Forum Question
GQ is pleased to present two new Forum essays, on the topic of the role of translation in German Studies. If you have opinions or experiences in this area, please share them with us. Send a short statement of up to 300 words to german.quarterly@duke.edu. And of course we are always glad to hear thoughts on any of our previous forum questions. The editors promise to respond.
The Role of Translation in German Studies
MARK HARMAN,
Elizabethtown College
“Academics have never done well at recognizing the distinctiveness of aesthetic
experience,” as Russell Berman pointed out in a recent forum on the role
of literature in German Studies, However, that assertion is not necessarily
true of literary translators whose primary task, beside the rendering of meaning,
is to forge in the target language a literary texture that recreates some of
the aesthetic qualities of the original. The snail’s pace with which translators
read the original text could be a useful antidote to the increasingly pervasive tendency—and not only on the part of undergraduates—to “get through the
reading” as quickly as possible, thereby dulling the aesthetic pleasure of reading.
Moreover, there clearly is a need for more translation into English. According to figures released by UNESCO, while 50 percent of all translations published worldwide are translated from English, only 6 percent are translated into English. By 2004, the figure for translated titles as a percentage of book production in the U.S. had shrunk to 2.64 (versus 7 per cent in Germany in 2008).
This insular trend has serious implications for the study of foreign
languages such as German. The profession would therefore be well-advised to
encourage and reward attempts by younger scholars to continue in the path
pioneered by seasoned scholar-translators such as Christopher Middleton,
Rainer Schulte (American Literary Translators Association), and the late
Leslie Willson.
Of course, there is nothing new about advocating the use of translation,
since it was a staple ingredient in language courses before the advent of proficiency
models of language acquisition. As one who suffered under the old
grammar/translation method of language instruction, I would never support
a return to that brain-deadening ritual. However, the teaching and practice of
literary translation can heighten students’ sensitivity to language and literature,
thereby building much needed bridges between language and literature
studies. Moreover, it could also encourage a return to the teaching of slow
reading, which, as Uwe Steiner pointed out in a previous Forum, Nietzsche
regarded as the primary role of the philologist.
Here are a few suggestions about the benefits of integrating translation
into our curricula and scholarship.
- Translation is by nature synthetic and interdisciplinary. Moreover, unlike many other interdisciplinary ventures, it focuses primarily on language and literature. As a result, it enhances rather than dilutes what many of us see as our primary fields.
- In literature courses, paying attention to translation can help direct students to the aesthetic properties of literary works and combat what many perceive as a drift towards illiteracy in an age of visual overstimulation.
- The translation of primary texts in the field of cultural studies could help integrate the study of language, literature, and culture. Careful use of translation in upper-level language courses can not only help foster an awareness of the stylistic features of German but also hone writing skills in English. If my own experience with students is any indication, it can also encourage the creative use and enjoyment of both languages.
I hope that others will be willing to add to this list or contribute in other ways to this discussion about literary translation.
NORA ALTER, University of Florida
As my contribution to a discussion on translation for The German Quarterly I would like us to consider the possibility of inter-medial translation. In any
conversation on translation, it is only natural to take as starting point Walter
Benjamin’s seminal tract “The Task of theTranslator.” In this essay, Benjamin
observes that translation was above all a “mode,” meaning a variety of expression,
a new arrangement or a new form (1). For Benjamin only works that have a
certain “translatability” can be translated with any degree of fidelity to the
original. “Translatability,” Benjamin observes, “is an essential quality of certain
works,” by which he means that “a specific significance inherent in the
original” can be put into the words of a different language (71). This “specific
significance” is related to “pure language,” or to the theoretical or philosophical
core of what is to be translated. At best, the new translated text becomes an “echo of the original”; the reverberations that come to comprise the new alien
form are necessarily distortions (2). Although Benjamin refers exclusively to
written texts, he does not exclude the possibility of translation from one
medium into another. Indeed, in “The Author as Producer” he argues that “we
have to rethink our conceptions of literary forms or genres, in view of the
technical factors affecting our present situation,” and thereby indicates his
keen awareness that new media such as cinema and photography will transform
established genres and produce new forms (3). And, taking Benjamin’s
words to heart, in my own work I have investigated whether or not it is possible
to translate the literary-philosophical essay into an audio-visual form.
Writing in the late seventies, French structural anthropologist Claude
Levi-Strauss pushed the issue of translation forward to include movement
between media. In his radio lecture “The Meeting of Myth and Science”
(1977), he proposes that translation is a process not just from one language
into another but from one medium to another. Levi-Strauss is adamant that
meaning, significance, and understanding can be translated or transmitted to
non-linguistic signifying systems insisting that “‘to mean’ means the ability
of any kind of data to be translated in a different language. I do not mean a
different language as French, German,or the like, but to be expressed, in different
words, on a different level”(4). It seems that for Levi-Strauss, like for
Benjamin, translation becomes less a system based on linguistic exactitude
but more a mode. Of key concern is whether one can translate across media
into different codes, to try to express in one language, that is, the language of
graphic arts and painting, something which also exists in music and which
also exists in the libretto; that is, to reach the invariant property of a very complex,
let’s not say code, but set of codes. There is the musical code, there is the
literary code, and there is the artistic code and the problem is to find what is
common to all of them. It’s a problem, let’s say of translation, to translate
what is expressed in one language—or in one code, if you prefer—to be able to
express it in a different language.
Of course, addressing this issue in the late seventies, Levi-Strauss does not include what has become one of the most prevalent acts of translation today— the translation of analogue information into digital codes and with that a shift from the material into the virtual.
To conclude with a return to Benjamin, “In all language and linguistic creations, there remains in addition to what can be conveyed something that cannot be communicated... It is the task of the translator to release in his own language that pure language which is under the spell of another, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work” (79–80). Whether we are working with literary texts or with new media, in all instances it is our duty as critics to pay special heed to Benjamin’s advice; to continuously strive to open doors onto new possibilities and liberate thought.
Notes
1. Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator” [1923], Illuminations (New York:
Schocken, 1969), 70.
2. “The task of the translator consists in finding that intended effect [intention]
upon the language into which he is translating which produces in it the echo of the
original….Unlike a work of literature, translation does not find itself in the center of
the language forest but on the outside facing the wooded ridge; it calls into it without
entering, aiming at the single spot where the echo is able to give, in its own language,
the reverberation of the work in the alien one” (76).
3. Walter Benjamin, “The Author as Producer” [1934], Reflections (New York:
Schocken, 1986) 224.
4. The lecture is published in Myth and Meaning: Cracking the Code of Culture (Toronto:
U of Toronto P, 1978).