Читать книгу German as Contact Zone - Russell West-Pavlov - Страница 16

Having explored and anticipated a very expansive and capaciously catachrestic notion of translation, I wish to return now to the notion of ‘culture’. Rather than defending the topos of ‘culture as translation’, I think it is worth examining the notion of culture that is equated, all too liberally in the eyes of some critics, with the process of translation. Culture itself is a translation, to the extent that it represents a ‘refinement’ and ‘elaboration’ of raw nature, as in the famous ‘raw’ vs. ‘cooked’ binary that provided Lévi-Strauss (1964) with a founding semiotic bifurcation. But deconstruction and common sense shows how close culture remains to that which putatively precedes and obviously pervades it, as for instance in agriculture or other practices that harness the generativity of nature and remain in close proximity—promiscuity perhaps—to that generativity.

Here, it could be claimed that I am pushing the translation metaphor even further off the beaten track of literal meaning, far into the surrounding scrub. Here is a Heideggerian Holzweg (1972) if ever there was one! On the contrary, I would suggest that the process being activated here is the intentional exploitation of the ever-present blurring of culturally embedded practices of translation and translational practices as the essence of culture. I am in a sense responding to Serres’ (2008: 271) injunction, when he claims that ‘improvisation is a source of wonder … Think of anxiety as good fortune, self-assurance as poverty. Lose your balance, leave the beaten track, chase birds out of the hedges.’ To broaden the purview of translation to encompass ‘culture’ is not to wander away from translation proper so much as to turn back towards that which underpins it. This may sound like an extension of the Heideggerian metaphor employed above, but in fact what is meant is something rather different: not a metaphysical evocation of a conveniently abstract Dasein but a totality of material processes that are resolutely physical in their functioning.

To focus on that always already active process of translation, which itself unceasingly operates the blurring that the translational ‘turn’ took as its vehicle, and to radicalize it, is not to embark upon a dangerous process of drift, a dérive, but if anything, to follow a track, to answer a call. It is to accept (if I may be permitted a tentative formulation whose structure will almost immediately have to be inverted) the interpellation of the natural substrata of interlingual translation, and to follow its beckonings. In Japanese nature tourism in the Canadian Rockies, the North American wilderness must be ‘translated’ by a Japanese tour guide for Japanese tourists (Satsuka 2015), yet underpinning this is the prior ‘translation’ of wilderness into a national park, a much-documented global project (e.g. Shetler 2007; Dlamini 2012, 2016), and underpinning that, in turn, are the manifold interactions of the natural world in itself. Yet even this example assumes a sort of triangular hierarchy, with genuine interlingual (and intercultural) translation at the top of the pyramid, and progressively less-literal but more widespread processes below. In what follows, I will seek to invert this triangle, so that universal cosmic process of translation—understood, to take only one possible approach, as the exchange of ‘information’ (see chapter 4 below)—generate the local variety of information exchange that we label interlingual translation.

Here it may be worth picking up the most cogent caveat raised against translation as culturalist metaphor: namely, that by generalizing the activity of translation to include almost every cultural process, it elides the very real intellectual, institutional, economic, and thus material work of translators themselves, re-enacting just the sort of obfuscation of translation that Venuti (1995) militated against. How to envisage ‘a wide conceptual space for “translation without translations”’ in Pym’s (2010: 150) pithy phrasing, that does not ‘throw away or belittle the work that professional translators do’? This is a genuine point of concern, one that grounds a powerful and significant critique, but it depends upon a further line of demarcation that transpires to be highly problematic. The caveat entails a notion of the figure of the translator which is based upon a plethora of mechanisms of professional corporatization and hence exclusion, even though translators themselves may be intercultural negotiators, polylingual middlemen and cross-border-guides in much of their everyday practice (Pym 1998: 160-76). The translator’s profession is already an embattled one, where various professional guilds, associations and qualifying exams regulate admission, obviously in the interests of maintaining standards and professional integrity, but also in the interests of lobby work and the preservation of privileges and monopolies. There are many permutations and combinations of translator competence and professionalism that are becoming more and more acute for instance as increasing numbers of ‘lay’ or ‘volunteer’ translators—from actors in ‘community interpretation’ through to the polylingual children of monolingual immigrants (Ahamer 2012)—are active or employed in public institutions such as hospitals, job centres, asylum-seekers’ screening centres, courts, and so on. The fraught question as to ‘who translates’ (Robinson 2001) may be interpreted as a question of individual, internal subjective identity and translative agency; by extension, however, it may equally be posed as a question of external, collective agency. The notion of socio-economic translator agency is one that is important, not least because it raises the issue of the boundaries that are placed around agency.

The caveat raised under the banner of the real work of translators thus has as its subtitle: translators translate, culture does not—and certainly culture in its nonhuman, natural forms does not either. Clearly, however, this is a highly problematic distinction. Translators translate, but non-translators are translating all the time. Certainly human non-translators translate constantly—for instance, in the language and literature classroom, a context to which we will return in part 3 of this book. But do animals translate? Presumably they are doing so constantly, just as we translate the barked or miaouwed messages of our pets on an everyday basis. Do plants translate? It would seem that they do communicate with each other, and some of their communication may be metalinguistic communication about other beings’ communication, including forms of translation (Wohlleben 2015). Do rocks or mountains translate? What are we to make of a text such as Canadian novelist Anne Michaels’ Fugitive Pieces (1998: 53) that tells us, ‘it’s no metaphor to hear the radiocarbon chronometer, the Geiger counter amplifying the faint breathing of the rock, fifty thousand years old.’ Is this mountain using the Geiger counter to translate its heart-beat into something approximately convertible to human language? In other words, where does translation start, and where does it stop?

These questions may be taken as rhetorical flourishes, hyperbolic exercises in philosophical thought-experimentation on a par with Thomas Nagel’s (1974) classic enquiry, ‘What is it like to be a bat?’ Certainly such questions can figure here to point out the difficulty of drawing a translative frontier on the maps of communicative interactions that make up the world. However, in this book, as will become clear in due course, such questions are meant literally, and are meant to be taken seriously: ‘it’s no metaphor …’, Michaels (1998: 53) assures us. Only one aspect of my question, ‘where does translation start, and where does it stop?’, needs to be adjusted: my series of questions assumes the normative centrality of interlingual translation as the template against which we measure other beings’ translation-work. This normative centrality is a hidden assumption that I will be questioning through the entirety of the book.

Just such a normativity underpins Even-Zohar’s meditations upon the notion of ‘transfer’ as a generalized operation that replicates translative movements across a plural range of cultural systems (whence the notion of ‘polysystems’ that underpins his theory). Translations are the local manifestation of larger cultural transfers. Translative transformations also generate cultural transformations, and thus polysystems theory seeks to explain a clear ‘correlation between transfer and transformation’ (1990: 20). Responding however to the perceived threat to the actual work of translators and theoretical analyses of that work posed by the expansion of the framework of analysis, Even-Zohar (1990: 74) acknowledges that ‘[s]ome people would take this as a liquidation of translation theory.’ Rebuffing this accusation, he maintains that

the implication is quite the opposite: through a larger context, it will become even clearer that ‘translation’ is not a marginal procedure of cultural systems. Secondly, the larger context will help us identify the really particular in translation. Thirdly, it will change our conception of the translated text in such a way that we may perhaps be liberated from certain postulated criteria. And fourthly, it may help us isolate what ‘translational procedures’ consist of. (ibid: 74)

Even-Zohar is at pains to preserve the specificity of translation as an interlingual activity within larger cultural process of exchange. Yet it is the pronounced centrality of ‘culture’ in this systemic theory that allows Even-Zohar to make a difference between interlingual and intercultural transformations, and thus between textual ‘translation’ and cultural ‘transfer’. This distinction, however, is silently transported to the outer periphery of Even-Zohar’s polysystems, so that ‘nature’ is excluded from these transformative processes. In the rest of this book, by contrast, I will be aguing that nature is the locus par excellence of transformation: ‘nature’ is a moniker for the sum total of transformative processes that constitute the planet. Thus Even-Zohar eloquently urges the enlargement of frameworks of analysis for the work of translators, but his commitment to respecting the specificity of their work leads him to insert brakes to this expansive process. It is exactly for this reason that in this book I choose ‘translation’ as the all-embracing term for transformative transfers of many types, without wishing in any way whatsoever to denigrate or diminish the work of translators in their everyday practice. Far from marginalizing their work, I wish to integrate it into much larger processes, processes that by far exceed the still limited realm of ‘culture’—thereby enhancing the status of interlingual translation rather than diminishing it.

Thus, in the chapters that follow, although I take human written texts and the interlingual translation processes in which they are embedded as my primary object of analysis, I nonetheless assume the derivative character of human interlingual translation. The dérive or drift that so disturbs traditional translation theorists in actual fact points, indirectly, towards the derivative nature of human interlingual translation. That derivative character does not render textual translation a secondary or second-rate activity, but simply underscores the relational and interdependent nature of all human activity. It is high time we realized that ‘interdependent’ does not mean ‘secondary’ or ‘second-rate’: this residual paranoia of Enlightenment individualism is well past its use-by date and a new understanding of interdependency is long overdue.