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TRANSLATION

My Imperfect & Parallel Art

    ne of my favorite metaphors for translation comes from Japanese culture. It is the uniquely Japanese practice of kintsugi. The term refers to the putting back together of broken pieces of a vessel, say a ceramic bowl, with the use of a binder or “glue” that is even more precious than the broken ceramic, which can be gold, silver, or even platinum. The resulting reassembly practically shows off the “stitching” metal, in accordance with another Japanese cultural philosophy of Wabi-sabi, or the acceptance of imperfection or transcience. In the case of kintsugi, the patched-up vessel does not hide the fact that it has been broken, and it even shifts into a new mode of existence with the stitches and all.

 

Translation, in much of its modern sense, does not hide its being a translation. It does not pretend or aspire to sounding like an original, or as if the original work in the source language was written as if in the translating or target language. The difference from kintsugi is that the “vessel” of the original language is deliberately “broken” to be reassembled again in the target language. The breaking occurs during the close reading performed by the translator and the “stitching” with the use another material is the reassembly that takes place in the translation. The reassembled vessel, with the “precious” stitching and all, transforms the broken vessel, gives it a new life or identity: it has been recreated or “reborn.”

 

The precious metal, the gold that glues the broken pieces of the vessel together, gives us an idea of what Walter Benjamin calls the “pure language” of translation—which is neither or no longer the original Tagalog or Filipino of Rio Alma or Rogelio Mangahas, and yet it is neither the English I know  from Hemingway or Updike or CNN and the movies.

 

Lately I have been compelled to talk about my practice of translation which is quite a different story from the act itself. This led me to ask the question,  “In what language was I translating, given the fact that I am neither a native speaker of Filipino, the source language, nor of English, the target language?” It is a rather belated question, but in a manner more deliberate and indulgent about what I have been doing quite instinctively for quite a long time now. Because for more than 30 years, as long as I have been writing my own poetry, I have been translating—in a sort of parallel art, as I consider it now—the work of many of my fellow Filipino poets into the English language as I knew how it would sound. And that is, on the basis of 1) my own literary education, mostly on my own,  2) how it was written and sounded in my mind, for example, by Ernest Hemingway, John Updike, T.S. Eliot or W.H. Auden, and 3) how it sounded mostly on CNN, or BBC, or the movies.

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Only lately, in fact, did I pause to consider what language was I translating in or into—perhaps not only in the way poets and writers of fiction used such language—but how the “ordinary” speaker of English might listen to the hybrid I was producing, rendering Tagalog or Filipino poetry in the language I was not a native speaker of, but which I used in my own creative or literary practice. This translation practice of mine between two language that are not my own—I am a Bikolano translating Tagalog or Filipino text into English—is quite anomalous as I look back on it.

Being fraught with problems springs from the essential “imperfection” of translation. It has been called an “imperfect art,” because there are never exact equivalences between words, idioms, or phrases between the two languages in translation. And because no two languages have the same manner of generating meaning. In the same token, translation is always a work in progress: the translating language is ever interacting with the original, according to the changes in time, in readers, in reading. That is why there are periodical, even yearly editions of the translations (readings and re-readings) of the racial and historical epics and myths like Gilgamesh, religious text the Bible and the Vedas, the Greek classical tragedies, the Divine Comedy, Beowulf, Hudhud.

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Which leads me to explore once again my former and unspoken proposition then that the original “vanishes”  in the translation, because of the translator’s deliberate concealment; but also because the translator must “lose” his own voice, if his translation were to mean anything at all to a strange audience he was now addressing, and in an even stranger language. And this language the literary philosopher Walter Benjamin would demand to be “transparent,” a “shining through” from or “upon” the original:

 

     A real translation is transparent; it does not

     cover the original, does not block its light,

     but allows the pure language, as though 

     reinforced by its own medium, to shine upon

     the original all the more fully.

 

Benjamin, however, also warns us:

 

     The traditional concepts in any discussion

     of translations are fidelity and license, the

     freedom of faithful reproduction and, in its

     service, fidelity to the word. These ideas seem to

     be no longer serviceable to a theory that looks for

     other things in a translation than reproduction

     of meaning. (Emphasis mine)

 

What happens when we read the translation of a work whose language we do not know or speak? The answer can be fairly simple: the original for us does not exist. We have nothing in our hands but a counterfeit whose authenticity we have no way of ascertaining. There is no guarantee that a translation is “faithful” to the original, especially because we don’t know what the original was or is. (“Faithfulness,” as Benjamin says, is no longer a value in translation, if we are interested in the “process” or the seeming chemical reaction that happens between two languages in translation.) What matters to the reader is that the translation reads and works like a “literary” work, a poem that evokes meaning or a piece of prose that makes sense, and in a language he or she can recognize or understand, even if both the acts of recognition and understanding are fraught with problems.

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Upon this imperfection the target language imposes or inscribes its own “domestic intelligibilities,” as Lawrence Venuti calls them. They are the values for comprehension and understanding, interpretation, meaning  and memory, and surely practical usage, that the target language demands from the new text or the work newly resurrected in the different streets and villages of the translating language. Translation is a domestication of the foreign language in the translating language of which the new or other reader is a native speaker.

 

But the act of translation does not intend to banish the original author from his translated work. In his seminal essay, “The Function of Translation,” Benjamin says translation is ultimately a resurrection of the “dead” work (dead to others who do not know the language). It bestows an “afterlife” upon the original, a life quite different from its own “domesticities,” if we may. It is being or will be read, after all by a different set of readers, and such a different “crossing” is a  resurrection or even reincarnation in the “pure language” different from the original yet not exactly equivalent to the translating language. Such language is nearer to what Rumi calls the language  of God, which is silence. “Everything else is poor translation.”

 

For our present purpose,  let’s return to Venuti’s “domestication,” where we can  concede, merely, or ultimately, that the  translated work has been uprooted and moved residences where the author is unknown to the neighborhood. Where Don Quixote might transfixing readers as he conquers “new” windmills, but Miguel de Cervantes is an unknown. Or perhaps in the best of all possible worlds, the translated work, in all its qualities and guises, has vanished and relocated, but also in the biblical sense transfigured into bilocation and omnipresence.

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3 March 2018

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ROGELIO G. MANGAHAS' Gagamba sa Uhay or Spider on A Stalk in my translation is one example of a bilingual project that was accomplished with close collaboration between author and translator, a privilege when both are more or less contemporries.

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