We may think of translation, if we think about it at all, as simply the rendering of one language into another: a technical skill that, if done well, might approach art. On further reflection, though, we may begin to appreciate what the great literary critic George Steiner meant when he described translation as central to human culture and, more specifically, to the mystery and complexity of human communication not only across languages but within them. As he wrote in his masterful exploration of the subject, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation, published exactly fifty years ago, “In short: Inside or between languages, human communication equals translation…. A study of translation is a study of language.”
Even more than its centrality to communication and language, translation draws us closer to one of the paradoxes of the human person as both a member of a species and an irreducibly distinct individual. “Why,” Steiner asks, “does homo sapiens…this unified, though individually unique mammalian species not use one common language?” Instead, we ended up with thousands of languages, not just the living ones but the even more numerous extinct ones, all of which defy even the possibility of a universal language atlas that could name or count them all. The very multiplicity of spoken tongues speaks to the mystery of humankind’s unique capacity for symbolic behavior: that is, for being able to represent and receive, through expressive symbolic forms such as music, art, and language itself, the experience of being in the world—and through those shared representations, to arrive at intimations of being and meaning themselves. Translation, to put it in fundamental terms, is the ongoing human practice of bringing meanings from one symbolic system (each with its own uniquely individual and communal inflections) into contact and interaction with other symbolic systems. In the beginning was the Word, but the Word became many words—all being translations of the originary Word.
The thematic essays in this issue explore translation in its most capacious sense, as a powerful manifestation of the way human cultures become and serve as repositories of meaning and value from which we humans derive, for better or worse, purpose and direction as well as a sense of good and evil.
A close look at translation also reveals, as historian Olga Litvak brilliantly elucidates in her essay “Untranslated,” that bad translations and even intentional resistance to certain kinds of translation may be both cause and result of complicated relations across cultures and traditions. Pointing to the “long history of the highly fraught relationship between Christians and Jews,” she notes that it is one in which “matters of translation did not remain merely academic.” In works as various and temporally disparate as the ancient Hebrew texts of the Tanakh and the novels of Philip Roth, Litvak finds “a powerful argument for the coherence of Jewishness as a form of life, a way of reading that resists translation.”
The slips and resistances of translation also reveal, in their all too human way, a key reason that machine translation will always remain, at best, a conveniently useful if insufficient tool, and possibly even a seductively dehumanizing one. In his wide-ranging essay “After Babel Fish,” critic Richard Hughes Gibson acknowledges that machine translators such as AltaVista’s Babel Fish and its even more powerful successors have proved capable of “remarkable technical feats” (and often some quite droll ones), but he cautions that we should be wary of their offerings. “Automatic machine translation is being marketed as a means to expand our little worlds. It may just as easily render the world back to us on ever more narrow terms.”
To make a good literary translation, argues the Russian literature scholar Gary Saul Morson in “A Question of Purpose,” the translator “must translate the work, not the words on the page.” Among other things, that means conveying, as Constance Garnett did and many other more literal translators did not, the tonal complexities of the great Russian writers. That requires attention to how such realists as Dostoevsky and Tolstoy deployed the narrative device of free indirect discourse (“double voicing”) to enable the reader, Morson writes, to hear “both the character’s inner voice and the author’s different, often ironic, one.”
And how to translate the supremely inimitable parables of Franz Kafka? In “The Kafka Challenge,” literary historian and translator Paul Reitter finds that neither of two admirable translations of The Metamorphosis “manages to preserve the full effect of Kafka’s sentences—the translation of his work does indeed ‘create a problem’—and yet both renderings are excellent: careful, thoughtful, and polished. They give us a Kafka who is recognizably himself. In fact, for an author so much associated with radical singularity, linguistic self-alienation, and Talmudic indeterminacy, or, in a word, untranslatability, Kafka has proven to be remarkably translatable.”
“Translation can be the beginning of a moral education…,” writes historian and translator Blake Smith in “Translation and Taste.” Revisiting the writings on judgment by Hannah Arendt and one of her outstanding protégés, Michael Denneny, Smith relates how the latter learned from writers of the early-modern period to view the translation of ancient writers as essential training in the life skill of wise discrimination, something that neither reason nor science could adequately provide. “Translation is one of the most visible portions of the ‘kind of reality’ where judgment and taste apply, and where neither logic nor tradition (nor their apparent collapse) provide liberation.”
“Emerging in the first decades after the Civil War and drawing on elements of earlier African American field hollers, chants, and spirituals, the blues was, above all, a music of resistance, a defiant assertion of agency despite exploitation and virtual disenfranchisement,” writes author W. Ralph Eubanks. In “Retranslating the Blues,” he recalls both the wider context of the evolution of that powerful musical idiom and his own evolving relationship with a genre that he, as a younger man in the 1970s, along with other black intellectuals of his generation, largely disavowed as an almost shameful reminder of an “an unlettered, unrefined black culture that we educated ones considered backward or even ‘ignorant.’” But living through the changing conditions of the South of his lifetime—from the last years of Jim Crow to the post–civil rights era of the New South to the recent ominous resurgence of some of the worst features of the Old South (and not just in the South)—Eubanks slowly came to a new appreciation, a “retranslation,” of what he had once undervalued. Above all, he writes, “now may be the time to take what has been lost in the translations of the blues and recover its real value as instruction on how to survive, thrive, and move forward—and to do so with a certain sly humor and insouciance that subverts the schemes and dreams of those who want to bring back an imagined past that will provide even less to those whom it promises most.”
We moderns “are living in a tower of Babel,” wrote the German-Jewish philosopher Edith Stein, who famously converted to Catholicism and took vows as a nun, and was later murdered in the death camps of Auschwitz. As theologian Catherine Moon relates in “Thinking Across Languages,” Stein emerged from her doctoral studies under the philosopher Edmund Husserl to take his phenomenological method in a very different direction from that of Martin Heidegger and subsequent existentialist thinkers such as Jean-Paul Sartre. That such a divergence could occur, Stein understood, was at least partly the result of the incommensurable meanings of key philosophical terms, including the crucial word experience. In Stein’s acute reflections on how and why “languages grow from the spirit [Geist] of the people who speak them,” Moon explains, she provided new approaches to a Christian ontological realism even while insisting that “those who seek to ‘start over’ or ‘begin anew’ often philosophically misunderstand that the fact of not being able to fully translate everything reveals the nature of translation and the deeper meaning of language itself.”
As artificial intelligence bids fair to equal or outdo mere human intelligence (at least in the minds of its many deep-pocketed promoters), we do well to heed philosopher Talbot Brewer’s admonition: “So much hinges on whether we have understood this special power of ours, this power of the word.” In “The Word Made Lifeless,” Brewer offers a compellingly reasoned account of what “the word” means, denotatively and connotatively, in its many historical, mythical, and philosophical formulations, applications, and uses. Observing that it “was widely accepted among Greek philosophers that logos is a crucial, and perhaps the most crucial, of the distinctive capabilities possessed by human beings,” Brewer insists that the fully Greek sense of the word must be translated beyond its narrow association with language itself. Even more, he argues, “It brings us into contact with, and takes direction from, realities that lie beyond language and that give to language the great significance that it has. If it were not for the capacity of logos to reach beyond language and find significance and guidance there, the Word would be a lifeless thing—or so I will try to show.”
And in that showing, Brewer makes it clear what the stakes are if logos is reduced to—or translated downward into—a mere instrument of selfishness or power rather than the means of perceiving and achieving the good, an outcome that would leave us as no more than the stochastic parrots that the Sam Altmans of the world say we are, having fully remade ourselves in the image of our machines.
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Beyond the thematic section, readers will find a timely reflection on a key cause of the parlous state of democracy at home and abroad, as a new breed of autocrats bends the language and meanings of democracy to subvert democratic institutions and practices as well as the liberal ideals that inform them. In “Democracy by the Book,” philosopher Antón Barba-Kay explains how declining—or, more exactly, shallowing—literacy makes us less able to acquire, much less exercise, the indispensable skills of democratic citizenship. Pointing specifically to the “three ways in which digital technology has been justified and even is justified as a democratic force but that are in fact working against it by reforming our understanding of what we are and how we communicate,” Barba-Kay also proposes some last-ditch strategies to oppose the forces that are making citizens’ democratic participation and agency “seem more like an undesirable inefficiency.”
In a deeper sense, then, Barba-Kay’s essay does connect with the theme of the issue: Our democracy is only as good as the words we citizens understand and live by—the words we must never cease translating, and translating well, to achieve the democracy that deserves its name.