LITERARY TRANSLATION: AN ANCHOR OF INTERDISCIPLINARY THINKING By Rainer Schulte Several attempts have been made in recent years to establish interdisciplinary programs in various institutions across the country. Narrow specialization or over-specialization within one discipline no longer seems to meet the demands of our present educational needs. It is not clear in all cases what these needs might be, but in general, humanistic studies have lost a great deal of the vitality and enthusiasms that they had in earlier periods of our civilization. It is my contention that the art of translation can play an important role in developing interdisciplinary thinking, and that Translation Programs will rapidly assume the same importance that Creative Writing Programs now enjoy in most literature departments. Translation can be considered one of the most intense ways of revitalizing the study of literature. A few maxim-like statements might capture the thrust that humanistic studies will have to take in the next few years.
A literary text can be approached from two different angles: from the point of view of the writer who produces the text, and from the point of view of the reader, scholar and critic who tries to describe and illuminate the text. The person who is in the habit of creating a text generally reads other texts with greater intensity and awareness. The writer and poet reads the text from within and tunes into the structures that underlie a work of writing. The function of the scholar/critic is to enter a text, to understand a text, describe its various levels of structure and meaning and to lead the reader back to the creative impulse that was responsible for the creation of the text. Both ways of looking at a text can easily lose perspective. The scholar frequently sees a text as nothing more than a historical, social, psychological document, and largely ignores the aesthetic value of the text by focusing on a sequence of mental footnotes. The writer might not apply any critical standards to the text, but sanction everything he does by labeling it "creative." The act of translation, however, can succeed in establishing a healthy balance between the creation of the text and its interpretation. Naturally, no translation can come about without the act of interpretation that precedes it. Translation fosters creative reading of the text. An intense exchange between the text and the reader is established through the close reading that translation requires from the translator. In that sense it is perhaps no coincidence that most poets have also been involved in translations. In what way then does the act of translation intensify interdisciplinary thinking? To answer this question, we must first establish the relationship between translation and interpretation. Without an act of interpretation, no true translation is possible. And interpretation is seen here not as the accumulation of information on the text, but as a process of visualizing the situations as they occur in the text of the source language. "Visualization" is a key word in the translation and interpretation process. Words have their lexicon meaning, but in a literary text, especially in a poetic text, words take on meanings that are beyond or different from the immediate lexicon meaning. The translator as interpreter has to visualize the directions of meaning that are suggested by the particular sequence of words or sentence structures the poet has created. That process of visualizing the various levels of meanings and ambiguities is extremely slow, but has to be started in the source language before the translator can even think about translating a line. Practically speaking,t he translator must start his work by an extensive use of dictionaries in the source language in order to prepare a full visualization of the situation as presented in the original text. The dictionary activity in the source language might be as intense as the dictionary usage from the source language into the target language. The translator must learn very rapidly that his major function is to think out relationships that exist between words so that he recreates the situation and not just words. That kind of activity will show the translator the multiplicity of nuances that interact between words; he will acquire a keener sense of language awareness and is therefore concerned with the transplantation of situations rather than words, although ultimately that transplantation has to be materialized through words. In any translation it is easy to detect those translators who have only worked on the level of transferring lexicon meaning rather than the ramifications of meanings inherent in a situation. The true translator works through associative thought processes by constantly thinking out relationships between words, between sentences, between linguistic structures. He is always aware of the multiple explosive possibilities that can happen between words. The translator starts with a lexicon understanding of the word, but then he must proceed to investigate the historical, cultural background of words as encountered in the context of the text. Linguistic understanding functions as the beginning to place the text within a cultural context. This process can never be a linear one; it works on several levels at the same time and for that very reason falls into the realm of interdisciplinary thinking. The translator always moves between two objects, he constantly changes his frame of reference, he does not paraphrase a text but recreates the text. When a translator is involved in transferring one level of language into another, he is forced to step from one frame of reference to another. This point marks the beginning of associative thinking. The constant shift from one level of perception to another requires him at all times to find the vital language that best corresponds to that transference in the present moment. The shifting angle of approach, the constant stepping from one frame of reference to another, the exercise of visualization that takes place between words, all these factors contribute to the development of an intense interdisciplinary thinking. The process is precise in thinking out nuances, in expanding the understanding of a word's magnetic field. No one else, whether the creator of a text or the critic of a text, would read the text with the intellectual and perceptive intensity that the translator has to bring to the text in order to effectuate a good translation. The translator is at all times involved in several processes: he tries to understand the text, he evaluates the possibilities of language and he makes decisions about which nuance he will focus on. He combines understanding with evaluation and decision-making, all activities that are essential for the promotion of interdisciplinary thinking. Theory and practice find a harmonious balance in the act of translation, but always oriented toward solving problems as they emerge during the process of translation. Translation, like all interdisciplinary studies, takes place in the present. It is a process that combines various activities at the same time. Since language is in a constant flow of change, translation problems are never the same. A translation of the same text five years later poses different problems of language sensibility which accounts for the fact that probably all texts should be retranslated every twenty-five years. Human situations are of a similar nature. They are never the same, they change from one moment to the next and no one single method learned within the confines of a discipline can be used to approach such a situation. A certain mental flexibility comes into play in order to meet the constantly changing aspects of a situation. Herein lies the essence of an interdisciplinary approach. To a certain degree, the act of translation can be compared to the work of a performer. The performer starts with the signs on the page; they might be words or musical notations. The process that the performer has to initiate is somewhat the reverse of what the creator of a text does. Through the signs ont he page the performer tries to understand the situation, the emotional intention that preceded the expression through signs. The creator of a text goes from the source to the flow of the river, the performer starts with the flow and works himself back to the source. In both cases, they are performing extremely intense intellectual and emotional acts. For the performer, the signs ont he page are to be seen as tools that take him beyond the signs to the original power and energy that made the work possible. Once he has established a feeling for that power he can think about beginning to perform. With respect to the act of translation I called this process the "visualization" of the situation. For a performer to be successful he must free himself from the restrictions of the signs on the page. Once he has understood the situation that lies behind these signs, he is then in a position to establish his own mental and emotional connections with the situations that will give life and energy to his performance. As strange as it might sound,t he translator must free himself from words first before he can undertake the actual act of translation. He is not translating words, he is transferring situations through the medium of words. However, words without the substance of visualized situations behind them will never succeed in reconstructing or creating an emotional impact once they have been transferred into another language. Like the musical performer who has to know well the instrument on which he performs, the translator must know extremely well the shades of the language he translates into. Frequently, for that reason, people who know the source language very well are not necessarily good translators. Once a translator has succeeded in transplanting a situation from one language into another, he then can fall back on trying to approximate the lexicon appearance of the source language with the lexicon meanings of the language he translates into. That resemblance might almost be considered a coincidence rather than a necessity. Ten pianists who perform the same musical piece come up with ten different interpretations of the text, without, however, violating the basic signs which they study when they first come into contact with the text. In translation, similar rules apply. Let's assume someone were to translate a poem from Spanish into English. Then, a native Spanish speaker would retranslate the poem back into Spanish and another English-speaking person would transplant the poem back into English. Ideally speaking they should be quite similar. However, experience has taught that this is not the case at all. The various interpretive statements of each translator have added a new dimension to the text, without necessarily violating or destroying the basic situation of the original poem. The fragility and the constant weighing of nuances and the decision making process involved in this act of translation bring the translation activity very close to the thought and work process that goes on in interdisciplinary studies. The person involved in translation and interdisciplinary studies is always at the edge of the possible and the impossible, of that which can be expressed and that which cannot be fully reflected through words, at the border where intellect and emotions meet. The intellectual process always tries to illuminate the emotional situations through a never-ending sequence of "visualizations." Translating words corresponds to playing notes in their chronological order. Translating a text is a reconstruction of situations as they occur in the text. At that level, only the intense interpreter of a text will be able to recreate a vital text in another language. As in the performing arts, often this highest kind of translation will have to rely on a strong dose of inspiration. Good translations are as rare as good works of literature, perhaps even more so. In summary, the art of translation practiced in the context of a Humanities program can greatly contribute to an intensification of literary and humanistic studies. Translation strengthens the art of interpretation and will make it possible for readers to get back into the text, rather than just read about the text. The translator can also balance the tremendous gap that has developed between the creator of a text and the critic/scholar by focusing on a very vigorous and detailed analysis of the text itself. The translator can increase the writer's critical sense of his own language, and the translator can open channels for the scholar to learn how to read a text, to think through a text, which might lead to an expansion of the aesthetic experience of the text. And Finally, the approaches that a translator has to use in order to make possible a transference of a text from one language to another are quite similar to those used in interdisciplinary thinking. Translation increases a person's mental and methodological flexibility, it is always production-oriented and combines understanding with processes of evaluation and decision-making when confronted with a situation or a problem in the present. |