Philosophy of Translation – Culture

When Amanda Gorman’s poem “The Hill We Climb” appeared in German translation at the beginning of the year, half the republic set out for a popular parlor game: Find the mistakes. Back then, at the beginning of 2021, hardly anyone asked what one was actually missing out on if one was merely looking for errors through this or other translations without any further interest in knowledge, and which truths might also be hidden in errors. Answers to this question can be found in the books of the British translator Kate Briggs and Uljana Wolf, one of the most important voices in German-language poetry. It’s about texts that deal with translation. And as surprising as it may sound, you belong in the context of attempts to think differently about society.

The German translation of “This Little Art” by Sabine Voss has been published by INK Press, a sparkling, stimulating work somewhere between a memoir and an entertaining philosophical essay that pays tribute to translators of the 20th and 21st centuries. It is Kate Briggs’ first book of her own. The Englishwoman lives and teaches in Rotterdam. She has translated texts by Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes into English. This year she was awarded the Windham Campbell Prize for “This Little Art”, one of the world’s most highly endowed literary prizes.

Released in London in 2017, Briggs of course does not yet refer to Gorman and the European debates about good translations and missed opportunities. Uljana Wolf, who was responsible for the other literary event of the season with “Etymological Gossip”, points in the background discussion to a 2018/2019 discussion about Briggs’ book, which dealt with power structures and interpretative sovereignty in the US translator scene . Knowing this, it becomes even clearer that “This Little Art” is an essay that goes far beyond the work of translating. Briggs advocates an attitude towards life, actually proposing an ethic of working, reading and living, and indeed by the way this text is written: as an invitation to practice a different point of view than that of judgment.

Briggs doesn’t write if you’d think she’s dancing. She thinks in the writing movement and not alone, but together with a multitude of other voices in her profession, and she makes this clear as a process in the text that she cleverly organizes between two poles: on the one hand, the story of Helen Lowe-Porter’s discrediting, the first Thomas Mann translator into English. On the other hand, her own relationship with the late Roland Barthes, with whom she is openly in dialogue throughout the entire book, one of many love stories that “This Little Art” also tells.

Brigg’s book begins with a captivating scene that not only illustrates the pact between translator and reader, but also turns it upside down in a performative way: Anyone reading a translation, for example that of “This Little Art”, agrees to the fiction, “Kate Briggs “and not” Sabine Voss “to read. The reader skips the moment of difference. The translator says the serving “maid” stands “forehead to forehead with the world, which she says breathlessly and bitterly serious in the face: Look world, I just do this for you.“

Open detailed view

Briggs asks, “Is that how it works?” Voss writes in the afterword that translating means dissolving certainties. Briggs / Voss write of the translator’s “racing heartbeat” at work. You write with Barthes about the desire to transform yourself as a reader into a writer. And they write of the status of a translated text when it enters the consciousness of the critic, the reader: the exclamation “This is a translation!” change the way of reading, create an unquestioned temporal and hierarchical relationship between the original and the translation.

“It’s easy not to think about translating,” says a refrain in “This Little Art”. Above all, this has to do with the way translations are usually presented to readers. In German-speaking countries, there are few publishers like mare, Guggolz and INK Press who name translators on the front of the covers. Their performance is rarely described in reviews. Briggs complains less, but notes that translators obviously do not exist and are read as subjects with a context. What do you miss out on?

You are missing out on an epoch-making opportunity. This becomes clear when you read Uljana Wolf’s book “Etymological Gossip”. It brings together essays and speeches from the past fifteen years that Wolf has revised for this edition and composed in their entirety in such a way that various forms fit into a poetic-ethical book, a subtle intellectual, aesthetic and political autobiography, a proposal, different to think and act differently. Wolf writes of “translation as resistance” in her book and explains in an interview that in literary writing as in translating it is necessary “to have all the languages ​​of the world in your head”, even if you do not speak them, so “a kind of thing.” poetic of relationto practice a poetics of relationship “.

Briggs calls her idea of ​​reading and translating an “exercise in delicacy”

It is precisely this relationship-based thinking, based on the philosophy of Édouard Glissant, that the reader misses out on if one only dives to “track down and examine the obvious flaw” but not to “look at the whole” as Briggs asked, quoting Helen Lowe-Porter. Anyone who is only looking for mistakes and then triumphantly stands in the bookstore is blind to this whole, to themselves in the structure of the relationships and the historical and cultural conditions of a translation. Briggs and her colleague David Horton call their idea of ​​reading and translating in contrast to such blindness an “exercise in delicacy”.

“Delicacy” also means “the art of not treating all objects equally”. Uljana Wolf practices this delicacy in her book much more strictly than Kate Briggs. The horizon of their spelling and reading is wider and yet leads to playful, but also immediately illuminating sentences like this: “Lullabies are work songs on the edge of language.”

“Etymological Gossip” marks a turning point in the way life and writing, ethics and poetics come together. A really short but central chapter is “Zong!” Dedicated to a book published in 2008 by the Caribbean-Canadian poet M. NourbeSe Philip, which Wolf describes as “one of the most influential and important books of English-language poetry in recent years”. “Zong!” bear testimony to a massacre that was perpetrated on board the ship of the same name of around 150 enslaved people in 1781 in order to defraud the insurance company. A court file documents the case in which “the immense lawn of the unsaid” was included. Uljana Wolf describes how Philip tries to create a breathing space for the dead by arranging the words on the white page Zongwhose text commemorates them has been refused.

A translation can also instrumentalize a text for its own purposes

Wolf’s book, like Briggs’s, protrudes into a wider debate: On September 20, M. NourbeSe Philip published a long text on her Facebook page in which she explains her demand published earlier this month, the Italian translation of “Zong!” to destroy. The background: In June the Italian publisher Benway Series published “Zong!” published in the translation of the poet Renata Morresi. So reports Philip.

In this constellation and with such a complicated and existential project as “Zong!” to have been passed over is one thing. What weighs heavily for M. NourbeSe Philip, however, above all is that Morresi changed the organization of the text and took away his breathing space. Morresi also admitted, “Zong!” to be seen in the context of the migration debate in Italy, i.e. to instrumentalize the book for European purposes.

“Form helps the mind to remember,” writes Wolf. “This is the only way to keep thinking urgent.” In her explanation of why she said “Zong!” have not translated “simply”, writes Wolf: You stand when you consider your position as white Central Europeans make them aware that they do not have the right to imitate the rituals of the “tongue-speaking ancestral writing” Philips. In other words: Here, too, it is a matter of relating to the text, to its language and to those who speak in it. The point is to find a way to “make the text visible by cautiously untranslated. “The opposite of Morresi’s method.

The best translation is always brutal because it obliterates other words

Just as it is easy not to think about translating, so easy it would be to find such accuracy to be excessive. Is that she? Anyone who reflects on their relationships to languages ​​and literary works and their translations as much as Uljana Wolf does not run the risk of having to defend their interpretive sovereignty at the checkout of a bookstore. Anyone who thinks this way learns, like Wolf and Ilse Aichinger, that mistakes can lead to “language wrinkling, which leads to new wrinkles”. Learn what it actually means to find the “best” translation: “To be the best, it has to be brutal – good words or languages ​​are only good because they have erased other words, those ‘weaker possibilities'”.

From Uljana Wolf, in turn, one can learn what “counter-definitional work to infiltrate nomadic thinking” could look like. And also that “biographical nomadic events” do not make them possible per se. Both Kate Briggs and Uljana Wolf question the conditions of language and subject development in such a way that one suddenly confidently thinks: It would not be so difficult to rethink oneself together. This has absolutely nothing to do with inaccuracy, subjectivism or loss of quality. The opposite is the case, if one understands after reading these two books: “Let’s dance!”