A few days ago, I discovered that Derrida’s brisure – a permeable boundary between terms and areas – is translated as “hinge.” On the one hand, this is a perfectly fine translation, and certainly appropriate to its usage in a philosophical/theoretical context. A brisure in French is, indeed, a joint between elements in carpentry or locksmithing. Or, a hinge, if you will. But that’s not my first association with the word. The verb briser means to break apart; the noun brisure is a crack, a fragment, or the act of breaking. My main association with the word is one of disjunction. There is necessarily breakage in the English hinge – it has to link two elements, after all – but this isn’t overtly highlighted in the word. Juncture and, especially, a sort of flexibility of movement are what jump out to me. A “hinge” to me is un gond rather than une brisure.
I don’t know what “better” translation I would choose. I can’t think of an English word that holds the paradox of breaking and joining the way that brisure does, the opposition inherent in Derrida’s use of the term. It also doesn’t really matter. Brisure is a name, a title, as is “hinge.” Neither word has to contain every element of its definition. Neither is Derrida’s concept unto itself, but rather a shorthand meant to conjure a larger explanation. Translating a text perfectly is inherently impossible, and nothing more so than attempting to translate a single word.
Louis de Funès in Le Gendarme à New York (dir. Jean Girault, 1965)
Still, my pause and immediate desire to nitpick the choice is telling. It belies the slew of contradictions inherent to translation and loving words. It’s easy to crave a perfectly linear, word-to-word relationship between one language and another. It’s far more elegant that way: My tailor is rich. Mon tailleur est riche.(1) Fabulous. Language comprehension as a long but simple code breaking exercise. Immediately, however, even in two rather similar languages such as English and French, uncomfortable bits of excess start to crop up, seemingly unaccounted for particles, problematic overlaps in usage. Finally, the devastating discovery: some things are seemingly untranslatable.
I’m tired of this notion. It’s true, in a sense (see the issues of brisure and “hinge”). But brisure, with its connotations and etymological branching, isn’t “untranslatable.” It’s just not elegantly translatable, at least if you want to retain the full breadth of the word. It’s translatable in a messy way that involves footnotes and asides. One word turns into an informative paragraph.
I’m also tired of the notion that you can’t get the full intended flavor of text in translation. Again, not because it’s not true. It’s just not that interesting to note that a text is different in translation. Of course it is. It seems unnecessarily exclusionary to keep pointing it out. “You don’t really know this work. You think you like this novel, but you can’t possibly know it because you haven’t read it in the original.”
This assumes that the original text has an unimpeachable authority. That assumption is often based on the idea that no translator can match the specific genius of the Great Writer who composed the original. In my opinion, this is in turn often related implicitly or explicitly to the idea that certain languages are better than others: more beautiful, more poetic, more impactful. The argument against translation is then more often than not an unproductive knot of truths rendered banal and outright falsehoods. No, the specific magic of a text cannot be reproduced by even the most gifted translator without making accommodations. Yes, each translation is an imperfect copy that only captures a certain refraction of its generating text. But so is any reading of the untranslated work. Every reading is a translation, and the original itself is unfixed. Even a faithful translation is imperfect, but so is the original, by virtue of the ambiguities of its signifiers.
I have a great reverence for original texts. Part of my living, and part of my life – that is, my personality – is about having a relationship to texts in a language that many people around me don’t understand. I sell the idea that there’s something to gain from being able to read a French text in French, and I do so with the zeal of a true believer. What I really want to sell, however, is curiosity and a sort of messy extension of understanding more than anything else. The meticulous work of translating is one of broadening, not replacing. I don’t want to teach people French so they can understand the “real” meaning of a work; I want to thicken their conception of a work, and my own.
I also want to broaden people’s conception of what a language has to be. Desire to account for every word in a sentence as an understandable and necessary component is also a need to map our primary language onto another. Learning another language rewires our assumptions of what makes up the most basic architecture of communication.
It’s not fair of me, but I regularly find myself frustrated by what people find mystifying in a language. “No, no, no, language is fascinating and impossible and mind-bending, but this isn’t the magical stuff! It’s just some dude!” The subjunctive is a metaphysical foray into the concept of experience and reality, but you also just need to memorize which verbs set it off and which do not. You can’t argue your way out of using it based on your own underlying belief around where thought ends and feeling begins. (2)
Furthermore, it’s not possible to draw a hard line between what points of divergence between languages are incidental variations of evolution, and which are noteworthy indicators of some more profound human difference. Certainly the way a language acts tentacles into cultural implications. I’ve written about it before. But mining a language’s idiosyncrasies isn’t a simple skeleton key to understanding the people who speak it. (3)
Let’s take the example of “I miss you” in French: tu me manques. The internet loves it. Because you see, I don’t just miss you, you to me are missing. Very poetic. I can unspool an entire theory about the relative importance of “I” and “you” in each case, and the resulting narrative significance. If you are the subject and act upon me directly, do you have more agency than if I act upon you? Do I center myself by making myself the subject? Does it mean something about the way francophones and anglophones form attachments? Maybe. At the very least, sentence structure and vocabularies turn into cultural tropes. I’m banking on the fact that language has a palpable impact on literature and art as a basic premise in my doctoral research. Still, I’m suspicious of trying to map the reasons and results of linguistic signatures too neatly.
This also brings us back to the question of translation. Although I find it useful to dismember a sentence to its skeletal parts in order to understand the processes at work, the best translation isn’t necessarily the one that attempts to shoehorn every word in the same order. (My adolescent Latin translations are very guilty of this.) At best, it’s bulky. At worst, it does a disservice to the original sentence and may even be effectively wrong.
Reflexive words are a perfect example, and French is overrun with them. Grammatically, it’s imperative to understand that their conjugation includes a subject, a verb and a reflexive object pronoun that matches the subject. When I first introduce them, I typically use préparer (to prepare) and its reflexive partner se préparer: je prépare – I prepare; je me prépare – I prepare myself. I use this verb because: it’s regular, its meaning is easy to guess and, most of all, turning preparing into self-preparing with an object pronoun is logical from an anglophone perspective. Still, “I prepare myself” – while most literal – isn’t the only or even the best translation of je me prépare. Depending on the context, it may be “I get ready,” with no nod to a reflexive pronoun at all.
Beyond the issue of what’s more colloquial, unduly literal translation can be simply wrong. Je me perds is literally “I lose myself,” but it also means “I get lost.” These are not the same thing. I’ve chosen short, direct examples in the present tense; things quickly get dicier as soon as more complexity is introduced. Merely transitioning to a compound tense gets us even farther away from the intended meaning: Je me suis perdu.e, wherein suis is the auxiliary verb “to be” in the present tense becomes “I myself am lost” instead of its actual meaning: “I got lost.”
Misunderstanding the literal content is an obvious pitfall, but misrendering the style and spirit of a text in translation produces its own deleterious effects, and that misinterpretation is far more subjective and harder to arbitrate: What are actually the key elements of a writer’s style? What’s the proper way to be faithful? What necessary compromises are the ones worth making? There’s no dogma that can save us entirely.
The various threads around translation I’ve brought up here all circle around faith and compromise in fact, and a desire for readability, in translation’s nest of contradictions. Translation is a concession; translation is an opportunity. Translation is always incomplete, but so is any interpretation within one language. And no solution lies in an overly direct, inflexible transposition. That is, trying to force a language into a prescribed and predictable template in which it doesn’t fit instead of allowing discomfort and unfamiliarity to broaden how we think communication can and should occur.
Notes:
This is the first sentence of the Assimil method for learning English, originally founded in 1929. Referenced and parodied in works throughout the French 20th century, it became shorthand for French people learning English. Generations of “mai téloR eez Reesh.”
Broadly speaking, verbs get classified into feelings and thoughts or sensory perceptions when it comes to the subjunctive. “Heart verbs'' such as vouloir que (to want that), aimer que (to love) and craindre que (to be afraid) are followed by the subjunctive, while “head verbs” such as penser que (to think), dire que (to say) and voir que (to see) are not. Espérer que (to hope), however, is a “head verb,” and that usually causes some discomfort.
To say nothing of the fact that there’s tremendous diversity in the francophone world, thanks in part to my people’s penchant for colonialism.