The Fiction of Translation: Abdelkebir Khatibi's "Love in Two Languages"

Author(s): Thomas O. Beebee

Source: SubStance, Vol. 23, No. 1, Issue 73 (1994), pp. 63-78
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3684793
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The Fiction of Translation:
Abdelkebir Khatibi's Love in Two Languages

Thomas O. Beebee

Ce qui semblait nous unir itait une extraor-

dinaire traduction. Je veux dire . . . que j'6tais moi-meme transpose,
transplante dans ma parole maternelle en un simulacre si fantastique
qu'elle ne pouvait concevoir, A son tour, que comme une grande fiction.
J'aurai donc parld dans l'abime de ce ricit, si bien qu'elle fut
irrisistiblement ce personnage de roman qui m'avait si merveilleusement
s6duit.

Abdelkebir Khatibi, Amour bilingue (71)

An extraordinary translation seemed to unite

us. I mean ... that in my own language I myself was transposed,
transplanted into a sham so fantastic that she could only conceive of my
telling of the unnameable in her as an enormous fiction. I will thus have
spoken in the abyss of this story, so well that she was irresistibly the
fictional character who had made such a marvelous conquest of me.
Love in Two Languages, trans. Richard Howard (62)

Bilingualism in the Text

LET US TRANSLATE THIS EPIGRAPH. Let us call Abdelkebir Khatibi's

Amour bilingue (1983) the mimesis or fictional account of a love affair; let u
suppose that this love affair takes place between two people--already an
oversimplification, for throughout the text there are pronoun shifts be
tween the "I" and the "he" and the "she" and the "you," and concomitan
changes from second- to third-person address, so that the structure of this
love becomes triadic, as the supposedly dyadic relationship of translatio
always is; let us further suppose that the affair is between a bilingual
Maghrebine man and a somewhat less bilingual French woman- again,
the text gives only clues, such as the "le climat gris et maussade de so
enfance," (18) ("gray and gloomy weather where she had spent he
childhood" [12]), the reference by the narrator to French as his secon
language, and the occasional Arabic words which faintly illuminate hi

SubStance #73, 1994 63

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 64 Thomas O. Beebee

discourse like stars. L

like most love affairs
lapsus, expulsion and
fictional translation situation. On several occasions, the narrator en-
courages such an allegorical reading: "La bi-langue! La bi-langue! Elle-
m.me, un personnage de ce rdcit, poursuivant sa quite intercontinentale,
au-dela de mes traductions" (109) ("The bi-langue! The bi-langue! Herself, a
character in this story, on her intercontinental quest, beyond my transla-
tions" [981). Given that bilingualism is a character in the story, what are the
critical strategies necessary for interpreting her? How to read the fiction of
translation?

Despite the plethora of theory and criticism on the translation of

literary texts, there is very little to help us deal with the appearance of
translation within literary texts. As far as I know, only Meir Sternberg, in
his "Polylingualism as Reality and Translation as Mimesis," has noticed
that "Literary art . . . finds itself confronted by a formidable mimetic
challenge: how to present the reality of polylingual discourse through a
communicative medium which is normally unilingual?" (222). In answer-
ing this question, Sternberg outlines a very useful continuum for the depic-
tion of translation. Sternberg's strategy is classically structuralist: the
reality of a fictional literary world (the object) can be either unilingual or
polylingual, as can also the medium providing the mimesis. Hence, the
four archetypal possibilities shown below.'

Strategy Referential Vehicular Matching Homogenizing Vehicular Promiscuity

Restriction Convention

Object Unilingual Polylingual Polylingual Variable, possibly

Unilin ual

Medium Unilingual Polylingual Unilingual Polylingual

Example Jane Austen Los rios profundos, Star Trek Finnegan's Wake
Comparative

Literature articles

Four Ways of Representing Language

Though whole texts have been presented as examples, it should be noted

that the strategies in question are local, and a single text can use all of them.

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 Fiction of Translation 65

Also, vehicular matching

extreme cases, more rare
transposition (interferen
mar or vocabulary of the
Quechua," etc.).
The object of Amour bi
polylingual, as Khatibi h

Nous, les Maghrdbins, nou

langue arabe (A peu pr!s),
prbs); et depuis des temp
berbere.

C'est dire que le bilinguis

regions, des faits recents
plurilangue : diglossie (ent
l'espagnol au nord et au sud

We Maghrebines took fourt

a century to learn French (n
known how to write Berber.

This is to say that bilingualism and plurilingualism are not recent events in
these parts. The Maghrebine landscape is still plurilingual: diglossia (be-
tween Arabic and its dialects), Berber, French, Spanish in the north and
south of Morocco.2

Yet, despite this amazing proliferation of langages in Morocco, Amour

bilingue is written almost entirely in French. This would make it an ex-
ample of homogenizing convention. Obviously, my choice of Star Trek as
one of the prime examples of homogenizing convention will call down the
wrath of thousands of Trekkies on my head. But I stand by my claim that
Star Trek homogenizes what must be an extraordinarily plurilinguistic
universe, and even make the statement general, to include most Anglo-
American science fiction. Walter E. Meyers finds that foreign (alien) lan-
guages in science fiction are consistently handled either by having the
aliens learn English or by the invention of an automatic translator:

Thus, to take the most obvious example, in the compass of one hour on the
television program Star Trek, the aliens had to be encountered, a conflict
discovered and intensified, and a resolution achieved. The demands of the
genre left very little scope for long-term scholarly research. As a result, the
program depended heavily on a "Universal Translator." (129)

This homogenizing universalism, where all languages can be learned and

translated, is directly addressed in Amour bilingue. Though Amour bilingue
also homogenizes, unlike Star Trek it does so while making the reader

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 66 Thomas O. Beebee

painfully aware of th
follow Jose Maria Ar
profundos includes a
order to depict the b
Khatibi's purpose is d
process distorts the su
Though Sternberg's
basic point is well tak
mimetic device for dep
al world, which may
ways in which such re
fictional work's them
there can be no discu
means of translation. A
issue that I would like to use his treatment of translation as mimesis in

order to read the translation theme in Amour bilingue. I will argue th

Amour bilingue adds three interrelated aspects which his analysis does n
discuss, but which prove to be essential for any consideration of the fiction
of translation: 1) language as object vs. language as medium; 2) mimesis v
allegory; 3) the r6le of ideology in the depiction of translation. These three
questions problematize the binary thinking behind Sternberg's categori
ing. As an admirer of his fellow Maghrebine writer, Jacques Derrida,
Khatibi wishes to confound the oppositions that allow the formulation
such categories.

Translation as Mimesis

Several moments in the narrative posit translation as a relatively

complicated object of mimesis:

Un jour, devant une cabine de traduction simultande, il lui avait dit : <<Veux-
tu que nous nous y enfermions pour nous traduire mutuellement?>> Par la
suite, il lui acheta une machine A traduire et qui lui efit servi--quelle id6e!-
lorsqu'elle decouchait de continent en continent. (57)

One day, in front a simultaneous interpretation booth, he said, "Shall we

lock ourselves in there and translate each other?" Subsequently, he bought
her a translation machine which would have been useful to her-what an
idea!-when she stayed out all night from one continent to the next. (48-9)

The faintly absurd appearance of a simultaneous interpretation booth o

of nowhere, followed by the universal translation machine from Star Trek,

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Fiction of Translation 67

alerts us to the dreamlik

comes to literary texts,
medium language, since
tionalmimesis, language
Polylingualism is an im
writer who grew up und
love: "J''avais appris sa la
("I had learned her lang
response to that reality h
translation situation. Bu
simply as the homogeniz
than the narrator's belove
creation of her (remembe
language, is simultaneous
love clinch of French an
presence of the other, s
itself, as in the following

separe de ma langue mater

lui revenait en dehors de m
.. S'il m'arrivait de substit
compte), j'avais l'impre
d'enfreindre un loi, mais d
parvenait A son ecoute ... e
vagabonde, retournee sur e

Difference qui m'exaltait. C

&cart, le deportant dans un
langue morte et langue viva
separe en se traduisant con

Separated from my mothe

speech came back to her f
loved her.... If I happened
was on my own behalf) I d
mistake or breaking a law
taneously: one which reach
which was there and yet w

Difference which exalted m

this gap, carrying it into
language and living langua
unites through separation
translating itself would be a

When it works, translat

bilangue. Therefore, Kh

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68 Thomas O. Beebee

which we hear the p

ticular is a clue to th
doubling-by the con
narrative sequence. H
plore the depths of t
able result that mime
attempt to separate m
The inseparability o
Sellin points out, can
ing. It derives from
side of the same coi
pointed out above, th
part of translation wh

The word, the writt

valorized by ancient Q
otics on the other, hav
with the plain narrativ
side of the page and th
gleams as a barrier in

Calligraphy provide
word into its visual
portance by includin
his chapter headings

Amour

Cover of Amou

SubStanc

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 Fiction of Translation 69

Calligraphy bypasses mi
within the grapheme rath
raphy thus resembles not
story point at rather than
Khatibi's fictional world,
calligraphy rather than a
calligraphy, let us listen to
The Splendour of Islamic Cal

The Arab calligraphers consi

soul expressed through the
and concretely with the liter
refers back to an establishe
language of love. (22)

The Qur'anic tradition, o

depicting Arabic as the p
has caused to become late
39). Arabic thus function
Sprache (pure language) fu
des UJbersetzers," Benjam
message, but as a remind
languages are tesserae of th
ing:

... alle iiberhistorische Verwandtschaft der Sprachen beruht darin, dal3 in

ihrer jeden als ganzer jeweils eines, und zwar dasselbe gemeint ist, das
dennoch keiner einzelnen von ihnen, sondern nur der Allheit ihrer einander
erganzenden Intentionen erreichbar ist: die reine Sprache. (85)

... all kinship of languages that goes beyond historical derivation is based
on this: that in each of them individually one thing, in fact the same thing,
is meant-something, however, that cannot be attained by any one lan-
guage alone, but only by the totality of their mutually supplementary inten-
tions: pure, universal language. (84)

This pure, universal, prelapsarian langage is of course precisely what is

absent and exists nowhere. And therefore Amour bilingue cannot mime it,
but only allegorize it.

Translation as Allegorical Metaphor

As the title of his essay indicates, Sternberg begins with the external
reality of polylingualism, and proceeds to show how such a reality can be

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 70 Thomas O. Beebee

reproduced metonym
mimesis. If one begins
lation as interior real
would proceed not mi
the invisible, immutab
as metaphor rather t
some of the most im
allegorical rather tha
lation of Evgeny One
allegory of his relati
which swelled Pushk
tomes in English, is
Kinbote's overwhelm
opus. And how can w
to write the Quixote
translation? At any r
who interprets Jor
Quixote" as a commen
ready extant book in
and job of work. It ca
Love, impossible and
book. "Que se traduis
this love?" [1011), ask
divide along love's do
According to the for
did not: what fractions of their two cultures were able to converse with
each other through the screen of mutually incomprehensible languages?
Language is a source of jouissance, but not a channel of communication; the
inequalities between their two languages presage the final separation:

Je tremblais jour et nuit. Ma panique? Un tribut sanglant g ta langue. La

magnifique loi des serments trahit immanquablement. Qu'un etre soit
6cras6 par des mots institubs et qui ne veulent plus rien dire pour sa parole
intime, est une abstraction d'amour insupportable. (94)

Night and day I trembled. What panicked me? A bloody tribute to your
language. The magnificent law of oaths never fails to betray. That a being
should be crushed by words that have been instituted and no longer ex-
press his own most personal speech is an abstraction of unbearable love.
(83)

Khatibi's translator, Richard Howard, chose another reading of the ques-

tion by translating en as if it were par: "What was translated by this love?"

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 Fiction of Translation 71

This form of the question

unsayable thing is translat
tion.

Love means in this text through its (non)position in the no-man's land,
just as jouissance occurs in this love affair in the bilangue: "Avec toi, je
jouissais entre deux langues, I'une traversant l'autre" (87-88). The mean-
ings (which are of course non-meanings, belonging to neither language) of
the bi-langue lie in the interstices between its associated words, just as love
occurs between two people. The bi-langue is thus portrayed as the son of the
lovers, with translation the process of its begetting:

Maintes fois, j'ai pens6 A ce qui te traduit, te transfigure A ta langue :

ev6nements, choses, paysages; comme si ton pass6 avait 6pousd le mien,
accouchant d'un enfant-notre amour; comme si cet amour ne pouvait que
se perdre dans l'oubli, en une g6ndologie qui ne reviendrait A personne, ni A
ta langue ni A la mienne, mais au temps meme; comme si, marchant A
travers deux pays en effa;ant leurs fronti~es invisibles--dans notre langue
commune--nous 4tions animbs par le serment silencieux des choses, ser-
ment qui f6conde et d6truit tout ddsir. (24-5)

So many times I thought of what translates, what transfigures you to your

language: events, things, landscapes: as if your past had married mine and
given birth to a child-our love; as if this love could lose itself only in
forgetfulness, in a genealogy that belonged to no one, neither to your lan-
guage nor to mine, but rather to time itself; as if, walking across two
countries and erasing their invisible borders-in our common language--
we were animated by the silent oath of things, oath that fertilizes and
destroys all desire. (18)

Translation reproduces rather than erases itself, as it should. It produces a

residue, an excess, which Khatibi symbolizes here as a child.

Translation and Ideology

The stubborn presence of translation's bastard child brings us to the

third issue in the fiction of translation, conspicuously absent from
Sternberg's analysis: ideology. Like love, translation is a communicative
social transaction for which society chooses the terms of repression or
disclosure. Henri Meschonnic has given us the dearest statement of the
repressive side:

Un imp4rialisme culturel tend A oublier son histoire, donc A m4connaitre le

r6le historique de la traduction et des emprunts dans sa culture. Cet oubli
est le corollaire de la sacralisation de sa litt&rature. (310)

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 72 Thomas O. Beebee

Cultural imperialism t
both the historical r61
own culture. This forg
culture).

This dialogic formation of discourse about translation can be observed

in the contrasting garrulousness of literary scholars and the taciturnity of
diplomats and scientists on the subject. Translation is the dirty joke of the
latter disciplines. With rare exceptions such as Dell Hymes, even cultural
anthropologists rarely let the translation process--the question of just how
they are translating a source culture into a target culture--get in the way of
their writing. And yet in some sense cultural anthropology, not to mention
geography, is nothing other than a translation. Fiction is distinguished
from other forms of discourse in its propensity to "play" with the given
ideologemes of its cultural context. Thus the best place to trace the ideol-
ogy of translation is through its fictional embodiment.
Another way of formulating this critique would be to say that
Sternberg's model assumes our ability to consider the image of translation
separated from its frame, which would be the ideological role which trans-
lation plays in the discourse as a whole. Sternberg himself, who consistent-
ly shies away from any consideration of the ideological implications of any
particular mimetic strategy, realizes this when he says,

The absolute location of a device [on the schema given above] ... can in
itself tell us very little about its actual mimetic effect or force or function,
which can never be determined a priori but turns in each case on a large
complex of variables and constraints general and specific, historical and
poetic, sociolinguistic and generic, textual and contextual. In different con-
texts, the same translational form may serve different functions and the
same function may be served by different forms. (233)

There are certain fictions of translation whose ideology Khatibi wishes to

deconstruct. One such fiction is particularly associated with colonization
itself. And so the story-a true story of a fictional language-is inserted
into Amour bilingue of the r61e played by translation in the conquest of
Algeria. Here the dream of interlingual communication becomes, as
George Steiner puts it "pidgin and not Pentecost" (470). But the tragedy of
the situation is that pidgin believes itself to be Pentecost:

Oui, rappelez-vous la conquete d'Algerie. En 1830, les troupiers franqais

avaient appris quelques mots d'un sabir (lingua franqua), melange de mots
italiens, espagnols, provenqaux. Vous n'allez pas me prendre A la lettre,
mais ils croyaient parler en arabe, alors que les soldats arabes croyaient
parler en franCais. Quelle histoire! Cela devait mal finir. (50)

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Fiction of Translation 73

Remember the conquest of

words of the local pidgin,
won't believe it but they t
troops, speaking the same
story!No wonder things tu

The misunderstanding
colonialism's discontents
inevitable, but is ideolog
a fiction created by nin
Charles de Gaulle's fran
disposition du monde u
universel de la pensde"
perhaps more ancient v
which human sinfulness
(Khatibi, Splendour 39).
which here is revealed a
hubris (the Arab belief t
that they had mastered
this anecdote is a realisti
the tower of Babel. In Ge

Les S~mites veulent mettre

nifier simultandment une
ainsi leur idiome) et un
humaine. Inversement, q
rompt la transparence ra
coloniale ou l'impIrialisme l
assujetit A la loi d'une trad

The Semites want to bring

simultaneously a colonial v
idiom) and a peaceful tran
when God imposes and
transparency but interrupt
perialism. He destines them
translation both necessary

The story of Algeria re

sett puts it, of both sides
language. For Ortega, th
lation is desirable it is also
carrying it out.3 One ca
Danielle Marx-Scouras h
Maghrebine literature: t

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 74 Thomas O. Beebee

from French and Isla

from within, with the

Like Derrida, Maghreb

absolute origin: a begin
signified, etc.) which is e
.... The apparent begin
distinction which a soc
clusion ....

And yet, in the unremitting effort to repel the other is the unconsc
realization of the illusory nature of our endeavor. For as Derrida, Kh
and others have noted, the line of demarcation between inside and out
same and other is a most tenuous one. (5-6)

We need only insert the concept of "translation" in the series of be

or sources to be deconstructed in order to arrive at Khatibi's fiction of

translation. Khatibi wishes to rid himself of the nostalgia for a "sourc

text, derived from the "mother tongue" of Arabic, which would groun
and command the signification of the "target" text. Instead, there are only
two texts, between which meaning lies.
A pidgin entirely similar to that of the conquest of Algeria in 183
performed on a more self-consciously unconscious level, is carried out
the narrator as he "translates" the French word "mot" into the Arabic
"kalima":

En franqais-sa langue 6trang&e--le << mot o est pros de la mort, il ne lui

manque qu'une seule lettre : concision de sa frappe, une syllable, extase
d'un sanglot retenu. ...

Il se calma d'un coup, lorsqu'apparut le << mot > arabe << kalma > avec son
equivalent savant << kalima o et toute la chaine des diminutifs, calembours
de son enfance : << klima o ... La diglossie << kal(i)ma o revint sans que
disparuit ni s'effaqat le mot << mot >. Tous deux s'observaient en lui,
pr~6dent l'6mergence maintenant rapide de souvenirs, fragments de mots,
onomatoppes, phrases en guirlandes, enlac6es A mort : ind6chiffrables. (10)

In French-his foreign language-the word for "word," mot, is close to the

one for "death," la mort; only one letter is missing: the succinctness of the
impression, a syllable, the ecstasy of a stifled sob....

He calmed down instantly when an Arabic word, kalma, appeared, kalma

and its scholarly diminutives which had been the riddles of his childhood:
klima..... The diglossal kal(i)ma appeared again without mot's having faded
away or disappeared. Within him, both words were observing each other,
preceding what had now become the rapid emergence of memories, frag-
ments of words, onomatopoeias, garlands of phrases, intertwined to the
death: undecipherable. (4)

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 Fiction of Translation 75

We note first of all that

of the French "mot,"4 t
since there is no substit
across the abyss of their
tion, the production of a
is a literal movement th
"calma" to "kalima") and
Umberto Eco put it in h
as metaphorical substitu
traversal. And this non-
"kalima" through the my
emotional and phonolog
"mot" and we get "mort,"
verb "calmer" in the pa
translated into Arabic "
bears some resemblance to that of Umberto Eco for the semantics of

"meandertale," can help us in tracking this process:

Mot C: la mort 0 calma C> kalima klima

"wmad" h" from calmer, "to calm" Arabic "word" diminutive of "kafima"

childhood memories

Everything happens in this process except what should happen in

translation, including the absolute beginner's error of the false cognate
between "calma" and "kalima." The example is totally equivalent to the
Algerian conquest except that it does not deceive itself (Meschonnic's
meconnaitre) by repressing the bi-langue, that is, by pretending that there
has occurred a transference of meaning, the discovery of a common sig-
nified, the substitution of signifiers that we associate with translation.
Khatibi does not propose this method of translation as a model. The
story instead is couched as a fiction; the operations on language arise and
disappear into the narrator's unconscious, a process that constitutes yet
another form of translation: '"Traduis-moi dans tes inconscients, tu verras"
(43) ("Translate me in your subconscious, you'll see" [35]). In this little

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 76 Thomas O. Beebee

example, we can see so

the interlinear version

W6rtlichkeit und Freih

vereinigen. Denn in irge
h6chsten aber die heilig
Die Interlinearversion
Ubersetzung. (99)
Literalness and freedom must without strain unite in the translation in the
form of the interlinear version. For in some degree, all great writings, but
the Scriptures in the highest degree, contain between the lines their virtual
translation. The interlinear version of the Scriptures is the archetype or ideal
of all translation. (96).

Holy scripture, Benjamin is saying, means something; that meaning, "das

Gemeinte," is not expressible in the words of scripture, but they point to it.
One does not translate the words of holy scripture; rather, one points in
another language at "das Gemeinte," which thus lies between the alternat-
ing lines of the two languages. Between the lines is the bi-langue, which as
we have seen is the true protagonist of this fiction. The object of the
narrator's love is repeatedly invoked as a double, like the double text of an
interlinear translation:

Peut-etre aimait-il en elle deux femmes, celle qui vivait dans leur langue
commune, et I'autre, cette autre qu'il habitait dans la bi-langue. O( 6taient-
ils donc dans le regard, l'61an, le d~sir mutuels?

Ce n6tait
mais pas une
une sorte sym6trie ladepermutation
d'inversion, l'un A l'autre,
d'ununamour
vis-A-vis vertical etA parall.le,
intraduisible,
traduire sans r6pit. L'intraduisible! passion de tout amour, quand le d6sir
tombe dans l'oubli de soi separe. (26)

Perhaps he loved two women in her, the one who inhabited their common
language and another as well, the one who inhabited the bi-langue. Where
were they then in the reciprocal glance, the mutual momentum, the shared
desire?

There was no exact symmetry between them, no encounter both vertical

and parallel; rather, there was a kind of inversion, the permutation of an
untranslatable love, that had to be translated without respite. The untrans-
latable! passion of all love, when desire falls away into self-forgetfulness
apart. (20)

Khatibi's novel can thus be regarded as the inversion of the true story
of the conquest of Algiers. In these two stories, as Sternberg puts it, the
same form of translational mimesis-the construction of a pidgin--serves
two entirely different functions.

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 Fiction of Translation 77

Khatibi's focus on the untranslatable, like his commitment to

deconstruction, arises not out of an arbitrary, academic will to power. He
wishes to destroy with it a certain ideology of translation found in the story
of the Algerian conquest. Such a translation

... n'est plus dsfinie comme transport du texte de d6part dans la litt~rature
d'arrivee ou inversement transport du lecteur d'arriv~e dans le texte de
depart ... mais comme travail dans la langue, decentrement, rapport
interpo6tique entre valeur et signification, structuration d'un sujet et his-
toire ... et non plus sens. (Meschonnic 313-14)

Translation is no longer defined as the transportation of the source text into

the target literary system, or inversely, the transportation of the reader in
the target culture into the source text ... rather, it is defined as work within
the language, decentering, interpoetic relationship between value and
signficance, the structuration of a subject, and history... and no longer as
content.

The Pennsylvania State University

NOTES

1. The table is Sternberg's (224), with some alterations and the addition of
amples.
2. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations into English are my own.
3. "Hay un falso utopismo ... consistente en creer que lo que el hombre desea,
proyecta y se propone es, sin mis, posible" (438) ("There is a false utopianism ...
which consists of the belief that what man wants, projects, and plans is also immedi-
ately possible").
4. In explaining an illustration of his book on Islamic calligraphy (co-authored
with Mohammed Sizelmassi), Khatibi notes that kalima "simply means 'word'" (127).

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Deniau, Xavier. La Francophonie. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1983.
Eco, Umberto. "The Semantics of Metaphor." Role of the Reader: Exploration
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