After Babel – George Steiner

Understanding as translation

Language (…) is the most salient model of Heraclitean flux. It alters at every
moment in perceived time. The sum of linguistic events is not only increased but
qualified by each new event. If they occur in temporal sequence, no two statements
are perfectly equal. Though homologous, they interact. (…) In short : so far as we
experience and ’realize’ them in liniar progression, time and language are
intimately related : they move and the arrow is never in the same place.

But ordinary language is, literally at every moment, subject to mutation. (…) New words enter as old words
lapse. Grammatical conventions are changed under pressure of idiomatic use or by cultural ordinance. (…)
Different civilizations, different epochs do not necessarily produce the same ‘speech mass’; certain cultures
speak less than others; some modes of sensibility prize taciturnity and elision, others reward proxility and
semantic ornamentation.

One thing is clear : every language-act has a temporal determinant. No semantic

form is timeless. When using a word we wake into resonance, as it were, its entire
previous history. A text is embedded in specific historical time; it has what
linguistis call a diachronic structure. To read fully is to restore all that one
can of the immediacies of value and salient in which speech actually occurs.(…) A
true reader is a dictionary addict.

The complete penetrative grasp of a text, the complete discovery and recreative
apprehension of its life-forms (prise de conscience), is an act whose realization
can be precisely felt but is nearly impossible to paraphrase or systematize.

Every musical realization is a new poiesis. It differs from the other performances
of the same composition. Its ontological relationship to the original score and
to all previous renditions is twofold : it is at the same time reproductive and
innovatory.

When we read or hear any language-statement from the past, be it Leviticus or last
year’s best-seller, we translate. (…) The schematic model of translation is one in
which a message from a source-language passes into a receptor-language via
transformational process. The barrier is the obvious fact that one language
differs from the other, that an interpretative transfer, sometimes, albeit
misleadingly, described as encoding and decoding, must occur so that the message
’gets through’. Exactly the same model – and this is what is rarely stressed – is
operative within a single language. But here the barrier or distance between
source and receptor is time. (...) the tools employed in both operations are

correlate : both the ’external’ and ’internal’ translator/interprète have recourse

to lexica, historical grammars, glossaries of particular periods, professions, or

social millieux, dictionaries of argot, manuals of technical terminology. (…)

Certain elements will elude complete comprehension or revival. The time-barrier

may be more interactable than that of linguistic difference. (…) The ‘translator
within’ has to cope with subtler treasons. Words rarely show any outward mark of

altered meaning, the body forth their history only in a fully established context.

Where a passage historically remote, (…), the business of internal translation

tends towards being a bilingual process : eye and ear are kept alert to the

necessity of decipherment. The more seemingly standardized the language – (…) the

more covert are indices of semantic dating. We read as if time has had a stop.

History is a speech-act, a selective use of the past tense.(…) What material

reality has history outside language, outside our interpretative belief in

essentially linguistic records (silence knows no history) ? (…) We have no total

history, no history which could be defined as objectly real because it contained

the literal sum of past life. (…) We remember culturally, as we do individually,

by conventions of emphasis, foreshortening, and omission.

As every generation retranslates the classics, out of a vital compulsion for

immediacy and precise echo, so every generation uses language to build its own

resonant past. At moments of historical stress, mythologies of the ‘true past’

follow on each other at such speed that entirely different perspectives coexist

and blur at the edges.

The fracture of words, the maltreatment of grammatical norms which, as the Opies

have shown, constitute a vital part of the lore, mnemonics, and secret parlance of

childhood, have a rebellious aim : by refusing, for a time, to accept the rules of

the grown-up speech, the child seeks to keep the world open to his own, seemingly

unprecedented needs. In the event of autism, the speech-battle between child and

master can reach a grim finality. Surrounded by incomprehensible or hostile

reality, the autistic child breaks off verbal contact. He seems to choose silence

to shield his identity but even more, perhaps, to destroy his imagined enemy.

Eros and language mesh at every point. Intercourse and discourse, copula and

copulation, are sub-classes of the dominant fact of comunication. They arise from

the life-need of the ego to reach out and comprehend, in the two vital senses of

’understanding’ and ’containment’, another human being. Sex is a profoundly

semantic act. Like language, it is a subject to the shaping force of social

convention, rules of proceeding, and accumulated precedent. To speak and to make

love is to enact a distinctive twofold universality : both forms of communication

are universals of human physiology as well as of social evolution. It is likely

that human sexuality and speech developed in close-knit reciprocity. Together they

generate the history of self-consciousness, the process, presumably millenary and

marked by ennumerable regression, whereby we have hammered out the notion of self and otherness.
(…) If coitus can be schematized as dialogue, masturbation seems to

be correlative with the pulse of monologue or of internalized address. (…)

Ejaculation is at once a physiological and a linguistic concept. Impotence and

speech-blocks, premature emission and stuttering, involuntary ejaculation and the

word-river of dreams are phenomena whose interrelations seem to lead back to the

central knot of our humanity. Semen, excreta, and words are communicative

products. They are transmissions from the self inside the skin to reality outside.

Any model of communucation is at the same time a model of trans-lation, of

vertical or horizontal transfer of significance. No two historical epochs, no two

social classes, no two localities use words and syntax to signify exactly the same

things, to send identical signals of valuation and inference. Neither do two human
beings. Each living person draws, deliberately or in immediate habit, on two

sources of linguistic supply : the current vulgate corresponding to his level of

literacy, and a private thesaurus. The latter is inextricably a part of his

subconscious, of his memories so far as they may be verbalized, and of the

singular, irreducibly specific ensemble of his somatic and psychological identity.

Part of the answer to the notorious logical conundrum as to whether or not there

can be ’private language’ is that aspects of every language-act are unique and

individual. They form what linguists call an ’idiolect’. Each communicatory

gesture has a private residue. The ’personal lexicon’ in every one of us

inevitably qualifies the definitions, connotations, semantic moves current in

public discourse.

Obviously, we speak to communicate. But also to conceal, to leave unspoken. The

ability of human being to misinform modulates through every wavelength from

outright lying to silence. This ability is based on the dual structure of

discourse : our outward speech has ‘behind it’ a concurrent flow of articulate

consciousness.

’Translation’, properly understood, is a special case of the arc of communication

which every successful speech-act closes within a given language. (…) The model

‘sender to receiver’ which represents any semiological and semantic process is

ontologically equivalent to the model ’source-language to receptor-language’ used

in the theory of translation. In both schemes there is ‘in the middle’ an

operation of interpretative decipherment, an encoding-decoding function or

synapse. Where two or more languages are in articulate interconnection, the

barriers in the middle will obviously be more salient, and the entreprise of

inteligibility more conscious. (…) In short : inside or between languages, human

communication equals translation. LANGUAGE and GNOSIS

A true translator knows that his labour belongs ‘to oblivion’ (inevitably, each

generation retranslates), or ‘to the other one’, his occasion, begetter, and

precedent shadow. He does not know ‘which of us two is writing this page’. In that

‘transubstantial ignorance’ – I find no simpler, less unwidely term – lies the

misery of this whole business of translation, but also what repair we can make of
the broken Tower.

What we find here is a ‘dynamic mentalism’ : language organizes experience, but

that organization is constantly acted upon by the collective behaviour of the
particular group of speakers. Thus there occurs a cumulative dialectic of
differentiation : languages generate different social modes, different social
modes further divide languages.

WORD AGAINST OBJECT

A cognate duality marks the coexistance of language and of time. There is a sense,
intuitively compelling, in which language occurs in time. Every speech act,
whether it is an audible utterance or only voice innerly, ‘takes time’ – itself a
suggestive phrase. It can be measured temporally. It shares with the sensation of
the irreversible, of that which streams away from us, ‘backward’, in the moment in
which it is realised. As I think my thought, time passes; it passes again as I
articulate it. The spoken word cannot be called back. Because language is
expressive action in time, there can be no unsaying, only denial or contradiction,
which are themselves forward motions. (…) Time, as we posit and experience it, can
be seen as a function of language, as a system of location and refferal whose main
co-ordinates are linguistic. Language largely composes and segments time. I mean
this in both a ‘weak’ and a ‘strong’ sense. The weak sense relates to the actual
psychology of time-perception, to the ways in which the language-flow in and amid
which we pass much of our experience of temporality. (…) It is likely that the
current of language passing through the mind, either in voluntary self-address or
in the perhaps random but almost certainly uninterrupted soliloquy of mental
activity, contributes largely to the definition of ‘interior time’. Here, the
sequence of speech signals or named images may well be the principal clock.
Nevertheless, there are the ‘weak’ forms of the co-ordination of language with
time. Other agencies do as much or more to structure and to alter our time
consciousness. Drugs, schizophrenic disturbances, exhaustation, hunger, common
stress, and many other factors can bend, accelerate, inhibit, or simply blur our
feeling and recording of time. The mind has as many chronometries as it has hopes
and fears. During these states of temporal distortion, linguistic operations may
or may not exhibit a normal rhythm. The ‘strong’ sense of the time-language
relation is grammatical. (…) our uses of time are mainly generated by the grammar
of the verb. (…) The past-present-future axis is a feature of grammar which runs
through our experience of self and of being like a palpable backbone. (…) Does
past have any existence outside grammar ? The notorious logical teaser – ‘can it
be shown that the world was not created an instant ago with a complete programme
of memories ?’ is, in fact, indecidable. No raw data from the past have absolute
intrinsec authority. Their meaning is relational to the present and that relation
is realized linguistically. Memory is articulated as a function of the past tense
of the verb. (...) Our conjugations of verb tenses have a literal and physical
force, a pointer backward and forward along a plane which the speaker intersects
as would a vertical, momentarily at rest yet convincing of itself as in constant
forward motion.(...) Proust’s minutely discriminated narrative pasts are
reconnaissances of the ‘language-distances’ which we postulate and traverse when
stating memories. (…) What is psychoanalysis if it is not an attempt to derive and
give substantive authority to a verbal construct of the past ?

The past is to be re-called by present discourse, Orpheus walking to the light but

with his eyes resoultely turned back.

The historian must ‘get it right’. He must determine not only what was said (which

may prove exceedingly difficult given the state of documents and the conflicts of

testimony), but what was meant to be said and at what diverse levels of

understanding the saying was to be received.

There is a vital sense in which grammar has ‘developed man’, in which we can be

defined as a mammal that uses the future of the verb ‘to be’. (…) The syntactic

development is inextricably inwowen with historical self-awareness. The ‘axiomatic

fictions’ of forward inference and anticipation are far more than a specialized

gain of human consciousness. (…) The provision of concepts and speech acts

emboding the future is as indispensable as is that of dreams to the economy of the

brain. Cut off from futurity, reason would wither. (…) Through shared habits of

articulate futurity the individual forgets, literally ‘overlooks’, the certainty

absoluteness of his own extinction. Through his constant use of a tense-logic and
time-scale beyond that personal being, private man identifies, however abstractly

with the survival of his species. (…) Future tenses are an example, through one of

the most important, of the more general framework of non- and counter- factuality.

They are a part of the capacity of language for the fictional and illustrate the

absolute central power of the human word to go beyond and against ‘that which is

the case’.

Language is in part, physical, in part mental. Its grammar is temporal and also

seems to create and inform our experience of time. A third polarity is that of

private and public. It is worth looking at closely because it poses the question

of translation in its purest form. In what way can language, which is by operative

definition a shared code of exchange, be regarded as private ? To what degree is

the verbal expression, the semiotic field in which an individual functions, a

unique idiom or idiolect ? How does this personal ‘privacy’ relate to the larger

‘privacy of context’ in the speech of a given community or national language ? The

paradoxically possibility of the existence of private language has widely

exercised modern logic and linguistic philosophy. It may be that a muddle between

‘idiolect’ and ‘privacy’ has frustrated the whole debate.

Meaning and public verification are reciprocal aspects of a genuine speech-act.

Wittgenstein insists that any given sign which has a use cannot simply be

associated with a personal sensation. In language utility and mutual

intelligibility are indivisible.

‘A privately referring-with-a-word person is not a referring-with-a-word person at

all. A person who is privately referring with a word is not a logical

possibility’.

(…) a distinction must be drawn between a language which only one person does use

and understand (the last member of a moribund community or speech-culture), and a language which
only one person can use and understand.

‘The fact that a word has a private reference does not mean that it has a private

meaning; there is no reason why a word should not refer to a private object and

yet have a meaning that is publicly ascertainable and publicy checkable’. (D.

Locke)

G. Weiler : ‘To use a language <<in isolation>> is like playing a game of

solitaire. The names of the cards and the rules of the manipulation are publicly

given and the latter enable the player to play without the participation of other

players. So, in a very important sense, even in a game of solitaire others

participate, namely those who had made up the rules of the game.’

No two human beings share an identical associative context. Because such a context

is made up of the totality of an individual existence, because it comprehends not

only the sum of personal memory and experience but also the reservoir of the

particular subconscious, it wiil differ from person to person. There are no

facsimiles of sensibility, no twin psyches. All speech forms and notations,

therefore, entail a latent or realized element of individual specificity. They are

in part an idiolect. Every counter of commnunication carries with it a potential

or externalized aspect of personal content. The zone of private specification can

extend to minimal phonetic units.

(…) Because every speech form and symbolic code is open to contingencies of memory
and of new experience, semantic values are necessarily affected by individual and/or historical-cultural
factors.