Translation as Total Social Fact and Scholarly Pursuit

Abstract

Translation as Total Social Fact and Scholarly Pursuit Derek Schilling (bio) Basic propositions count, and always will. Contrary to outward cultural indications and to now dominant assumptions born of today’s digital bias, translation is not about data-crunching, smooth information flows, circuit topology or input-output. It’s not just typing a word, chain of words or full paragraph in a backlit dialog box and obtaining instant satisfaction with a touch of a button (voilà!). Such popular notions notwithstanding, translation is a philosophical notion of broad historical import; a practical activity or vocation; and a socio-cultural fact. I can think of nothing wholly axiomatic or a priori about it, although it grounds many, if not most, acts of human communication. Harboring many unknowns, it calls for a short introductory gloss. In a non-particular way, translation is: • moving signs from domain A to domain B across a boundary that is political and cultural, linguistic and symbolic; • stimulating curiosity and making history by affirming humanity’s profound multilingualism in and through print, up to and including digital forms of writing, archiving or communicating; • voicing across world idioms works both major and minor, ranging from sagas and autofictions to haikus and tonkas, from gothic dramas and sci-fi to chick lit, thus bringing books by classic or up-and-coming authors to [End Page 841] distinct publics, “uptranslating” and/or “downtranslating” according to sociolinguistic situation and global financial dynamics (thus, maintains rightly Casanova, Paris and London play crucial functions for Africa and Asia, and, unsurprisingly, Ouagadougou [Burkina Faso] and Kuala Lumpur [Malaysia] not so much); • cultivating faith in our human community and its inbuilt capacity for constant transformation, and so providing a solidly plural ground from which to combat factionalism, dictatorship, communitarianism, bigotry, in a word, staving off a damaging and provincial “inward cultural turn.” This initial, non-particular approach posits translation, à la Mauss, as a “total social fact.” Practically, though, any act of translation brings with it a host of obligations and habits. For an individual taking on an actual job of translating a work, translation is, variously: • marking up a shopworn copy of a book with marginalia; parsing its paragraphs and highlighting this or that curious circumlocution, or an odd Dutch, Danish, or Tlinglit loan word; unpacking story chronology from start to finish, including all flashbacks and anticipatory flash-forwards; following a lyrical motif in its rich unfolding, its own “disfiguration”; spotting an acrostic or an uncommon play on words; in short, making that book wholly yours, appropriating it so that you, acting as authorial ally and guardian (down with that translator-cum-turncoat hogwash!), can pass it on in turn, insuring its futurity; • and now, your trustworthy dictionary in hand—a Collins, a Harrap’s, or a big Gafiot for occasional Latinisms—taking down long word lists, stockpiling bits you’ll start using tomorrow or in a fortnight, probably only to discard two-thirds; composing an all-too-rough draft, knowing that your initial wordings, your savvy acts of transposition will probably sound “off” at first, as if coming from your book, your book, as is said of a jazzman’s riffs: Louis Armstrong’s brassy splats; Sonny Rollins’ guttural honks; J.J. Johnson’s glissandi; Sun Ra’s cosmic comping; Sarah Vaughan’s scat-singing; Mal Waldron’s minor-chord twists and turns; John Tchicai’s shrill runs; Anthony Braxton’s skittish zigzagging; or young Kamasi Washington’s highfalutin funk (with backing by a full choir); • and now, putting your mind to it with an aim to total accuracy, producing wordings as convincing and faithful as you possibly can, honoring grammatical axioms and prosody, matching sound to signification, signification to sound à la Rimbaud, Char, Glissant, Portugal or Hocquard; • to wit, swapping out noun for noun, changing syntax to conform to standards in an idiom of arrival (Russian today, why not Swahili tomorrow?); [End Page 842] making apt accommodations for an unusually compact mass, in stanza six, of four consonants (is this agglutination of Ukrainian origin? or Slovakian? Mongolian possibly?); supplying a conjunction with a mind to suturing two distinct propositions or punctuating at your choosing with a colon, dash, comma, or that microscopic dot known as...