Between Politics and Intimacy: New Comparative Readings of Modern Polish Literature and Culture

TELLING TALES AND BUILDING BRIDGES

WHAT DOES IT (AND WHAT DOES IT NOT) MEAN TO BE LOST IN TRANSLATION?

Smaranda Nicolau

1. TRANSATLANTIC BRIDGES
Bilingual building of a bridge made up of autonomous experiences linked to one another, a ferry of emotions from one shore of the Atlantic to the other. (Joan Usl, painter Tate Modern, commentary on her work, Bilingual)

And so Ewa begins to write, to bridge a gap, as to bridge the Atlantic, as to stretch herself across the ocean and make a bridge of herself, between her selves. One might think that giving her bridge the title Lost in translation is intended to announce that she is (or was at some point) actually lost in translation, and the first understanding of this is that she is lost because she lacks language to find herself (her old self) in her new world she lacks the language required to make a successful transposition. I dont really believe this is an adequate understanding, but before I can explain why I dont believe it, and what I do believe I have to pause and question this phrase, lost in translation. Its used to cover so vast a range of phenomena as only suffice to make it completely obvious that the phrase itself has almost no meaning. It can go from losing the sense of a word when translating it into another language, to losing the meaning of a text when carrying it across linguistic borders, to fully losing the ability to communicate in situations that can only be described as postmodern (to use yet another notoriously loose word) - and all the way back again, and in this demented chase you barely glimpse the sheer size of the expression. If one were to begin to map its meanings, where on the map would Ewa find herself? I will argue against such a loose usage of the term, and argue that if one is to give it more precise meaning, then Ewa falls right off the map. First I will discuss the notion of being lost in translation, when translation is understood literally, as between two languages, then I will speak of translation and interpretation, a notion I am not comfortable with and that I will try to question, and I will end by revealing the importance of narration to interpretation. In the end I wil do something that perhaps ought not be done to a persons autobiography, and that is, I will question Ewa Hoffmans interpretation of what her book

achieves. I will try to show that translation therapy is an inappropriate expression for the description of the performative act which is her autobiography. 2. PLEASE MIND THE GAP BETWEEN THE TRAIN AND THE PLATFORM.
Caused by interpretation, the liminal space is bound to contain a resistance to translation, a resistance, however, that energizes the drive to overcome it. Thus, interpretation also turns into the attempt to narrow the very space it has produced. (Wolfgang Iser Interpretation as Translation)1

There are two sides of being lost in translation the first is loss, the second is recovery. Loss is a paradox. I confess it completely paralyzes me. I can only explain why I think this is so. I cannot even begin to overcome it. The retrieval of what is lost is naught but the building of a bridge on these paradoxical pillars that are the initial loss. The paradox always lies in between. When something is lost in translation it is suspended in a space of its own. This space has to be comprehended (and to comprehend is always to include). But before something can be missing, somebody has to notice its not there. Enter paralyzing paradox: Lets say that translation, for the time being, refers strictly to transferring meanings of words, phrases and texts from one language into another. To say that something is lost in translation implies a bilingual individual in a position to judge whether or not something actually is lost, i.e. whether some part of meaning from what was to be translated has been left behind, or has been suspended in between2 the source and target languages. The paradox lies in the fact that to grasp the absence of something, one must also already possess some knowledge or image of its presence, as of that which is absent.

Iser, Wolfgang. "Interpretation as Translability," in The Range of Interpretation. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000, p7 2 In between is much more fitting than left behind, seeing as when something is translated, by the sheer intentionality inherent to the act of translation, it ceases to be in the source language and begins to exist unto its targeted equivalent.

To understand that something cannot be said is to say it. There is an easy way out of this pickle. One could argue (and would not be completely mistaken) that sensing absence does not involve full knowledge of the alternative, namely, of presence. This is true. What I am saying is that it does not matter. Say I needed to translate a word from Romanian into English, and the best translation I could find falls short of the original3 meaning, it fails to seize some nuance. How do I know this? If this nuance simply does not exist in English, I should not even be able to think about it. That is to say, if there is some patch of green grass somewhere in the world that Romanian describes but English cannot, if there is some sort of blank spot in English where this patch of green grass would be, I would be reduced to silence. If translation would be impossible, I would have no need for it, no desire for it, because I would have no knowledge of what it could achieve. This is the intentionality of translation that it is always translation into something that is sensed beforehand. I can only wish to say in English what I already know can be said in English. And here I state an all important postulate ANYTHING CAN BE SAID. That this is so is something I believe with all my might. This is why the mystic side of being lost in translation is not entirely to my taste. Nothing is ever truly lost if one truly wishes to say it. It always seems to me that if someone claims impossibility of translation, they are simply confessing their impotence and frustration. They lack words or style or time. This I have to clarify. Granted, it is insane to affirm that nothing is lost in translation. I can immediately think of at least a few things that are almost always inevitably lost in translation: humour as shaped by language itself, will obviously be non-translatable(English irony, Polish play on words); humour as shaped by mass memory, reactions to some shared history/culture; tone also shaped by language; metaphors, figures of speech fully dependant on structure of representation in a certain language; styles of writing, such as gavda born out of the use of language within specific socio-cultural and historical circumstances (that cannot be recreated, nor need they be recreated in any other language) and so on. All of
3

This is an obsolete way of referring to what is to be translated. I think that when we limit translation to the act performed by a bilingual it becomes quite obvious that there is never any talk of original and copy, but rather the bilingual translator has the upper hand of a simultaneous understanding there is something to be said, and the bilingual always and at the same time knows what that is in both languages. What is left is the choice of the most proper form. This simultaneous understanding can only be denyed on the basis of a highly questionable assumption that a bilingual individual can at any point separate his two languages completely. I dont believe this is actually true.

these, you will notice, have something to do with form. The form of what is said is always inevitably the first to be lost in translation, and this is of course no minor casualty, seeing as form and content are by no means clearly separable. It seems that I contradict myself at this point, and indeed my mind is as if tied up in knots, but I will try to untangle them. These are simply the paradoxical pillars on which I rest my arguments. How to reconcile the fact that anything can be said with the fact that there is always something lost? I explain this in the following section. 3. THE DULL FLAME OF DESIRE
[It would seem that] we must draw the conclusion that misunderstandings are an unavoidable fact, and thenceforth translation is theoretically impossible and all bilingual individuals are simply schizophrenics. But then, all of the sudden, you find yourself catapulted onto the other shore translation exists, therefore it must be possible. ( Paul Ricoeur The Paradigme of Translation)4

Let me anticipate a bit. The outline of my argument is as follows. There is a desire to translate, a need to fill in the gaps created by translation itself. I state that this desire can only come from a sense of possibility. We want to translate because we know it to be always possible, though at times difficult. Far from me the thought of denying all loss, but just as far is the needlessly mystical notion of loss beyond all hope of retrieval. That something is lost is simply an incentive to recover it, at once based on and at the heart of the desire to retrieve it. Form is lost, I said. This might be, to some extent irretrievable, to the same extent as it is impossible to duplicate. But this is only to say that something said in one language will never sound the same in any other, which simply trivial. And here enters the central part of the argument how would one attempt to retrieve form? In much the same way as one would retrieve any other unit of meaning by explaining it, and I will argue that to explain is always to integrate into some sort of narrative. Translators prefaces
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Ricoeur, Paul, Jeanrenaud, Magda (transl.). Paradigma Traducerii, in Despre Traducere (Romanian translation of Sur la traduction, Bayard, 2004) Bucharest, Polirom, 2005, pp.80-81. My translation into English.

are exactly the attempt to explain what is lost. And some of them are successful enough to allow me to do away with all the mysticism of the phrase lost in translation. When something cannot simply be named in another language, it needs to be explained. Explanation is story-telling on the side of stories, metadiscourse for the discourse that flows from the uttering of a name. If I cant translate a Romanian word with an English word I will use a side-story a preface, an intro, a translators note to what the word means, a note in which I will try to explain also what is the significance of the fact that, in Romanian, a single unit of speech (a word) encapsulates what takes pages to say in English. All of this I will do just out of the desire to translate. I would almost never renounce saying something just because it does not translate smoothly. You may not be able to actually name what is lost from the source language in the target language, but you can always define it, at least describe it. It just takes an effort. One could of course argue that even when described, the gap is not fully overcome. True. But again, and so ad infinitum if the gap is not fully overcome, then there must exist a person who is able to see that it has not been fully overcome, which means someone is always able to appreciate the distance, which means that to an even lesser extent, that person can create yet another (tertiary) explantion(bridge) to integrate what has yet not been integrated, and so on and on, as smaller and smaller gaps remain to be filled. As long as I know something is missing, I also already have an image of what things would be like were it present. This is how I escape paralysis by telling side-stories, by writing explanatory notes, by making the effort to say anything I have to say, because I know it can be said, and because I want to say it. This is the governing paradox of language that there is nothing outside of it, and yet it manages to turn unto itself its reflexivity, multiplied countless times, to reflect on reflection upon reflection upon reflection. This is what gets us trapped in between loss and retrieval, and this is also what pulls us out of the trap, by putting in us the desire to translate. 4. TELLING TALES
Having established this event as the precipitating cause the subsequent cure, which is to be understood as providing or constructing a narrative of complete

inclusion, was successful. (Andrew Benjamin, Psychoanalysis and Translation)5

Having decided that one can always recover meanings from that all ominous liminal space, now is the time to discuss interpreting meanings. If interpretation has to cope with the liminal space resulting from something being transposed into something else, then interpretation is primarily a performative act [rather than an explanatory one]. The selfgeneration of criteria in interpretation allows us first and foremost to participate in whatever is highlighted rather than to validate the results achieved.6 That is to say that in the very clear situation of translating between languages, what is needed to recover meanings is mainly explanation, but when treading on the sinking sands of memory, if we accept Steiners concept of interpretation as translatability we will have to, well, allow space for interpretation. This is where I begin to tie Ewa Hoffmans Lost in Translation to the previous discussion about loss and retrieval. Let me anticipate a bit and mention that it will prove essential to distinguish clearly between translation as between two languages and translation as interpretation. I have already pointed out, by opposing explanation to interpretation, that the two are very different.7 Between languages, lost meanings must be integrated into explanations. Both explanation and interpretation require comprehensible narratives. I will limit myself to discussing interpretation now.

Benjamin, Andrew. "Psychoanalysis and Translation," in Translation and the Nature of Philosophy. A New Theory of Words. New York: Routledge, 1989, p114 6 Iser, Wolfgang. "Interpretation as Translability," in The Range of Interpretation. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000, p7 7 Translation and interpretation are such vague terms as to almost rival postmodernism. I understand interpretation as in dream interpretation, as the process of retrieving some meaning that is lost in spaces immemorial. The liminal space between two languages is not such a space. Essential to this notion of interpretation is the fact that it aims to cancel out deformations enacted on meanings, whereas when discussing translation as between languages, to say that the meaning of a word is deformed is to assume that it could be any other way, to place it outside of language, an aberration in itself. When a word, phrase or text is suspended in a liminal space, it is only waiting to be given a suitable form. When a dream has to be interpreted it is because meaning is hiding and has to be forcibly robbed of its disguise. In this sense, I am not even sure whether or not I agree with the notion of interpretation as translation. Such a loose association of words (or rather association of loose terms) surely causes only confusion. Regardless of my opinion, Ewa Hoffman most certainly makes this notion her own, and so I must as well, but the distinction I make here is necessary as it anticipates my conclusion.

One has to tell a story about himself, so as to make himself understood to the world, but one must also tell stories to himself in order to construct his own identity. What, if not the latter, is Ewa Hoffman trying to do? From this point of view, story telling is extremely interesting because the narrator is at the same time distancing himself from himself as bringing himself nearer by constructing his narrated self. We construct ourselves as we tell stories about ourselves. An autobiography is the peak of such acts of self construction one consciously distances himself from himself in order to be able to write himself. As the writing flows we can only imagine the distance growing. The tear between the writer and his work is all the greater as the work really is the writer in this situation, the writers explicit attempt at constructing a coherent image of his own person. This process is actually extremely frightening for many reasons firstly, because a story can be told in countless ways, but the writer may only choose one, and so an autobiography gives birth to a single person of such fixedness as to leave no room for the actual person to be any different, or even possibly different. So I am convinced, and Ewa Hoffman can only prove me right, that in a sense, autobiographies are born out of fear of possibilities, of multiple possible ways of viewing ones own person. Secondly, they are desperate acts to delineate ones destiny, to seek out order in a haze of events, which, again, can only be born out of a great fear of indeterminacy. And thirdly, and perhaps the scariest of the three - where is the writer while he is writing himself? Suspended, but within arms reach, so that with each page he writes he may bring a little piece of himself back down to Earth, to better examine it and find its place on a page, in ink. Surely if ever there was an exorcism performed, this must be it. We are the stories we tell. The stories we tell about ourselves are us to a greater degree, to the extent to which they are clear choices of how we wish to be viewed. But unlike interpreting dreams to unmask deformities, interpreting ourselves is more likely to create deformities. Stories have beginnings and ends. Who is to say that we do? Who is to say we are not, instead, limitless creatures? Our very need to tell these stories answers this question. Our desire to have a beginning and an end, our desire to make ourselves clear to ourselves, our willingness to choose one interpretation and kill all other possible ones. And where is translation in all of this? Nowhere. Translation here is to mean transposition it is to say that when we narrate ourselves, we are simply moving a meaning (our being)

from its carcass of flesh and bones, with its beginning and its end, into a carcass of words, where we may choose how we begin and we may choose how we end. That we use the word translation attests to our belief that we may exist elsewhere than in words. Which is of course neither verifiable nor falsifiable, although it is probably false. And indeed if translation be interpretation, verification is not an issue, but rather highlights. What do we choose to read as us? What moments in our lives do we make essential? What are the building blocks of choice for the construct that will be us, in writing? And where is language in all this? Everywhere. When we give ourselves bodies of words, when we extricate ourselves from ourselves so that we may speak of ourselves, when we are ready to trap ourselves in a single way of telling our story, when we perform all of these absolutely frightening acts of violence on our possible selves, it is only to say that language is all we are. As for loss we may say we narrate what is lost to retrieve it. But when we narrate ourselves, is that to say that we are lost? Yes. But not in translation. We are lost in a sea of possibilities. Because as long as our stories have no beginnings and no ends, we may be anything. As long as Ewa does not write, she is only sustaining the tear between two possible Ewas the one who may have lived in Poland and the one who may live in America. What she must do is give a coherent reading to her life. Which in her case is more difficult, because a good chunk of her life only reads in Polish. So she must translate. And when she says she is lost in translation, should we understand that she lacks language for translation? Of course not. She calls it the space sickness of transcendence. Agoraphobia her horizons are too wide. She has been in two worlds, and they clash. She needs to sort out the loose ends. She needs to build bridges so that she may connect all the dots that are her lifes events. She needs to give herself a beginning, a middle and an end. She needs to let go of all the what ifs? that limitlessness allows for. Ewa, poor Ewa, torn apart, the two Ewas, the possible Ewas, Ewa always triangulating. And what does she triangulate back to? She herself doesnt know, not until she finishes writing her story. When her narrated self is built she claims to no longer need to triangulate. In fact, she has built her bridge, and the road is now smooth, free of possibility. Her bridge is herself, stretched across the ocean in words, in the story of her life. Once she

has constructed her written self, she may breathe lightly, she may enjoy her two languages instead of always questioning which one she eats, drinks, speaks and dreams in. Nothing was lost to recover, except the possibility of a Polish Ewa. But this possibility is not recovered. The door is slammed shut on it, and instead of two possible lives, Ewa now has one, that leads from shore to shore of the Atlantic. If language was ever the issue, then certainly it was not so by the lack of it. On the contrary, Ewas surplus of language, as a leftover from her possible life, her surplus of culture, her surplus of experience, all of these cause space sickness of transcendence, and the cure for it is not therapy through translation, or is only therapy through translation in as far as translation means interpretation. I have decided that I do not agree at all with the view that interpretation is translation. I believe that the opposite of interpretation, explanation, is essential to translation, as I tried to show in the beginning. The misunderstanding comes from viewing the liminal space between languages as related to the space that is the uncreated, un-narrated individual. From the latter space one does not recover meaning, but rather one selects and constructs it. What is lost in translation when translation is understood as interpretation is the alternative interpretation. To explain is to widen understanding, to interpret is to narrow down that which is interpreted, to choose, to close up the loose ends and not look back. To interpret is to tell a story, but tell only one when many are possible. Multiple interpretations are possible, but lest we go insane with possibilities, not more than one interpretation should be possible at any given time. The paradox of language is that it may reflect on itself, and when Ewa reflects on her two languages and her two cultures she sees herself as split. All bilinguals must be schizophrenics. But there is a cure. That she calls it therapy through translation is fitting, to the extent to which her translations tends towards uniformity and coherence. She needs only one language, or two languages at peace with each other, but this is only what she needs in order to construct a coherent narrative. The narrative is the actual therapy, the construction of herself is the actual cure. And there is no recovery of something lost involved, only closure. And at the moment of closure, there ceases to be a clash between

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languages, the need for triangulation is no more. The story has been told, it cannot be told differently at the same time. And this was what was needed.
Accepting and affirming the impossibility of recoverable origins gives rise to post-modern strategies of experimentation. While dwelling on what has been lost, hoping for restoration or recovery a simple melancholic desire is the predicament of modernity. (Andrew Benjamin, Psychoanalysis and Translation)8

Benjamin, Andrew. Idem, p111.

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