spaztastic
i think i had my first "crazy grad student" moment tonight.
so the other day (friday) i went and talked to my prof, mr. bennett. he's teaching my class on turn of the century lit, but i went to go talk to him about this paper i'm writing for mr. kaiser's class on walter benjamin, the german-jewish literary critic, philosopher, essayist, etc. my paper is going to be about paul de man (deconstructivist critic), particularly his talk on walter benjamin's essay "the task of the translator". so i'm talking a lot about what translation is, but mainly about how de man seriously misses the point of benjamin's essay. to summarize in an extremely general way: de man says that benjamin's text is untranslatable, that it performs the idea of untranslatability, the idea that translation is essentially impossible.
i went to bennett originally to talk about my paper for his class, but after we were done talking about that, i asked him about this other paper. i know that mr. bennett really hates de man, so i was hoping to get some insider tips, some fuel for my fire, if you know what i mean. unfortunately, he didn't say a lot that was helpful, but he did open this word document of one of the chapters of a book he's written and point to a passage in cervantes' don quixote which deals directly with questions of translation. i read a bit of it and i was kind of curious, so he gave me the page number and the edition i should try to find, and off i went to the library. after some searching, i found some acceptable editions of quixote, but it took me a bit to find the passage. once i did, i went back to the german modular unit (i usually refer to it as a trailer, because it looks like one) and made some copies of the passage (about 3 pages), left the books in my mailbox - i had too many books in my bag already - and went home to do some work.
tonight i finally got down to doing some work on the paper, because this weekend i was preparing notes for my workshop on sunday, which was just a really really long meeting that involved myself and the other members of the benjamin seminar talking about our paper ideas and listening to mr. kaiser comment AT LENGTH on each one, whether we liked it or not. so on sunday night i was too exhausted (i had been to a party until about 230 and only got 5 hours of sleep) to do much work, except maybe a little reading. so tonight after i got home i started working. i decided, after about one introductory paragraph, that i would try to work with quixote instead of diving right into de man or benjamin. i saw mr. bennett today and he told me that he would talk more with me about this benjamin paper if i wanted to, and i could tell he had more to say about it than the last time we talked - he must have read over some of de man's and benjamin's texts.
my "crazy grad student" moment came in several instances, i suppose. the first was the realization of the irony that in my essay about translation, i'm forced to use a translation of quixote because i don't fucking speak spanish. the second was that i noticed there were lots of footnotes from the translator/editor of the volume in this particular passage. i wanted to read the footnotes, but they were endnotes, as it turns out. i realized this at around 11pm. i was torn between waiting until tomorrow to get the book, which was in my box in the trailer, or jumping in my car and trying my luck with the lock on the trailer door. i eventually said "fuck it", got in my car, and gunned it over to "grounds" (that's campus for all you non-UVa students). lo and behold, the door could be opened with my puny TA-issued key. and there you have it.
i guess the craziest thing about this is that i felt the biggest rush working on my paper tonight, an even bigger rush at being excited about getting some random book in my mailbox at 11 at night, and an even bigger rush when i finally read those footnotes!
this is what i've got so far. you don't need to read it unless you're really curious or in the off chance that you have absolutely nothing better to do. the irony of ironies is that because i've copy-pasted the document, you can't read my footnotes. and my indents are gone, oh well:
In the last of a series of lectures at Cornell University that would ultimately be his last lecture before his death, Paul de Man gave a talk on Walter Benjamin’s essay on the task of the translator, “Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers”. When I had finished reading de Man’s paper, I had the impression that something was awry, that de Man had somehow missed the mark of Benjamin’s essay; in the conventional sense, I felt as if something had been lost in translation. Strangely enough, this is the very idea that serves as de Man’s point of departure and overriding conclusion: that translation is impossible, and that Benjamin’s text, an untranslatable text itself, performs the notion of untranslatability. If this is the case, a number of worrying questions are raised. If it is impossible to translate anything, why bother translating at all? At the risk of sounding impertinent, we might also ask why Benjamin wrote the essay in the first place, especially considering that the piece was meant as an introduction to Benjamin’s published translations of Baudelaire. If we cannot answer the latter, the question of why we would read Benjamin’s essay today, assuming that translation is impossible, seems to shed its disrespectful connotation.
Before we begin examining de Man’s argumentation, perhaps it would be beneficial to have a brief look at a passage from a fictional text that precedes Benjamin and de Man by a number of centuries, but deals with similar problems of translation, particularly de Man’s claim that translation can only fail. In the second book of Cervantes’ Don Quixote, there is an episode in which the protagonist stumbles upon a book-printing shop in Barcelona. Upon entering, Don Quixote meets a man who is working on a translation from a Tuscan book called Le Bagatelle (literally, “trifles”) into Castilian Spanish. Quixote quizzes the man briefly on his Italian-to-Spanish translation and marvels at the man’s abilities:
“Body of me!” exclaimed Don Quixote, “how far advanced your Grace is in the Italian language! I will lay you a good wager that you translate piace as place, più as más, su as arriba, and giù as abajo.”
“I do indeed,” said the author, “for those are the proper equivalents.”
Even if we take into account the historical milieu of Cervantes’ work, it is hard to excuse Quixote’s simplistic conception of translating text. Translators of the early 17th century surely knew, as we do today, that the meaning of a word can change depending on its context. That the book being translated is identified as “of little importance” and that, as Cervantes’ translator makes us aware , Le Bagatelle is an imaginary book certainly cast(s) a spurious shadow on the translator’s task.
“And I would venture to take an oath,” Don Quixote went on, “that your Grace is not known to the world at large, which always is chary of rewarding men of exceptional ability and works deserving of praise. How many talents have been tossed away, how many geniuses have been tossed into the corner, how much of real worth has gone unappreciated!”
Quixote is quite confident in his opinions of translations and translators; we can perceive this from his readiness to bet or swear on his suppositions. His assumption about the renown of the translator he meets is neither immediately denied nor affirmed (such is Quixote’s loquacious nature), but would we be wrong if we agreed with him? The “world at large” is unappreciative of “men of exceptional ability and works deserving of praise”, by which Quixote could mean to say “writers and their writing” or specifically, the man in the shop, his ilk and their compositions - in other words, translators and translations. Quixote speaks of translation itself as an art in its own right, its practitioners as “geniuses”, and its material production as having “real worth”. Why is it, then, that translators and translations never get the recognition they deserve?
“But, for all of that, it appears to me that translating from one language into another, unless it be from one of those queenly tongues, Greek and Latin, is like gazing at a Flemish tapestry with the wrong side out: even though the figures are visible, they are full of threads that obscure the view and are not bright and smooth as when seen from the other side. Moreover, translating from easy languages does not call for either wit or eloquence, any more than does the mere transcription or copying of a document.”
Here Quixote’s excursus on translation seems to take a turn for the arbitrary. Translating from any language, with the exception of the classical tongues, is undesirable. In the tapestry of translated language, the “figures” are recognizable, their outlines can be discerned, but the general effect is far from pretty. Quixote’s reference to “easy languages” might be understood as the non-classical languages, collectively. Why they should be any simpler to translate from than from Greek or Latin is another question that remains unanswered. Maybe we should just be thankful that Quixote has not yet banished translation to the realm of “the impossible”. In effect, this speech seems to have canceled out the compliments Quixote has just made about the translator, as well as translators in general.
To our chagrin, the nobleman does not succeed in rescuing himself from committing this faux pas in the end, but he does continue to comment on the task of the translator. Fortunately for Quixote, the translator is an intellectual who pays nobility the respect it deserves and, subsequently, only speaks when spoken to.
“By this,” the knight continued, “I do not mean to imply that the task of translating is not a laudable occupation, for a man might employ his time less worthily and with less profit to himself. I make an exception here of those two famous translators: Doctor Cristóbal de Figueroa in his Pastor Fido and Don Juan de Jáuregui in his Aminta, where happily one may doubt as to which is the translation and which the original.”
With this comment, Quixote has completely negated anything flattering he has said about the translator; worse, less lucrative enterprises than attempting to translate text are certainly conceivable. Is translation worthwhile or not? Quixote names two Spanish authors (one of whom translated from Italian [!] ), whom he admires as “exceptions” to his rules, because the translated product and its text of origin are apparently interchangeable. By “dropping” the names Figueroa and Jáuregui in his own text, Cervantes elevates their literary status by referring to them as translators, and as a result, the standing of translators in the world.
If Quixote has been, up to this point in his excursus, relatively clear and straightforward, the end of his discourse becomes decisively muddier. Following his prior logic, if an original text and its translation are identical, then the experience of reading that translation could be likened to viewing a Flemish tapestry from the “right” position and setting eyes on a beautiful, complete artwork. However, if a reader such as Don Quixote can perceive the two tapestry-texts as identical, this means that he has the ability to read the original. But if he can read the original that is exactly the same as the translation, why would he want to read the translation in the first place? Alas, our hunger for answers is not satiated this time, either.
Don Quixote changes the topic of discussion at the end of his speech with a question regarding the translator’s financing of his book’s printing. The translator happily divulges that he does not desire fame and recognition in return for his printed books, since his own writing talent has already brought him fame; rather, he is only trying to earn some money, “for without it a fine reputation is not worth a cent.” Leaving the translator to his work, but still managing to speak about proofs that he comes across in the shop, Don Quixote further complicates the status and notion of translation and raises ever more questions, all of which inhabit Benjamin’s (and de Man’s) essay in some way.
Quixote first praises the proofs for a book called Light of the Soul, a religious work on spiritual guidance that did exist but was never printed in Barcelona. He notes that these are the types of books that should be printed, although there are many such books in print, since there are “many sinners these days.” In a way, the imperfect proofs themselves (“not-yet-print material”) are like the souls of the living, waiting to be inscribed into God’s Book of Life but in need of correction. The second and last set of proofs Quixote glances at are for the “Second Part of the Ingenious Gentleman, Don Quixote de la Mancha, composed by a certain native of Tordesillas.” Cervantes, in the guise of Quixote, decries the work’s existence and suggests it be “burned to ashes as a piece of impertinence”. The work in question is not the book we are reading; its author was a competitor of Cervantes named Avellaneda , whose recounting of Quixote’s adventures was also never published in Barcelona. There are several notions of “what translation is” at work here. Firstly, we can imagine the common conception of writing as the translation of thought. Secondly, it is reasonable to view book printing as a translation from a written manuscript, a process that is never completely foolproof. Thirdly, it is even possible to conceive of the competing versions of Don Quixote’s own story as translations of “reality” or transpired events into language. Each of these notions of translation can be said to be failures in one way or another, and the fact that the books referred to were never printed in a shop in Barcelona implies the books’ failure to be materially transmitted.
so the other day (friday) i went and talked to my prof, mr. bennett. he's teaching my class on turn of the century lit, but i went to go talk to him about this paper i'm writing for mr. kaiser's class on walter benjamin, the german-jewish literary critic, philosopher, essayist, etc. my paper is going to be about paul de man (deconstructivist critic), particularly his talk on walter benjamin's essay "the task of the translator". so i'm talking a lot about what translation is, but mainly about how de man seriously misses the point of benjamin's essay. to summarize in an extremely general way: de man says that benjamin's text is untranslatable, that it performs the idea of untranslatability, the idea that translation is essentially impossible.
i went to bennett originally to talk about my paper for his class, but after we were done talking about that, i asked him about this other paper. i know that mr. bennett really hates de man, so i was hoping to get some insider tips, some fuel for my fire, if you know what i mean. unfortunately, he didn't say a lot that was helpful, but he did open this word document of one of the chapters of a book he's written and point to a passage in cervantes' don quixote which deals directly with questions of translation. i read a bit of it and i was kind of curious, so he gave me the page number and the edition i should try to find, and off i went to the library. after some searching, i found some acceptable editions of quixote, but it took me a bit to find the passage. once i did, i went back to the german modular unit (i usually refer to it as a trailer, because it looks like one) and made some copies of the passage (about 3 pages), left the books in my mailbox - i had too many books in my bag already - and went home to do some work.
tonight i finally got down to doing some work on the paper, because this weekend i was preparing notes for my workshop on sunday, which was just a really really long meeting that involved myself and the other members of the benjamin seminar talking about our paper ideas and listening to mr. kaiser comment AT LENGTH on each one, whether we liked it or not. so on sunday night i was too exhausted (i had been to a party until about 230 and only got 5 hours of sleep) to do much work, except maybe a little reading. so tonight after i got home i started working. i decided, after about one introductory paragraph, that i would try to work with quixote instead of diving right into de man or benjamin. i saw mr. bennett today and he told me that he would talk more with me about this benjamin paper if i wanted to, and i could tell he had more to say about it than the last time we talked - he must have read over some of de man's and benjamin's texts.
my "crazy grad student" moment came in several instances, i suppose. the first was the realization of the irony that in my essay about translation, i'm forced to use a translation of quixote because i don't fucking speak spanish. the second was that i noticed there were lots of footnotes from the translator/editor of the volume in this particular passage. i wanted to read the footnotes, but they were endnotes, as it turns out. i realized this at around 11pm. i was torn between waiting until tomorrow to get the book, which was in my box in the trailer, or jumping in my car and trying my luck with the lock on the trailer door. i eventually said "fuck it", got in my car, and gunned it over to "grounds" (that's campus for all you non-UVa students). lo and behold, the door could be opened with my puny TA-issued key. and there you have it.
i guess the craziest thing about this is that i felt the biggest rush working on my paper tonight, an even bigger rush at being excited about getting some random book in my mailbox at 11 at night, and an even bigger rush when i finally read those footnotes!
this is what i've got so far. you don't need to read it unless you're really curious or in the off chance that you have absolutely nothing better to do. the irony of ironies is that because i've copy-pasted the document, you can't read my footnotes. and my indents are gone, oh well:
In the last of a series of lectures at Cornell University that would ultimately be his last lecture before his death, Paul de Man gave a talk on Walter Benjamin’s essay on the task of the translator, “Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers”. When I had finished reading de Man’s paper, I had the impression that something was awry, that de Man had somehow missed the mark of Benjamin’s essay; in the conventional sense, I felt as if something had been lost in translation. Strangely enough, this is the very idea that serves as de Man’s point of departure and overriding conclusion: that translation is impossible, and that Benjamin’s text, an untranslatable text itself, performs the notion of untranslatability. If this is the case, a number of worrying questions are raised. If it is impossible to translate anything, why bother translating at all? At the risk of sounding impertinent, we might also ask why Benjamin wrote the essay in the first place, especially considering that the piece was meant as an introduction to Benjamin’s published translations of Baudelaire. If we cannot answer the latter, the question of why we would read Benjamin’s essay today, assuming that translation is impossible, seems to shed its disrespectful connotation.
Before we begin examining de Man’s argumentation, perhaps it would be beneficial to have a brief look at a passage from a fictional text that precedes Benjamin and de Man by a number of centuries, but deals with similar problems of translation, particularly de Man’s claim that translation can only fail. In the second book of Cervantes’ Don Quixote, there is an episode in which the protagonist stumbles upon a book-printing shop in Barcelona. Upon entering, Don Quixote meets a man who is working on a translation from a Tuscan book called Le Bagatelle (literally, “trifles”) into Castilian Spanish. Quixote quizzes the man briefly on his Italian-to-Spanish translation and marvels at the man’s abilities:
“Body of me!” exclaimed Don Quixote, “how far advanced your Grace is in the Italian language! I will lay you a good wager that you translate piace as place, più as más, su as arriba, and giù as abajo.”
“I do indeed,” said the author, “for those are the proper equivalents.”
Even if we take into account the historical milieu of Cervantes’ work, it is hard to excuse Quixote’s simplistic conception of translating text. Translators of the early 17th century surely knew, as we do today, that the meaning of a word can change depending on its context. That the book being translated is identified as “of little importance” and that, as Cervantes’ translator makes us aware , Le Bagatelle is an imaginary book certainly cast(s) a spurious shadow on the translator’s task.
“And I would venture to take an oath,” Don Quixote went on, “that your Grace is not known to the world at large, which always is chary of rewarding men of exceptional ability and works deserving of praise. How many talents have been tossed away, how many geniuses have been tossed into the corner, how much of real worth has gone unappreciated!”
Quixote is quite confident in his opinions of translations and translators; we can perceive this from his readiness to bet or swear on his suppositions. His assumption about the renown of the translator he meets is neither immediately denied nor affirmed (such is Quixote’s loquacious nature), but would we be wrong if we agreed with him? The “world at large” is unappreciative of “men of exceptional ability and works deserving of praise”, by which Quixote could mean to say “writers and their writing” or specifically, the man in the shop, his ilk and their compositions - in other words, translators and translations. Quixote speaks of translation itself as an art in its own right, its practitioners as “geniuses”, and its material production as having “real worth”. Why is it, then, that translators and translations never get the recognition they deserve?
“But, for all of that, it appears to me that translating from one language into another, unless it be from one of those queenly tongues, Greek and Latin, is like gazing at a Flemish tapestry with the wrong side out: even though the figures are visible, they are full of threads that obscure the view and are not bright and smooth as when seen from the other side. Moreover, translating from easy languages does not call for either wit or eloquence, any more than does the mere transcription or copying of a document.”
Here Quixote’s excursus on translation seems to take a turn for the arbitrary. Translating from any language, with the exception of the classical tongues, is undesirable. In the tapestry of translated language, the “figures” are recognizable, their outlines can be discerned, but the general effect is far from pretty. Quixote’s reference to “easy languages” might be understood as the non-classical languages, collectively. Why they should be any simpler to translate from than from Greek or Latin is another question that remains unanswered. Maybe we should just be thankful that Quixote has not yet banished translation to the realm of “the impossible”. In effect, this speech seems to have canceled out the compliments Quixote has just made about the translator, as well as translators in general.
To our chagrin, the nobleman does not succeed in rescuing himself from committing this faux pas in the end, but he does continue to comment on the task of the translator. Fortunately for Quixote, the translator is an intellectual who pays nobility the respect it deserves and, subsequently, only speaks when spoken to.
“By this,” the knight continued, “I do not mean to imply that the task of translating is not a laudable occupation, for a man might employ his time less worthily and with less profit to himself. I make an exception here of those two famous translators: Doctor Cristóbal de Figueroa in his Pastor Fido and Don Juan de Jáuregui in his Aminta, where happily one may doubt as to which is the translation and which the original.”
With this comment, Quixote has completely negated anything flattering he has said about the translator; worse, less lucrative enterprises than attempting to translate text are certainly conceivable. Is translation worthwhile or not? Quixote names two Spanish authors (one of whom translated from Italian [!] ), whom he admires as “exceptions” to his rules, because the translated product and its text of origin are apparently interchangeable. By “dropping” the names Figueroa and Jáuregui in his own text, Cervantes elevates their literary status by referring to them as translators, and as a result, the standing of translators in the world.
If Quixote has been, up to this point in his excursus, relatively clear and straightforward, the end of his discourse becomes decisively muddier. Following his prior logic, if an original text and its translation are identical, then the experience of reading that translation could be likened to viewing a Flemish tapestry from the “right” position and setting eyes on a beautiful, complete artwork. However, if a reader such as Don Quixote can perceive the two tapestry-texts as identical, this means that he has the ability to read the original. But if he can read the original that is exactly the same as the translation, why would he want to read the translation in the first place? Alas, our hunger for answers is not satiated this time, either.
Don Quixote changes the topic of discussion at the end of his speech with a question regarding the translator’s financing of his book’s printing. The translator happily divulges that he does not desire fame and recognition in return for his printed books, since his own writing talent has already brought him fame; rather, he is only trying to earn some money, “for without it a fine reputation is not worth a cent.” Leaving the translator to his work, but still managing to speak about proofs that he comes across in the shop, Don Quixote further complicates the status and notion of translation and raises ever more questions, all of which inhabit Benjamin’s (and de Man’s) essay in some way.
Quixote first praises the proofs for a book called Light of the Soul, a religious work on spiritual guidance that did exist but was never printed in Barcelona. He notes that these are the types of books that should be printed, although there are many such books in print, since there are “many sinners these days.” In a way, the imperfect proofs themselves (“not-yet-print material”) are like the souls of the living, waiting to be inscribed into God’s Book of Life but in need of correction. The second and last set of proofs Quixote glances at are for the “Second Part of the Ingenious Gentleman, Don Quixote de la Mancha, composed by a certain native of Tordesillas.” Cervantes, in the guise of Quixote, decries the work’s existence and suggests it be “burned to ashes as a piece of impertinence”. The work in question is not the book we are reading; its author was a competitor of Cervantes named Avellaneda , whose recounting of Quixote’s adventures was also never published in Barcelona. There are several notions of “what translation is” at work here. Firstly, we can imagine the common conception of writing as the translation of thought. Secondly, it is reasonable to view book printing as a translation from a written manuscript, a process that is never completely foolproof. Thirdly, it is even possible to conceive of the competing versions of Don Quixote’s own story as translations of “reality” or transpired events into language. Each of these notions of translation can be said to be failures in one way or another, and the fact that the books referred to were never printed in a shop in Barcelona implies the books’ failure to be materially transmitted.