Читать книгу German as Contact Zone - Russell West-Pavlov - Страница 7

Mauretanian-Malian filmmaker Abderrahmane Sissako’s Rostov-Luanda (Sissako 1997) is one of the most curious road movies produced in recent decades. The film tracks the protagonist Dramane (who is played by and may be close to Sissako himself) in his quest through Luanda, the capital of Angola, and two other Angolan rural centres, to find a long-lost friend named Baribanga. Baribanga is a former fellow student from the era when Dramane/Sissako trained at the Moscow Film Academy in then Soviet Russia. The two Africans met on the long train-ride from Moscow to Rostov-on-Don, where both were to take part in a Russian language course, and became friends, but have lost contact in the years after the collapse of the Soviet world. Dramane wonders what has become of his friend after decades of civil war in Angola, and undertakes to track him down.

The quest takes Dramane/Sissako from Paris back to his native Kiffa in Southern Mauretania, prior to making the journey to war-scarred Luanda, the capital of Angola, as well as to several other regional towns in Angola. Finally, in a surprising turn of events, the journey takes the questing protagonist back to Europe—to East Berlin, where Baribanga is now living, but about to return home after the years of exile. In the final scene of the film, Germany and its capital become a ‘contact zone’—an eerie place of meeting, where presence and absence, arrival and departure, and finally, speech and silence, overlap.

Sissako’s film, in which a bewildering range of languages are spoken on the screen, gains another overlay of language in its final moments. In the last, almost mute scene, not a word of German is spoken. Yet the language is present in visual form: in the subtitles at the bottom of the screen—and in a brief glimpse of a street-sign, one that is programmatic for the import of Sissako’s film (and also for the underlying thesis of this book): ‘Walkürenstraße’ [‘Valkyrie Street’] (Sissako 1997: 56:47).

The street does exist in the real-life East Berlin suburb of Karlshorst (it can easily be located on Google Maps streetview, or visited in person if you so wish). But Sissako’s semi-mute filmic text is more interested in exploiting the mythic-allegorical resonances of the street-name: in Germanic mythology, the valkyries were the beings that accompanied warriors fallen in battle to Walhalla. Sissako’s mythicological pun is not merely about Dramane’s imminent task of accompanying Baribanga back to the erstwhile battle-grounds of South-Western Africa after the cessation of Cold War hostilities. It is also about his own place within an elaborate allegory of transportation and translation, whether geographical, linguistic, cultural or mnemonic.

Within that allegory, Germany and the German language are also translated. But not merely translated—they are more profoundly and mysteriously transmuted. Transported from its customary hegemonic position as a national language of a global economic hegemon, German is relocated to a diegetically marginalized position of urban dilapidation and imminent departure. In Sissako’s final scene, German becomes a frontier region, a departure lounge, almost a non-place à la Augé (1992). It becomes, in Sissako’s bizarre filmic semiotics, a ‘contact zone’, and thus provides a neat image for both of the two intertwined undertakings explored in this book: ‘contact zones’ and ‘translation’, with both of these being meant in a much broader sense than customary usage might suggest.

The expansion of meaning that I operate upon concepts such as ‘contact zone’ and ‘translation’ is hinted at in the name of the street upon which Sissako focuses. Sissako’s ‘Walkürenstraße’ is not merely a label that refers to passages between places, languages, or cultures. The valkyries transported the fallen warriors from this life to the after-life—across the frontier between life, death, or non-life or the-other(s)-of-life. This is no ordinary frontier, but rather, the ultimate frontier, the border par excellence; the moment of its transgression in fact announces the blurring or even abolition of all frontiers. Given the polyglot character of Sissako’s film, this frontier may also be the frontier between language and non-language, or the other(s)-of-language, whose status in the social sciences is not dissimilar to that of death in the life sciences.

I have stressed the alternative ‘other(s)-of-life’ and ‘-of-language’ that somehow eludes the binary ‘life’/‘non-life’ and ‘language’/‘non-language’ because that binary itself may be an illusion. Many streets in erstwhile Cold War Berlin were borders: Bernauer Straße between the districts of Mitte and Wedding is doubtless the most infamous example. Indeed, the East Berlin section of Sissako’s film begins with a brief sequence in which the taxi drives alongside to still remaining stretches of the Berlin Wall (Sissako 1997: 56:20). But the street in the last scene of Sissako’s film is not a frontier in that sense. Rather, it’s quite literally the street of the Valkyries, a street that crosses a frontier. Friedrichstraße at Checkpoint Charlie might be a better Cold War analogy for such a border-crossing street. The street of the Valkyries is a thoroughfare that translates between states, and no less importantly, connects them to one another. Sissako explores, via his filmic semiotics, the manner in which frontiers, from the microscopic to the planetary scales, are in fact, lieux de passage and lieux de brassage, ‘contact zones’ at which translations take place in such a way that the frontier enables rather than hinders communication and travel. His film thus exemplifies the way this book is not merely interested in expanding the semantic fields covered by ‘contact zones’ and ‘translation’ well beyond those of language and culture, but also seeks to turn that expansion back upon the line of demarcation that is constitutive of both terms, thus rendering it creative and generative.

Sissako’s film stages the absence of German and the imminent-absence of Germany as its point of arrival. In place of that evacuated site of German and Germany, it installs a periphery and a site of transition, a ‘contact zone’. Such a conceptual operation opens both the place and the language up to translation. But Sissako carries out these conceptual undertakings via the concrete semiotic presentation of built environments and natural landscapes. In this way, he suggests that translation is not merely a matter of language and culture, but, via the mediation of geography, becomes a phenomenon that pervades the entirety of the material world. Sissako’s project thus performs, albeit in reverse order, the four-part thesis of this book:

1 Translation is first and foremost a process that is ubiquitous in the material world, where the very smallest building blocks of matter are not so much entities as contact zones, fields of force, energy and attraction. In these constitutive contact zones, translations—exchanges of information—that make the world in its ongoing dynamic transformation, are constantly taking place.

2 One subset of such ongoing flows of information is language, itself a processual translative medium that interacts with other languages in what we know as interlingual translation.

3 One such language, German, can finally be read as a subspecies of cosmic translation. The translative nature of material itself devolves to the German language to make it, in my reading, an always already translative contact zone susceptible of new understandings—and in particular, of new pedagogical transmission in the contemporary translation classroom.

4 The Global South is the cradle of the contact zone as the basal form of cultural development and provides driving impulses for the reconceptualization of translation as a quantum process. This in turn generates central pedagogical inputs into the translation classroom.