Last week, I read Jhumpa Lahiri’s most recent collection of essays, Translating Myself and Others (2022) (1). A dive into her relationship to the language she’s most recently adopted as a writer and translator, Italian, as well as into the emergence of her writerly voice in any language and how she reads the literary voices of others, this is a kind of book that’s absolute candy to me. Over and over, Lahiri makes a case for the similarities between what we consider “original” writing and translating others, as well as the ways in which undertaking the latter fundamentally changes one’s conception of what language is and can be as material: “translating goes under the skin and shocks the system, such that… new solutions emerge in unexpected and revelatory ways” (7).
Reading this collection also made me return to a short passage from a Lydia Davis essay (2020) which jumped out at me in August while I was rereading her collection Essays One (2019) (2) in the midst of #WomenInTranslation (3): “... the impulse to translate, which I see as very closely related to the impulse to write something original. I have gradually, over the years, come to see the close parallel: that just as I want to capture something outside myself in a piece of original writing, when I want to translate something I also want to capture it, in this case to reproduce it in English” (144). Davis then cites the literary critic and translator Clare Cavanagh, who beautifully summarizes the impulse of translating poetry, even if, by her own admission, to do so is “impossible”: “You see a wonderful thing in front of you, and you want it” (145) (4).
That’s it. If you’ve spent any time with me, you know how much the notion of translation is a motif and, frankly, an obsession in my life. Some of this is purely practical. English is my second language, and I’ve spent most of my life switching from French to English and vice versa, sometimes with the unconscious, immediate dexterity of a truly bilingual kid, sometimes with the slight delay of needing to translate the first word that came to mind, regardless of language setting. (And, much to my chagrin, sometimes with a frustrating delay as dentifrice utterly blots out the notion of such a quotidian word as toothpaste…) Language, and the communication of it through a host of different practices that extend beyond a base-level conception of words are utile representations of objects strung together for practical purposes, is part of my livelihood in all its facets: in teaching, translating, coaching and singing. Of course I think about language and languages so much.
Davis’ and Cavanagh’s lines resonate with me because they neatly encapsulate the core of my obsession: that all communication is an act of translation, that it stems from a possessive love affair with something, and that it is impossible.
Every interaction and thought and memory is an act of recursive translation. For someone so hyper verbal, I’m also constantly petrified by the expanse before me that I’m meant to fill with words. If I think too hard about it, I can’t quite will myself to utter any syllable at all. So, in the case of a translation, there’s something liberating in the overt acknowledgement that what you have before you can only be an imperfect copy of something else (5). (Nevermind that the “original” was always imperfect itself.) That it necessarily contains itself and at least one ghost of that supposed original it seeks to capture. I want as many ways to ensure that people will read multiple simultaneous lives in things, and especially in their representation.
In Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972), desire has a double life: in the psychology and memories of the cosmonauts who visit the mysterious planet around which the film is centered, but, quickly, within the planet itself. Through the physical powers of Solaris, narrative creations from humans in the shape of yearnings and memories are made real and begin a second life related to but quickly no longer reliant on their human originators. In fact, it’s not entirely clear if the central protagonist of the film – a psychologist, mind you – is really the undebatable Creator of the physical manifestations that begin to haunt him. They may have existed on Solaris prior to his seeking them out; they may have been waiting for him. Effectively, the distinction is moot, because they exist outside of him and regardless of him by the time he begins to interact with them. In coming into being, they gain a personal history that encapsulates more than their official inception, much like we all do. But here, this inheritance becomes uncanny because there isn’t the organic and expected flow of a perceived chronology behind them. They simply came into being, as far as the cosmonaut and audience are concerned. So it’s unsettling that in existing currently – they do exist, right? – the manifestations are able to convince us that they always existed.
Expanses of memory and the subconscious made literal (and deeply aesthetic) in Solaris
Words, too, are both our creations and predate each of us. A sort of nebulous, poly-historic “we” invented them; an equally broad entity made up of specific users and utterances continually brings language to life, but words are older than we are as individuals. They’re waiting for us. They contain unto themselves essentially nothing and within their rhizome a collective consciousness far greater than one speaker or writer: near infinite valences of histories and associations, etymologies, assumptions and (mis)understandings. This is always true, but translating exposes this fact so that it’s unavoidable even to the most linear of language users. That’s the alarming frustration of being faced with an unfamiliar language: this doesn’t mean anything. And, if you’re the right kind of neurotic and/or nerdy, it’s also the exhilarating benefit afforded by translation: this means so many more things than I ever thought.
Notes:
Lahiri, Jhumpa. 2022. Translating Myself and Others. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Davis, Lydia. 2019. Essays One. New York: Picador.
https://www.womenintranslation.org
Cavanagh, Clare. 2003. "The Art of Losing: Polish Poetry and Translation." Partisan Review 70 (2).
Lahiri refers to something oddly indispensable about the dispensability of translations. Because they’re often seen as only an approximation of a great work, they are allowed to be living, organic things. They can be updated in ways that the Urtext cannot – must not be allowed to – be. Sometimes, originals could benefit from the same sort of continuing life.