After Babel

by George Steiner

Return to top ⤴

A book about language and translation, basically arguing that all communication is translation. Translation is typically imagined between languages, but Steiner raises the idea of translation between historical and present contexts as well as between people’s internal thoughts, which still need translating even if they’re speaking the same language.

These notes (and the long selection of quotations) are very rough, and will need to be pared back and edited. Though this is a good example of why I write notes in the first place, because I have no memory of reading this book, at all…

Notes

Quotes

There is also a reassuring modesty in more recent claims made for a ‘theory of translation.’ After Babel tries to show that there cannot, in any strict or responsible sense, be any such ‘theory.’ The cerebral proceedings which would have to underlie and explain it are simply inaccessible.

To an extent almost defiant of common sense, approved academic studies have fragmented into minute specialization. The parish grows smaller with every teaching appointment or research grant. The sanctioned vision is microscopic. More and more is being published in learned journals, by academic presses, about less and less. The note is one of Byzantine minutiae, of commentaries on commentaries on commentaries towering like inverted pyramids on single points often ephemeral.

After Babel postulates that translation is formally and pragmatically implicit in every act of communication, in the emission and reception of each and every mode of meaning, be it in the widest semiotic sense or in more specifically verbal exchanges. To understand is to decipher. To hear significance is to translate. Thus the essential structural and executive means and problems of the act of translation are fully present in acts of speech, of writing, of pictorial encoding inside any given language. Translation between different languages is a particular application of a configuration and model fundamental to human speech even where it is monoglot.

There are no ‘theories of literature,’ there is no ‘theory of criticism.’ Such tags are arrogant bluff, or a borrowing, transparent in its pathos, from the enviable fortunes and forward motion of science and technology. There are, most assuredly, and pace our current masters in Byzantium, no ‘theories of translation.’ What we do have are reasoned descriptions of processes. At very best, we find and seek, in turn, to articulate, narrations of felt experience, heuristic or exemplary notations of work in progress.

Our instruments of perception are not theories or working hypotheses in any scientific, which means falsifiable, sense, but what I call ‘working metaphors.’

The determination of tone-values, of the complete semantic event brought about by Posthumus’s words, the attempt to grasp the full reach of those words both inward and in respect of other personages and the audience, moves in concentric and ever-widening circles.

No aspect of Elizabethan and European culture is formally irrelevant to the complete context of a Shakespearean passage.

Wittgenstein asked where, when, and by what rationally established criterion the process of free yet potentially linked and significant association in psychoanalysis could be said to have a stop. An exercise in ‘total reading’ is also potentially unending.

When reading any piece of English prose after about 1800 and most verse, the general reader assumes that the words on the page, with a few ‘difficult’ or whimsical exceptions, mean what they would in his own idiom.

A great part of Western art and literature is a set of variations on definitive themes. Hence the anarchic bitterness of the late-comer and the impeccable logic of Dada when it proclaims that no new impulses of feeling or recognition will arise until language is demolished.

I suspect that the receptivity of a given language to metaphor is a crucial factor. That receptivity varies widely: ethno-linguists tell us, for example, that Tarascan, a Mexican tongue, is inhospitable to new metaphors, whereas Cuna, a Panamanian language, is avid for them.

One thing is clear: every language-act has a temporal determinant. No semantic form is timeless. When using a word we wake into resonance, as it were, its entire previous history. A text is embedded in specific historical time; it has what linguists call a diachronic structure. To read fully is to restore all that one can of the immediacies of value and intent in which speech actually occurs.

The process of diachronic translation inside one’s own native tongue is so constant, we perform it so unawares, that we rarely pause either to note its formal intricacy or the decisive part it plays in the very existence of civilization. By far the greatest mass of the past as we experience it is a verbal construct. History is a speech-act, a selective use of the past tense. Even substantive remains such as buildings and historical sites must be ‘read,’ i.e. located in a context of verbal recognition and placement, before they assume real presence.

In the absence of interpretation, in the manifold but generically unified meaning of the term, there could be no culture, only an inchoate silence at our backs. In short, the existence of art and literature, the reality of felt history in a community, depend on a never-ending, though very often unconscious, act of internal translation. It is no overstatement to say that we possess civilization because we have learnt to translate out of time.

The privileged speak to the world at large as they do to themselves, in a conspicuous consumption of syllables, clauses, prepositions, concomitant with their economic resources and the spacious quarters they inhabit.

The language of a community, however uniform its social contour, is an inexhaustibly multiple aggregate of speech-atoms, of finally irreducible personal meanings.

Obviously, we speak to communicate. But also to conceal, to leave unspoken. The ability of human beings to misinform modulates through every wavelength from outright lying to silence.

‘Translation,’ properly understood, is a special case of the arc of communication which every successful speech-act closes within a given language. On the inter-lingual level, translation will pose concentrated, visibly intractable problems; but these same problems abound, at a more covert or conventionally neglected level, intra-lingually.

In other words, any genuine act of translation is, in one regard at least, a transparent absurdity, an endeavour to go backwards up the escalator of time and to re-enact voluntarily what was a contingent motion of spirit.

Thought is language internalized, and we think and feel as our particular language impels and allows us to do. But tongues differ as profoundly as do nations. They too are monads, ‘perpetual living mirrors of the universe’ each of which reflects or, as we would now put it, structures experience according to its own particular sight-lines and habits of cognition.

All men do so, and in that sense language, and metaphor in particular, are a universal fact and a universal mode of being.

Every language structures and organizes reality in its own manner and thereby determines the components of reality that are peculiar to this given language.

The ‘semantic field’ of a given culture is a dynamic, socially motivated construct. The particular ‘language and reality game’ played by the community depends, in a way very similar to that argued by Wittgenstein in the Philosophical Investigations, on the actions, on the historically evolved and agreed-to customs of the particular society. What we find here is a ‘dynamic mentalism:’ language organizes experience, but that organization is constantly acted upon by the collective behaviour of the particular group of speakers. Thus there occurs a cumulative dialectic of differentiation: languages generate different social modes, different social modes further divide languages.

Whorf finds that the Hopi language contains no words, grammatical forms or idiomatic constructions referring directly to what we call ‘time,’ or to the vectors of time and motion as we use them.

In practice, the analysis of phonological universals turns out to be a rather simple-minded and blunt enterprise. A good many conclusions are, again, of the order of unsurprising generality implicit in the statement that all human beings require oxygen.

A single genuine exception, in any language whether living or dead, can invalidate the whole concept of a grammatical universal. Indeed, this whole approach has since been largely abandoned.

Chomskian ‘deep structures,’ on the other hand, are located ‘far beyond the level of actual or even potential consciousness.’ We may think of them as relational patterns or strings of an order of abstraction far greater than even the simplest of grammatical rules. Even this is too concrete a representation. ‘Deep structures’ are those innate components of the human mind that enable it to carry out ‘certain formal kinds of operations on strings.’ These operations have no a priori justification. They are of the category of essential arbitrariness inherent in the fact that the world exists.

The claims made for a scientific linguistics derive their substance from an assumed parallelism with formal logic and with the kinds of experimental psychological and statistical investigation which are, in fact, susceptible of precise, quantifiable treatment. It may well be that human speech is not of this order. The problems posed by the indissoluble bond of the examining process with the examined, the dynamics of instability which result from the need to use language in order to study language—these are very probably resistant to rigorous, let alone exhaustive, construction.

But to assert that any given pattern is uniquely concordant with ‘underlying reality’ and therefore normative and predictive, is to take a very large, philosophically dubious step.

The marginalia, the anarchic singularities and inefficiencies which generative transformational grammars leave to one side or attempt to cover with ad hoc rules, may in fact be among the nerve-centres of linguistic change,

It is quite conceivable that, in language, continuous induction from simple, elemental units to more complex, realistic forms is not justified. The extent and formal ‘undecidability’ of context—and every linguistic particle above the level of the phoneme is context-bound—may make it impossible, except in the most abstract, meta-linguistic sense, to pass from ‘pro-verbs,’ ‘kernels,’ or ‘deep deep structures’ to actual speech.

Certain experts in the field of simultaneous translation declare that a native bilingual speaker does not make for an outstanding interpreter. The best man will be one who has consciously gained fluency in his second tongue.1 The bilingual person does not ‘see the difficulties,’ the frontier between the two languages is not sharp enough in his mind.

Yet in another sense we have said almost nothing when we analyse the operations of the larynx or transcribe on to graph paper the extraordinarily intricate, rapid, and rigorous moves whereby tongue and palate collaborate to exteriorize speech sounds, many of them scarcely distinguishable but vitally different in purpose.

We distort the question even when we merely ask it. We give it, inevitably, the flatness and coherence of normal speech.

the elucidation of what was meant, implied, concealed, inferentially omitted, equivocated on ‘in these circumstances, to this audience, for these purposes and with these intentions’ (Austin’s defining rubric for the truth or falsity of an utterance), can. never be reduced to a single, stringently verifiable method. It must remain a selective, highly intuitive proceeding, at the very best self-conscious of its restricted and, in certain regards, fictional status. It hinges, in Schleiermacher’s phrase, on the ‘art of hearing’.

To all past events, as to all present intake, the observer brings a specific mental set. It is a set programmed for the present.

The final exchanges between Eteocles and the Chorus in the Seven Against Thebes are a perfect instance of free fatalism. Eteocles’ knowledge that death waits for him at the seventh gate does not void his action; it gives it the dignity of meaning.

Reportedly, the Old Believers in Russia, seeking martyrdom and immediate ascent into the kingdom of God, used the future tense of verbs sparingly, if at all.

Condemned men probably bring complex idiomatic attenuations to any discourse on the ‘day after tomorrow.’ From a psycho-linguistic and socio-linguistic point of view, as well as in the perspective of cultural history, it would be valuable to know a good deal more than we do about the ‘cut-off points’ in future imaginings for different societies and epochs.

Is the chronological scale of human history sufficient to register, at anything deeper than levels of idiomatic fashion, genuine and differentiated changes in man’s time sense?

Close the door on the future and all perception, all knowledge is made inert.

Future tenses are an example, though one of the most important, of the more general framework of non- and counter-factuality. They are a part of the capacity of language for the fictional and illustrate the absolutely central power of the human word to go beyond and against ‘that which is the case’.

There are no facsimiles of sensibility, no twin psyches. All speech forms and notations, therefore, entail a latent or realized element of individual specificity. They are in part an idiolect. Every counter of communication carries with it a potential or externalized aspect of personal content.

As concentric spheres of association move outward, they come to include the community, the province, the nation. There are innumerable near-identities or, more strictly speaking, overlaps of associative content which Englishmen share by virtue of historical or climatic experience but which an American, emitting the same speech-sounds, may have no inkling of.

Where experience is monotonized, on the other hand, the associative content grows progressively more transparent. There is, currently, a stylistic and emotional esperanto of airport lounges, a vulgate identically inexpressive from Archangel to Tierra del Fuego.

When we speak to others we speak ‘at the surface’ of ourselves. We normally use a shorthand beneath which there lies a wealth of subconscious, deliberately concealed or declared associations so extensive and intricate that they probably equal the sum and uniqueness of our status as an individual person.

A diffuse rationalism, the levelling impress of the mass media, the increasing monochrome of the technological milieu, are crowding on the private components of speech. Under stress of radio and television, it may be that even our dreams will be standardized and made synchronic with those of our neighbours.

Even the earliest literary texts known to us have a long history of language behind them.

There can be no definitive lexicon or logical grammar of ordinary language or even of parts of it because different human beings, even in simple cases of reference and ‘naming,’ will always relate different associations to a given word. These differences are the life of normal speech.

The most obvious difficulties, however, arise from the psychology of meaning. A logical grammar such as the universalists aim for has to ignore all differences between the way in which diverse languages, cultures, and individuals use words. In fact, ‘meaning’ is scarcely ever neutral or reducible to a static, unambiguous setting.

Within any given language or period of history the rules of grammar are nothing more than very approximative, unstable summaries of regularities or ‘majority’ habits derived from actual speech. This truth is not invalidated by the possibility that the boundaries within which such regularities can change may be determined by deep-seated and perhaps universal constraints.

It is because the correspondence between words and ‘things’ is, in the logician’s sense of the term, ‘weak’ that language is strong. Reverse these concepts, as artificial universal languages do, and the absence-of any natural, complex strength in the ensuing modes of communication is obvious.

A theory of language and of truth which does not keep in view the distinction between the relation of a perceptual stimulus to its causal source and the relation of a symbol to its referent—the latter depends on a linguistic community and social code—is in danger of being one-sided and artificial.

Language is the main instrument of man’s refusal to accept the world as it is. Without that refusal, without the unceasing generation by the mind of ‘counter-worlds’—a generation which cannot be divorced from the grammar of counter-factual and optative forms—we would turn forever on the treadmill of the present.

Statistically, the incidence of ‘true statements’—definitional, demonstrative, tautological—in any given mass of discourse is probably small.

It will, except on specialized occasions of logically formal, prescriptive, or solemnized utterance, not convey ‘truth’ or ‘information of facts’ at all. We communicate motivated images, local frameworks of feeling. All descriptions are partial.

Information does not come naked except in the schemata of computer languages or the lexicon. It comes attenuated, flexed, coloured, alloyed by intent and the milieu in which the utterance occurs

Uniquely, one conjectures, among animal species, we cultivate inside us, we conceptualize and prefigure the enigmatic terror of our own personal extinction. It is only imperfectly, by dint of strenuous inattention, that we bear the knowledge of that finale.

In actual speech all but a small class of definitional or ‘unreflective-response’ sentences are surrounded, mutely ramified, blurred by an immeasurably dense, individualized field of intention and withholding.

Because all human speech consists of arbitrarily selected but intensely conventionalized signals, meaning can never be wholly separated from expressive form. Even the most purely ostensive, apparently neutral terms are embedded in linguistic particularity, in an intricate mould of cultural-historical habit. There are no surfaces of absolute transparency.

Not everything can be translated now. Contexts can be lost, bodies of reference which in the past made it possible to interpret a piece of writing which now eludes us.

To dismiss the validity of translation because it is not always possible and never perfect is absurd. What does need clarification, say the translators, is the degree of fidelity to be pursued in each case, the tolerance allowed as between different jobs of work.

Truchement is a complicated word with tonalities inclusive of different ranges and problems of translation. It derives from Arabic tarjumdn (Catalan torsimany) and originally designates diose who translated between Moor and Spaniard. Its use in Pascal’s Provindales, XV, suggests a negative feeling: the truchement is a go-between, whose rendering may not be disinterestedly accurate.

It is only very recently, and this is a revolution in the subject, that the ‘anatomy’ and raw materials of translation are becoming accessible to methodical scrutiny.

Suppose we put the question in its strongest form: ‘what, then, is translation?;’ ‘how does the human mind move from one language to another?’ What sort of answers are being called for? What must be established for such answers to be plausible or, indeed, possible? The theory and analysis of translation have, until now, proceeded as if we knew, or as if the knowledge needed to make the question nontrivial were foreseeable given a reasonable time span and the current rate of progress in psychology, linguistics, or some other authenticated ‘sciences.’

Virtually everything we know of the organization of the functions of language in the human brain derives from pathology. It has been recorded under abnormal conditions, during brain surgery, through electrical stimulation of exposed parts of the brain, by observing the more or less controlled effects of drugs on cerebral functions. Almost the entirety of our picture of how language ‘is located in’ and produced by the brain is an extrapolation from the evidence of speech disorders followed by the study of dead tissue.

To know how a process is organized, to have a flowchart of sequential operations, is not, necessarily, to know the nature of the energies involved. A phenomenon can be mapped, but the map can be of the surface.

A ‘complete translation,’ i.e. a definitive insight into and generalization of the way in which any human being relates word to object would require a complete access to him on the part of his interlocutor. The latter would have to experience a ‘total mental change.’ This is both logically and substantively a meaningless notion.

The radical generosity of the translator (‘I grant beforehand that there must be something there’), his trust in the ‘other,’ as yet untried, unmapped alternity of statement, concentrates to a philosophically dramatic degree the human bias towards seeing the world as symbolic, as constituted of relations in which ‘this’ can stand for ‘that,’ and must in fact be able to do so if there are to be meanings and structures.

As we have seen at the outset, the hermeneutic of import occurs not only across a linguistic-spatial frontier but also requires a motion across time. What ordinary translation tries to do is ‘to produce the text which the foreign poet would have written had he been working in one’s own speech now, or more or less now.’ The latitude of ‘more or less,’ the elasticity of assumed contemporaneity is, as we shall see, one of the persistent, functional aspects of the whole construct of understanding and restatement.

The parameters of linguistic ‘distancing,’ of historical stylization are endlessly variable. Translators may opt for forms of expression centuries older than current speech. They may choose an idiom prevalent only a generation back. Most frequently, the bias to the archaic produces a hybrid: the translator combines, more or less knowingly, turns taken from the past history of the language, from the repertoire of its own masters, from preceding translators or from antique conventions which modern parlance inherits and uses still for ceremony. The translation is given a patina.

Plato uses ‘the god’ and ‘the gods’ almost at random, and even combines the two in the same sentence (in 71a). But Jowett retains ‘God.’ As Cornford points out,1 the “resulting distortions of the tone of the original, and of its logical emphasis, are far from trivial. Plato was no monotheist; he believed in the divinity of the whole of phenomenal nature and attributed a divine status to the heavenly bodies. Jowett’s ‘Christianization’ of the dialogue, moreover, misses a central aspect of Plato’s teaching on creation.

The bulk of literary, historical, philosophical translation, even where it concerns fiction, political writings, or plays intended for production, shows symptoms of retreat from current speech. When we score a translation as being lifeless, as being cast in ‘translationese,’ what we are usually condemning is the patina.

By choosing or achieving almost fortuitously a dating some two to three generations earlier than their own, the transistors of the Authorized Version made of a foreign, many-layered original a life-form so utterly appropriated, so vividly out of an English rather than out of a Hebraic, Hellenic, or Ciceronian past, that the Bible became a new pivot of English self-consciousness.

Erroneously or not, by virtue of initial chance or of method, the Western eye has fixed on certain constants—or what are taken to be constants—of Chinese landscape, attitude, and emotional register. Each translation in turn appears to corroborate what is fundamentally a Western ‘invention of China’.2 Pound can imitate and persuade with utmost economy not because he or his reader knows so much but because both concur in knowing so little.

French, German, Italian, English renditions of Japanese haiku are intimately related and come out in hushed monotone. In other words: the more remote the linguistic-cultural source, the easier it is to achieve a summary penetration and a transfer of stylized, codified markers.

In Pound’s imitations of China, in Logue’s Homer, ignorance of the relevant language is a paradoxical advantage. No semantic specificity, no particularity of context interposes itself between the poet-translator and a general, cultural-conventional sense of ‘what the thing is or ought to be like.’ Whatever the archaeologists may tell us, we have come to envision antique statuary as pure white marble; and time’s erosion, having worn away the original loud colours, affirms our misprision.

Repetition is the purest concentrate of translation. To repeat identically is to translate along the axis of time (repetition comes after, however closely). To repeat ‘freely,’ as does Celan, is to exemplify the entire dialectic of secondariness and potential invention which binds the translator to and divorces him from his source.

This context is no less than the entire corpus of German Shakespeare translations (the translator translates after and against his predecessors almost as much as he translates his source). The context is also the interiority, which is psychologically authentic though it may be arbitrary and falsely acquisitive as well, of Shakespeare’s works inside the German-speaker’s sense of his own language and of its literary modes. It is, finally, the particular abrogations or extensions of self which carry the translator, notably when he is himself a writer of some stature, to the original.

Out of the tension of resistance and affinity, a tension directly proportional to the proximity of the two languages and historical communities, grows the elucidative strangeness of the great translation.

In each case the imbalance caused by the initial motions of trust, decipherment, and appropriative use remains unrighted. The translation outweighs the original or is outweighed by it;

In the Psalms, for example, the formulaic, literalist texture of the Hebrew idiom is frequently distorted to baroque magnificence.

He can re-fashion this imagery, adapt it to its task, assimilate it to his needs and change it beyond recognition, but he can no more represent what is in front of his eyes without a pre-existing stock of acquired images than he can paint it without the pre-existing colours which he must have on his palette.

The discipline of referential recognition, of citation, of a shared symbolic and syntactic code which marked traditional literacy are, increasingly, the prerogative or burden of an elite.

The outward gains of barbarism which threaten to trivialize our schools, which demean the level of discourse in our politics, which cheapen the human word, are so strident as to make deeper currents almost impalpable. It may be that cultural traditions are more firmly anchored in our syntax than we realize, and that we shall continue to translate from the past of our individual and social being whether we would or not.

I believe that the communication of information, of ostensive and verifiable ‘facts,’ constitutes only one part, and perhaps a secondary part, of human discourse. The potentials of fiction, of counterfactuality, of undecidable futurity profoundly characterize both the origins and nature of speech. They differentiate it ontologically from the many signal systems available to the animal world.

Alchemy »