Polylingualism as Reality and Translation as Mimesis

Abstract

Translators and theorists of translation naturally recall with gratitude incident of Tower of Babel as felix culpa responsible for crisscross of interlingual chasms which they are constantly urged to survey and as far as possible to bridge. The attitude of writers to this sociolinguistic turning-point is, however, less uniform and certainly more ambivalent. True, it has widened their range of both materials and devices far beyond anything conceivable in a state where the whole earth was of one language and of one speech. But from another viewpoint, this very asset may be regarded as a liability or at least a mixed blessing. For disruption of state of world-wide linguistic homogeneity has made profusion and confusion of tongues not only a verbal but also an existential fact, and, in addition to basic tasks of referring to extraverbal reality and reporting verbal messages within same code, it has laid on each language burden of reporting messages originally encoded in other languages. This forms of course common source of all translational problems. But what should be noted is that complications arising are intratextual as well as intertextual and representational as well as communicative. These complications manifest themselves to some extent whenever we try not, as in standard translation, to substitute our own discourse for an utterance made in another language, but to incorporate this utterance into our own discourse. Such framing and juxtaposition of differently-encoded speech are, however, particularly common within fictive worlds created in literature, with their variegated referential contexts, frequent shifts from milieu to milieu, abundance of dialogue scenes, and keen interest in language of reality and reality