16 Afterword of the Translator
Translation of texts such as these is an edge-case where translation becomes a task much closer to that of creative writing itself: the various blog entries, in their deliberate ambiguity, occasional punning or word- play, their resorting at times to cultural signifiers specific not only to the language but occasionally to the region and generation of the author, and in particular their reliance on idiomata that—by their very nature— defy translation, require the exercise of subjective judgment to a greater degree than is usually the case. By contrast, the subject matter—here, touching mostly on questions of philosophy and æsthetics, particularly concerning language and communication as such, but also ranging far afield—demands an almost fastidious attention to meaning, and great care in word choice in the interest of clarity and precision. This seemingly paradoxical task, employing discipline and exactitude in the service of a text the author of which is deliberately seeking to evade just this sort of linguistic rigidity—conveying ambiguity as precisely as possible, so to speak—is inherent to the original texts as well, and is a particular tension that is, as it were, not a bug but a feature of them.
To that end, a number of features of the English translation of these texts is unique to them, and not part of the German originals. For example: in German— the cliché is that German is a far more rigid language, whereas English is claimed to be more flexible (a cultural trope, one might observe, that reveals more about the respective speakers of German and English than any characteristics of the languages themselves, pres- ent though they may be)—one relies far less on various methods of punctuation (commata, but also colons and semicolons, dashes em and en, or the occasional nested parentheses and brackets) that may be found in more florid (we refrain from the admonition of purple, or belles-lettres) English prose.
But to an English reader the long chains of commata that might separate and structure a German text without trouble become tire- some to read, the relations between a sentence’s vari- ous sub-clauses and the ways in which they relate to, comment on, or even contradict one another less clear, the creative use of sentence structure to communicate a certain playfulness less readily apparent. Likewise, the habit among some English authors, of debatable utility or taste, of using alliteration is almost wholly absent in German writing but which can, when used with self-awareness and judicious irony, convey a certain acknowledgment that one is playing, here, with the language itself. Conveying this playfulness, conveying not only the meaning but the sense of the text, relies on a theory of translation, called “dynamic trans- lation,” which seeks to translate not only the lexical meaning of the words themselves, but also the cultural and social signifiers they convey, into something fa- miliar to the reader.
(We might note in passing the curious habit popular in the 19th century, as [British] English authors translated the Spartan variant of Greek in preparing Classical stage-plays—written as they were by Athenian playwrights who regarded the Spartans as war-obsessed madmen—for local, modern audiences, of often giving the Spartans the closest local equivalent to a bar- barous dialect familiar to English audiences; and thus we find, for example, the Spartans of Aristophanes’ Ly- sistrata speaking [shouting?] their lines in a thick Scots brogue.)
The author of the present volume is deliberately using a particularly stylized form of German to effect a similarly playful, one might say “liberal” in the classic sense of the word, way of thinking: the use of allusion or contradiction, of ambiguity and irony, the occasional deliberate wandering of the train of thought towards ruminations only tangentially related to the subject at hand; these are all parts of a desire, I am given to speculate, to break away from the stereotypically rigid, constructivist, positivist, systematic way of thinking which the younger generations accused their elders, in the painful cultural reckoning of the postwar, of trying to impose (maintain?) in the face of a reawakening so urgently needed.
I confess to being of two minds regarding this particular belief about language, which is (as stated above) a cultural trope common among my German colleagues and which furthermore, I note with some resignation, remains one of the oldest and most enduring to be found in relations between the Old and New Worlds. I resist the idea, for example, fashionable at the moment among native German speakers of the last several generations, that mixing in a few English words and phrases—one should say American, as it derives from the German experience under American oc- cupation postwar—automatically (somehow) makes one’s rhetoric more “modern,” more “international,” more “cosmopolitan” and “hip.”
I recall the observation of Edward Gibbon—purveyor of the stuffiest and most purple of academic prose and whose citation should immediately serve as warning that the citing text likewise aspires to erudition or even pomposity, and yet a great pleasure to read—in discussing the de- cline of learning in the late Roman Empire, and the futile efforts to effect good taste by emulating the ancient masters: “But the provincials of Rome, trained by a uniform artificial foreign education, were engaged in a very unequal competition with those bold ancients, who, by expressing their genuine feelings in their native tongue, had already occupied every place of honour.”
In the present case, we might thus protest (without claiming for ourselves “every place of hon- our,” much less the pride of place in being either “bold” or “ancient”) the author’s efforts in linguistic playfulness, in ambiguous and heterogeneous meanings (or his own resistance to the idea of concrete meaning at all) as being mere emulation.
And yet: by the same token there exists a deep truth about human cognition, which incidentally has great consequences for philosophy, that it is constituted of paths of connection, patterns of interaction between neural cells (or groups of them), that these connections are built and reinforced through use, and that learning new things—in particular, learning a new language, or new ways of speaking one’s own—effectively changes those paths, and in a very real sense does change how one thinks, indeed changes who one is as a person.
There exists another theory in translation, known as “radical translation,” which may roughly be described thus: if I and the speaker of another language are seeking to learn one another’s language without the aid of an intermediary translator, we are forced into the peculiar situation of having to assume, a priori, that each of us is being honest about what we mean.
If, for example, I point to a particular rock and ask you what the word is for that rock, and you use a word that I know is used commonly to name a certain species of rabbit in your language, then I have to assume that you meant to use that word in this case, and that there is something about this rock that relates the two (perhaps its shape? Perhaps a popular folktale about a rabbit which involved this rock?), and that my task in constructing the translation dictionary for our respective languages will be to explain this hidden meaning.
Another, apocryphal and cautionary, example involves the origin of the designation of that Australian marsupial as “kangaroo,” supposedly acquired by European settlers from the aboriginals by asking the animal’s name but which actually meant “I don’t understand” in the natives’ language.
These sorts of stories always carry with them a certain unseemly colonialism (look at these natives with their strange, difficult-to-understand language! How odd and colorful and quaint the metaphors they use to describe their world!) that does not obtain in the case of the American occupation of Germany after the Second World War (though, one much admit, even this case does have a whiff of it).
But in a sense, despite their shared linguistic heritage, the two languages— native, as all languages are, to cultures whose histories diverged in some more-or-less-distant past, spoken by people with at times strikingly different yet nevertheless deeply ingrained ways of viewing the world—are fundamentally different languages; and the similarity in lexical roots or inflection or (to a lesser extent) grammar conceals deep differences in what their respective speakers might mean with the particular language they deploy.
My task, as I see it here, is thus not only to translate German, but specifically this German, which deviates in deliberate ways from what one might expect from a “proper” example of German philosophical prose. If I were to indulge, as the author himself occasionally does, in a bit of cultural genealogy, I might point to his background growing up in the Saarland, occupied as it was by French troops postwar, I might find in this upbringing in a border state (similar to the experience, further south, in French Alsace, where one still finds French shopkeepers of older generations who speak German) some explanation for his particular affinity for the French philosophers, for that particular brand of postmodernist philosophy characteristic of the schools of Baudrillard and Foucault, for the particular (one might admonish as impish) pleasure to be found in writing a text constructed specifically to thwart efforts to derive “meaning” (indeed, as already noted, that is employed to argue both in its content and form that “meaning” as such is a construct with very little concrete existence).
On the one hand, the kind of language used in the original German is indicative of a very specific kind of thought, only expressible with this language, and not some other; and translating this German thus requires knowing not only something about the target language, but about the source as well. I thus have to know something of the cognitive state of the author, the cognitive patterns which gave rise to this particular use of language, and this paradoxically before I can understand what he is telling me about that state through his writing, in order to have an idea what that state is.
On the other hand, in so doing I have to consider the mindset of my interlocutor, to imagine what he might be thinking, and to assume (thereby engaging in the “radical” part of the translation) that the language used is intentionally the way it is, and that whatever ambiguities I encounter are intended, and that these, too, should be conveyed in the translation.
All of this is to say, as any experienced translator will likely affirm (I would hope, as I—not being an expert authority on German-to-English translation—would appreciate the validation), that translating a text necessarily involves heterogeneous thinking: adopting a mental state not one’s own, and is thus a priori the adoption of the kind of mental variability and multiplicity—the felicitous word for this in one of the essays is “pluriverse,” used in contrast to the normalizing “universe”—that the author is encouraging us to employ more in our daily lives.
Lastly, I must note the unavoidable fact that, as noted at the beginning, translating a text itself remains a creative task, and leaves indelible traces of the translator throughout. In this, I caution (as should be evident from this, my own, prose) that my own style of writing has its own characteristics, deriving from my own preferences and biases as to what good English prose should be. This is, in my defense, not a wholly subjective stance derived only from my own tastes: I am greatly indebted in my efforts to the excellent texts available to the author of English prose covering matters of style, grammar, or vocabulary; chief among these is Garner’s superb Modern English Usage, but the Manuals from Kate Turabian or the University of Chicago, attractive as they are to one seeking to emulate the dense (admittedly occasionally also stuffy but hopefully enlightening thereby) prose of the erudite and academic, have also greatly helped me in produc- ing texts that, I should hope, might serve as examples of good judgment, elegant language, and refined taste. (As an example of the reliably good advice to be found in Garner, I have wisely used Scots to describe the language, rather than an earlier version of this text which used Scotch: the latter now almost universally regarded as offensive in all but a few extraordinarily limited cases).
In this my own personality as a writer inevitably insinuates itself into the text, and we find a sort of dialectic between myself and the author that reflects the ancil- lary debates and discussions we have had in preparing the English edition.
This dialectic is difficult, if not impossible, to discover (has the alliterative recurrence in this paragraph of words beginning with “di” become sufficiently prominent as to require acknowledgment?) in the English text alone, and future work with these texts envisions an edition in which not only the English and German texts appear side-by-side, but further- more the discussions we have had over questions of word choice, formulation of an argument, style, readability, etc., would appear in footnotes. Such an edition then becomes not only a collection of discussions of the subject matter, but exists (like the somewhat florid prose, one might chastise) as a sort of objet d’art for the enthusiast of translation theory.
Such enthusiasts most certainly exist, but we might suspect fewer in number than the audience for which these texts are initially intended: the reader interested in the complexities of cultural and linguistic philosophy, curious about the insights a “Saar-Frenchman” (the German term is “Saar- franzose and is used nowadays almost exclusively by the older generations) might have about the state in which his country finds itself in the present day, or about what consequences the new mass-media of our Internet-connected (one might also say “obsessed”) age might have for the discipline of philosophy, or for the affairs of everyday people going about their lives.
One ought not be surprised to find an author with interests in the fields of postmodern philosophy and literature would also be interested in covering a wide range of topics, from the mundane to the esoteric, the historical to the quotidian; and indeed, one finds that the texts cover a surprising array of cultural fields, for which, again, different kinds of language—one thinks here of the linguistic phenomenon of “code-switching”—are appropriate.
These essays, originally published as blog entries, constitute the beginning of an ongoing investigation into the linguistic and cultural lenses through which we view the world, and an effort to explore a different way of doing so: with different language, grounded in a different (perhaps constructed) culture. By their nature they are provisional and exploratory, more questions than answers: necessarily restrained, deliberately fragmentary and equivocal. It is the nature of one investigating unknown terrain to exercise caution and prudence, and the linguistic tools here, both in (his) self-restrained ambiguity and (my) deliberative precision, are intended as aids to the reader, simultaneously illustrative of the kind of thinking and indicative of the kind of future culture (or cultural philosophy) they are employed to pursue.
Stuttgart, May 2017
