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Kugelmass, Translator
(Some Thoughts on Translation and Its
Teaching)
In Woody Allen’s New Yorker
short story “The Kugelmass Episode,” collected in Side Effects
(Allen 1982), Kugelmass is a professor of humanities at the City College
of New York who, longing for some excitement in his middle-aged life and
sick of the sensible advice offered him by his analyst, hooks up with
a magician named The Great Persky. Persky has invented a machine that
can insert living human beings into books: the client climbs into a coffin-like
box and The Great Persky throws in a book of the client’s choice,
whereupon the lid is closed and the client is magically transported into
the chosen book.
Kugelmass chooses Madame Bovary,
and appears in Emma’s bedroom at an auspicious period in between
her affairs with Leon and Rodophe. She speaks English: “She spoke
in the same fine English translation as the paperback” (66). They
have a steamy affair, and college students all over the country wonder
who this bald Jew is, kissing Emma Bovary on page 100. During the course
of the affair Kugelmass brings her to New York; they stay at the Plaza,
shop at Halston and Saint Laurent, see A Chorus Line and the Guggenheim—and
baffled readers everywhere wonder where Emma has gone. “‘I cannot
get my mind around this,’ a Stanford professor said. ‘First
a strange character named Kugelmass, and now she’s gone from the
book. Well, I guess the mark of a classic is that you can reread it a
thousand times and always find something new’” (72). Kugelmass
only brings her for the weekend, which he tells his wife he’s spending
at a conference in Boston; but when it comes time to send her back, the
box malfunctions, and it takes The Great Persky a week to fix it. Kugelmass
frets that Emma is costing him an arm and a leg at the Plaza; plus she
wants to be an actress and needs professional photos; and a colleague
in comp lit at CCNY has identified Kugelmass as the new character in Flaubert
and has threatened to tell his wife.
When Persky finally gets the machine
working, Kugelmass sends Emma back to Charles and declares he’s through:
no more affairs with fictional characters. But Kugelmass is hooked, and
three weeks later he is back wanting to be sent into Portnoy’s
Complaint:
This time, instead of a popping noise there was a dull explosion, followed by a series of crackling noises and a shower of sparks. Persky leaped back, was seized by a heart attack, and dropped dead. The cabinet burst into flames, and eventually the entire house burned down.
Kugelmass, unaware of this catastrophe,
had his own problems. He had not been thrust into Portnoy’s Complaint,
or into any other novel, for that matter. He had been projected into an
old textbook, Remedial Spanish, and was running for his life over
a barren, rocky terrain as the word tener (“to have”)—a
large and hairy irregular verb—raced after him on its spindly legs.
(77-78)
First Reading: A Cautionary Tale
What can this humorous little fantasy
tell us about translation? One connection is immediately clear: Kugelmass
has his affair with the Emma of a particular English translation, not
of the French original. When he is projected into the novel, he goes not
to nineteenth-century France but to a fictional France imagined by one
of Flaubert’s many English translators. Emma speaks English—whether
British English or American English or some other variety, Allen doesn’t
tell us. Presumably, in any case, when she is trapped in New York and
says she has to get back because “Charles will miss me” (74),
she pronounces her husband’s name the American way, not the French.
Also, the readers who notice Kugelmass in the book are English-speakers;
in fact, Americans; specifically, American professors and students of
French and comparative literature. Kugelmass is himself a professor, although
of what humanistic discipline, exactly, Allen doesn’t tell us either.
We assume he’s not an English professor, since he gloats the first
time he and Emma make love: “‘My God, I’m doing it with
Madame Bovary!’ Kugelmass whispered to himself. ‘Me, who failed
freshman English’” (68). (And in that line I would go ahead
and accent “Madame Bovary” on both first syllables, American-style.
That’s probably how Kugelmass would say it; maybe this translated
Emma too.)
Indeed the story’s boundaries and
transgressions seem to be as much academic as marital: Fivish Kopkind,
for example, the comp lit professor who recognizes Kugelmass in the book
and threatens to go to his wife with the news of her husband’s affair,
is described by Kugelmass as someone “who has always been jealous
of me” (75). Both Kopkind and Daphne Kugelmass are jealous, Daphne
because she suspects her husband has “a chippie stashed somewhere”
(70), Kopkind because by the tacit rules of academic specialization Kugelmass
has no business in a French novel, even if it is in translation. Only
a professor of French or comparative literature should be screwing around
with Emma Bovary.
From a translation studies point of view,
then, the story’s scene is specifically academic literary translation,
more specifically still the reading of academic literary translations
in or for university literature classrooms. In this allegory of reading,
to borrow Paul de Man’s term and method, Kugelmass represents the
target-language reader—and we would have to say that he is very much
the kind of American masscult target-language reader against whom Larry
Venuti inveighs in his work, a reader who is not really very interested
in the otherness or the foreignness of Flaubert’s novel, but rather
focused utterly on easy pleasure on his own terms. He longs for romance,
a longing that his analyst describes disapprovingly as “acting out”
(62); he doesn’t want to be changed by the affair he imagines, only
diverted by it, fleetingly thrilled, made to feel temporarily alive by
the tingling sensations of love (or lust). The novels Persky offers him
are all English translations, but Kugelmass doesn’t exactly protest—it’s
hard to imagine him whining, “Doncha have any originals in here!?”—and
the “chippie” he ends up in bed with is not only an assimilated
one, a highly Anglicized Emma Bovary whose name presumably rhymes with
“ovary,” but a woman who even in French has become a byword
for the superficial, easily distracted bourgeois consciousness that Venuti
condemns. Also, of course, their talk is all of 1970s American pop culture:
Emma, to be sure, was just as happy as Kugelmass. She had been starved for excitement, and his tales of Broadway night life, of fast cars and Hollywood and TV stars, enthralled the young French beauty.
“Tell me again about O. J. Simpson,” she implored that evening, as she and Kugelmass strolled past Abbé Bournisien’s church.
“What can I say? The man is great. He sets all kinds of rushing records. Such moves. They can’t touch him.”
“And the Academy Awards?” Emma said wistfully. “I’d give anything to win one.”
“First you’ve got to be nominated.”
“I know. You explained it. But I’m convinced I can act. Of course, I’d want to take a class or two. With Strasberg maybe. Then, if I had the right agent—” (69-70)
Writing on January 23, 1995, the first
day of O. J. Simpson’s murder trial, I find that reference to him
particularly telling: for Kugelmass O. J. is still a great running back,
not an alleged murderer, not the Nordberg of the Naked Gun movies,
not even a color commentator. Readers read (in case we needed reminding!)
in a specific time and place; their responses to a book are shaped by
their total cultural situation.
This first tentative approach to the
story as an allegorical theory of (reading) translation, then, would make
the catastrophic ending poetic justice, punishment for Kugelmass’s
offenses against otherness, against the foreign: instead of another “easy”
novel like Portnoy’s Complaint (which is in fact even easier
than Madame Bovary, written as it was a decade or so before Kugelmass
wants into it, by and about New York intellectual Jews like himself),
Kugelmass finds himself in a Spanish textbook, being chased by the verb
tener. This is the foreign with a vengeance! The pastoral scenes
of Flaubert’s (translated) novel, which Allen has been blending humorously
with the neuroses of contemporary American culture, shift abruptly into
a nightmarish landscape of sudden death and explosions and fire—and
a foreign language, Spanish, which, tellingly, is imaged monstrously,
out of dystopian sf movies like The Incredible Shrinking Man, whose
protagonist at one point has to do battle with a giant spider. Surely
this is an appropriate punishment for the ethnocentric reader as condemned
by the entire romantic tradition in translation theory, from Herder and
the Schlegel brothers through Antoine Berman (1984) and Lawrence Venuti
(1995).
Second Reading: A Translator is Born
This first allegorical reading of the
story is, however, entirely negative. Can we not squeeze a more positive
moral out of it for translation theory?
Catastrophic as Kugelmass’s ending
is from his own point of view, it is not difficult to see that the end
of Kugelmass the unfortunate lover might well be the beginning of Kugelmass
the translator. Indeed many a real-world translator’s passage from
mono- into bilingualism and eventually into translation has been every
bit as traumatic as Kugelmass’s: Squanto’s, for example, as
described in William Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation (1952:
79):
He was a native of this place, and scarce any left alive besides himself. He was carried away with divers others by one [Captain Thomas] Hunt, a master of a ship, who thought to sell them for slaves in Spain. But he got away for England and was entertained by a merchant in London, and employed in Newfoundland and other parts, and lastly brought hither into these parts by one Mr. Dermer, a gentleman employed by Sir Ferdinando Gorges and others for discovery and other designs in these parts.
A Patuxet, Squanto (or Tisquantum) was
kidnapped from his tribe in 1614; he was “brought hither”—to
the “New World” (old for him), not to his tribe, not set free,
as Bradford seems to imply, since he had to jump ship to return to his
native region—four years later, in 1618; upon returning to Plymouth,
he found his entire tribe wiped out by a European-introduced disease that
had swept through the area the year before. A hard way to gain a translator’s
professional skills.
Others have been taken abroad against
their will as well, often less brutally than Squanto but no less disruptively:
the spouses and children and servants of government officials or corporate
executives or military officers (etc.) sent abroad to administer a terrtory,
for example, who (the accompanying family) must deal with the same culture
shock as the family member thus officially sent, but without the motivational
boost of career advances or, in some cases, the explicit choice to go
abroad or stay put. Sometimes first exposure to a foreign culture is less
violent, but is still perceived as a form of violence by comfort-lovers
who would rather not confront the new, the alien, the different: almost
certainly the vast majority of foreign language learners in classrooms
all around the world (not just in the Anglophone world, conditioned to
monolingualism by a century and a half of political and cultural imperialism)
respond this way to foreign languages at first, some longer than others.
And even the most eager and adaptable students of foreign languages and
cultures will at some point reel at the sheer alienness of the speech
and cultural norms that surround them, will feel it as a shock to the
system: look how easy all this is for them, how difficult for me; how
hard I have to work to make sense of things, how hard I have to concentrate
every second of the day, how many humiliating mistakes I still constantly
make, and how effortlessly they glide from conversation to conversation,
register to register!
And I would be willing to bet that a
large majority of professional translators got into the business out of
a kind of emotional parsimony, an attempt to turn their adjustment traumas
to some good use. If you have to live far from the reassuring familiarity
of your native culture, you might as well make the best of it—and
what better “best” to make of it than the work of the intercultural
navigator, the translator?
And speaking of interculturality: note
that the Spanish textbook isn’t just a foreign text. Most
likely it is written both in English and Spanish, instructions and grammar
rules (especially in a remedial text) in English, reading texts and examples
in Spanish. In his traumatic passage from mono- to bilingualism, and perhaps
to a future as a translator, Kugelmass is inserted not exactly into the
foreign but into the intercultural, into the interstices
between cultures, into what Friedrich Schleiermacher (1973: 63) derogates
as the “unerfreuliche Mitte”, the “unsettling in-between”
in which, as Anthony Pym (1995) rightly says, all translators live their
professional and personal lives.
Third Reading: Technical Translation
Thus transformed from a cautionary tale
into an allegorical Bildungsroman, a story about the birth or genesis
of the translator, “The Kugelmass Episode” also reminds us that
the book into which Kugelmass is projected in the end is not only a book
with foreign words in it, thus an allegorical simulacrum of the foreign,
as the romantics would want it, or of interculturality, as Anthony Pym
would prefer; it is also a nonfictional book, indeed a nonliterary work
(at least as “literature” is commonly defined). Bluntly: Remedial
Spanish is a technical text. And it seems likely to me that some of
the horror that Allen humorously paints for us in the ending stems from
Kugelmass’s (and by extension our own) realization that he is no
longer in the familiar world of the (translated) literary classic, but
in a how-to manual of sorts, a technical text that “lacks” the
“imaginative” and even “human” element of Madame Bovary.
This is, of course, how technical texts are typically portrayed by professors
and students of the humanities: as devoid of certain humanizing qualities
that make literary texts pleasant, even sometimes unimaginably beautiful,
places to live in for a while. Without the “elbow room” or “freedom”
lent a work by the literary imagination, it becomes a prison block of
the mind, a bleak, desolate, virtually uninhabitable soulscape from which
the human imagination flees screaming. Hence, presumably, the spidery
monster that the verb tener becomes: it is hard for the Anglophone humanist
to imagine feeling at home with tener, or with any given grammatical
form in any given language; it is especially difficult, maybe impossible,
to imagine feeling at home in a foreign language textbook. The humanist
mind shrinks from the prospect of being trapped forever in such a dull,
uninspiring, unimaginative place. Surely that would be a living hell!
This attitude is reflected in literary
translators’ negative conception of technical translation as well,
of course. Translation tout court is shunned by many humanist scholars
as limiting, confining, imprisoning for the imagination; but at least
literary translation partakes (at second hand, but still!) of the imaginative
genius of the original literary creation. A technical translation is a
dull, lifeless copy of a dull, lifeless original. Hence, so the reasoning
(or the prejudice) goes, one translates literature out of love, technical
texts (if at all) purely for the money. A person who loves a literary
text and possesses the requisite linguistic skills may undertake its translation
in order to bask in its brilliance, to feel the freedom of its imaginative
world from the inside, even if s/he is not particularly enamored of the
subordinate work of the translator. Ask a person of these tastes whether
it is possible to undertake a technical translation for similar motives,
and s/he will laugh in your face: love a technical text! Bask in its brilliance!
Feel the freedom of its world! Hah! A person who “loved” a technical
text would have to be singularly stunted, dulled, limited, creatively
handicapped or disabled (or “challenged”), which would be a
nice way of saying “imaginatively retarded.”
Hence also, while the granting of tenure
and promotion for literary and scholarly translations is still a controversial
issue in academia, nobody even raises the possibility of granting tenure
or promotion for the translation of technical texts. “Note the extensive
knowledge of Mexican farm machinery that was required to do these three
full-length translations of technical specifications from Spanish to English.”
What a joke!
But “The Kugelmass Episode”
can again push us past this tired old dualism. Horrifically as the Spanish
textbook is portrayed, it is certainly not a dull or unimaginative place:
it is populated by great hairy spidery monsters! It is a place of high
adventure—even if they are not particularly pleasant adventures.
Well, yes, we might want to say, but
that is just Woody Allen’s imaginative license; remedial Spanish
textbooks aren’t really that interesting.
But maybe that’s the point: if Woody
Allen can take that kind of license with a remedial Spanish text, can’t,
at least potentially, anyone? Isn’t the “imaginativeness”
of a text at least partly, and perhaps even largely, in the eye of the
beholder—in the imagination of the reader? It may be true that certain
texts lend themselves more than others to imaginative re-creation in the
reader’s eyes, ears, mouth, arms and legs, etc.; it may be true that
technical texts are more resistant to such re-creation. But the implication
of those truths (if that is what they are), that it takes a Woody Allen
to make a remedial Spanish text come alive imaginatively, may be that
our kneejerk attacks on “boring” or “tedious” or “unimaginative”
technical texts are misdirected. The problem, this would suggest, isn’t
with the texts, but with their readers: if a remedial Spanish textbook
is boring, maybe that is because its reader doesn’t know how to see
spiders in it.
The point I’m leading up to here
is that technical translators almost certainly do know how to see spiders
in remedial Spanish textbooks—or, to put that more generally, that
technical translators know how to make their texts come alive in a variety
of highly imaginative ways, by visualizing, narrativizing, personifying,
kinestheticizing them.
This occurred to me six months or so
ago while I was translating a chainsaw manual from English to Finnish.
As often happens when I translate, my mind started wandering; I wasn’t
even sure where. I just put myself on autopilot and translated. Some front
part of me was looking up words in the dictionary, building coherent Finnish
sentences, doing various analytical tasks; a back part was somewhere else,
lost in a reverie that felt vaguely romantic, though probably only because
it remained romantically vague. And as I say, this happens to me a lot.
It is an extremely common frame of mind for me to be in when I translate.
At one time I might have been tempted to say that my mind only wanders
when I translate boring technical texts, that I’m 100% on task when
I translate literature; but it’s not true. My mind wanders when I
translate literature too.
There is, in fact, a certain reverie
state that seems highly productive for me as a translator of any kind
of text, literary or technical; and I’m guessing that the same is
true for many translators, perhaps most. The fact is, as I was translating
the chainsaw manual I wasn’t daydreaming about fame and fortune,
or about the laptop computer I wanted to buy, or about anything else in
a nebulous future; my reverie was actually quite focused. In my reverie
I was reliving all the times I used a chainsaw in Finland, usually with
a Finnish friend or brother-in-law—often, for some reason, in the
snow. I could feel the cold, feel the leather gloves on my hand, feel
the crusty snow packed on the logs, hear the snow crunching under my feet,
feel the hairs in my nose freezing together. I have never owned a chainsaw,
and translating the manual I began to feel that I never wanted to, either,
because I had always thought that you just pick the thing up, prime it,
give it some choke, pull the starter cord, and start cutting. The manual
made owning a chainsaw seem like an impossibly complicated matter. My
mind wandered to the Finnish men I’d known who owned chainsaws—and
without exception they were careful, methodical men who would almost certainly
oil and clean and sharpen their chainsaw more or less as the manual instructed.
I wouldn’t: I’d throw it in a corner and haul it out whenever
I needed it, then take it to the shop when it didn’t work right.
While I was working on the translation,
in other words, on a hot summer day in Illinois, my whole internal world
was Finnish; my reverie transported me, in effect, to the place where
I had last heard and used the words and phrases I needed to do this translation
job.
Not that I did any of this intentionally;
in fact, I didn’t even realize I was doing it until several months
later, in the autumn, when I started thinking about using a page from
the chainsaw manual in a workshop I had been asked to give in Mexico (where
in fact, in the middle of my discussion of the translator’s imaginative
re-creation of the technical text, “The Kugelmass Episode” came
to me out of the blue—a story I had read at least fifteen years earlier
and had not thought about since). I suppose I am partly aware of my mind
wandering when I translate; and if someone from the thought police were
to stop me while I was doing a translation and say accusingly “your
mind is wandering!” I would probably feel vaguely guilty, like a
bad boy. But in fact, by creating a multisensory scene or context for
my translation, my semiconscious reverie was actually helping me translate.
It was not only wordlessly dredging up Finnish words that I hadn’t
used in years (and had perhaps never actually spoken, only heard); it
was creating a kind of native Finnish-speaker within me, a competent and
careful and knowledgeable Finnish-speaking chainsaw user, which improved
the fluency of the Finnish into which I was translating.
Literary translators are contemptuous
of technical translators because their work seems so mechanical, repetitive,
mind-numbing in its attention to objects rather than human contexts. But
a good technical writer or translator is always going to have to feel
the total human context of an instruction manual, or the translation is
not going to work—and I personally find it hard to see much difference
between this and the imaginative work done by a fiction-writer or movie
producer/director/writer like Woody Allen, or by a literary translator.
Like Allen, the technical translator too sees movies in her or his head,
visualizes the total human system (or narrative) of the technical text
in an imaginative reverie that is not qualitatively different from that
of the novelist. People use chainsaws; a manual for the owner of a chainsaw
is not mere words devoid of human context, it is (at least potentially,
in the imaginative reader’s mind) a rich human narrative full of
infinitely methodical care and insistently suppressed anxieties about
bodily harm. Indeed like all inanimate objects, chainsaws sometimes seem
to have a life or a mind of their own: they buck, they kick back, their
chains break, they get dull and sluggish and refuse to function. Chainsaws,
like irregular Spanish verbs, can be terrifying monsters.
All right, you protest, but chainsaws
are rather ordinary machines; some people see them every day, work with
them constantly, depend on them. It is natural to humanize a machine like
that. People also humanize their cars, their home appliances (washers
and driers, toasters and microwaves), their computers and televisions.
But what about less commonly used technologies, technologies that do not
impinge so directly and richly on ordinary people’s everyday lives—like
the microscopic components of computer chips, or chemical compounds? What
about numbers, sheer mathematics? How does one find, or invent, a human
context there? What kinesthetic movies play in the head of the mathematics
translator?
The answer is: whatever movies the translator
is capable of playing. Many people perceive numbers and noises synesthetically,
as colors or smells (or both); some have even speculated that the remarkable
humans known as lightning calculators multiply five-digit numbers by access
to some such synesthetic medium, which gives them the answer instantaneously,
holistically, rather than at the end of a long (and slow) linear sequence
of mathematical operations. Is it so difficult to imagine, then, that
translators of mathematical texts make those texts too come alive—that
they conjure up subliminal narratives or other richly human coherence
structures as they translate, and that those imaginative structures not
only keep them interested and engaged in their work (prevent them from
burning out) but actually help them to translate faster and with greater
accuracy?
Technological objects are never just
machines; numbers are never just abstractions; they are always complexly
situated in vast cultural systems, whole interactive narratives of prediction
and control, calculation and miscalculation, production and distribution,
marketing and purchase, use and misuse. And like legal and commercial
and medical documents, the texts written about them are steeped in human
consequence, human connection—”nonfictional” novels all.
The translator who is able to enter imaginatively into those novels, or
“write” them as s/he translates, will not only enhance her or
his recall of words and phrases and registers and so translate more rapidly
and accurately (and make more money); s/he will also enjoy her or his
work more. Humanists are right in this: people do need human contexts,
human connections. Without them we do lose interest in our work, even
our lives; feel an emptiness and anomie creep over us; burn out and look
elsewhere for meaning. The humanists’ mistake lies in assuming that
there are texts in which those connections are missing.
Kugelmass in the Classroom
The Kugelmass of Allen’s story is
among other things a teacher. We never learn what kind of pedagogue he
is, how he runs his classrooms, whether he lectures (as I would assume)
or has students involved in hands-on exercises or collaborative projects
(not likely); all we really know about his professional life as a teacher,
in fact, is that several times in the story he has to interrupt his pleasure
with Emma Bovary to go teach.
But the story obviously has pedagogical
implications, and I want to conclude this essay by considering a few of
them. We might begin by asking whether a student will “learn”
Madame Bovary more fully or effectively by engaging it as Kugelmass does,
falling in love with Emma (“acting out”), or as the Stanford
professor probably does, analyzing its narrative structure or symbolic
structure or cultural situatedness. That question will be difficult to
answer as long as the student remains an abstraction, as long as we don’t
know whether s/he already “loves literature,” whether s/he comes
to the literature classroom with a passionate full-bodied engagement with
the text that resembles Kugelmass’s, or remains largely baffled about
why anyone would want to read a novel in the first place. The former student
might well benefit from an analytical approach; the latter student will
probably be driven into paroxysms of frustration and suppressed resentment.
A student who doesn’t know how to “love” or “live”
literature, for whom the notion of dwelling imaginatively and passionately
in a work of fiction is inconceivable, will yawn (at best) at analyses
of symbolic or thematic or class structures, but will profit enormously
from a critical pedagogy that trains him or her in imaginative re-creation:
visualization exercises that connect the words on the page with the student’s
own experiential background, imagery exercises designed to evoke a holistic
emotional response, dramatization exercises that help the student act
the book out, feel it in her or his whole body, her or his embodied social
sense.
This will be doubly important for students
reading in a foreign language, where, depending on their exposure to the
culture in which the language is spoken natively, it may be difficult
for them to make the text “come alive,” feel vibrant and real.
Here various visual and kinesthetic imagining exercises can be powerful
tools for bridging the gaps between “the foreign” and a student’s
own experience. Even at a rudimentary or remedial level of language learning,
imagining yourself being chased by a spidery tener— whatever
the kinesthetic equivalent would be for that image with specific grammatical
forms—is probably much more effective than just memorizing conjugations.
When I was learning the Spanish subjunctive I could never keep the endless
lists of rules straight in my head, not even with plenty of time, when
I was doing a written exercise; when I was trying to say something—quiero
que ...—it was hopeless. I first had to figure out what kind
of subordinate clause I was in, then run down the various types of verb
that took the subjunctive in that clause type (influence, emotion, etc.).
Running this mental program fast, even when I was able to track down the
right clause and verb types, took five or six seconds—much too long
for speech. Somebody with an analytical bent went to a lot of trouble
to systematize the Spanish subjunctive, and that’s wonderful; but
it’s a lousy pedagogical tool.
But gradually I began to get a feel for
it, a kinesthetic sense of when the subjunctive should be used, and came
up with a much simpler rule: use the subjunctive to indicate unreality
of any sort, things that haven’t happened yet, things that have only
happened from someone’s point of view, etc. I tried this rule out
on my Spanish teacher, but she didn’t like it; it didn’t cover
the subjunctive field complexly and comprehensively enough. But the other
students in the class loved it: now instead of dozens of nested and embedded
rules they had just one that was fast and easy to use; and to their amazement,
once they began using it they started guessing right almost every time.
(And how important is it to get something right every time?) But this
drove the teacher nuts. She would give us a sentence, “I hope he
comes on time,” espero que ..., and ask us “subjunctive
or indicative, viene or venga”; some student would
say “subjunctive, venga,” and she would pounce: “Why?”
“Because he hasn’t come yet.” “No!” she would
crow. “Because esperar is a verb of emotion!”
No wonder Woody Allen imagined tener
as a giant spider.
Actually, having personally grown rather
fond of tener and even the subjunctive, I would venture to say
that the grammatical spiders of Spanish or any other language are only
terrifying monsters when taught analytically, with hairy rules protruding
from every part of their scrawny anatomies. In this sense my Spanish teacher,
and other strictly analytical teachers like her, are like authoritarian
parents who tell stories about the bogey-man to keep children terrified
of transgression. Most spiders, it turns out, are neither poisonous nor
carnivorous. Anyone who wants to speak Spanish had better learn to make
friends with them.
These ruminations have important implications
for the training of translators as well. If in fact it is true that all
translating, of technical as well as literary texts, is considerably more
imaginative, creative, and subconscious than dominant analytical models
of the process would allow, then we are doing our translation students
a disservice by drilling them in rules and analytical systems—the
stylistic system of a technical register, for example. What translators
need to facilitate their work is not a conscious and analytical repertoire
but a subliminal one—highly sophisticated, to be sure, full of fine
distinctions and complex connections, all the sublimated traces of earlier
analytical processes, but subconscious.
And this suggests that, whenever we teach
student translators analytical material—contrastive linguistic systems,
register analyses, terminologies—we should devote at least as much
classroom time to the sublimation of this material, the effective
internalization or “intuitivization” of what was once rational,
as we do to its actual analytical presentation. How do Spanish
students get from the jillion rules for the subjunctive to its actual
fluent use in speech? How do student translators get from analyses of
the transfer parameters between two languages—Spanish and English,
say—to the ability to transfer material between them quickly and
effectively and enjoyably?
Once again, “The Kugelmass Episode”
suggests that the best technique for facilitating that sublimation is
imaginative projection: inserting yourself creatively, dramatistically,
visually, kinesthetically into a text, any text, even a remedial Spanish
text or chainsaw manual. Imagining yourself being chased by a spidery
verb, if that’s what works for you. Remembering and imaginatively
reliving past experiences that bear directly or indirectly on the subject
matter of the text. Scrabbling together invented (fictional) contexts
for subjects of which you have no direct experience, from books you’ve
read, movies and TV shows you’ve seen, people you’ve talked
to. Acting out. Creating what amounts to a literary construct as an imaginative
pathway from mechanical understanding of individual words and phrases
through to a living, pulsating feel for the text’s human connectedness
in the source and/or target languages.
A significant consequence of this approach
might be that literary translators will find a new and enhanced role to
play in translator training programs. At present there is frequently a
tension in such programs between literary translators, who feel that their
work is the only interesting kind of translation, and technical and other
nonliterary translators, who feel that their work is the only commercially
viable kind of translation. Especially in countries like the U.S. and
the U.K., where it is difficult or impossible to earn a living by translating
literature alone, there is a widespread feeling in translator training
programs that on purely economic grounds there is no justification for
the teaching of literary translation—a perception that sits ill with
literary translators’ sense of self-worth. But if literary translation
can be reframed as an imaginative channel that will help all translators
translate better, faster, and more enjoyably, perhaps there is an economic
justification for classes in literary translation after all.
Just how that would work is another story,
and a long one. I have written a textbook, Becoming a Translator
(Robinson 1997), that offers some specific exercises designed to help
student translators sublimate or internalize analytic material more effectively;
at this writing it is still in production, so I still don’t know
how well it will work. Suffice it to say here that the pedagogical discussion
about training translators has in most respects not even begun: putting
texts in front of students and saying “translate!” does not,
I think, exactly constitute a pedagogy. Maybe that is the best way to
teach translators; maybe it isn’t. At present it seems to be more
or less a default choice, as no one knows what else to do —what else
might be done. Kugelmass, bizarre as the idea seems, may offer
a direction: what the student translator needs is not an analyst, but
a magician.
References
Allen, Woody. 1982. “The Kugelmass
Episode”. In Allen, Side Effects. New York: Ballantine Books,
59-78.
Berman, Antoine. 1984. L’Épreuve
de l’éstranger: Culture et traduction dans l’Allemagne
romantique. Paris: Gallimard, 1984. Translated by S. Heyvaert as The
Experience of the Foreign: Culture and Translation in Romantic Germany.
Albany: SUNY Press, 1992.
Bradford, William. 1952. Of Plymouth
Plantation, 1620-1647. Ed. Samuel Eliot Morison. New York: Knopf.
de Man, Paul. 1979. Allegories of
Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust.
New Haven: Yale University Press..
de Man, Paul, ed. and trans. 1965. Madame
Bovary: Backgrounds and Sources; Essays in Criticism. New York: Norton.
Pym, Anthony. 1995. “Schleiermacher
and the Problem of Blendlinge”. Translation and Literature
4(1):5-29.
Robinson, Douglas. 1997. Becoming
a Translator: An Accelerated Course. New York and London: Routledge.
Schleiermacher, Friedrich. 1973. “Über
die verschiedenen Methoden des Übersetzens.” In Hans Joachim
Störig, ed., Das Problem des Übersetzens, 38-70. Darmstadt:
Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Translated by Douglas Robinson as
“On the Different Methods of Translation.” In Robinson, ed.,
Western Translation Theory From Herodotus to Nietzsche. Manchester:
St. Jerome Publishing, 1997, 225-38.
Venuti, Lawrence. 1995. The Translator’s Invisibility. London and New York: Routledge.
