice beginning with the consonant cluster ‘tr,’ the French ‘trouvaille’ (windfall, fortunate discovery, lucky break) became ‘treasure trove’ ” (“Translating” 253, emphasis added). These two translations are offered as examples of how “I was able to imitate the wordplay in English.” But this first-person ability ends up disappearing into the action or transaction of

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the verb “became” repeated with each example: marche/marché became “tread/trade”; trouvaille became “treasure trove.” These actions of becoming happen apparently without calculation or provision, somewhere that the translator is not an actor, at least not the principal actor. Such comings and becomings, in other words, are not strictly within my ability as translator and take place somewhere beyond my direction. Rather, I come upon them, if I do, as trouvailles, “fortunate discoveries,” in Venuti’s phrase, in other words, lucky finds. To the extent that he or she has one as an ability, the translator’s skill might finally consist in knowing how to have good luck. But as there is no such ability, as good luck either finds or fails to find us, perhaps the translator always has reason to be modest.

What if, however, this modesty were also a cover thrown over the passion that draws one tongue to another? In “What Is a ‘Relevant’ Translation?” Derrida confesses to such a passion: I believe I can say that if I love the word, it is only in the body of its idiomatic singularity, that is, where a passion for translation comes to lick it as a flame or an amorous tongue might: approaching as closely as possible while refusing at the last moment to threaten or to reduce, to consume or to consummate, leaving the other body intact but not without causing the other to appear—on the very brink of this refusal or withdrawal—and after having aroused or excited a desire for the idiom, for the unique body of the other, in the flame’s flicker or through a tongue’s caress. I don’t know how, or in how many languages, you can translate this word lécher when you wish to say that one language licks another, like a flame or a caress. (175) There is an erotics of translation, a lingual passion that passes between tongues, when one licks and is licked by the other. Like any two bodies when they touch, each is both touching and touched, at once. Beyond or before calculation, translation also transpires in the erotic, amorous embrace of languages, each whorled in its own singular direction and its own world, like hermaphroditic snails. It is thus not so much calculation as tact that must be exhibited upon approaching the place “where a passion for translation comes to lick [the word] as a flame or an amorous tongue might,” a tact that leaves, we read, “the other body intact,” untouched. Tact is another name for touching, but also, as Derrida has elsewhere recalled, a name

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for not touching, for an absence of touch in a tactful withdrawal (see On Touching). Translation, then, would be a form of tact that advances fingers of language into the surrounding darkness as they feel their way toward the other idiom so as to touch it with tact, leaving it intact. And the translator, meanwhile, is the one who listens for and records the reverberations of this tactful touching of tongues. Which could bring us back to the matter of luck, the lucky find, the trouvaille. In the same essay in which Derrida professes or confesses a passion for translation, he recounts his own “modest but effective experiment in translation” (“What Is” 177) that, over the span of thirty years, hit upon the same French word—“assuming that it is the very same word, and that henceforth it is French through and through” (178)—to translate, first, a key term in Hegel’s dialectical vocabulary and then, second and many years later, a word of Shakespeare’s concerning mercy or forgiveness from The Merchant of Venice. What is more, this coincidence does not take place just between the French word, which is the verb relever, and each of the other two tongues involved. The English word also newly translates the German one and vice versa in an unheard-of but quite plausible way. In other words, it is a very lucky encounter not just among two languages, a source and a target language, but among at least three. I say “at least three” because one should also count among the parties here a certain philosophical language, Hegel’s, as well as the language of Christian mercy as articulated, especially by Saint Paul, in tension with the Jew’s appeal to justice. So, when Portia lectures Shylock about how mercy should season justice, Derrida hears echoes of his own earlier translation of Hegel’s aufheben as relever in French and proposes as translation of “Mercy seasons justice,” “Le pardon relève la justice.” Here is how he describes the experience of this double trouvaille: [T]hat this same word could have thus operated, in a single language, between three languages, so as to “translate,” or in any case to put to work different words belonging to apparently different contexts in at least two other source languages (German and English)—this fact seems an incalculable stroke of luck, an invention or necessity for which I wonder who can bear the responsibility, even if it was apparently mine at first and mine to sign. I harbor no illusion or pretension in this respect: if I took the initiative in these quasi-translations, I could do so only by hearing, so as to record them, various possibilities or laws—semantic and formal—already inscribed in this family of languages and, first and foremost, in “my” language. (178, trans. modified)

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Although Derrida is describing an “incalculable stroke of luck” and thus an experience that few if any practicing translators could expect to have, it is nevertheless exemplary of every translator’s relation to the idiomaticity of tongues. It is the chance of any translation, and like chance and luck, it depends on the incalculable alterity of another. Whence, again, the modesty with which the nominal translator, Derrida, strictly limits his claim to this invention, even though he signed or “patented” it first.3

Speaking of the translator’s modesty, I can’t resist wanting to quote the first stanza of Vladimir Nabokov’s clever poem “On Translating Eugene Onegin.” It is often referred to in works on translation. 1 What is translation? On a platter A poet’s pale and glaring head, A parrot’s screech, a monkey’s chatter, And profanation of the dead. The parasites you were so hard on Are pardoned if I have your pardon, O, Pushkin, for my stratagem: I traveled down your secret stem, And reached the root, and fed upon it; Then, in a language newly learned, I grew another stalk and turned Your stanza patterned on a sonnet, Into my honest roadside prose— All thorn, but cousin to your rose. As a depiction of the translator’s modesty, even abjection, beside the author’s achievement, here is Nabokov’s portrayal of himself as a parasite who “traveled down your secret stem/ And reached the root, and fed upon it.” Like a snail, perhaps, a creature you often find on plant stems. And yet, Nabokov is hardly withdrawing modestly into his shell here; he is also the snail producing a “stanza patterned on a sonnet” that stands beside Pushkin’s not as thorn to rose or prose to poetry, but as another kind of translation, one that would itself be a fine poetic rose. Rather than snail, butterfly.

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When I first began to learn another language at school, at around age thirteen, the audiolingual method was all the rage. Initiation to the other language proceeded through repetition of phrases, little dialogues, set questions and replies, all of which was supposed to induce one to begin thinking right away in the other language and to forestall as far or as long as possible a reliance on anything resembling translation. We were meant to understand pragmatically, in its own context, the sense of what we were repeating, relying above all on the ear rather than the eye. If I remember correctly, initially we weren’t even allowed to see the language written or only minimally, and for the first year and a half or so, we did not read anything much at all. Our texts were above all spoken. The age had invented not long before the pedagogical language lab, its space divided into many little separated booths where you could go one on one with a taped voice, which you were meant to reproduce, react to, repeat, all the while being silently overheard by a teacher who spoke up in your ear to correct mistakes and accents.4 This was the basic scene and method of modern language instruction, a rejection of the way languages had classically been taught, through version et thème, that is, through translation. As Venuti has also remarked, a consequence of this prevalent mode of language pedagogy is that “translation has been stigmatized” and effectively banished from foreign language instruction (“Translating” 243). But many today might well point out that this is a secondary issue, the greater one being the general curtailment of foreign language instruction altogether, at the secondary and tertiary levels, never mind the primary level, where it has always had at best a tenuous, experimental, or restricted presence. Which is paradoxical, when you think about it, given the audiolingual method of infantilization that, basically, seeks to simulate, reproduce, or repeat the presumed primal scene of a child’s first steps into the language that will have to become his or her own. This instruction that so artificially (and vainly) banishes translation is modeled on an idea of the child’s first appropriation of language, which, it is thought, ipso facto cannot have relied on what we normally call translation, that is, on an interlinguistic transaction, since it is precisely the very first appropriation of language, any language. Now, if one grants the validity of this idea of no translation at the beginning—which I do only rhetorically and only for the moment—then one ought to conclude that the most favorable time to deploy a teaching method that aims to simulate the beginning is at the earliest point in the child’s schooling, kindergarten and preschool.

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Perhaps many have indeed so concluded. Perhaps, after fifty years or more, the antitranslation school of language teaching has even begun to achieve what would seem to be its natural ambition, which is to convey to the so-called in-fans the simple truth of more than one language, more than one way to speak, more than one way to make and mistake meaning as soon as there is more than one to speak. If so, however, then this antitranslation school has also had to convey the sensation of having more than one tongue or feeling more than one tongue on one’s tongue, and thus the sensation of—or even, who knows, the passion for—translation, as Derrida called it. Bilinguals no doubt know this feeling from their first memories of language. (I think of Hélène Cixous’s maternal German and paternal French tongues interacting in her own idiom.) But beyond this limited sense, isn’t bilingualism just the condition of learning language, any language, including the very first one? I even wonder if this is not what Derrida also meant when he wrote and repeated in Monolingualism of the Other, “I have only one language [langue], it isn’t mine.”5

Snail mucus is also thought to have cosmetic benefits. There is beauty in slime.

According to Proust, “[T]he duty and the task of a writer are those of a translator” (qtd. in Genette 223). Is Proust being modest? I wonder. Arthur Goldhammer, the distinguished translator of dozens of works in modern French history and historiography, quotes Proust’s assertion after situating it like this: Style is like error, and no doubt that is why a stylist like Proust is so drawn to what Gérard Genette calls the volupté immanente, the intrinsic sensual pleasure of certain deviations from the norm. The duc de Limoges, like the hotel manager at Balbec, errs repeatedly because we all, according to Freud, experience a compulsion to repeat the errors we would suppress. But the writer, like the duchesse, is a sadistic voyeur, drawn by the intrinsic pleasure of imitating the damage to language that these unconscious artists inflict. And the translator must learn to share that pleasure, even when it goes against the grain. Hence, as Proust says in the

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passage Genette cites as an epigraph to his article, “the duty and the task of a writer are those of a translator.” (Emphases added) Whether he means to do so or not, Goldhammer describes here a doubled figure of translation and writing, in which each must imitate or emulate the other. More precisely, “the translator must learn to share that [sadistic] pleasure,” to which Goldhammer prudently or prudishly adds “even when it goes against the grain,” by which he could mean either the grain of the translator’s own taste (sadism as distasteful), or against the grain of the common tongue, what Venuti called “standard dialect.”6 This is just the first turn, however, in the whorling embrace of (what is called) writing by (what is called) translation and vice versa. For there is a versa, if one can say that, if not a vice. And it doubles the positions of the two terms being related here. A writer, selon Proust, must be a translator, his or her duty and task are those of a translator, whose duty and task is to share the writer’s pleasure in translating what the writer is translating into writing, in other words translation. Once again, think hermaphroditic snails making love.

“Translation is also political,” my friend interjected after I’d tried to say something in response to that prying question: “What are you working on?” I had touched on this inchoate or invertebrate idea of an erotics of translation, and that’s when she said, with some impatience and as if to challenge me, “Translation is also political.” “Well, of course it is,” I said. But what does that mean, translation is political? What doesn’t it mean? All I can say is that, in the moment, this figure of translation-as-also-political connected in my mind with an anecdote recounted by Michael Henry Heim, who was a most extraordinary translator from numerous languages. In a rare interview that surfaced after his recent death, Heim recounts how, as a graduate student studying in Prague in 1968, he was there during the Soviet invasion and became a de facto translator or interpreter between the Czechs and the invading soldiers: In the week that followed, I constantly crisscrossed the city interpreting between Czechs and the Soviet soldiers. Czechs were all supposed to learn Russian in school, but they had such antipathy to the language that even though Czech and Russian are closely related they could not communicate with the invaders. No Czech ever asked of me who I was. They were just grateful I could help

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them convince the Soviet soldiers what a mistake they were making. The soldiers were mostly naive kids and mostly non-Russians, that is, members of national and ethnic minorities. I suspected they had been singled out as a demonstration of the possible consequences of trying to strengthen their national identity, which is after all what the Czechs were after. Because Heim knew German as well, he was also swept up by a West German television crew in Prague to cover the events. They needed help interviewing Czechs in their language and finding their way around. “Despite the painted-over street signs,” he says, “I knew the city well enough to get them where they needed to go to warn potential victims that Soviet agents were after them. And since I also spoke both German and Czech, I could help them find ordinary Czech citizens to interview.” What strikes me now about this anecdote is the chance that governs it. It is like the lucky find of the trouvaille. In the circumstance, however, the trouvaille is Heim himself, the one who happens to be just there, just then, able to translate among multiple sides of the event.

In her great text “The Mark on the Wall,” Virginia Woolf portrays a writer who lets her thoughts be drawn out by an unidentified mark on the wall across the room, a point and question to which she returns over and over after having repeatedly drifted into writing about one thing and another, what with one thing leading to another. Unless the writer interrupts herself by getting up from her table to go see what it is, the writing will just go on rebounding away from and back to that question. The text cuts off only after someone else, who sounds a lot like Leonard Woolf, comes into the room, sees the mark, and makes a disapproving comment about the snail on the wall. At which point the writer interrupts what she’s been writing with the exclamation: “The mark on the wall! It was a snail.” As devices go, a snail is no more or less arbitrary than any other. But Woolf had the good taste, at least, to point to the lowly mollusk with only a quick parting gesture, whereas I’ve been projecting and pointing to snails on the wall since we began.7 From its first casting into my ear and onto my tongue, this word and this thing, in more than one language, has been vehicle and shelter for thinking about what is called translation. But perhaps it has also excused or provided an alibi for advancing by successive whorls, rather than moving along the straight path of argument or

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exposition. Before casting the device aside, however, I will just recall how the whorls of a snail’s shell always turn clockwise. Which can remind us of the clock that, at least figuratively, clings to the wall as we speak and that, in turn, tells me it is time to stop here.8

This paper was originally delivered at the conference “Theory, Translation, Universality” at Princeton University on April 25, 2014. I wish to thank Katie Chenoweth for her invitation and Joan Scott for her warmly encouraging response. peggy kamuf writes on literary theory and contemporary French thought. She has translated numerous texts by Jacques Derrida and several works by Hélène Cixous. Director of the Derrida Seminars Translation Project, she also coedits the series publishing Derrida’s teaching seminars into English. She is Marion Frances Chevalier Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California.

Notes

Works Cited

1

This curious fact is one of those selected for remark by Les Murray in his extraordinary poem “Mollusc.” I thank Nicholas Royle for this reference as well as for the inspiration of his own “Mollusc.”

2

For this notion of “abusive translation,” see Lewis.

3

There would be much more to say about this essay’s analysis and example of inventive translation. I have tried to do so elsewhere; see Kamuf.

4

For a thorough history of the language lab in the u.s., see Roby.

5

Translation modified of “Je n’ai qu’une langue, ce n’est

pas la mienne” (Derrida, Monolingualism 1). 6

Elsewhere, Venuti has taken Goldhammer as his principal example of the translator’s bias in favor of “current Standard English” and the empiricist “assumption that language is transparent communication” (Venuti, “Translation” 78).

7

This is a reference to the PowerPoint slides that accompanied the original lecture.

8

The oed also gives “Snail, n. 5. Mech. a. A flat, spirally curved piece of metal; esp. a toothed disc of this shape forming part of the striking mechanism of a clock; a spiral cam.”

Derrida, Jacques. Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin. Trans. Patrick Mensah. Palo Alto: Stanford up, 1998. . On Touching, Jean-Luc Nancy. Trans. Christine Irizarry. Palo Alto: Stanford up, 2005. . “What Is a ‘Relevant’ Translation?” Trans. Lawrence Venuti. Critical Inquiry 27. 2 (Winter 2001): 174–200. Genette, Gérard. “Proust et le langage indirect.” Figures II. Paris: Seuil, 1969. 223–94. Goldhammer, Arthur. “What the Translator Must Know.” http://www.people.fas.harvard .edu/~agoldham/articles/WhatMust.htm (accessed 16 Feb. 2014).

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Heim, Michael Henry. “A Happy Babel: An Interview with Michael Henry Heim.” Trans. Sean Cotter. M-Dash: A Magazine of Translation. http://mdash-ahb.org/the-translation-forum /8-a-happy-babel-interview-with-michael-henry-heim/ (accessed 16 Feb. 2015). Kamuf, Peggy. “ ‘ This were kindness’: Economies of Differance in The Merchant of Venice.” Oxford Literary Review 34.1 (2012): 71–87. Lewis, Philip. “The Measure of Translation Effects.” Difference in Translation. Ed. Joseph Graham. Ithaca: Cornell up, 1985. 31–62. Murray, Les. “Mollusc.” Translations from the Natural World. New York: Farrar, 1994. Roby, Warren. “Technology in the Service of Foreign Language Learning.” Handbook of Research on Educational Communications and Technology. Ed. David Jonassen. Aarhus: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2004. Royle, Nicholas. “Mollusc.” Fragmente 6 (1995): 92–99. Venuti, Lawrence. “Translating Derrida on Translation: Relevance and Disciplinary Resistance.” Yale Journal of Criticism 16.2 (2003): 237–62.

. “Translation, Empiricism, Ethics.” Profession (2010): 72–81.

. The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2008.

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