Words and Worlds Ethnography and Theories of Translation
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2014 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4 (2): 193–220 COLLOQUIA Words and worlds Ethnography and theories of translation John Leavitt, Université de Montréal If different languages orient the speaker toward different aspects of experience, then translation can be seen as a passage between lived worlds. This paper traces out some key moments in the history of translation theory in the modern West and argues that translation and ethnography require each other. Free of the constraint that professional translators produce easily digestible texts for the target audience, anthropologists are particularly well placed to carry out translations that take context seriously into account, as well as ethnographies centered on texts. Such “ugly” translations (Ortega y Gasset) can force the reader to work to reorient him- or herself, to cross a boundary into what is potentially another world, initially another language-world. Through the history, we seek to distinguish the translation of referential content, something that is always possible, and translating stylistic and indexical (contextual) elements, something that has often been declared impossible. The paper draws some of the implications of these arguments on the basis of text-artifacts constructed from Central Himalayan oral traditions. Keywords: translation, ethnography, history, poetics, Central Himalayas Introduction Of the human sciences, only anthropology has consistently taken seriously the idea that beside or beyond the evident fact that all human beings live in the same world, there is a sense in which they live or have lived in different worlds. Since Boas, these have been called “cultures,”1 and have recently returned as “ontologies.” As it hap- pens, the cultures that seem to be most different from the ones that have produced most anthropologists are those that have been colonized and transformed. Are we to think of an Australian or African tribal group as living in a different world, or rather as peripheral lumpen proletarians? How important is what is distinctive? 1. Boas is the first to have used the word “culture” in the plural in English (Stocking 1968). The plural use in German (Kulturen) had been established in the late nineteenth cen- tury by Lazarus, Steinthal, and the school of Völkerpsychologie (Kalmar 1987). This work is licensed under the Creative Commons | © John Leavitt. ISSN 2049-1115 (Online). DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14318/hau4.2.009 John Leavitt 194 As Bridget O’Laughlin wrote (1978: 103), what is distinctive about the zebra is its stripes, but stripes are hardly the most important aspect of a zebra’s life. Yet what is most important to people themselves depends in part on their his- torical situation and their expectations; these need not always be the same every- where, at every time. Existing in a situation of starvation and disease is not the way any human being, or any organism, wishes to live. But once you can eat and feed and protect your children, then other factors come into play. These factors may be conscious or close to consciousness; or, as in the case of the language one speaks, they may be largely unconscious. And the record shows that these world-making factors can be extraordinarily diverse. This means that human values, goals, and conceptualizations are themselves diverse, and maybe even incommensurable (Povinelli 2001): insofar as concep- tions differ, lived worlds may be said to differ. Probably the most blatant diversity is that of human languages, this very diversity being one of the important lan- guage universals. This is a simple fact: the species speaks or has spoken thousands of different mutually unintelligible languages. How seriously should this diversity be taken? Some say not at all: according to Noam Chomsky, if a Martian arrived on Earth and observed how children learn language, he (in these parables it is always a male Martian) would say that there is only one human language with, in Steven Pinker’s oxymoron, mutually unintelligible dialects (Pinker 1994: 240). On the other side, both George Steiner (1975) and Claude Hagège (1985) use the same parable to opposite effect: both say that if a Martian arrived on earth and observed human physical variation, he would assume that there were maybe a dozen human languages—instead of the five to ten thousand we actually find (for discussion of the Martian parable paradox, seeLeavitt 2011: 5–6). Diversity goes all the way up and down the levels of language structure, from sound to the dividing of experience in lexicon, to the directing of attention to one or another aspect of experience by pervasive grammatical categories, to genres of discourse, the kinds of things one is expected to say and hear in a given society. Both the music and the meanings of languages are organized differently for each one—and, again, there are thousands. This gives the continuing impression, through the generations, that different languages convey different worlds (Sapir 1921: 120–21; Friedrich 1986: 16). The idea that ethnography is a kind of translation (Asad 1986; Rubel and Rosman 2003; and see the essays in this issue) has largely been treated metaphorically, as an implication of the broader movement to see cultures as texts to be interpreted (Geertz 1973; Ricoeur 1973). Now (Hanks and Severi, this issue), we are seeing an attempt to use the idea of translation as an alternative both to fixed cognitive uni- versals and to an ontological pluralism of sealed worlds, implying instead a focus on the processes of exchange and transfer not only between societies (“cultures”), but also between different social classes, genders, caste groupings, within societies, which in fact define all social interaction. There is, however, a risk here, as there is in any analogy. By extending the idea of translation out of language into culture more broadly, we weaken its force of sur- prise. Languages that are mutually unintelligible are absolutely so. To recap Roman Jakobson’s functions of language (1960): when someone speaks, say, Turkish—one 2014 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4 (2): 193–220 195 Words and worlds of the approximately 9,990. languages that I absolutely do not know,2 I do not un- derstand a single word. The referential function is missing, or rather was never there. A unilingual Turkish friend and I may be very phatic together over coffee, I may feel strong aspects of his expressivity, he can be effectively conative in get- ting me to jump out of the way of an oncoming bus, I may even sense some of the rhythm and alliteration if he recites a poem, but as long as he keeps speaking Turkish, there is no referential content, unless the two of us start working hard and for a long time on the metalinguistic function—which is to say that we start learn- ing each other’s languages. Note how different this is from what is called translating culture. Since what we call culture includes virtually all aspects of life, as soon as I arrive in, again, say, Turkey, I think I recognize all kinds of things: houses, restaurants, markets, places of worship; men and women, children and adults, dressing somewhat differently from each other and occupying somewhat different roles. I can immediately begin to form impressions on what might someday become ethnographies of the econo- my, politics, social organization, religion. We can call these translations, and they share characteristics with interlingual translations. But there is a precious opacity to languages that other human practices do not share, or do not share so unavoid- ably. Staying close to actual linguistic translation practice offers ethnographers a salutary reminder of how much, in all aspects of a culture, they do not understand. As against the model or metaphor of the text, an alternative tradition, of philol- ogy and ethnopoetics, has opted, rather, for what we might call the metonym of the text: texts exist in cultures and in particular linguistic media. In this view, texts are seen not as “fragments of culture” (Silverstein and Urban 1996: 1), but as cultural foci, incomprehensible outside of their cultural and social situations, and, above all, made of language, which is to say, always a particular distinct language. The fact of linguistic difference involves every level of language, from the un- translatability of phonetics and phonology (Webster 2014) to that of the universe of presuppositions out of which the source text arises, with levels of lexicon and grammatical architecture in between. Moving from one language to another and trying to have coherent “normal” texts in both must necessarily mean suppres- sions and additions—what A. L. Becker (1995), following Ortega y Gasset, calls deficiencies and exuberances; what John McDowell (2000) calls muting and add- ing. Yet it seems to go without saying that modern Western translation, whether literary translation or the mass of “useful,” that is, business, government, and other organizational translation, has as its central, often its only, goal to convey what are considered the necessary or useful aspects of the referential meaning of a text into another language. But producing such a usable text, that is, a normal-sounding or normal-reading text in the target language (to use the rather frightening terminology of translation theory), requires alterations of what was there in the source text, even in its referen- tial meanings, at every level of language. The original is thinned out (deficiency), or else one feels it has been thickened up with material that wasn’t there in the original (exuberance). This situation is all the more acute if we hope to convey not only the 2. I use the figure of ten thousand attested human languages. The figure ranges from five to ten thousand, depending on what is considered a language and what a dialect.