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Anthony
Pym 1998
(Text originally
published in Catalan as "Qüestionement de la traducció
del mite", Mites australians, Ed. Anthony Pym, Calaceite:
Caminade, 1990, 37-48.)
If myth, according
to Lévi-Strauss, is "the discursive mode in which
the value of the saying traduttore, traditore is
practically zero" (1958: 232), it might be assumed that
nothing could be easier than translating myths. And yet
it is not clear whether the argument immediately concerns
actual work against difficulty or simply the fact that,
in the case of myth, there is no unique author who might
be betrayed. The ultimate sources are unavailable; every
version is already a transformation of a transformation;
and thus no translator can be wrong or unfaithful. More
important, the thesis of maximum translatability says nothing
about how myths should be translated, nor why contemporary
societies should attach any value to such translations.
These latter questions require a rather more critical approach,
and perhaps far less self-assuredness about the relation
between what can be said in theory and what is desirable
in practice.
Some well-founded
voices of dissent may be pitted against Lévi-Strauss.
Malinowski, who considered myth to be the "narration of
the primal event which set the precedent for an institution"
(1926: 56), thus allows us to posit that a myth can only
function in the social place of its corresponding institution.
Beyond that place, its relation to action must be annulled
and translation can in practice only achieve the movement
of dead text. The ethnolinguist Hymes similarly regards
each people as the owner of its myths, and does so to the
point where the only correct translations or interpretations
are those carried out by the people itself:
In a Chinookan
myth, for example, any translation, even an abstract, would
make clear the presence of a structure "Interdiction: Interdiction
violated", and imply that the outcome (a murder) follows
from the violation, as so often is found to be the case.
Analysis of the myth in terms of its specific development
in Clackmas Chinook discloses structures that place an almost
opposite significance on the myth. [...] The myth is to
be understood in terms of a specifically Chinookan theory
of myth such that it is here not the violator, but the one
who issues the interdiction, who, in Clackmas terms, is
culpable. (1974: 99-100)
Hymes argues
that this particular myth is untranslatable. And yet, in
presenting his argument, he has surely translated the supposedly
untranslatable part of the myth. Georges Mounin, at least,
would seem prepared to classify such explanations as effective
translations (1976: 54). Yet Hymes' notes obviously belong
to an explanatory discourse that is not in itself immediately
mythological: it is all too explanatory. Something has changed
in this transition; a particular mode of untranslatability
has been encountered.
Exactly what
is untranslatable here? Surely, that part of the myth which
is explanation and yet remains attached to a particular
social institution. The linguistic function concerned is
moreover decidedly injunctive (the social distribution of
guilt), over and above the other entirely translatable functions
able to convey the basic narrative and definitional structure
of the myth. The part of the myth that can be owned is thus
not the "world-view" as such, but the specific social value
of certain descriptions, definitions and categories.
A similar distinction
between readily available narrative material and untransferable
values is in fact a feature of most myths prior to the moment
of translation, as Von Leonhardi found in his dealings with
the aboriginal tribes of Central Australia:
There can be
no doubt that most of the men sing the chants without understanding
them, and that women and children witness sacred rites without
having knowledge of their meaning. But the old men, who
carry the traditions, know precisely what these acts mean,
in all their details, and are able to explain them. (cited
by Lévy-Bruhl 1935: 114)
There can be
no doubt as to why the specific values of myths often remain
unexplained, even though their textual material is known.
Their possession is not only knowledge, but institutional
power, which will cease to exist when the mythological significations
are exchanged in the public domain or the social institutions
themselves disappear. Explanation is thus in itself a mode
of profanation.
A further theory
places the untranslatability of myth at the opposite end
of the scale of linguistic functions, referring not to injunctions
but to categories. For Lotman and Uspenski (1973), mythological
consciousness is marked by a symbolic logic that is untranslatable
onto another plane. The basic argument is not sociological,
but depends more on examples that benefit from the relative
absence of the verb "to be" in Russian:
1. Mir est'
kon'.
2. Mir est'
materija.
The first
statement ("world is horse") is considered to be based on
the non-hierarchical logic of the proper noun and thus non-equivalent
to its metalinguistic description in the second ("world
is material"). The difficulty of the transition becomes
particularly evident in the English rendering of the utterances,
where one feels almost obliged to add the analytical articles
"the world is a horse". But even with the articles, one
readily senses the radical difference between the kind of
category conveyed through symbols and that conveyed through
hierarchical logic. As much as the second statement might
explain the meaning of the first, it is not mythological.
Wondjinas
for Quine
Myth may be
one of the few areas in which Quine's theory of "indetermination
in translation" is something more than an occasionally perverse
thought experiment. The imaginary jungle linguist who sets
out to translate native expressions into English is confronted
by precisely the kind of problem regularly encountered in
the ethnological interpretation of myth. Indeed, the problems
faced by real ethnologists are sometimes even more radical
that Quine's radical example. Not only is there a decided
lack of immediate "stimulation", but also, in some circumstances,
a lack of srutable response: initially, Wirz (1925) could
only guess the symbolic meaning of the term gåri (nevertheless
written with a little hat) because to every question posed,
the Marind-anim always answered 'yes'. As Hintikka has stressed
(1969: 70-71), without at least a working hypothesis distinguishing
between assent and dissent, Quine's system of formal categories
falls flat on its face, and no utterance may be considered
radically translatable. It should be admitted, however,
that the association of sentences with their objective references
is not entirely of the same order as the interpretation
of symbolic meaning: Wirz was eventually able to identify
the term gåri with the enormous head-dress worn in
certain ceremonies; but this immediate referentiality was
not what he sought as the translatable unit of meaning:
"Exactly what does the gåri [now object, not term]
signify?" (Wirz 1925: 120) In other words, the object itself
simply remits to a further language, a system of objects,
in which it must be explained. The problem thus quickly
becomes not so much of knowing where to begin (Quine's essential
problematic), but of knowing where to stop. The term gåri
did not lack referentiality, but situational explanation.
The appropriate approach was obviously the analysis of contexts:
observation of the ceremonies in which gåris were
worn led Wirz to suppose that the symbolic meaning he sought
was associated with the sexual orgies that took place at
the same time. This was of course pure conjecture, based
on the formation of context and comparative observation.
But its outcome, as we shall see, was not without interest
for future extension of the comparative method: Lévy-Bruhl
(1935: 138) notes that a native drawing of a man wearing
the gåri, reproduced by Wirz, "is very similar to
the paintings we find in Grey and Elkin" and shows no mouth.
George
Grey discovered cave paintings of the mouthless figures
in 1838, during his expedition to the north-west of Australia,
close to what is now the south of Irian Jaya, that is, not
far from the Marindi studied by Wirz. Similar specimens
from the same region were studied by A.P. Elkin in 1930
and 1933, providing the basis for the above comments offered
by Lévy-Bruhl in 1935. The Frobenius expedition of
1938-39 discovered further examples, described by Petri,
Schulz and Lommel. Ernest Worms then located more paintings
in 1943-44, documented in his 1968 study; and Grey's specimens
were re-found by H. Coate in 1946 (studied by Elkin 1946).
In all cases, these figures - Wondjinas - have no mouth.
Or, as Quine would perhaps suggest, all paintings without
a mouth are called Wondjina.
The first interrogations
concerned the verbal level: the use of the name. According
to Elkin (1930), "wondjina" not only refers to the paintings,
but also means "rain, or the power to bring about rain":
"Perhaps we can see the wondjina as the reproductive force
in nature and in man, associated with rain." The same author
later cited the interpretation given by Mr Love (an appropriately
named missionary in the region), according whom the Wondjinas
were the first men to walk on the earth, creating numerous
geological features and entering the ground in the places
where their pictures now stand and where their spirits shall
remain forever (Elkin 1933). The relation between the paintings
and rain was formally, indeed experimentally, attested:
The natives
do not try to restore the paintings. However, in certain
cases, and especially in the case of the large Wondjina
and his children, the head, hair, eyelids and nose are repainted
and restored. This should only be done at the beginning
of the rainy season, because the addition of paint brings
rain. A native who accompanied me repainted a large Wondjina
with some charcoal as I was examining the paintings. Several
days later, in the middle of the dry season, there was light
rain. The natives took great pains to point out the cause
of these exceptional rains. (Elkin 1930)
This was enough
evidence for Lévy-Bruhl to associate rain with fertility,
to refer to the orgies Wirz had attached to the gåri,
and to declare the mythological relation between the gåri
of the Marindi and the halos which, in fact, surround the
heads of the Wondjinas.
There is more.
Worms, who appears not to have read Elkin's early papers,
reports two myths associated with the Wondjina pantings.
According to the first, the images represent the spirit
of the great snake Walangor, which is concentrated in caves.
According to the second, the paintings were born from the
eggs of the snake Oongod (whom the ethnologist accorded
a fitting transcription). But there must be some doubt as
whether these are two distinct myths. The second name would
appear to englobe the first since, as Elkin notes, "in some
tribes 'wondjina' is an equivalent of 'ungud', meaning 'belonging
to the dreamtime or simply definitive': sometimes, to the
question 'What is that?', the reply is simply 'It is ungud'
(it belongs to the dreamtime)." It would seem that Worms,
like Quine's linguist and perhaps like Lotman and Uspenski,
took the whole for the part, or mistook the non-reply "ungud"
for a proper name.
Whatever the
fantasies of ethnologists, there can be no doubt that the
Wondjinas are associated with snakes. Worms reports that,
in one cave, several mouthless figures were surrounded by
no less than forty-two paintings of snakes. The association
with fertility would seem fairly clear. Yet still there
is more: the snakes concerned - be they Wondjina or Ungud
- are specifically water snakes, and their spirit is that
of the rainbow (cf. Testart 1978: 109-116). Looking closely
at the published reproductions of these figures, it is possible
to imagine that the halos around the Wondjinas' heads are
in fact snakes, arched in the form of rainbows, and not
particularly the gåris about which Lévy-Bruhl
was so enthusiastic.
But even this
apparent solution does little to exhaust the explanatory
possibilities of comparison. For example, an Aranda rain-prayer
published by Strehlow (in Nevermann et al. 1968: 235) tells
of how Kantjia, the spirit of the rains, who is always surrounded
by a curtain of rain, keeps the water of clouds in his hair
(his hair is rain), and stops it from falling by means of
a tight headband that he only releases at the beginning
of the rainy season. Or again, Hernandez (1961: 115-116)
relates a Kimberlies myth that tells of how a man who wept
so bitterly that Galoru sent thunder and lightning, creating
a flood (tears are like rain; the Wondjina's eyes are drawn
like its hair). The ethnologist adds that Galoru is a rain-spirit,
and that drawings of his head show a surrounding rainbow.
And so on. Given this comparative context, Lévy-Bruhl's
association of Wondjinas with gåris must seem far-fetched,
but remains unfalsifiable.
The point is
that explanation through comparison (which is also the basis
of structuralist approaches) does not reduce mythological
material, but instead tends to accumulate it. In this particular
case, comparison may certainly reinforce associations with
rain and fertility rites, but such partial explanations
merely reveal further absences requiring further explanation.
One would have to find out, for example, why the Wondjinas
have no sexual organs, and why some of them have a conspicuous
mark on their chest. And so on. The simple fact is that
ethnological explanation is in itself essentially narrative
prose; it is designed to tell us stories about other cultures.
Indifferent both to the apparently definitive nature of
myth and to the initial difficulties of Quine's jungle linguist,
the real problem of ethnological explanation is that it
sets up a process of semiosis that it is then unable to
stop.
Why no mouth?
For Lévy-Bruhl, the question was banal and uninteresting,
since "mouthless figures are to be found in numerous prehistoric
drawings and paintings, and even on many ancient monuments
in the Mediterranean region" (1935: 136). This may be so,
but could not the geographical extension of the phenomenon
serve to multiply doubt, making its explanation all the
more vital? Elkin of course asked why there was no mouth,
but received a definitive non-reply: "They simply replied
that it was impossible to draw a mouth. Apparently, the
effectiveness of the painting depended on this absence"
(1930).
Others have
asked the same question, and their replies have not been
without a kind of mythological reason:
"I am noman,
my name is noman"
but Wanjina
is, shall we say, Ouan Jin
or the man
with an education
and whose mouth
was removed by his father
because he
made too many things
whereby cluttering
the bushman's baggage
vide the expedition
of Frobenius' pupils about 1938
to Auss'ralia
Ouan Jin spoke
and thereby created the names
thereby making
clutter
the bane of
men moving
and so his
mouth was removed
as you will
find it removed in his pictures
It was perhaps
through Ezra Pound's extensive comparisons (here conflating
Homer, the Frobenius expedition and a Chinese figure of
silent wisdom) that a certain explanation of the mouthless
figure found its way into the poetry of John Berryman (Of
1826):
I am so wise
I had my mouth sewn shut
A similarly
definitive answer was at least intimated by Elkin: "If a
thing is ungud, or brought about by ungud, there is nothing
more to be said about it, or at least nothing more is going
to be said". And again in the constant "yes" given in reply
to Wirz's questions about the gåri. The absence of
the mouth is non-reply, negation of the proper name, the
escape of Odysseus.
I do not know
why the Wondjinas have no mouth. But I suspect it is to
prevent them from telling everything to prying ethnologists.
As Ortega commented, "every society hides something in order
to say something else" (1937: 336). Despite all attempts
at translation, sacred knowledge may thus remain sacred,
and an essential absence may continue to stimulate both
the curiosity of ethnologists and the instituional power
of tribal elders. It may even bring rain. Let us leave this
absence where it lies - at the base of a process of non-tautological
semiosis overlooked by Lotman and Uspenki -, and remark
that only poetic metaphors have offered anything approaching
a definitive explanation.
Homogeneous
translation is cultural appropriation
It is a peculiar
fact that, in a fairly mythological science like contemporary
theoretical physics, a significant text may come from virtually
any university in the world and effectively participate
in a discussion with wholly international frames of reference.
Since the categories and definitions concerned are explicit,
they can belong to an international culture, independently
of whatever they might be construed as meaning within individual
societies. The cultural distance involved is socially vertical
(the initiated as opposed to the uninitiated), and not horizontal
(that is, not based on material distance in time and space).
Something must
surely be wrong when this same kind of international participation
is imposed on a mode of discourse that, as we have seen,
is marked by a high degree of implicit and even secret meaning.
When ethnological comparison jumps from tribe to tribe,
society to society, and even continent to continent, the
kind of explanation attained seems more appropriate to its
own international extension as European science than to
the social specificity of the myths supposedly explained.
This is not to deny that myths have long migrated from culture
to culture, enabling striking parallels to be discovered
in the narratives of societies that are otherwise far apart
(even in the case of Australia's geographical separation,
there can be no doubt that there were numerous cultural
contacts with the islands to the north). Concrete transfer
between societies is not in itself a sufficient basis for
the assumption of automatic homogeneity. The hypothetical
sameness necessarily projected prior to comparative analysis
can be equated neither with a universal entity like the
"primitive mind" or "mythological consciousness", nor with
a constant mode of explanation. It is therefore potentially
dangerous to suppose that there should be a homogeneous
or constant strategy for translating myths.
In the case
of Australian aboriginal culture, it is too late to undo
the effects of European homogenisation. Alain Testart (1978)
admits it is now impossible to base historical readings
of Australian myths on traditional sources: the only record
of the myths of pre-conquest Australia is the corpus of
texts and observations compiled by European ethnologists
over the past century or so. That is, the myths that might
most legitimately be associated with an ideal like prelogicity
are in fact those recorded in European languages, mostly
English and German. Strictly aboriginal narrative is now
at least as rare as full-blood Aborigines. Many of the traditional
concepts have been mixed with Christian theology, and even
basic terms of reference have been adapted to circumstances.
Worms notes that, although there are many aboriginal words
for the mythological time of creation, "many of the natives
themselves now use the English translation 'to dream, dreaming,
the dreamtime'" (in Nevermann et al. 1968: 169). European
colonisation has already imposed a first level of homogeneity
on the narratives previously belonging to numerous different
tribes and numerous different languages. On the social level,
it is now impossible, and not particularly desirable, to
restore the previous heterogeneity. Does this mean one should
therefore translate in a homogeneous way?
Quine (1960:
58) notes that Malinowski "spared his islanders the imputation
of prelogicity by so varying his translations of terms,
from occurrence to occurrence, as to sidestep contradiction."
That is, the strategic variation of terms overtly works
in the interests of homogeneous translation, ultimately
making natives speak like ethnologists. Quine goes on to
support the ethics of this strategy: "Wanton translation
can make natives sound as queer as one pleases. Better translation
imposes our logic upon them". Thus, presumably, "the world
is a horse" is a better translation than "world is horse".
But could it then be considered ethically inferior to truly
impositional translation as "the world is material"? To
what extent is the projection of "our logic" a strategy
for the extension of international science, for the cultural
appropriation of all myth in the guise of universal human
dignity?
What exactly
is "our logic" in such cases? It would be possible, for
example, to extract only basic narrative structures and
transform all aborginal myths into a series of cute children's
stories, as has been done in the coffee-table versions marketed
by Mountford and Roberts (1969). Alternatively, a translator
could overtly choose the path of ethnological explanation
and get lost, as we have seen, in the midst of skyscraper
footnotes. Or again, the sacred nature of many myths, especially
as related through chants, lends itself to essentially poetic
translation which, like the Wondjinas, may even find some
kind of explanation in verse. In this line of argument,
Meschonnic (1973) believes that fidelity to rhythm should
act as a defence against annexation.
Yet myths translated
according to any one of these strategies will inevitably
finish up sounding like children, ethnologists or "queer
natives" who communicate by beating drums. None of these
logics can hope to be entirely adequate, since none can
transfer the diverse forms that myth has within the familiarity
of the source society. It should be borne in mind that myths
are circulated not only in their recititative versions,
but also through images, song, dance and drama. They are
at once children's stories, the points of departure for
endless secret elaborations of knowledge, and the stuff
of poetic utterance. The translator's problem is not that
of choosing an incorrect discourse, but the fact that contemporary
logics of genre and modes of artistic production makes such
choice obligatory. Whatever is done, the translated text
will convey only certain aspects of the source material.
A certain degree of cultural appropriation is unavoidable.
Perhaps there
can be no theoretical solution to the problem of how to
translate myths. All radical translational alternatives
prove more or less unsatisfactory. Non-transfer, the simple
refusal to have anything to do with mythological material,
would lead to the total disappearance of traditional myths
along with traditional societies. Non-translation, which
amounts to simply repeating proper nouns, would eventually
deprive myths of all possible understanding. And the ideal
of total translation, which would use all conceivable strategies
to convey numerous versions corresponding to the diverse
meanings a myth may have had in the society of origin, is
destined to lose the essential mythological quality of significant
absence.
Relatively little
can be done about the noble or ignoble reasons why industrialised
societies seek to accumulate the cultural products of non-industrialised
societies. The training and dispatching of ethnographers
and translators is perhaps necessarily a very one-sided
affair. However, the strategic relations between source
and target texts do not exhaust the mediational possibilities
of translation. There are also strategies that concern the
relation between the target text and the intended target-culture
receiver.
Close inspection
of Lévi-Strauss's maxim of translatability reveals
that it is in fact a theory of reading: "a myth is perceived
as myth by all readers" (1958: 232).
When compiling
a small selection of Australian aboriginal myths for translation
into Catalan (1989), I found myself unable to apply any
coherent theoretical principle that could justify the ethics
of the undertaking. All the texts sounded infantile, so
I added a modern revolutionary myth (dating from 1963) in
which Jesus becomes Jinimim and Noah's ark becomes the survival
of aboriginal society after the drowning of the whites.
But the selection remained completely prosaic, so I included
a rain-prayer and an epic in verse. The genres appeared
to be falsely separate, so the epic was also presented in
a partly contradictory prose version. The myths seemed too
distinct, so I made the same character reappear in different
contexts. There was no explanation, so I threw in a Catalan
version of the above essay, to explain the absence of footnotes.
The result is perhaps no more than a bizarre pedagogical
exercise. But the practical strategy that slowly evolved
is perhaps not quite so naïve. It is enough to imagine
the presuppositions with which a reader would approach such
a text, and then to use the order of presentation and conflicting
modes of translating to set up and frustrate an expanding
horizon of expectation. Hopefully, this bastard strategy
will allow something of value to be left unsaid.
- Last update
9 February 1999
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