Bertrand Russell claims, “No one can understand the word ‘cheese’ unless he has a nonlinguistic acquaintance with cheese” (Jakobson, 113). In other words, language cannot be employed to properly communicate a certain concept unless one’s understanding of the concept had been established independently of and prior to language.
In his short story La Busca de Averroes, Jorge Luis Borges (from Twentieth-Century Buenos Aires) depicts Averroes (from medieval al-Andalus), about whom he knew nothing but what he had learned from other writers’ texts. From the outset of the writing process, Borges was well aware of the difficulty of his undertaking––the difficulty of articulating a certain snippet of Averroes’s life with very little prior information. One might even say this difficulty was precisely what set him on this path; this difficulty is analogous to the difficulty that occupied the very ‘snippet’ of Averroes he wanted to substantiate. Namely, Averroes is concerned with translating Aristotle’s Poetics; he, Averroes, finds it very difficult because ‘tragedy’ and ‘comedy’ do not exist in his world. And Borges, while he understood Poetics, set out to struggle with the same task: the task of the translator seeking the taste of foreign cheese—tragedy and comedy for Averroes, and Averroes for Borges.
Throughout the story, Averroes, supreme interpreter of Greek thought, cannot quite grasp the meaning of tragedy and of comedy––a meaning which we learned in middle school. At last, he settles with the following definition: “Aristotle gives the name of tragedy to panegyrics and that of comedy to satires and anathemas” (Borges, 155). Because his society is devoid of theatre, no template is available to guide Averroes in elaborating further on tragedy and comedy. This itself is a tragedy: the tragedy of the translator. According to his own definition, what Averroes struggles to understand is precisely that which he is embodying in that very moment. Indeed, “Few things more beautiful and more pathetic are recorded in history than this Arab physician’s dedication to the thoughts of a man separated from him by fourteen centuries,” to the cheese he never gets to taste (Borges, 149). And Borges, familiar with theatre but not with Averroes, embodied this tragedy by writing about the latter.
Based on Averroes’s conclusion in La Busca, Les Mots canins by Abdelfattah Kilito would fall closer to comedy than tragedy. In this piece dedicated to communicating the deficiency of translation––the impossibility of successfully transferring a piece of information or a sensation from one linguistic or semiotic system to another, untouched––Kilito unpredictably drifts between possibilities, each of which role-plays reality. According to the translator, the result is a “playful narrative” in which Kilito is “happy to let his ideas play themselves out” (Kilito, 21). No more familiar with canine communication mechanisms than the Bedouin he depicts, Kilito willfully gets lost in language and lets the meaning of his words wander just as his lost Bedouin wanders in the desert.
Then he arrives at the following: “When two languages meet, one of them is necessarily linked to animality” (Kilito, 27). The minimalism of this statement accounts for its prevalence in history. It led me to consider the case of Korean, my first language, during the time when Korea was a Japanese colony.
Some people characterize Japanese colonialism during the first half of the Twentieth Century as unorthodox compared to ‘typical’ imperialist efforts of European regimes. According to these people, Japanese colonialism was unique not only because it occurred noticeably later than its European counterparts, but also because the Japanese colonizers were unquestionably more akin, phenotypically, geographically, culturally, and linguistically, to the populations they colonized than were the Europeans to their colonial subjects. Thus, inapplicable to the Japanese mind was the sense of the so-called “white man’s burden,” which, hypothetically, stripped Christopher Columbus’s conscience off of any question of legitimacy when he proclaimed to the “laurel-skinned people who [didn’t] yet know about clothes, sin, or money and gaze[d] dazedly at the scene” that their habitat would belong to Isabella and Ferdinand from that moment on (Galeano, 46).
If I remember correctly, in the Korean Catholic version of the Babel story that I learned as a child, the narrative focus was hubris (another Greek concept, the meaning of which I happen to be able to approximate.) Building the tower was a challenge to God––an attempt to transcend mortality. The confounding of language significantly diminished the power of language, because what enabled Babel in the first place was linguistic unity. The story ended with the dispersion of that power.
To totalize colonization by quelling resistance and annihilating the Korean identity, Japanese colonizers prohibited the Korean language altogether, including family names. To many Koreans, for whom language served as the biggest source of identity, this was the most devastating blow. If European colonizers linked local languages to animality because of the differences they observed, then Japanese imperialists in Korea made the differences observable by first linking Korean to animality. Either way, a language no longer human is no longer expected to induce human understanding. How could colonized populations communicate a protest if their medium of communication was linked to animality? Kilito introduces the proposition without much contextualization and thus leaves it applicable to any two languages, because the question of which of the two it would be that gets linked to animality goes without saying. It is a matter of power.
In Les Mots canins, the only meaning Kilito’s bedouin can ascribe to dog barks with certainty is their possible indication of nearby human settlement, which by no means accounts for what they mean among dogs. In fact, although the story unravels through dog words, no dog is consulted and dog language is perceived in human terms only. If foreign language is linked to animality, then animality is linked to anathemas. If a dog could wonder it would wonder first about the meaning of meaning, not of cheese. Hence the comedy of the translator.
Bibliography
- Borges, Jorge Luis. Averroes’ Search. In Labyrinths, Edited by Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby. Translated by J. E. Irby. New Directions, 1964.
- Galeano, Eduardo. Memory of Fire I. Genesis. Translated by Cedric Belfrage. Pantheon Books, 1985.
- Jakobson, Roman. “On Linguistic Aspects of Translation.” In The Translation Studies Reader (2000), Edited by Lawrence Venuti. 1959.
- Kilito, Abdelfattah. Dog Words. Translated by Ziad Elmarsafy. Indiana University Press, 1994.
Behind the Writing
“Because I’m a linguistics major and bilingual, I’ve been interested in translation for some time (I wrote my linguistics capstone paper on Korean-English translation). Translation feels like a special terrain that is directly concerned with ‘gaps’ between languages and points us to new truths about language itself and its relation to culture. This one is a short commentary on translation especially regarding its unavoidable imperfections. It is originally inspired by the modified version of a written assignment I once did for COMPLIT322 last year.”
Writer To Writer Literary Journal 