Читать книгу German as Contact Zone - Russell West-Pavlov - Страница 10

Under the sign of ‘das Offene’, this book begins with a speculative wager that may be very much like the sort of quest that Dramane/Sissako undertakes as he goes in search of a friend he almost doesn’t find—thereby producing a film which is much more, at the end of the day, than the quest for a single person. The individual search cedes to the discovery of a community and a natural landscape. What is the wager-like interrogatory quest that this book embarks upon?

It runs as follows: What if we were to approach translation not only as a linguistic activity that has produced, in the last decade or two, a large body of imaginative and stimulating scholarship using translation as a (sometimes overstretched) metaphor—but rather, as a generalized process of creative dynamism informing the entire fabric of life—of which linguistic translation, therefore, would be one limited exemplar? In other words, what if we were to take translation as a metaphor seriously—even over-seriously? What if were to take the ‘transport’ (in modern Greek, you catch the metaphor to get to work) of ‘translation’ across the vehicle/tenor border, into foreign semantic fields not merely as a creative abuse of language—but as a symptomatic revelation of translative operations that have always already been going on in all the fields of natural activity, obfuscated all too often by our obsessive focus upon linguistic translation?

We might discover that linguistic translation, far from being the ‘purest’ (non-metaphorical) form of translation, putatively contaminated and conceptually weakened by modish similes and conceptual derivatives, would itself be merely one participant in a gigantic network of metaphoric-metonymic transitions, transformations and metamorphoses to which one might assign the label of bíos, following the affirmative biopolitical project undertaken by Roberto Esposito (2008). Such a project has been assayed by Michel Serres’ Hermes III: La Traduction (1974) [Hermes III: Translation], a remarkable transdisciplinary essay that ranges across the fields of genetics, thermodynamics, politics, philosophy, painting and literature, showing how each of these areas displays operations that can be regarded as translation. Translating widely in the very hubris of its scholarly scope, Serres’ book offers a panorama of processes of translation in the broadest sense possible, of which literary-linguistic translation (and the human nature it supposedly demarcates from the natural world) is merely one realm of productivity.

This book seeks to take this idea seriously, investigating translation into (and occasionally out of) German literature as an exemplar of the ways in which translation might be seen as an index of larger process of cosmic and social creativity. Indeed, from this point of view, the German language itself would be seen as one strand in a bundle of languages linked by translative processes and indicative of social creativity. The German language thus comes to be understood, within this book, as a ‘contact zone’: a sector always already polylingual in itself, and blurred around its many borders at the points where it meets other languages. The notion of the ‘contact zone’ comes into the literary humanities via Pratt (1992: 6), who ‘borrow[s] the term “contact” … from its use in linguistics, where the term contact language refers to improvised languages that develop among speakers of different native languages who need to communicate with each other consistently, usually in the context of trade.’ In this book, I redirect it to its original socio-linguistic context, and the ‘original’ historical situation to which it refers, that of ‘exchange’. It is striking, however, even weird, that among the ‘literate arts of the contact zone’ listed by Pratt (1991: 37)—‘[a]utoethnography, transculturation, critique, collaboration, bilingualism, mediation, parody, denunciation, imaginary dialogue, vernacular expression’—translation does not figure, though her ‘transculturation’ might be a rough approximation. (In a similarly bizarre fashion, Genette [1997: 405] mentions translation as one of the ‘paratexts’ that he declines to deal with.) Alternatively, one might premise that ‘translation’ is absent from Pratt’s list because it is the all-encompassing, and thus invisible term that embraces all her ‘arts of the contact zone’. Such a lacuna is filled by Apter (2005), who converts the ‘contact zone’ into a ‘translation’ zone in reference to an emergent field of studies at the intersection between translation studies and comparative literature (compare Bassnett 1993: 138-61). Translation is the dynamic nexus of such interdisciplinary undertakings.

Following Apter’s example, I import the term into the very heart of German national identity, the language itself. As a ‘pluricentric’ language (Muhr, Marley, Kretzenbacher and Bissoonauth, eds 2015), one that is also plural at its centre, I regard German as a ‘contact zone’, a realm of constantly productive translations hitherto understood as irritating interferences and impurities to be suppressed rather than embraced and fostered. Pratt (1992: 6) notes that ‘[l]ike the societies of the contact zone, such languages are commonly regarded as chaotic, barbarous, lacking in structure.’ Even though the German language is usually characterized as highly structured, Pratt’s comment is immensely relevant, because ‘chaos’ can be read here not in its customary negative sense, but in the sense of non-linear material creativity known to ‘chaos theory’ (Ruelle 1993). In the latter usage, ‘chaos’ describes the unpredictable and therefore creative development of structures and systems as they interact with their environment.

We need to pursue this logic of the ‘translative contact zone’ further, however, turning it back upon the notions both of the ‘contact zone’ and of ‘translation’ themselves. In recent decades, scientific discourses have come to be seen as a subset of larger social, indeed geopolitical discourses, as in Bruno Latour’s Les Microbes: Guerre et paix (1984). But the frames for the sociological study of the sciences have shifted significantly in recent decades, taking in a larger, even planetary horizon today, and it would now be more accurate to see the planetary processes of creation as the total set, with geopolitics and its attendant discourses operating on them, to be sure—but more importantly, always within them (Rees 2018). Thus, by the same token, the translative operations worked within language would not stop at the borders of language, but would continue along multiple ‘lines of flight’ and ‘desire lines’ into manifold outlying regions of the natural world. As the gaze broadens to take in these extra-literary ramifications, however, a surprising inversion may become evident. In a recurrent ‘turning inside-out’ that is central to the vitalist re-envisioning of the world (Esposito 2008: 157-94) it transpires that the natural world is not the ‘outside’ of the ‘real’ business of translation. On the contrary, linguistic translation, significant though it may be within human history, turns out to be a province of cosmic creation, a secondary translation of primary translations of epic proportions.

The book addresses these issues by opening with the film I have just discussed, then turning to half-a-dozen examples of the translation of literary texts, before reflecting upon the very pragmatic space of the literary classroom, and finally returning to a visual example, a public-art mural in the form of a street-blackboard in Johannesburg, South Africa, to conclude its argument.

The final turn to pedagogy is one that is pre-empted by Sissako’s usage of the motif of a photograph showing the erstwhile Russian class in Rostov-on-Don—a semiotic marker so important in the film that, after numerous recurrences, it provides the closing image before the credits (Sissako 1997: 57:55). The photo of the class is evoked verbally for the first time during a telephone conversation between Dramane/Sissako and his teacher Natalia Lvovna, when he asks her to send it to him as an aid to finding Baribanga (ibid: 5:55). The first glimpse of the photo comes five minutes later (ibid: 9:05) and recurs on dozens of occasions subsequently (e.g. ibid: 12:38; 13:9; 18:15; etc.); it even figures in one of the shots taken over the shoulder of the driver on the trip into rural Angola (ibid: 18:56). The photo is a visual shifter that accompanies the protagonist on his search. The classroom, connoted metonymically in this manner, constitutes a peripheral but mobile translative community (made up of Cubans, Angolans, Philipinos) anchored in the landscapes—Saharan, then Siberian, and subsequently Subsaharan—that form the visual background to the inaugural voice-over telephone call and the subsequent multiple iterations of he socio-pedagogical deixis effected by the photo. The translative classroom is a translated, transported space of translation that frames but also pervades the film, thereby inflecting its closing repositioning of the German language itself.

There are in effect four intertwined ideas that underpin the argument. The four ideas are evident already in the four parts of the title of his book, and are sketched in the brief account of Sissako’s Rostov-Luanda given above. For the sake of clarity I reiterate them once again in schematic form:

1 The book reads German as a ‘contact zone’. This strand of theorization approaches the German language as a ‘pluricentric language’ and thus as an extroverted structure. It imagines German not as a singular entity but as a network of languages that is formed not from centre but rather from its peripheries, or suggests, alternatively, and more radically, that at its centre, the language is always already peripheral. The German language thus comes to be conceptualized not as a centripetal linguistic ‘Heimat’, but as a centrifugal meeting place, a contact zone whose tentacular expanse inevitably colours its putatively core regions. In Sissako’s film, one of these core-peripheral regions is East Berlin—a site that makes the national language (as once was) as an ineluctable zone of transition, negotiation, and of course translation. This, however, is only the first ‘provincialization’ of the German that we shall see at work here; it is caught in the tug of a larger, more fundamental ‘provincialization’ of language itself (Kohn 2013: 38-42), which is the gist of the second guiding idea.

2 The book suggest that linguistic translation is in fact a manifestation of ‘quantum’ processes, that is, the processes by which the entirety of material reality is on the move. Reality is not static, but is mobile and processual. At the smallest scales of the material universe, minute packets or ‘quanta’ of energy engage with each other, meeting in transformative encounters which ceaselessly generate new material structures. Out of each encounter a ‘translation’ ensues which becomes the next step in the dynamic process by which matter exists in a constant process of transformation. We must imagine something like Law’s (2007) ‘material semiotics’ in which actants interact with each other as meaning-bearing participants in transformative co-encounters that constitute a network of incessant translations. Translation is not a metaphor here, because each encounter actually is a transfer of information—a semiotic exchange—that transforms the (material) information itself and in turn perpetuates a transformation of the physical world: ‘One way to think of … a causal universe is in terms of the transfer of information … Each event is something like a transistor that takes in information from events in its past, makes a simple computation and sends the result to the events in its future’ (Smolin 2000: 55). Each quantum event is an encounter in which information is exchanged and changed, thereby provoking further change and further exchange.

3 Translation (in its minor, provincial interlinguistic sense) works in the same way as quantum processes, and this for two reasons. On the one hand, because it resembles those processes morphogenetically. This may appear to fly in the face of reason, because material processes and linguistic processes would seem to be fundamentally different from another, eschewing any possibility of comparison. But such fundamental differences are merely the attributions of a ‘separatist’ logic that is the hallmark of Enlightenment thought. This mode of thinking can be seen to emerge at the moment, for instance, when the topos of ‘copia’ gives way as a figure of thought to binary thinking (Ong 1958; West-Pavlov 2006: 57-9). From that moment on, the jumble of interrelated things cedes to a world of clear demarcations between this and that, here and there. Objects begin to emerge more clearly out of the distinctions that mark them off from other objects. Half a millennia of thought based upon the normative notion of discrete entities and concepts makes it almost impossible to think in terms of an interrelatedness of all things—a notion, however, that the massive, and increasingly terrifying evidence of climate change is slowly bringing back into the forefront of our consciousness. Isomorphic processes resemble each other, and are linked. Translation does not merely transfer a text from one domain to another, as the ‘transport’ metaphor suggests, because original and translation are not the same object. Rather, the entry of the text into another space involves an encounter between two cultures that generates a new text and thereby transforms the ambient cultural environment, contributing to its ongoing life. Thus, translation as a general linguistic operation, which the first argument located within, rather than only at the borders of the German language, is itself a subset of a broader cosmic process of material information exchange and ensuing reciprocal transformation at the adjacent borders of living entities. This broader cosmic process operates from the quantum level upwards, all the way to that of the universe itself, so that in effect it is coeval with the dynamic of life itself. Whence the second reason for the linkage between material processes and translation. They are linked concretely because they are fundamentally part of the same reality. One could cite manifestations of this idea of environmentas a base mode of connectivity across a range of disciplines and genres of thought. At one end of a spectrum of ‘scientificity’, contemporary Indigenous philosophies conceive reality as a single continuum of interactions: ‘Animacy … is the dynamic, transformative potential of the entire field of relations within which beings of all kinds, more or less person-like or thing-like, continually and reciprocally bring one another into existence’ (Ingold 2011: 689). At the other end of that spectrum, contemporary science is similarly characterized by a wide variety of field theories that have imposed the networked view of physical reality (Capra and Luisi 2014; Hayles 1984). Such ideas demonstrate the pervasiveness of notions of the infinite interconnectedness of the material world as a whole. Thus, material transformations are related to each other in a ‘fractal’ manner; they are isomorphic with one another in their operations at differing scales of reality because they are linked to each other by a myriad of intervening processes; across these fractally similar processes, translation produces transformation but also displays invariance.

4 Far from being an invention of European mathematics (Mandelbrot 1983), ‘fractal’ multiscalar replication and productivity is at the heart of much indigenous design from the Global South, ranging from textiles to architecture (Eglash 1999; see also Zaslavsky 1973). As my inaugural and terminal examples, all my case studies, and the provenance of much of my theoretical material suggests, the Global South plays a central role in driving the impetus of this integrative, anti-segregative project of quantum translation. De Souza Santos (2014: 223) sums up neatly by saying, ‘The modern history of unequal realtions between the global North and the global South is such that questioning and challenging the contact zone as it presents itself must be the first project of translation.’ The Global South has been, already well before the incursions of European colonization and at the very latest during the long imperial epoch, a ‘contact zone’ between cultures and their attendant epistemologies, as Pratt’s (1991, 1992) work on South America shows. The inclusive, eclectic and even promiscuous cosmic communities envisaged by non-European epistemologies and ontologies persisted in the interstices of European ‘epistemic violence’ (Spivak 1999: 277) and provide fundamental impulses for a notion of translation that is integrated into the ceaselessly transformative dynamics of the cosmos itself.

Bringing together these four central ideas, the notion of the ‘contact zone’, which I take from Pratt (1991, 1992), serves as a common denominator between these levels of dynamic, productive, and transformative interaction. Each quantum event that occurs as the dynamic building block of material reality is a ‘contact zone’ between two or more quanta of gravity. Without the interactions between quanta, there would be no world. In fact, there is no world before these interactions occur; the world emerges out of these interactions. Relation precedes material existence. Pratt’s (1992: 7) definition of the ‘contact zone’, though pitched at the human scale and context of colonial and postcolonial encounters, neatly replicates the constitutive nature of such interactions already active at a much smaller scale: ‘A “contact” perspective emphasizes how subjects are constituted in and by their relations to each other. It treats [such] relations … not in terms of separateness or apartheid, but in terms of copresence, interaction, interlocking understandings and practices.’ Every act of interlingual translation between two linguistic-cultural domains takes place in a specific local ‘contact zone’ made up of its own material contact zones. Finally, the entirety of a language can be imagined as a ‘contact zone’ of ‘contact zones’, an immense fabric of acts of dialogical interaction between speakers whose use of the language is inevitably different from one another—from the minute variations of idiolects to the opacity of dialects or major language variants to one another. A ‘contact zone’ emerges at every point on a multiscalar material reality at which an exchange of information takes place between dynamic actants, with transformative, generative results. Better than anywhere else, the epistemologies and the translative practices emanating from the Global South demonstrate an intuitive understanding of such all-embracing ontologies of transformation.

What I am proposing, via my inaugural but patently decentred reading of Rostov-Luanda that focuses upon the almost complete absence of its elided third term (Berlin), is the centrifugal displacement—the expatriation—of German and Germany itself. The film is all about language, but at the end, language becomes mute, and takes its naturally subordinate place within the material world that is the other major subject of Sissako’s filmic gaze. This shift of emphasis does not merely work to alienate and denaturalize human language—but rather, in the final analysis, to renaturalize it and to place it in networks of productive translation. Such networks of renaturalized translation are inevitably obfuscated, tamped down and controlled by the nation state and its attendant national languages in the first instance, and by extension all language that is conceptualized as the marker par excellence of the human. The post- and dehumanization of language leads ineluctably towards the re-naturalization of language as translation within a larger framework of universal translation.