Literature as Translation/

Translation as Literature
 Literature as Translation/
Translation as Literature

Edited by

Christopher Conti and James Gourley

 Literature as Translation/Translation as Literature,
Edited by Christopher Conti and James Gourley

This book first published 2014

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright © 2014 by Christopher Conti, James Gourley and contributors

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

ISBN (10): 1-4438-5494-8, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-5494-8

 TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Illustrations .................................................................................... vii

Introduction .............................................................................................. viii

Christopher Conti and James Gourley

Chapter One ................................................................................................. 1

Damage Control: Australian Literature as Translation
Nicholas Jose

Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 16

Translation and Literary Mimesis: The Case of Nobel Nominee
Pramoedya Ananta Toer
Elisabet Titik Murtisari

Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 30

Mystical Translation in Patrick White’s Voss
Christopher Conti

Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 47

Translating Giovanna Capucci’s Twin Towers: poesie—
Sound and Sense
Gillian Ania

Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 67

Flagging Down the flâneuse in Hazel Smith’s City Poems
Joy Wallace

Chapter Six ................................................................................................ 81

Lady Wortley Montagu: From England to Italy
Alessandra Calvani

Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 101

Promoting Feminism and an International Community of Letters:
Helen Maria Williams’ Paul and Virginia
Barbara Pauk
vi Table of Contents

Chapter Eight ........................................................................................... 117

Literary Landscaping and the Art of Social Reform: Repercussions
of Tǀson’s Reception of Turgenev in Translation
Daniel C. Strack

Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 128

Censorship and Rewriting in a Chinese Writer’s Translation
Wenjing Li

Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 138

Literary and Cultural Translation in the Music, Art, Science
and Politics of 1890s Melbourne
Matthew Lorenzon

Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 155

Translations from the Unknown: Hans Blumenberg’s Absolute
Metaphor
Robert Savage

Chapter Twelve ....................................................................................... 170

Crossing Borders: Cross-cultural Translation in Parental Autism
Memoirs
Rachel Robertson

Chapter Thirteen ...................................................................................... 184

“Ritually Unreadable”: Aestheticising the Economic in Cosmopolis
Sarah Comyn

Chapter Fourteen ..................................................................................... 195

Translating Unintelligibility in Samuel Beckett’s Play
James Gourley

Chapter Fifteen ........................................................................................ 206

Translation, Misunderstanding and Nonsense
Chris Andrews

Notes on Contributors.............................................................................. 219

Index ........................................................................................................ 222

 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Fig. 10-1 Lionel Lindsay, “Untitled Illustration”, 1902, etching ............. 140

Fig. 10-2 Norman Lindsay, “Wagner”, c. 1920, pen and ink on paper.... 143

Fig. 10-3 “Melbourne, 1897” .................................................................. 144

Fig. 10-4 Contents page of The Case of Wagner with annotations

by Lyle and Marshall-Hall ................................................................. 146
 INTRODUCTION

CHRISTOPHER CONTI AND JAMES GOURLEY

The diversity of approaches to the subject of literature and translation

in these pages challenged us as editors to find the right title for this
volume. While theories of translation are touched on here and there, what
unites this volume is the theme or motif of translation, the expressive,
ethical and intercultural potential of translation in and across a range of
intellectual, historical and cultural contexts. Our working title “literature
and translation”, however, suggested little more than proper names,
casting the very illusion of separate and distinct species we were at pains
to avoid. We soon dropped the identity thinking behind such a suggestion
as itself an inferior mode of translation that stamps “bare” phenomena
with the insignia of the concept. The impossibility of translation in the
sense of a copy or replica seemed to us the condition not just of literature
but of culture too. The densely cultured zones of meaning traversed by
translation cannot be circumvented with the lexical ratios of the dictionary.
The medium of translation is not abstract equivalence but the creative
understanding of another culture that preserves the foreignness produced
by temporal and cultural distances. As the etymological and semantic roots
of translatio (“transferral”, “transportation”) are entwined with those of
metaphor, our next attempt at a title, “translation and metaphorical play”,
tried to capture the elephant in the room—metaphor—with a butterfly net,
leaving untouched the initial problem of the separate identities implied by
“literature and translation”. What interested us was the “play” that
occurred at the border of literature and translation that enabled the one to
be thought in terms of the other, even as we failed to locate the junction
between the literary element of translation and the translational element of
literature. If definition can do no more than spot family resemblances
amongst phenomena, as Ludwig Wittgenstein suggested, then literature
and translation might yet be regarded as twins. “Literature as
translation/translation as literature” thus refers to this double or twinned
identity that resists the ratio of the abstract concept.
The diverse attempts in this volume to trace the features of translation
in literature and of literature in translation occur in an expanded field of
 Literature as Translation/Translation as Literature ix

translation studies ringed by the horizon of the corporate university.

Deciding what is translatable and what is untranslatable (and why) has
political and cultural ramifications in the increasingly globalised context
of the twenty-first century. The claim that nothing is translatable is usually
made in defence of the fragile ecology of local cultures after the damage
visited upon them by the “translatability” of global economic exchange.
The emergence of world literature as the new research paradigm in literary
studies is viewed darkly in some quarters as the ideological mask of
globalisation. Emily Apter has argued in response that translation can
“contest the imperium of global English” even as it performs the
“traumatic loss of native language”.1 The concept of world literature began
in the cosmopolitan effort to transcend the drive to ethnic nationalism in
the nineteenth century and its central claim that the ethnic uniqueness of
culture is untranslatable. The original interdisciplinary research
programme of Leo Spitzer and Erich Auerbach, those great polymaths and
exiles from Nazi Germany at Istanbul University in the 1930s, grew out of
Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s notion of Weltliteratur, the modern classic
“that circulates around the world outside of its initial home, usually in
translation”.2 David Damrosch has extended Goethe’s original idea with
Jürgen Habermas’ concept of the bourgeois transformation of the public
sphere in the eighteenth century, when poetry was as much a medium of
social exchange as it was a source of private pleasure. The newly
globalised, multimedia environment that literature finds itself in today is
where literature always belonged: “That is why in the age of globalisation,
although literary studies are often reported to be ‘dead’ and comparative
literature is also reported to be ‘dead’, a new comparative literature has
been reborn”.3
With the dissemination of literature in translation more global than
ever, world literature is rapidly displacing the incumbent paradigm of
national literature. National literature is far from dead, but we are learning
to see it afresh in light of a new appreciation of the complexity of relations
any national tradition maintains with others, which comes into view from
the comparative standpoint of world literature. Damrosch reminds us that
the various obstacles to translating literature from foreign traditions are
already present when we read the literature of our own tradition; for as
anyone who has spent any time there will know, the past is a foreign
country. The modes of reading based on the idea of literature as
translation, such as reading across time and reading across culture,

1
Apter, The Translation Zone, xi.
2
Damrosch, “What is World Literature?”, 176
3
Ibid., 181.
x Introduction

promise to expand our literary and cultural horizons. In his keynote

address to the Australasian Association for Literature’s 2011 conference in
Melbourne, where the bulk of these papers originated, Damrosch premised
the idea of a national literature on the presence of the work in a literary
culture rather than on the author’s passport. The shell game between
“nation” and “language” in the circular definition of national literature can
only be stopped by disclosing the rich international content of the national
canon, when, for example, we realise the import of Laurence Sterne’s
tribute in Tristram Shandy to “my dear Rabelais, and dearer Cervantes”
rather than to my dear Chaucer. 4 The displacement of the national
paradigm of literature has freed scholarship to pursue more international
lines of inquiry, restoring the cosmopolitanism of literary study bleached
away by the old debates over national literature. “World literature has
always been created through a dynamic interplay among national and
regional literatures”, observes Damrosch, and “can be said to have
preceded the birth of the modern nation-state by many centuries”.5
The role translation plays in the formation of a post-national canon is
discussed in the first two chapters. Nicholas Jose reflects on the diverse
contributions to the 2009 Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian
Literature—which he edited—in terms that challenge fixed notions of
national literature. Noting how much Australian writing in English
contains translation, Jose suggests Australian literature can be read more
generally as forms of translation, specifically as “writing that transports
forms and expressions from other languages and cultures into an
Australian literary field”. Like the society around it, Australian literature is
the product of historical rupture and cultural and geographical dislocation,
and Jose observes the impulses to recovery that dispossession implies.
From an indigenous perspective, English language and culture in Australia
is merely the biggest wave of migration to these shores, and might itself be
viewed as a form of translation in the generative sense that implies cultural
renewal. Taking his cue from Les Murray’s collection of poems
Translations from the Natural World, Jose redefines the Australian as the
cosmopolite and Australian culture as an ongoing translational process of
imitation and adaptation. Murray’s poet mimes the natural language of
things in a human language that overwrites nature with the damaged world
of history. Responding to Australian Literature through translational
practices of reading and writing yields a richer understanding of culture
than can be wrung from the nationalist paradigm. The argument for

4
Sterne, Tristram Shandy, 151.
5
Damrosch, “Toward a History of World Literature”, 485.
 Literature as Translation/Translation as Literature xi

reading Australian literature as translation rests not on how well the local
converts into universal currency, but rather on how well it resists the
damage exerted by the homogenising pressures of the global literary
marketplace. Elizabet Titik Murtisari then considers the decisive role of
translation in the development of national and world literatures with
regard to the formation of a new literature in post-war Indonesia and the
work of its foremost writer, Pramoedya Ananta Toer. Murtisari tracks the
influence of John Steinbeck on the evolution of Pramoedya’s style, which
Pramoedya cultivated when translating Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men in a
Dutch prison in 1943. The intimate instruction provided by translation
enabled Pramoedya to grasp the detail and subtlety of Steinbeck’s
simplicity and to incorporate the lessons of economy in novels like The
Fugitive, a novel smuggled out of prison and received to acclaim that
recreates Steinbeck’s cinematic style.
Christopher Conti contends in Chapter Three that the intercultural
potential of Patrick White’s epic Voss is borne by the motif of translation;
specifically, the idea of spirituality as the mystical translation of gross
materiality. Conti defends Voss from the indictment drawn up by post-
colonial criticism—which regards White’s mythic modernism as the mask
of imperialism—by suggesting it translates the foreignness of Aboriginal
culture for a white Australian audience. Whether White’s representation of
Aboriginals and Aboriginal culture represents an act of cultural effacement
or cultural preservation might depend on one’s theoretical point of view.
“Translation studies”, notes Emily Apter, “has always had to confront the
problem of whether it best serves the ends of perpetuating cultural memory
or advancing its effacement”.6 But translation becomes impossible when the
lines of cultural difference are drawn too sharply, whether by academic
culturalist or ethnic nationalist. Apter suggests the sudden prominence of
translation studies since 2001 owes something to 9/11, when the threat
posed by US monolingualism seemed to materialise. War and terrorism
represent conditions of nontranslatablilty, a “translation failure at its most
violent peak”. 7 Reflecting on her work as the translator of Giovanni
Capucci’s Twin Towers, a collection of poems penned in response to the
9/11 disaster and the ubiquitous media images of the collapse of the twin
towers, Gillian Ania is aware that translation is not just a linguistic project
but a cultural one. Her over-the-shoulder insight in Chapter Four into the
“impossible” task of translating poetry lays out for future scholarship the
method behind her choices as a translator of Capucci’s significant collection.

6
Apter, The Translation Zone, 4.
7
Ibid., 16.
xii Introduction

The role literature as translation plays as an agent of social

transformation and political emancipation is addressed in Chapters Five to
Ten. In Joy Wallace’s account of Hazel Smith’s City poems, the flâneur,
the quintessential figure of modernist writing, is playfully translated in a
series of experimental poems into the female flâneuse. Traditionally, the
promenading of the flâneur about the real and imagined cities of modernist
poetic discourse enables the reassertion of an imperilled male subjectivity.
The locus classicus of the flâneur is Baudelaire’s Tableaux parisiens and
Les Fleurs du mal, in which Baudelaire refashions the disorder and
detritus of the modern city into an allegorical form that reduces women to
material for male sign-making. Consequently, the specifically female
subjectivity of Smith’s flâneuse is imperilled not just by the insidious
streets of the metropolitan labyrinth but by the insolent male gazers that
occupy them. Smith’s translation of the terms of modernist discourse
playfully subverts this implicit gender stereotyping, thereby imagining
new possibilities in urban space for the recovery of an imperilled female
subjectivity. As Wallace points out, Smith’s poetic project is a form of
translation as metaphorical play.
Chapters Six and Seven form a pair of eighteenth century case studies
that begin from the historical fact that translation provided women with
the opportunity for social and political advancement, despite its gendering
as female labour that ranked it beneath the masculinised original text.
Alessandra Calvani shows how the derivative reputation of translation
allowed women to enter the literary world under cover, as it were, while
the content of the source text drew the point of attack. The close
relationship between gender and translation meant women could use
translation to speak to other women about topics like emancipation,
creating a circuit that linked women across Europe. Giustina Renier’s
translation of three Shakespeare plays exhibiting strong and literate
women, for example, subtly promoted the cause of female education. The
choice to introduce Lady Wortley Montagu’s Letters (1763) to an Italian
public devoid of female writers is therefore significant, and Calvani
compares the different methodologies of two Italian translators, Maria
Petrettini’s more traditional or mimetic translation in 1838 and Cecilia
Stazzone’s creative departure from mimetic translation in 1880. Barbara
Pauk reflects on a feminist translator’s role in the success of the eighteenth
century English translation of a French bestseller. Pauk argues that the
success in English of the French pastoral novel, Bernardin de Saint-
Pierre’s Paul et Virginie (1788), is indebted to its unconventional
translation by Helena Maria Williams, a radical Dissenter who amplified
the novel with feminist concerns of her own. Pauk places Williams in a
 Literature as Translation/Translation as Literature xiii

history of literary women seeking their own voice in translation, but notes
that Williams’ translation practice openly challenges the hierarchical and
gendered distinction between creative author and passive translator.
Williams’ translation remains problematic, as it merely reverses the
hierarchy of author and translator when it appropriates Saint-Pierre’s
work. Her literary and political activities nonetheless made her a
significant champion of the republic of letters and a feminised public
sphere.
The centrality of translation to the course of literary and social history
is further demonstrated in the case studies of Chapters Eight and Nine.
Daniel C. Strack’s study of literary influence puts the lie to the old charge
that significant matters of style must always be “lost in translation”. In
1852, Ivan Turgenev’s A Sportsman’s Sketches eluded the Tsarist censors
to focus attention on the plight of Russia’s serf population. Half a century
later, Shimazaki Tosǀn’s The Broken Commandment managed a similar
feat in Meiji Japan. Tosǀn was the first to champion the cause of the eta or
burakumin (a pariah group forced into ritually stigmatised jobs like
sewerage disposal), and, like Turgenev, risked censure in doing so. Tosǀn
learnt from Turgenev the technique unfamiliar to Japanese writing of
concealing metaphors in the landscape as a way of expressing the
emotional climate of his characters, referred to here as literary or
metaphorical landscaping. While evidence of Turgenev’s influence is
most clearly apparent in certain lexical choices, its social expression via
Tosǀn poses an intriguing question. How is it that two similar works using
similar depiction strategies caused fundamental egalitarian shifts in two
separate societies? Wenjing Li investigates a more controversial and
contemporary example of the political influence of translation practices by
looking into the rewriting strategy of Chinese publishing houses in her
case study of an Amy Tan translation by Jun Cai, prominent Chinese
writer of genre fiction. Cai’s translation initially appears to be an artful
way around Chinese censorship laws, but it soon reveals itself as
exemplary instance of them, muting the political issues addressed in Tan’s
novel in a wholesale rewriting or “suspense-izing” of the novel. While the
practice of “polishing” raw translations dates back to the late Quing
Dynasty, the observance of this tradition today serves current censorship
laws. The Chinese Communist Party policy of non-interference in Burma,
long at odds with the U.S. and European sanctions on Burma, explains
why a story exposing Burmese human rights abuses is assigned to a
popular genre writer for rewriting. Li investigates other forms of rewriting,
like the insertion of Cai’s personality into Tan’s novel, and notes another
xiv Introduction

reason for the success of this translation practice: a jump in book sales that
boosts the profile of both writers.
The privileged focus on textuality in literary studies in the last half
century has diverted attention from the movement of books, and not just
texts, across cultural and linguistic boundaries. Matthew Lorenzon’s study
of Melbourne’s fin-de-siecle arts scene avoids the fixation on textuality by
relating the conceptual economy of ideas uniting its musicians, artists,
scientists and politicians to the real economy of book trading and lending
that enabled it. The 1896 English translation of Nietzsche’s Case Against
Wagner struck the Melbourne scene like a lightning bolt, splitting German
Romantics from the criminal profilers of the scientific community.
Lorenzon focuses on the intellectual exchanges joining Norman and
Lionel Lindsay, the circle of criminologists centred on Professor Lyle and
Wagnerite Marshal-Hall, and future Prime Minister Alfred Deakin. The
division between aesthetic and scientific Nietzsches surfaces in the
exchange between Lyle and Marshall-Hall, who continued their social
chats about Cesare Lombroso in the heavily annotated margins of Lyle’s
copy of the book. Lombroso’s diagnoses of the supposedly recessive traits
of European intellectuals and artists like Nietzsche and Emile Zola, echoed
in Lyle’s annotations, were influential in the years leading up to Australian
Federation when a claim to political sovereignty required the supporting
claims of cultural and scientific legitimacy. The credibility of the young
nation’s claim to statehood rested on a translation into the political sphere
of the scientific prestige of the new criminal anthropology and the cultural
prestige of late German Romanticism. Lyle pushed the claim on the
scientific front, while Marshall-Hall lionized German culture in a way that
set the tone for Deakin’s mythologising of white migrant populations and
politics of racial exclusion.
This notion of some untranslatable essence of nationhood running in
the veins or ringing in the vowels of ethnic groups has a checkered history,
serving the progressive politics of self-determination in the context of
imperialism but also the reactionary politics of ethnic purity that
sovereignty can seem to entail. In one of history’s dark ironies, the modern
chauvinism of race, nation and language can be traced back to the historic
father of multiculturalism, Johann Gottfried Herder. Herder’s insistence on
cultural autonomy grew into an anti-assimilationist idea of the Volksgeist
at odds with Goethe’s translational humanism. The Goethean humanism
infused into the discipline of comparative literature by Spitzer and
Auerbach is at odds with the puritanical and parochial discourses of ethnic
nationalism. A more recent heir of Goethe’s humanism is Hans Blumenberg,
whose dizzying feats of scholarship have brought to philosophy a rigour
 Literature as Translation/Translation as Literature xv

worthy of Spitzer and Auerbach. Philosophically, the notion of

untranslatability shares none of the ambiguity that plagues the discourses of
nationalism, as it refers to the material resistance to the translational force
of concepts that marks the threshold of knowability. Reflecting on the
daunting task of translating Hans Blumenberg, Robert Savage comes to
grips with the notion of the untranslatable by unravelling the etymological
roots of translatio and their entwinement with metaphor. Blumenberg’s
epic works on the history of ideas track the limits of conceptuality back
into the subsoil of “absolute metaphors”, which bear an expressive
function that supports concepts, on the one hand, and defies translation
into clear and distinct ideas, on the other hand. Absolute metaphors serve
the existential function of keeping at bay the otherwise crushing mass of
the unknowable, thereby providing the necessary space for human self-
assertion in situations blocked to rational access. They translate the
terrifying absoluteness of the real into metaphor, thus enabling rational
access to the world in the first place and later extricating reason from
impasses of its own making. This functional capacity of absolute
metaphor, which cannot be overtaken by—or translated into—the concept,
explains the enduring power of myth. The experience of translating
Blumenberg’s reflections on the untranslatability of absolute metaphors,
however, leads Savage to an impasse. Can Blumenberg’s metaphorology
be applied to itself without contradiction? If an “assault on the universal”
requires a ground metaphor, then what is Blumenberg’s? Savage takes a
leaf out of Blumenberg’s exegetical manual when he uncovers the literary,
philosophical and autobiographical precursors to Blumenberg’s primal
scene in Kafka’s “Report for an Academy”, Paul Alsberg’s theory of the
developmental leap made by our hominid ancestors, and a Blumenberg
memoir on escaping his Nazi persecutors. In each case the impasse is
broken by a flight into metaphor and culture that “gives the slip” to one’s
would-be captor, as Blumenberg put it in a memoir. Here is the
indispensable metaphor of Blumenberg’s metaphorology. When there is
no way out, one requires the courage of one’s own conjectures, a useful
motto for the translator in the creative quest for the right word.
If the foreign is the sign of what lies beyond the reach of assimilation,
then this is an argument for—not against—translation, a point Emily Apter
makes in regard to the translational task of critical theory as identified by
Walter Benjamin.8 In Benjamin’s memorable metaphor, Adorno noted in
“Words from Abroad”, the foreign word is “the silver rib” inserted into

8
Ibid., 63.
xvi Introduction

“the body of language”, dislocating its organic wholeness. 9 Natural

language traps consciousness in the illusion of organic wholeness, an
illusion broken by the use of the foreign word. The encounter with the
foreign word—like aesthetic experience itself, for Adorno—exposes
subjectivity to the other and to the truth of its dissonant, fragmented
constitution. In Chapter Twelve, Rachel Robertson’s timely investigation
of the growing body of memoirs by parents of autistic children inserts “the
silver rib” of autism into ordinary language. Robertson refers to recent
theoretical work on ethical translation to defend the value of memoir
writing that decentres dominant discourses regarding difference and
disability. The forms of reflexive writing that flow from conceptions of
ethical translation challenge negative views of autism and foreground
issues relating to difference and inequality. Viewed as a form of cross-
cultural communication, the act of writing a memoir about raising an
autistic child can produce progressive cultural change. The nascent autism
rights movement promotes autism as a different way of being in the world
or as a type of difference in a neuro-diverse world on the analogy of a
different culture. While no one mistakes autism for an actual culture, the
analogy by which the former can be rethought in terms of the latter lends
theoretical and descriptive support to the normative demand for social
recognition raised with growing frequency in the autism community. The
metaphor extends along a number of points of contact that autism shares
with minority culture, which Robertson usefully links to the literature on
ethical or cross-cultural translation. Once translation is recognised as a
species of interpretation, the forcible assimilation of the foreign to the
familiar can be more readily identified and avoided in a new
understanding of translation that draws attention to the parent/translator’s
role as mediator and documenter. This reflective reconstruction of
translation seeks to preserve difference via interpretive strategies that
resist the traditional imperatives of fluency, which regularise foreignness
and smooth away the bumps in intercultural transmission.
The remaining chapters dilate on the motifs of translation and the
untranslatable. Sarah Comyn pursues the notion of money as a translator
of value through the pages of Delillo’s Cosmopolis. In the new
information world ushered in by the Roaring Nineties, information is a
spectacle with hypnotic, even mythic powers of enchantment to capture
reality in a mythology of the “new economy”, which supposedly
transcends the boom and bust cycle of capitalism. The anxiety over
personal authenticity that arises in connection with the virtualisation of

9
Adorno, “Words from Abroad”, 187.
 Literature as Translation/Translation as Literature xvii

money in techno-capitalism threatens to expose the fictitious foundations

of value in the information economy. The digitalization of money, or its
translation into information through virtual financial markets of the late
twentieth century, has meant that the sheer speed and volume of digital
exchanges on global markets short circuits the interpretive processes of
reading that enable meaning. Delillo’s emphasis on the role of translation
and interpretation in the financial sphere suggests that money and
aesthetics are competing exercises of valuation, thus placing the reader in
a similar predicament to the translator-brokers of the novel. James Gourley
then examines Beckett’s Play, a late piece which calls for the speech of
each character to be “largely unintelligible”. Positing Beckett’s work as
one of the locus points for the investigation of the work of art, Gourley
argues that with this play Beckett fundamentally alters the function of
theatre, and investigates the work of art as a process of translation that
persistently results in failure.
Finally, the fertile ground of misunderstanding in translation is
explored by Chris Andrews, the English translator of Roberto Bolaño’s
works. Andrews’ suggestion that creative misunderstanding is the guiding
axiom of the translator underscores the theme of this volume. A literary
work is often neglected in its own culture because it is understood all too
well, covered as it is in layers of over-understanding; but its
misunderstanding by a foreign culture can restore the distances required
by aesthetic appreciation. The creative misunderstanding of a particular
textual element, when it coheres with the integrity of relations
accomplished by the translated work, has often gone on to generate fresh
truths in foreign linguistic and cultural environments. In translation,
incomprehensibility is not an obstacle but an aesthetic ideal that restores
the potential of a work to generate new meaning after it has been stripped
away by over-understanding. Andrews refers us to the remarks of the
Argentine novelist César Aira on the motif or metaphor of translation. The
passage of a book across temporal and cultural distances, Aira notes, is
shipped by misunderstanding “in an endless voyage towards the
incomprehensible”. If the crew on this voyage are translators, as Andrews
suggests, then as readers we are its passengers.

Works Cited
Adorno, Theodor. 1991. “Words from Abroad”. Notes to Literature, vol.
1. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann. Trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen. New York:
Columbia University Press.
xviii Introduction

Apter, Emily. 2006. The Translation Zone: A New Comparative

Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Damrosch, David. 2008. “Toward a History of World Literature”. New
Literary History 39: 481-495.
—. 2011. “What Is World Literature? David Damrosch in Conversation
with Wang Ning”. Ariel: A Review of International English Literature
42.1: 171-190.
Sterne, Laurence. 1983. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy,
Gentleman. Ed. Ian Campbell Ross. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
 CHAPTER ONE

DAMAGE CONTROL:
AUSTRALIAN LITERATURE AS TRANSLATION

NICHOLAS JOSE

Australian writing in English contains a fair amount of translation, and

more that can be read as translation in a less literal sense: writing that
transports forms and expressions from other languages and cultures into an
Australian literary field. The Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian
Literature (2009), for example, includes many such instances. There’s an
extract from My Life and Work by Taam Sze Pui (c.1853-1926), first
published in a bilingual Chinese and English format in Queensland in
1925. The translator is a Chinese scholar, younger than Taam, working in
Innisfail, who may also have been the publisher. His name is unknown, as
is often the case with translators. Then there are the songs
“Ngalalak/White Cockatoo” and “Muralkarra/Crow” by Frank Malkorda
(c.1930-1993) that appear both in a transcription of their original Anbarra,
a North Central Arnhem Land Australian Aboriginal language, and a
translation into English by Margaret Clunies Ross, working from
Malkorda’s recordings, made in 1982, with Malkorda’s approval. There’s
“7 Last Words of the Emperor Hadrian” by David Malouf, the original
Latin and seven different English versions. And there’s “After Hölderlin”
by John Tranter, subtitled “a version of Hölderlin’s ‘When I Was a Boy’”
that freely interprets the German original. There’s Yahia al-Samawy’s
“Your Voice is My Flute”, translated from Arabic by Eva Sallis
(Hornung), and there are bilingual English and Aboriginal (Yawuru)
poems by Pat Torres.
If the idea of translation is applied more broadly, to include
transposition, adaptation and imitation, there are parodies too. John Clarke,
for example, renders classic English poems into Australian idiom and
context, turning “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” by Dylan Thomas into
“A Child’s Christmas in Warrnambool” by Dylan Thompson:
2 Chapter One

One Christmas was so like another in those years around

the sea town corner now, that I can never remember
whether it was 106 degrees in 1953 or whether it was 103
degrees in 1956. (1-4)1

Like so many Australian authors, Clarke was born outside Australia—

in his case, in New Zealand. In a biographical sense too, authors can live
in translation.

Each of these instances points to a space that lies behind the text, and a
process of repositioning. The extract from Taam Sze Pui, for example, is a
reminder that many people have spoken, written, read and published in
varieties of Chinese over a long period of time in Australia, very little of
which has been available in English. For those people to survive and
participate in Australian society, a continual translation back and forth was
required. Sometimes that produces an articulation in English of Chinese
experience and cultural form that is new, as in the work of William Yang,
a later relative of Taam Sze Pui, who relates Chinese family history in his
documentary performance work Sadness (1996). The form of Yang’s
work, a monologue that recounts oral history accompanied by a double
slide show that documents the past and the performer’s search for himself
within it, is a unique hybrid, as befits the traverse of crosscultural
narrative.
Ouyang Yu, who moved from China to Melbourne in 1991, only to
return to China later, part-time, as professor of Australian literature,
creates a distinctive Chinese Australian voice as persona in “The
Ungrateful Immigrant” (2005):

You expect me to speak English and write English

Which I can do but not so that you think I am English (8-9)

Here Ouyang breaks open the problem of the English language in

Australia, as both colonial inheritance that refers back to the fixed
authority of an imperial power, distant in time and place, and the
changing, changeable medium of daily life here and now, adopted and
owned by its users as a means of expression within society at large.
Ouyang’s work is restlessly experimental and generative in its shifting
forms and frames. His handmade chapbooks, such as Wo Cao (2003), for

1
Quotations are from texts as they appear in the Macquarie PEN Anthology of
Australian Literature, to which line and page numbers refer. This essay first
appeared in Westerly vol. 57.1 (July 2012), pp.102-20.
 Damage Control: Australian Literature as Translation 3

example, collage gum leaves, torn images and pieces of Chinese and
English text in order to locate the personal within a layered detritus of
nature and culture. Here the necessity of translation is the ground for
creative innovation.
If migration to Australia consists of languages and cultures as well as
people, Indigenous writing insists that English language and culture itself
migrated into Australia by way of invasion and occupation. Though
English may be “native” to many of us who use it—we’re born with it—
it’s not home-grown. Translation from Aboriginal languages into English
can be a form of sharing—cross-cultural communication—but also risks
being an appropriation, a forced conversion, as incommensurable difference
is managed linguistically, performatively, within structures of unequal
power where one side wants something from the other.
Yahia al-Samawy, born in Iraq in 1949, came to Australia in 1997 after
fleeing his country. Again the act of translating and publishing his poetry
in English makes the claim that Australian literature, like the society
around it, is produced from historical rupture, political conflict, cultural
and geographical dislocation, and the subsequent impulses of recovery and
reiteration, memory and hope, that dispossession demands and mobility
allows.
All of this makes for a plural and dialogic literature, which the
translations of David Malouf and John Tranter celebrate in their
metamorphic remake of classic sources. Malouf’s play with Hadrian’s
question about where the soul goes on the death of the body is a many-
sided recognition that an idea needs its local habitation to exist, just as that
local habitation is unimaginable without its animating imported idea:
“without you, my sweet nothing,/I’m dust” (7: 9-10). On a larger scale the
same could be said of Australia without its translation into language,
where such translation also gives birth to a sense of loss for the
unknowable, the unrecoverable: what “Australia” was before that name
was affixed.
Some authors in the Macquarie PEN anthology quote literary tags,
often the Bible, Shakespeare or the English poets, to add the lustre of
lineage to their writing. Sometimes these are foreign references that need
translating. A significant example is the line from the Roman poet Horace
that occurs in two different contexts. In Australia Felix (1917), the first
volume of her novel trilogy The Fortunes of Richard Mahony, Henry
Handel Richardson has Mahony’s interlocutor, who is bitter about how
Australia has failed to deliver on its promise, say:

There was a line we used to have drummed into us at school—it’s often

come back to me since. Coelum, non animum, mutant, qui trans mare
4 Chapter One

currunt. [This can be translated as: “the sky, not the heart, they change,
those who cross the sea”.] In our green days we gabbled that off by rote;
then, it seemed just one more o’ the eel-sleek phrases the classics are full
of. Now, I take off my hat to the man who wrote it. He knew what he was
talkin’ about—by the Lord Harry, he did! (293)

The argument is about whether Australia, rather than change the spirit,
the mind, has any use for it at all. For Tangye “the hardest and cruellest
country ever created” only has use for an imported European as “dung” for
the land, only as matter devoid of spirit. Mahony sees it differently. For
him, mind and conscience can survive, but through the exertion of human
will, in opposition to the circumstances inflicted by the change of skies.
For neither of them does the translation from one environment to another
nurture an entirely positive cultural change.
Writing much later, the art critic Robert Hughes quotes the same line
of Horace in order to challenge it:

One of the most disagreeable moments of my education [in Australia] was

having to stand up and speak ex tempore in Latin for four minutes, before
other schoolboys and our Jesuit teacher, on Horace’s famous tag, Coelum
non animam mutant qui trans mare currunt—“Those who cross the sea
change the sky above them, but not their souls”. I resented this, not only
because my Latin was poor, but because the idea struck me as wrong—the
utterance of a self-satisfied Roman, impervious to the rest of the world.
Hegemonic Horace.
But most Australians were on his side. The motto of Sydney University
expressed contentment with the colonial bind: Sidere mens eadem mutato,
another version of Horace’s imperial thought—“The same mind under
changed skies”. (928)

Australia has changed, Hughes argues, its mentality changed by its

circumstances, to which immigration—the experience of change in many
individuals—has itself contributed powerfully, creating, at least from the
optimistic perspective of a writer resident in New York in 1993, and by
contrast with the United States, an “intelligent multiculturalism [that]
works to everyone’s social advantage”. In the translation of culture, a new
culture forms through inflection by and of what is already there, forms
lastingly, or temporarily coalesces and then drifts apart. Hughes might be
pleased to learn that Sydney University has recently removed the Latin
motto from its crest.
To see and hear the process of renewal through translation requires a
reading that doubles back. In “Ahh . . . Bush-Honey There!” from Story
About Feeling, Bill Neidjie (c1913-2000) tells his listener how to read an
 Damage Control: Australian Literature as Translation 5

Aboriginal painting. He compares it to a newspaper, full of story, but story

that comes with feeling, with spirit, where it is the feeling, the spirit, that
transfers. It can become like a dream, as it came from the dreaming to
begin with, creating the country and the beings, “mother, granny, grandpa,
grass, fire, bird, tree”, that are present again in the picture. In the
translation from one medium to another there is transmission, dynamic
circularity, a renewing offer of exchange:

All that painting, small mark . . .

they put cross, cross and over again.
White, yellow and little bit charcoal, little bit red clay . . .
that’s the one all small meaning there.
They put it meaning.
They painting fish . . . little mark they make im, you know.
That’s the one same as this you look newspaper.
Big mob you read it all that story.
e telling you all that meaning.
All that painting now, small,
e tell im you that story.

That meaning that you look . . . you feel im now.

You might say . . .
“Hey! That painting good one!
I take im more picture”.

That spirit e telling you . . .

“Go on . . . you look”.
...

No matter who is.

E can feel it way I feel it in my feeling.
You’ll be same too.
You listen my story and you will feel im
because spirit e’ll be with you. (23-39, 76-80)

Bill Neidjie comes from Arnhem Land. His language here is a version
of Northern Australian kriol, a mediation between traditional language and
English. He was a member of the Gagadju language group. The Gagadju
tongue died with him, remembered today in the name of the park we call
Kakadu. It’s also present in Neidjie’s writing, as he translates for us—
“You got to put charcoal/because e got ‘business’ there, what we call
Dhuwa”—not only language but the world understanding of that language,
otherwise lost. Neidjie’s language goes back to what is lost in order to re-
constitute it and carry it forward, as a gift of communication. His
6 Chapter One

language, his idiolect, enacts an open and reciprocal imperative: “No

matter who is”.
The authors in the Macquarie PEN anthology are ordered by date of
birth which puts Bill Neidjie, published in 1989, next to Donald Friend
(1914-1989), writing in his diary in 1952. The two contemporaries could
not have more different backgrounds or life paths. Friend writes from
Toledo in Spain, after he has seen paintings by El Greco. Something about
the country has spoken to him, dry like the country around Hill End that he
painted in Australia, and something of the spirit too, in that fabled
cosmopolitan centre:

The place is sheer enchantment, magic. I won’t speak of the Grecos, which
are beyond belief. As much of his art, I imagine, grew out of this
environment as was born in his Byzantine origin. The folds of hills and
rocks suggest, quite as much as the enclosing womb shapes of ikons, the
peculiar swooping and folding-in forms he used. (587)

Friend’s language quickly moves from casual to probing, as he folds in

the interaction of environment, culture, spirit and artistic expression, with
his own situation as subtext, in a way that uncannily parallels Bill
Neidjie’s and seems distinctively Australian in its translational moves.
The first collection of poems to appear in colonial Australia, in 1819,
contained “The Kangaroo” by Barron Field, New South Wales judge and
friend and correspondent of London essayist Charles Lamb. The poem
entertainingly applies the sophisticated tropes of late 18th century/early
Romantic English pastoral poetry to the unique animal: “Kangaroo,
Kangaroo!/ Thou Spirit of Australia…” (1-2). A fond paradox of the
aesthetic theory of the time was that the best art transcended art to become
as if natural. So Barron Field pushes to the limit of precedent in trying to
describe the kangaroo—it is not a mythic beast, nor is it like a giraffe. The
poet can only credit nature, at play, as the artist of a creation that cannot be
improved: “be as thou art; thou best art so” (59). In other words, the
uncomfortable translation of contemporary English poetics to the fauna of
Australia enables the recognition that Australia can only be understood on
its own terms—which the poem then attempts to translate back:

For howsoe’er anomalous

Thou yet art not incongruous . . .
Happiest Work of finest Hand! (51-52, 63)

Many later writers and artists have responded creatively to the ecology
of Australia, none more so than Les Murray in his collection Translations
 Damage Control: Australian Literature as Translation 7

from the Natural World (1992) where he declares his abiding concern with
giving voice to others, including the spectrum of non-human others, and
those that some would denigrate as “sub-human” others too. His poems
verbalise the non-verbal, or translate from one side of the limits of
ordinary speech to the other, extraordinary side. This is not immodest, not
sublimely egotistical in the Romantic sense. On the contrary: “The miming
is all of I”. The phrase occurs in a poem called “Lyre Bird” about the bird
that patches together its creativity through spirited imitation of the sounds
of others. For Murray that becomes a way of speaking of the poet as
medium, in communion with the non-verbal or differently verbal world he
writes from. Mime here can be taken to represent the replacement of one
language by another, a language paradoxically without language,
apparently radically diminished, but then richly re-invented through
embodiment and gesture. Murray might call it the “natural” world that he
mimes, working to find an equivalence in language, but in the poet’s
articulation it becomes something else too. His language is a human
overwriting, which makes the natural world also non-natural, a damaged
world that carries history, culture and loss.
What if the idea that “the miming is all of I” were applied more
pervasively to Australian literature? Can we recognise a translational
process of imitation and adaptation, decomposition and re-composition,
going on all the time, allowing us to experience the new creation as also
measuring a distance, a space of travel? In moving forward, the new turns
and invites dialogue with where it has come from, and does so from a
position without precedent. Here the new, created in translation, also
creates the untranslatability that Naoki Sakai recognises in his fertile
aphorism: “It is translation that gives birth to the untranslatable”.2
In this way translation is an index of incommensurability, and, in its
contingency, an invitation to further attempts at translation, in the
knowledge that such translation is also invention in the Derridean sense:
“a new way of translating in which translation doesn’t go one way but
both ways”.3 Commenting on that passage, the philosopher Saranindranath
Tagore adds, “for the cosmopolitan, neither the self nor alterity are
transcendentally anchored. . . . The welcome [from self to other, same to
different, known to unknown] is founded on a translation, an invention,
precisely because the stranger cannot remain a stranger but must become a
friend”.4 To this I would add that in this context, the cosmopolitan can be
understood as the Australian, for whom neither belonging nor not-

2
Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity, 14.
3
Derrida, “Politics and Friendship”.
4
Tagore, “Bengal and Cosmopolitanism”.
8 Chapter One

belonging is stable, not “transcendentally anchored”. The Australian is

always self and other, in endless oscillation.
So we arrive at a richer understanding of the provisionality, the
mobility, the reflexivity, the infinite speculation that is culture, by
responding to Australian literature through translational practices of
reading and writing, as it invites us to do.
The Macquarie PEN anthology concludes with Vietnam: A psychic
guide by Chi Vu. It is the text of a performance piece that consists of
letters back to Melbourne in English from a Vietnamese Australian
woman who is alert to the textures of language crossing around her. In
what the speaker calls the “café of Babel”, English, Hebrew and different
kinds of Vietnamese mingle. It is like the place in the river where fresh
water and salt meet: “In this zone a special type of fish thrives. This is the
meeting of east and west. It is the mixing of two mediums. It is where the
other fish die” (1402). Chi Vu presents a performative, gendered interplay
of modes: writing, speaking, dancing, seeing, hearing. She finds
expression for herself, as other women have done in Australia before her,
particularly but not exclusively migrant women, through projecting a new
artistic language in an act of transformative translation.
Tom Cho, in Look Who’s Morphing (2009), makes a different kind of
play with that delta zone, where some thrive while others die. “AIYO!!!
An evil group of ninjas is entering and destroying a call centre!!!” begins
one short fiction that ends when a girl in the call centre remakes herself
with computer parts into a deadly cyborg and destroys the ninjas in turn, a
hybrid contemporary heroine with language to match:

Aiyah! She even eating the remains of all the ninja warriors! Wah, and
now she is offering to buy cappuccino for everybody!!! So polite-ah-she!5

These are the zones where literary innovation articulates new personal
and cultural possibilities.

But it has always happened in Australian literature, requiring only a

certain kind of attuned reading to see it, which might be called
translational in registering where elements have come from and how they
are changed in the process of creation. John Shaw Neilson (1872-1942),
for example, a poet close to the country and the hardships of itinerant rural
life, drew on folk ballad, the Bible and high lyricism to communicate his
oneness with nature as a new fusion. His poem “The Poor, Poor Country”,
written in 1934, concludes:

5
Cho, Look Who’s Morphing, 95.
 Damage Control: Australian Literature as Translation 9

The New Year came with heat and thirst and the little lakes were low.
The blue cranes were my nearest friends and I mourned to see them go;
I watched their wings so long until I only saw the sky;
Down in that poor country no pauper was I. (21-24)

In this idiom Neilson is synthesiser and conduit for different traditions

and perspectives, a translator of the natural world, an interpreter of himself
as “no pauper was I”.
Neilson was born in the same year as David Unaipon, the Ngarrindjeri
man whose Native Legends (1929) is credited as the first book authored by
an Aboriginal person. Unaipon’s work can also be understood as cultural
transmission, continuing an Indigenous tradition while translating it into
literary English form. “From a very early age”, he writes in “The Voice of
the Great Spirit”, “the mothers and the old men of the tribe instruct the
children by means of tales and stories. This is one of the many stories that
is handed down from generation to generation by my people” (320). That
requires, in part, a process of finding language for what is untranslatable, a
spirit beyond words: “Thalung is everywhere, and manifests through the
colour of the bush, the birds, the flowers, the fish, the streams; in fact,
everything that the Aboriginal sees, hears, tastes, and feels—there is
Thalung”. And through this language non-Aboriginal readers become
aware of what they might apprehend by substituting their own
understanding of a supreme deity. As in Neilson’s work, we are given an
intimation of what might be understood through translation back. In this
way Unaipon can be read simultaneously within the history of the English
literary forms he adapts and within the modes of Aboriginal culture.
Bill Neidjie is Unaipon’s successor, as is Alexis Wright in her novel
Carpentaria (2006) which opens with a magnificent rendering of a “tidal
river snake” that is both the environment and its living spirit: “it permeates
everything”. But to understand it that way requires an inside kind of
reading which the author invites us to make in a voice that transfers
knowledge, at once local and immemorial, to the listener, “you”:

Can someone who did not grow up in a place that is sometimes under
water, sometimes bone-dry, know when the trade winds blowing off the
southern and northern hemispheres will merge in summer? . . . It takes a
particular kind of knowledge to go with the river, whatever its mood. It is
about there being no difference between you and the movement of water as
it seasonally shifts its tracks according to its own mood. (1221)

Carpentaria imaginatively translates Aboriginal law to the extent of

the permissible, the limit of the possible, in its bounty of politically
10 Chapter One

charged stories and characters from particular country.

Like Chi Vu’s river where sweet and salt water mingle, like Les
Murray’s lyre bird language, Wright’s river speaks for a way of being in
the world that is greater than any fixed or singular perspective can express.
And that recognition is liberating, revolutionary and a call to justice. She
explains:

This is the condition of contemporary Indigenous storytelling that I believe

is a consequence of our racial diaspora in Australia. The helix of divided
strands is forever moving, entwining all stories together, just like a lyrebird
is capable of singing several tunes at once. These stories relate to all the
leavings and returnings to ancient territory, while carrying the whole
human endeavour in search of new dreams. Where the characters are
Indigenous people in this novel, they might easily have been any scattered
people from any part of the world who share a relationship with their
spiritual ancestors and heritage, or for that matter, any Australian—old or
new.6

It is such territory that the creator inhabits, where disintegration and

reconstitution are double sides of a process, where translation from one
state or condition or language to another is continuous, unpredictable and
generative. So Elizabeth Costello, fictional Australian novelist, discovers
(in J.M. Coetzee’s work of the same name), when asked what she believes:

But the Australian continent, where I was born into the world, kicking and
squalling, is real (if far away), the Dulgannon and its mudflats are real, the
frogs are real. They exist whether or not I tell you about them, whether or
not I believe in them. . . . She thinks of the frog beneath the earth, spread
out as if flying, as if parachuting through the darkness. . . . Yes, that she
can believe in: the dissolution, the return to the elements; and the converse
moment she can believe in too, when the first quiver of returning life runs
through the body and the limbs contract, the hands flex. She can believe in
that, if she concentrates closely enough, word by word . . . (982-4)

That generative zone, the moment of crossing, of formation, through

translation into new language, is where Australian literature comes into
existence.
A more extreme example is the hoax poet Ern Malley, conjured into
being by James McAuley and Harold Stewart in 1944, literally patched
together by transposition and remix of language tags out of context into
unlikely new creation. In the recent Cambridge History of Australian

6
Wright, “On Writing Carpentaria”, 6.
 Damage Control: Australian Literature as Translation 11

Literature (2009), one writer (Peter Kirkpatrick) claims Ern Malley as “the
ultimate triumph of modernism”7 while another (John Kinsella) suggests
that “a definitively postmodern moment is located” there.8 Philip Mead, in
his important book, Networked Language, draws on the Shakespearean
entanglement with the Ern Malley hoax. McAuley and Stewart used
fragments of Shakespeare in their concoction, and in the subsequent
obscenity trial of Ern Malley’s publisher, Max Harris, Shakespeare was
invoked on all sides as yardstick and arbiter of poetic value. Mead
concludes, provocatively, that “this is the sense in which Ern Malley is a
national poet, or, even, Australia’s Shakespeare”.9 The cultural translation
of Shakespeare has been an enduring imperial project. Here it comes back
to haunt, from beyond the limits of what authorship has conventionally
been taken to be. “. . . I have shrunk/ To an interloper, robber of dead
men’s dream. . . . I am still/ the black swan of trespass on alien waters”
concludes Ern Malley’s poem “Dürer: Innsbruck, 1495” (627), itself a
translation of an image of a distant reflection.
In My Life as a Fake (2003), Peter Carey’s fictional variation on Ern
Malley, where the imaginary poet becomes as flesh and blood as
Frankenstein’s monster and runs amok in Malaysia, the maker comments
on the creative transformation that has taken place: “What had been clever
had now become true, the song of the autodidact, the colonial, the
damaged beast of the antipodes”.10 For Carey, Ern Malley’s poems are a
postcolonial comeback, a self-made literary expression from the other side
of the line.
Literature comes from somewhere and goes somewhere, which may
also mean that it returns as gift or reflection to the place it came from. The
circulation of manuscripts, the movement of type, the portability and
durability of the book through many hands, the ceaseless back and forth of
interpretation and translation, across time and space: this is the life of
literature. Australian literature participates in these processes and contexts
too. Does that make it part of world literature? Or can it only be part of
world literature if it stops being Australian literature?
Perhaps Australian literature can be thought of as literature at the limit
of world-literature. Here I adapt the title of Ranajit Guha’s History at the
Limit of World-History, his densely suggestive retort to Hegel’s comment,
in 1839, that “India has no history”. World-history—Hegel’s term—could
only be the history of nation states and their institutions. Since India was

7
Pierce, Cambridge History of Australian Literature, 222.
8
Ibid., 476.
9
Mead, Networked Language, 185.
10
Carey, My Life as a Fake, 82-3.
12 Chapter One

not a state in the Western historiographical sense, it lay beyond the limit of
World-history. Australia, for Hegel, would have been outside World-
history too, certainly before 1788. World-literature—Weltliteratur—is
Goethe’s coinage from around the same time (1827), as the German
polymath looked to an encyclopaedically inclusive commerce between the
literatures of recognised cultures. He might have included Aboriginal
songs in World-literature, had he known them—the inconceivability of
that speaks for itself—but English writing from Australia would have been
compiled as British literature in Goethe’s world-literary world-historical
scheme—until a point of differentiation emerged that qualified it as the
writing of a recognisably separate language and community. That might
have been marked belatedly when Patrick White was awarded the Nobel
Prize in 1973 for introducing “a new continent into literature”, or when
David Malouf won the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 2000,
or even when that other Nobel Literature laureate, J.M.Coetzee, relocated
to Australia in the same year. But such appearances have not secured
Australia’s place in The World Republic of Letters (1999, English
translation 2004), French critic Pascale Casanova’s influential analysis of
how authors from the periphery achieve metropolitan (read: Parisian)
success, nor in the various other schemas that seek to move outside or
beneath hegemonic Anglophone (or Francophone) literary domination.
Third World, postcolonial, anti-orientalist: to include Australia in these
frames requires a degree of special pleading. It’s not an easy fit. In
practice such globally aspirational paradigms become catch-all categories
in which Australian and other “small” literatures figure as merely
following suit, the limit term at the end of a sequence of repetitions, a
place marker.
Oddly, China is in the same boat, only marginally present in most
discussions of world literature: hardly a small literature, but a major,
ancient and continuing literary stream from an alternative empire. I am
reminded of Derrida’s recognition of the “Chinese prejudice” in Western
thought, which prompts an awkward question from his translator, Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak: “the East is never seriously studied . . . in the
Derridean text. Why then must it remain . . . as the name of the limits of
the text’s knowledge?”11
Spivak’s question appears in the later corrected edition of Of
Grammatology and is investigated by critic Sean Meighoo who suggests
that if Western thought since the Enlightenment, including Derrida,
reaches a limit point in the way it misreads Chinese as a language (“the

11
In Derrida, Of Grammatology, lxxxii.
 Damage Control: Australian Literature as Translation 13

Chinese prejudice”), as Rey Chow and others, following Spivak, have

shown, it is only doing what Derrida himself critiques so insightfully in
relation to Levi-Strauss’s chapter “A Writing Lesson” in Tristes Tropiques,
asking “up to what point it is legitimate not to call by the name of writing
those ‘few dots’ and ‘zigzags’ on their calabashes, so briefly evoked”.
Derrida thus implicitly recognises “a form of writing that is not phonetic
or alphabetic, a form of writing that does not bear the imprint of
logocentrism”.12 That would paradigmatically include forms of inscription
in Australian Aboriginal cultures, from “time immemorial”. It calls for an
expansive conceptual revisioning of the ground in which Australian
literature exists, a further horizon.
China and Australia: unlikely boundary markers.
Part of the argument for reading Australian literature as translation is
that it makes visible the polysemic readings that co-exist across diverse
constituencies as part of the dynamics of interpretation. This depends not
on a text’s value being measured by how convertible it is into the gold
standard of pure literary autonomy, but rather on locally embedded
qualities that work against such convertibility.
American exceptionalism, as identified by de Toqueville, refers to the
qualitatively different capacity of an unprecedented democracy to make up
and live by its own rules and values, as if they were universal. It is a lofty
kind of obliviousness. Almost as a parody of this, turning handicap to
advantage, Australian literary exceptionalism might be the obverse. Let us
read with an eye to what does not lend itself to prevailing systems of
valorisation, to what is not easily generalisable. With no power to make
the rules beyond its borders, can Australian literature be read for its
resistance to the universalist paradigm? To use Derridean language, let us
ask what it means if Australian literature itself, as a field, is a kind of
aporia. “In globalized capitalism, can a tendentially aporetic state structure
serve as damage control for a persistent rewriting of ‘they’ as ‘we’?” asks
Gayatri Spivak in a recent essay. It is a powerful question, a “double-
binding question, making internationality itself aporetic with regard to the
linguistic diversity of the world”.13 Can a set of relations constructed in
terms of the national, such as Australian literature, with due self-critique,
work to undermine the hegemony of a homogenising and hierarchical
globalisation, such as some versions of world literature might represent?
The exceptionalism of Australian literature might be one such case of
“damage control” in which “the linguistic diversity of the world” is

12
Meighoo, “Derrida’s Chinese Prejudice”, 180.
13
Chakravorty Spivak, “They the people”.
14 Chapter One

uncovered once again, but this time from within the international English
that overwrites it, from below its horizon. It is a way of doing what Spivak
calls elsewhere “to translate before translation . . . not the content but the
very moves of languaging”, in order to find “a different kind of
commensurability” from “the uniformisation necessary for globality”.
“Globalisation takes place only in capital and data;” she writes,
“everything else is damage control”.14 It is an argument for highlighting
the translational mobility in literature, which calls for proper transnational
literacy, where the “trans” is a form of action. It is the “damage control”
that Australian literature performs against globalisation.

Criticism of the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature

has focused on who is not there, or not there in the right way. It is often an
author close to home—a family member, someone from the locality,
someone whose work was loved at school, someone from a cohort: a
favourite author. The notion of a pet author of this kind, a proxy for
ourselves, is a reminder in the face of globalisation and internationality
that local attachment is strong, and that a primary affiliation is with your
own. This relational participation extends to writers as well as readers,
who connect with each other locally, within communities of interest,
whether virtual or geographic. A gathering such as the PEN anthology
makes us aware of the hold of our specific and personal identifications.
We register exclusion as a sense of injustice, wistfully or furiously.
The exclusion is contrapuntal: the exclusion of Australian literature,
and the exclusions within Australian literature. As we put right the latter
by greater inclusiveness, we encourage the former by valuing texts that are
less and less convertible into the currency of universal recognition. Clive
James has suggested that success in international competition should be
the criterion for identifying Australian writers of merit.15 That seems to
miss the point.
The German romantic philosopher Herder had a more complex
understanding than his friend Goethe of how world-literature might work.
“Each [culture] is what it is, of literally inestimable value in its own
society, and consequently to humanity as a whole”.16 For Herder, the
creativity that makes such culture comes with “belonging”—to a “nation,
region, community” . . . to “a group, a culture, a movement, a form of
life”. “Without such belonging there is no true creation”.17 Yet to connect

14
Chakravorty Spivak, “Translating in a World of Languages”, 36-37.
15
Delingpole, “Clive James: Keep Tokenism Out of Literature”.
16
Berlin, Vico and Herder, 182.
17
Ibid., 194.
 Damage Control: Australian Literature as Translation 15

those various communities, to enable them to converse, from one

belonging/not-belonging to another, requires translation: historicised,
politicised, languaged. If anything has been learned in the two centuries
since Herder, it is how tricky that process is. Australian literature,
deciphered, transported, interpreted, can help. Reading Australian writing
with attention to its translational pulse decentres and horizontalises,
tumbles hierarchy, adds dimensional curve to the flat map of world
literature.

Works Cited
Berlin, Isaiah. 1976. Vico and Herder: Two Studies in the History of Ideas.
New York: Viking Press.
Carey, P. 2003. My Life as a Fake. Sydney: Random House.
Chakravorty Spivak, G. 2009. “They the people: Problems of alter-
globalization”. Radical Philosophy 157 (Sept/Oct).
—. 2010. “Translating in a World of Languages”. Profession 2010, MLA
35-43.
Cho, T. 2009. Look Who’s Morphing. Artarmon, NSW: Giramondo.
Delingpole, J. 25 September 2009. “Clive James: Keep Tokenism Out of
Literature”. telegraph.co.uk. Date accessed 8 February 2010.
Derrida, J. 1976. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty
Spivak. Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press.
—. 1 December 1997. “Politics and Friendship: A Discussion with
Jacques Derrida”. livingphilosophy.org/Derrida-politics-friendship.htm
Jose, N., ed. 2009. The Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian
Literature. Sydney: Allen and Unwin.
Mead, P. 2008. Networked Language: Culture and History in Australian
Poetry. North Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing.
Meighoo, S. 2008. “Derrida’s Chinese Prejudice”. Cultural Critique 68:
163-209.
Pierce, P., ed. 2009. The Cambridge History of Australian Literature. Port
Melbourne, Vic: Cambridge University Press.
Sakai, N. 1997. Translation and Subjectivity. Minneapolis, MN:
University of Minnesota Press.
Tagore, S. 20 August 2010. “Bengal and Cosmopolitanism”. Being
Bengali, conference paper University of Western Sydney.
Wright, A. 2007. “On Writing Carpentaria”. HEAT 13. New series.
 CHAPTER TWO

TRANSLATION AND LITERARY MIMESIS:

THE CASE OF NOBEL NOMINEE
PRAMOEDYA ANANTA TOER

ELISABET TITIK MURTISARI

After Indonesia declared its independence in 1945, the country’s

literature moved into a new era. Free from the yoke of Dutch colonialism,
Indonesian writers turned to so-called world literature for new literary
forms. Unlike Indonesia’s previous modern literary periods, which were
romantic in nature, this era was characterized by liberal revolutionary and
political themes. Translation also played a crucial role in the formation of
a new kind of literature in the emerging country: It provided not only a
means of access to western high literature, but also a means of writing
practice for its writers (see Foulcher). One writer who has much benefited
from this and may now be considered as the acme of Indonesian literature
is Pramoedya Ananta Toer (1925-2006). Pramoedya is the only Indonesian
to have been nominated for a Nobel Prize for literature—several times
since 1981. His best known works include Nyanyi Sunyi Seorang Bisu
(“The Mute's Soliloquy”) and Buru Quartet, which consists of four novels
and was written while he was a political prisoner in Buru Island (1965-
1979) under the Soeharto regime.
Pramoedya’s early penmanship grew under the influence of writers
such as Lode Zielens, John Steinbeck, Idrus (an Indonesian realist),
William Saroyan, and Maxim Gorky. However, among these writers, it
was Steinbeck who affected him deeply, especially with the novella Of
Mice and Men. He read and translated this work while he was in a Dutch
prison (1947-1949) and later adopted the American writer’s style in his
own writing, which remained one of the important features in his works as
an international writer. His fiction is simple, fast-paced, direct, and left-
leaning, and has been translated into more than thirty languages. The case
of Pramoedya shows the prominent role of translation in the development
 Translation and Literary Mimesis 17

of national and world literatures as a product of reciprocal literary

mimesis. In this paper, I shall examine this issue further by exploring the
contribution of translation to Pramoedya’s literary evolution.

Pramoedya’s early journey to writing

Pramoedya was born in 1945 during the Dutch colonial period in
Blora, a small city in Central Java. His father was an educator, a
prominent figure in the contemporary Javanese society who suffered from
a gambling addiction. After completing elementary school course in 1939,
Pramoedya went to a radio vocational school in Surabaya and graduated in
1941. Following this, he was enrolled as a junior high school student in
Jakarta and worked for Domei, the Japanese news service (1942-1945).
During this period, he began to develop his writing skills. At first it was
only technical—as a speed typist, stenographer, interviewer, and archivist
—but later he also took up creative writing, such as writing articles and
stories, and became an editor of his school magazine.
After the Japanese were defeated and the Dutch army arrived to re-
establish colonial rule, Pramoedya joined the Indonesian people’s army
and became a lieutenant, leading a unit of sixty people. During this time he
wrote short stories, his first two novels, Sepuluh Kepala Nica (1946) and
Krandji Bekasi Djatoeh (1947), and translated Lode Zielens’s Flemish
novel Moeder Waarom Leven Wij? (“Mother, Why Do We Live?”) and
Antoine de St. Exupery’s Terre des Homme. Pramoedya left the Indonesian
army after its rationalization, but was later arrested and jailed in Bukit
Duri by the Dutch military for possessing anti-colonial pamphlets (July
1947). It was during this imprisonment, with the run of the jail library, that
Pramoedya got the “the means and impetus to write”.1 Writing secretly at
night with an oil lantern, Pramoedya managed to produce a few works,
including two of his classics, Perburuan (“The Fugitive”) and Keluarga
Gerilya (“The Guerilla Family”).

Pramoedya, Steinbeck and Of Mice and Men

Pramoedya’s encounter with Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men was a
significant milestone in his literary career. It was his time of
“enlightenment and empowerment” as a writer, when he found a new form
that “so touched and impressed” him.2 It was at this time that Pramoedya’s

1
Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Lontar Foundation.
2
“A Chat with Pramoedya Ananta Toer”.
18 Chapter Two

writing techniques changed dramatically when he consciously adopted

Steinbeck’s style in his new writings after translating Steinbeck’s novella.
Steinbeck’s simple but elegantly balanced structures and cinematic
descriptions captivated Pramoedya, not least because Steinbeck’s humanist
realism suited the spirit of the young idealist writer.
Published in 1937, Of Mice and Men tells the tragic story of George
Milton and Lennie Small, two drifting ranch workers who share the simple
dream of having their own piece of land. Lennie is a huge man with
incredible strength, but is mentally retarded. By contrast, George is a
shrewd little man who acts as Lennie’s caring protector. Their dream to
settle down almost becomes a reality when Candy, an aging farm-hand,
joins forces with them. Unfortunately, it is shattered when Lennie
accidentally kills the wife of the ranch owner’s son. This human
hopelessness is clearly reflected in the title, which was inspired by the
Robert Burns poem To a Mouse, part of which reads: “The best laid
schemes o’ mice an’ men/Gang aft agley”(“The best-laid plans of mice
and men/often go awry”).
As Steinbeck’s simplicity is complex, and as Pramoedya had only just
started to learn English when translating the novella, the role of his
translation of this work is crucial to the development of his mature style.
First, the translation process would have forced Pramoedya into a more
intensive interaction with the source text than is usually afforded by a
casual reading. Such intimate interaction would have helped him
understand Steinbeck’s details and their motivation. For an early writer
who never had any formal literary training like Pramoedya, this
understanding of literary effects (and how they are constructed) is crucial.
Second, the translation process also helped him to practice creating these
effects in Indonesian. Understanding a particular style is one thing, but
reproducing it in another language requires a different type of skills, for
the task is one of rewriting. This rewriting element in translation allows
someone to both exercise and experiment with linguistic forms in order to
produce a particular effect, which is paramount in creative writing.
Pramoedya’s firm grasp of the essence of Steinbeck is reflected in his
translation of Of Mice and Men as Tikus dan Manusia (“Mice and Men”).
A number of Steinbeck’s works have been translated into Indonesian,
including The Grapes of Wrath into Amarah (Wrath) by Sapardi Djoko
Damono (2000), a literary professor and a well-respected Indonesian poet.
Yet, Pramoedya’s rendering is by far the most successful one, capturing
brilliantly the fire of the original as if retold by Steinbeck himself. Since
Indonesian tends to take a much longer expression than English,
Steinbeck’s conciseness is challenging to translate into the target
 Translation and Literary Mimesis 19

language. In spite of this, Pramoedya could reproduce his stylistic

simplicity by cutting down linguistic units and by the creative use of
contextual meanings to both maintain and compensate for Steinbeck’s
metrical language (see Murtisari). Pramoedya’s observation of Steinbeck’s
details and the way he strives to perfect the form of his translation is also
remarkable. Compared to Sapardi, for instance, Pramoedya made almost
seven times more shifts in his translation (or, in other words, more
“rewriting”) in order to better match the source text (see Murtisari). Most
of these shifts (58.1%) are applied to recreate Steinbeck’s style and 44.1%
for the conciseness. Sapardi, on the other hand, only devoted respectively
30.9% and 25.3% of his shifts for the same elements.

Mimetic road: from Balai Poestaka to Of Mice and Men

As we shall see later in this section, Of Mice and Men exerted much
influence in Pramoedya’s subsequent works, with their balanced structures
and visual effects. Before this, however, the young writer’s style varied
from a somewhat clichéd and melodramatic form to a simple, sharp, and
fast-paced style. The first pattern can be seen in the following text, which
comes from his early short story Ke Mana? (in Teew, 1995 [1993]):

Mendung hitam menebal. Hujan mulai melebat kembali. Kadang-kadang

saja guntur menggelegar diikuti oleh kilatnya yang cuaca. Bulan Nopember
1946 . . .

Black clouds thickened. The rain began to fall heavily again. Sometimes a
thunder roared followed by a flash. The month of November 1946 . . .

Angannya melayang, menembusi mendung dan hujan mengikuti

pengalamannya yang lampau. Ia mengerah. Ah, sudah setahun lamanya.

His imagination wandered through the clouds and rain, following his
experience of the past. He sighed. Ah, a year had passed. (Ke mana? 58-9)

According to Teew, this text reflects the typical form of Balai Poestaka,
a romantic literary period taking place during 1908 to 1932.3 One of its
features, which is shown in Pramoedya’s text, is the use of verbs derived
from adjectives (menebal, “thicken” and melebat, “heavier/thicker”, e.g.
for rain or plants).

3
Teew, Pramoedya Ananta Toer, 44.
20 Chapter Two

However, in his novel Krandji Bekasi Djatoeh, which is based on his

experience serving as a soldier, Pramoedya seemed to be experimenting
with an opposing form:

Jauh di samping-samping rawa dan hutan belukar tembakan terus

mendentam-dentam. Mortir musuh berterbangan di udara. Banyak yang
tidak meledak. Balabantuan Tentara datang. Mortir musuh seperti hujan.
Pasukan Farid merayap kembali menuju asrama. Melalui semak, meloncati
pagar. Merayap merangkak. Apa gunanya terus maju? Sembilan orang
yang tak berpeluru. (Krandji Bekasi Djatoeh, 161)

Far side next to the woods and swamp the gunfires are buzzing and
banging incessantly. Enemy mortars are flying in the air. Many do not
explode. Army reinforcements arrive. Enemy mortars come like rain.
Farid’s unit crept back to the dormitory. Going through the bushes,
jumping over the fence. Creeping, crawling. What good is moving
forward? Nine people without bullets. (My translation.)

This economic pattern mirrors the style Lode Zielens, whose work
Pramoedya translated around the same time: unadorned, fast-paced,
realistic, and using structures without a subject. Reflecting on Zielens’
contribution to his formative years, Pramoedya states:

At that time I was still very young, not yet 25 years old. I had greedily
swallowed the technique of Lode Zielens—to the last drop. It’s normal,
after all: an empty barrel will swallow anything poured into it. He taught
me that there is no great distance between objective and subjective reality.
Every-thing decisive comes from their mutual motion. And this motion
does not always end up in a completed resolution. Very often there are
only unconnected explosions. The same reciprocal effect applies to the
organization of sentences.4

However, after Pramoedya’s encounter with Of Mice and Men, he

drastically changed his style by embracing Steinbeck’s literary features.
Deeply admiring Steinbeck, Pramoedya initially modelled his stories after
the novella he translated. This is shown by the striking resemblance
between Pramoedya’s novel Perburuan (“The Fugitive”) with Of Mice
and Men. Perburuan is a novel set during the Japanese occupation in the
1945. The main character is Raden Hardo, a young Javanese aristocrat and
activist fighting for his country’s independence. Hardo and his two
friends, Dipo and Karmin, had previously served as platoon commanders

4
Toer and Anderson, “Perburuan 1950”, 41.
 Translation and Literary Mimesis 21

in the Japanese local military auxiliaries during the war. The three youths
planned a rebellion against the Japanese, but Karmin betrayed them at the
last minute. This work’s correspondence with Steinbeck’s style manifests
in the use of the “and” structure, vivid descriptions of people, nature, and
situations, and the use of dramatic language for strong emotions:

Bulan meninggi lagi. Lonceng kewedanan bertalu sekali. Dan sebentar

kemudian sebuah tubuh berjalan lambat melalui tanggul sawah dan
berhenti di depan pintu pagar. Bahunya menulang dan ia tak berbaju dan
kuduknya tertutup oleh rambut panjang.5

The moon rise again. The bell of the district office rang once. And soon, a
body walked slowly through the embankment and stopped in front of the
gate of a fence. His shoulders were bony. He had no shirt and his long hair
hung down his neck. (My translation.)

Angin meniup keras dan tajam. Keduanya terus berjalan beriring. Dan
diatas, bintang-bintang masih jua berkelipan kuning. Dan langit biru hitam
sekarang.6

The wind blew strongly and sharp. Both continued walking side by side.
And above, the yellow stars were still twinkling. And the blue sky was
now black. (My translation.)

Waktu ia hampir sampai pada pengemis- pengemis itu dadanya

dibusungkan. Ia berhenti dan berdiri tegak. Dagunya yang tipis tampak jadi
runcing. Kedua pelipisnya tertutup oleh rambut. Hidungnya menggetar.
Tangannya menunjuk-nunjuk. Kemudian terdengar suara lantangnya yang
mendekati teriakan. “Kere! Cih! Lekas pergi. Cih! Berbau seperti kakus.
Ayoh, pergi!”7

As she was near the beggars, she puffed up her chest. She stopped and
stood erect. Her thin chin looked pointed. Her two temples were covered
by hair and her nose quivered. She pointed. Then she said in her loud voice
which was almost like a shout. “Beggars! Ugh! Go away—quick! Ugh!
You smell like sewers of shit. Go away!” (My translation.)

In modelling himself after Steinbeck, young Pramoedya went even

further by developing scenes in Perburuan similar to the scenes in Of
Mice and Men that the task of translation had made so familiar to him.
Several of them can be seen in the following examples:

5
Toer, Perburuan, 47.
6
Toer, Perburuan, 16.
7
Toer, Perburuan, 7.
22 Chapter Two

1. Pramoedya:
The beggar sitting behind him listened carefully to all the grumbles. He
crumpled his body and embraced his knees more tightly. It was cold.8

Steinbeck:
Then he replaced his hat, pushed himself back from the river, drew up his
knees and embraced them.9

2. Pramoedya:
Right behind the gate there was a small path through the corn field, leading
twenty-meters to a hut made of woven black-brown coconut leaves. The
ground was covered with green grass, flattened miserably by footsteps.10

Steinbeck:
There is a path through the willows and among the sycamores, a path
beaten hard by boys coming down from the ranches to swim in the deep
pool, and beaten hard by tramps who come wearily down from the
highway in the evening to jungle-up near water.11

3. Pramoedya:
He put the husked corn to his right. Then he lighted the pile of twigs in
front of him. The fire cracked up as it ate the wood and he (the gambler)
began to roast the cobs. He squatted.12

Steinbeck:
George walked to the fire pile and lighted the dry leaves. The flame
cracked up among the twigs and fell to work. George undid his bindle and
brought out three cans of beans. He stood them about the fire, close in
against the blaze, but not quite touching the flame.13

8
Source text: Pengemis yang duduk dibelakangnya hati-hati mendengar segala
gerutu itu. Badannya dikecilkan dan pelukan pada lututnya dieratkan oleh
kedinginan. Toer, Perburuan, 15.
9
Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men, 9.
10
Source text: Presis dibelakang pintu pagar terdapat jalan kecil, diapit batang-
batang jagung, menjurus duapuluh meter kesebuah gubuk yang terbuat dari jalinan
daun kelapa yang berwarna coklathitam. Tanahnya ditumbuhi rumput yang merana
oleh injakan kaki berulang kali. Toer, Perburuan, 47.
11
Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men, 7.
12
Source text: Buah jagung yang telah terkupas ditaruhnya disamping kanan.
Kemudian unggukan kayu ranting yang ada di depannya dibakarnya. Bunyi
menggeretek dari api yang menelan ranting terdengar. Penjudi itu mulai
mengganggangi jagung. Ia berjongkok. Toer, Perburuan, 90-1.
13
Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men, 14.
 Translation and Literary Mimesis 23

Despite Pramoedya’s somewhat close imitation of Steinbeck, Perburuan

is a brilliant work. In the first place, recreation of Steinbeck’s style is not
an easy task. It requires skills in milking the materials into writing and a
sharp observation of their details. But what strikes me most as a reader is
how Steinbeck’s techniques could reveal the details of the local culture
and local realities in elegant cinematic pictures and poetic language.
Despite my initial objection to Pramoedya’s religious adherence to
Steinbeck, I could not help enjoying Perburuan with its local Javanese
context. (I got to know Steinbeck’s works much earlier than Pramoedya’s,
as the latter were banned in Indonesia when I was growing up.) While
taking a modern setting, the novel’s three main characters apparently
represent the warriors Arjuna, Bima, and Karna in the wayang play, which
is inseparable from the Javanese tradition.14 In Pramoedya’s work, this
local symbolism found a modern form of expression that never existed
before in Indonesian literature. Smuggled from prison, this novel received
a nod of approval from the national literary bureau Balai Poestaka and
won an award for the best novel of the year (1949). Steinbeck’s influence
in the country’s literature was received with open arms.
After his novel Perburuan was published in 1950, Pramoedya
continued to be productive and became increasingly prominent as a
national leftist writer until his imprisonment in 1965. (He was captured
during the nation-wide anti-communist purge and subsequently
imprisoned without trial, first in the notorious Nusakambangan Island
Prison and later in Buru Island.) Pramoedya’s showed a close adherence to
Steinbeck’s pattern in other works of this period, although not as strongly
as he does in Perburuan. Some of these works are Keluarga Gerilya
(1950), Bukan Pasar Malam (1951), Cerita dari Blora (1952), and
Korupsi (1954).15 It is interesting to see Pramoedya’s modification of

14
See Aveling’s translation. The Javanese wayang stories are based on the epics of
Ramayana and Mahabharata, which were initially brought to Indonesia by Indian
traders but then modified, becoming an important source of spiritual and ethical
guidance for the Javanese. The main character, Hardo, symbolizes Arjuna, the
handsome refined and noble prince. Dipo, on the other hand, represents Bima, who
is the largest and most violent of the Pandawa brothers. And Karmin, who is a
member of this group, but decides at the last moment to obey his Japanese shodan
as his ultimate commander, represents Karna, who remains loyal to his monarchy
while his king is wrong. This correlation between Pramoedya’s Perburuan,
Javanese wayang epics, and Indian Mahabharata/Ramayana demonstrates the inter-
mimetic process in the development of world, national, and regional literature.
15
According to Pramoedya, he was also influenced by William Saroyan’s style in
writing Keluarga Gerilya (see Toer and Anderson, “Perburuan 1950”, 41. This may
have been the case with other works adjacent to the novel.
24 Chapter Two

Steinbeck’s “and” structure by “overusing” the conjunction in these

works:16

Aku lihat bunda berdiam diri saja. Ia tak menjawab. Dan aku lihat mata
yang agak sipit itu jadi merah. Kemudian—kemudian matanya berkaca-
kaca dan waktu airmatanya akan jatuh, cepat-cepat disekanya dengan
ujung kebayanya. Melihat itu segera saja aku berteriak, menjerit, dan
menangis. Dan di kala bunda bangun dari tempat tidurnya. Dan pergi
meninggalkan kami, aku kian menjerit. Aku lari dan memegangi kainnya.
Berseru: „Mengapa ibu menangis, bu?“ (Yang sudah Hilang, Cerita dari
Blora, 21)

I saw mother remained silent. She did not answer. And I see her slightly
slanted eyes became red. Then—then her eyes filled with tears and when
her tears were falling, she quickly wiped with the tip of her blouse. Seeing
that, soon I yelled and screamed and cried. And then mother got up from
her bed. And leaving us. I screamed even louder. I ran and held her cloth.
Exclaiming: “Why are you crying, Mother?” (My translation.)

The overuse of “and” is especially frequent in Cerita dari Blora, which

seems to represent Pramoedya’s search for his own form as an author. This
experiment results in a sometimes awkwardly redundant structure and was
later abandoned by Pramoedya.17

16
Another example of this overuse of “and” can be seen in the following text:
“Tapi kini jalannya tak segagah dulu lagi. Dan orang mengatakan bahwa tegaknya
sekarang sudah seperti tanda tanya sonder titik. Tahun-tahun peperanganlah yang
menghancurkan badan, hidup, dan kehidupannya. Dan para tetangga dan para
kenalan mengetahui belaka, bahwa kian lama perempuan itu kian tolol di mata
mereka. Dan sebagai orang lainnya yang dinamai tolol juga, ia tak tahu
ketololannya. Dan inilah yang sering menjengkelkan orang, terutama para
tetangganya sendiri. (Toer, Keluarga Gerilya, 3).
“But now she did not walk as sturdily as before. And people said she stood like a
question mark without its dot. Years of wars had worn her body, life, and living.
And the neighbours and acquaintances knew she was becoming more stupid in
their eyes. And like any other person called stupid, she did not know her stupidity.
And this was what often annoyed people, especially her neighbours”.
17
In his novel Footsteps, for instance, which he wrote years later, he still employed
repeated use of “dan” at the beginning of a sentence, but it is more stylistic (as it is
not overused):
“Moga-moga bukan gangguan syaraf, doaku dalam hati. Kerja samanya tentu akan
kurang bermanfaat. Dan barang tentu Mama tidak akan menyarankan seorang
dengan gangguan syaraf. Dari pipinya yang menggelambir boleh aku jadi dapat
menarik dugaan, ia berada dalam kelelahan jiwa. Ia belum lagi tua. Paling tinggi
empat puluh. Dan kelelahan itu lebih-lebih tampak pada matanya”. Toer, Jejak
 Translation and Literary Mimesis 25

For the rest of his literary career, Pramoedya continued his use of
Steinbeck’s style, including in his Buru Quartet, which consists of four
novels: Bumi Manusia “This Earth of Mankind” (1980), Anak Semua
Bangsa “Child of All Nations” (1980), Jejak Langkah “Footsteps” (1985)
and Rumah Kaca “House of Glass” (1988). These works were published in
Indonesia after his release from political imprisonment in Buru Island.
Acknowledging his adoption of Steinbeck’s form, Pramoedya said: “[it
seems] the technique Steinbeck had bestowed on me [would] become a
permanent possession. . . . Steinbeck arranged his plain, terse, highly
charged words in neat, completed sentences”.18 This later application of
Steinbeck’s style in Pramoedya’s works, however, is not as apparent as it
was in his earlier works. While he is still interested in a simple and
concisely balanced structure with strong visual effects, it is now blended
with other influences in Pramoedya’s own mature formula after a long
journey of writing, which is now a complex hybrid. As we can see in the
following example, Pramoedya still uses the “and” structure in his novel
“Footsteps”, but less frequently:

Semakin menyakitkan. Melihat aku tak menjawab dan menatapnya dengan

pandang menantang, ia tak bertanya lagi. Disorongnya selembar kertas. Ia
menghendaki aku mempelajarinya.19

Even more offensive. Seeing that I was not answering and my eyes were
challenging him, he didn’t ask again. He pulled out a piece of paper. He
wanted me to study it.20

Para siswa yang kutemui sering menanyakan kesehatan istriku. Dari

mataku dan pipiku yang cekung mereka dapat mengerti tanpa kujawab.
Juga mereka ikut berduka cita secara jujur. Bergantian orang datang

Langkah, 228.
“Hope it’s not a mental problem, I prayed in my heart. Working with him in that
case wouldn’t be of much benefit. [And] Mama would never suggest someone
who had mental problems. From his sagging cheeks I guessed he might be
suffering from some nervous exhaustion. He was not old, forty at the most. And
the exhaustion was even more evident in his eyes” Toer, Footsteps, 178.
18
Toer and Anderson, “Perburuan 1950”, 41. “Teknik yang dihadiahkan Steinbeck
padaku tampaknya akan menjadi milik tetap... Steinbeck menderetkan kata-kata
sederhana bermuatan padat, kalimat-kalimat apik dan utuh“. Kurnia, “Pramoedya
Ananta Toer sebagai Kurir Sastra Dunia”, 6.
19
Toer, Jejak Langkah, 8.
20
Toer, Footsteps, 6. The word “sorong” in the source text actually means “to
push”, but Lane translated it as “to pull out”, which results in a stylistically more
faithful rendering.
26 Chapter Two

padaku mengulurkan tangan ikut berduka cita. Satu demi satu tangan
mereka kuterima. Dan tangan-tangan itu dingin seperti hatiku.21

The other students often asked how my wife was feeling. From my sunken
eyes and cheeks, they understood without needing an answer. . . . their
sadness at my loss was also sincere . . . . Each came to me to offer his hand
and to express condolences. One by one I shook their hand. And those
hands were cold like my heart.22

Pramoedya and world literature

Pramoedya’s first translated works were his early short stories, translated
individually into Dutch, Chinese, English, Russian, and French between
1951 and 1969.23 A longer work, Bukan Pasar Malam, was translated into
English by C.W. Watson and published by Cornell University in 1973.
Following this is a more substantial translation of Pramoedya’s works in A
Heap of Ashes, by Harry Aveling, an Australian scholar, in 1975. This
book was published by the University of Queensland Press as part the
Asian and Pacific Writing Series, which was designed “to make accessible
to [international] English readers some of the world’s most exciting and
dynamic literature”.24 This is reflected in the preface written by the general
editor, Michael Wilding:

As a forum for contemporary writers and translators in Asia and the

Pacific, the series will make their work available not only throughout the
countries of that area but to a larger readership in Europe, Africa, and
America. . . . it marks . . . an international mood of literary exploration, an
interest in new forms and new stimuli, a spreading interest in getting to
know other cultures, a determination to break down language and other
barriers that have prevented literary interchange.

After this publication, Aveling also translated Perburuan into English

as The Fugitive, which was published by Heinemann Educational Books in
Hong Kong in the same year (1975). According to Aveling, his
translations of A Heap of Ashes and Perburuan were partly motivated by
Pramoedya’s plight in imprisonment on Buru Island.25 With the limitations
of Pramoedya’s early works, all the translations of his works up to this

21
Toer, Jejak Langkah, 145
22
Toer, Footsteps, 113
23
Toer, The Fugitive (Aveling 1975), 190-2.
24
Wilding, in Heaps of Ashes, 1975.
25
Personal communication, October 2011.
 Translation and Literary Mimesis 27

period seem to have been motivated mainly for literary and cultural
exchange. On this basis, it was primarily the translation that made the
early works become part of the world literature, and thus the role of the
translator (and the publisher) was crucial in the exchange. On the other
hand, it was Steinbeck’s aesthetics that enabled Pramoedya to make stories
that appealed to a wider readership, to capture in detail the element of
cultural difference and offer something new to people across cultures. This
is especially demonstrated with the translation of Perburuan, which
closely resembles Of Mice and Men. Pramoedya’s mimicry was
transformative and creative, as it is in literary hybrids, and the issue of the
originality of the style became secondary. In fact, reflecting on his
selection of Pramoedya for his translation project, Aveling said that
Pramoedya was “a great writer who deserved to be better known”.26
The translation of Pramoedya’s more mature works started in 1982,
two years after Bumi Manusia (“The Earth of Mankind”) was printed and
banned in Indonesia. This novel was translated by Max Lane, an
Australian diplomat, and published by Penguin Books, which resulted in a
surge in Pramoedya’s world readership and reputation. Translations of the
other novels of the Buru Quartet soon followed, while other later works
were translated in 1995. Pramoedya’s works have been noted to have
consistently served “justice, freedom and equality of all humans, and . . .
human worthiness”.27 And with all his contributions to world literature, he
may now be considered as an international writer, just like Steinbeck, his
great precursor and chief literary model.
With his works translated into at least thirty-three languages,
Pramoedya is now widely read around the world. After evolving through a
period of apprenticeship to world authors through translation, Pramoedya
established himself as, first, a well-respected national writer, and, later, an
international literary figure. By translating other authors’ works, especially
Steinbeck’s, he was able to not only have a more intensive interaction with
the source text but also to “own” the source text’s style by his practice of
recreating it in the target text. At the beginning, Pramoedya’s early works
were a somewhat close imitation to the works he had translated, but later
he was able to transform all the styles he had learned into a new form—
Pramoedya’s “own” style. Here one circle of text migration has been
completed through a mimetic process. While world literature has given
Pramoedya a new form of narrative, his hybridization has contributed in
turn to world literature. In this sense, world literature is formed by a

26
Personal communication, 2011.
27
Teew, in Wertheim, 91.
28 Chapter Two

dialectic process, which has only been made possible with translation. The
case of Pramoedya further confirms the central role of translation in world
literature and its formation.

Works Cited
“A Chat with Pramoedya Ananta Toer”. Michigan Today, Summer 1999,
accessed October 6, 2011.
http://michigantoday.umich.edu/99/Sum99/mt9j99.html.
Foulcher, Keith. 2009. “Menjadi Penulis Modern: Penerjemahan dan
Angkatan 45 di Jakarta Masa Revolusi”. In Sadur: Sejarah
Terjemahan di Indonesia dan Malaysia,edited by. Henri Chambert-
Loir, 835-853. Jakarta: Kepustakaan Populer Gramedia.
Kurnia, Anton. April 20, 2009. “Pramoedya Ananta Toer sebagai Kurir
Sastra Dunia”. Last modified http://indonesiabuku.com/?p=377.
Kurniawan, Eka. “Buku, Perang, dan Penjara”. Tokoh. Last modified April
21, 2009. http://suplementokoh.wordpress.com/2009/04/21/buku-
perang-dan-penjara/.
Murtisari, Elisabet T. 2011. “The Uses of Relevance Theory for the Study
of Explicitation and Implicitation: The Case of the Indonesian
Translations of Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and
Men”. PhD thesis, Monash University.
“Pramoedya Ananta Toer”, Lontar Foundation. Accessed September 23,
2011, http://www.lontar.org/index.php?page=author&id=18&lang=en.
Rush, James. R. “Biography of Pramoedya Ananta Toer”. The 1995
Ramon Magsaysay Award for Journalism, Literature and Creative
Communication Arts. Last modified 1995.
http://www.rmaf.org.ph/Awardees/Biography/BiographyPramoedyaAn
a.htm.
Steinbeck, John. 1939 [2000]. Amarah. Translated by Sapardi Djoko
Damono. Jakarta: Obor.
—. 1937 [1970]. Of Mice and Men. London: Penguin Books.
—. 1937 [2003]. Tikus dan Manusia. Translated by Pramoedya Ananta
Toer. Jakarta: Lentera Dipantara.
Teew, A. 1995 [1993]. Pramoedya Ananta Toer: De Verbeelding van
Indonesiɺ. Breda: De Geus, quoted in Wim Wertheim. “Highest Praise
for Pramoedya”. In Pramoedya Ananta Toer. Essays to Honor
Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s 70th year, edited by Bob Hering, 91-3.
Yayasan Kabar Seberang.
—. 1995. “Pramoedya Ananta Toer and the Indonesian language”. In
Pramoedya Ananta Toer 70 Tahun. Essays to Honour Pramoedya
 Translation and Literary Mimesis 29

Ananta Toer’s 70th year, edited by. Bob Hering, 43-60. Yayasan
Kabar Seberang.
Toer, Pramoedya A., and Benedict Anderson. 1983. “Perburuan 1950 and
Keluarga Gerilya 1950”. Indonesia 36 (October): 24-48. Southeast
Asia Program Publications at Cornell University.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/3351025.
Toer, Pramoedya A. 1950/1955. Perburuan. Jakarta: Balai Pustaka.
—. 1975. The Fugitive. Translated by Harry Aveling. Hong Kong:
Heinemann Educational Books (Asia).
—. 1985. Jejak Langkah. Jakarta: Hasta Mitra.
—. 1985/1990. Footsteps. Translated by Max Lane. Ringwood: Penguin
Books.
—. 1995. Keluarga Gerilya. Jakarta: Hasta Mitra.
Wilding, Michael. 1975. Introduction by General Editor to Heap of Ashes,
Pramoedya Ananta Toer. Translated by Harry Aveling. University of
Queensland Press.
 CHAPTER THREE

MYSTICAL TRANSLATION
IN PATRICK WHITE’S VOSS

CHRISTOPHER CONTI

Voss, too, was translated. The numerous creases in his black trousers
appeared to have been sculptured for eternity.1

Patrick White’s Voss consorts with the divine. Its hallucinatory prose
transforms the desert interior of the Australian continent into a numinous
landscape where even “the souls of rocks” are worthy of consideration
(204). The journey across this enchanted landscape implies the work of a
divine translator who reads human action sub specie aeterni, translating
material failure into spiritual success.2 On this painful journey to self-
discovery, to “death by torture in the country of the mind” (475), the
insufficiency of the will to reach spiritual enlightenment is echoed in the
insufficiency of words to express it. The explorers struggle with words in
the desert haze as much as with themselves, for words, like the will,
mortify and betray us as often as they serve us. On the land that resists its
inhabitants, words resist their users, thwarting them to the point where
silence is chosen “as a state preferable to conversation” (132). The
annihilating truth of human subjection to divine power is disclosed at the
limits of words and experience, where only silence speaks truly. But just

1
Patrick White, Voss (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1957), 183. All citations
refer to this edition.
2
See Bliss on the Christian notion of felix culpa or fortunate failure in White’s
novels. For Tacey, alternatively, White’s fixation on the quest for self-extinction by
outsider figures like Voss represents an unrecognised nihilism which White’s
canonizing critics, as much as White himself, must repress behind “the wishful
fantasy of mystical translation”, as McGregor puts it (Eccentric visions, 153).
During makes a similar criticism of White and the so-called literary establishment.
Such oppositional gestures clear the space for critique at the risk of recoiling on the
critic by echoing Voss’s remarks about “the miserable fetish” of Christianity (211).
 Mystical Translation in Patrick White’s Voss 31

as the failure of words to plumb the depths of experience gives them,

paradoxically, the power of transcendence to refer to such depths
symbolically, so the failure of human striving on the temporal plane
indicates the possibility of wholeness on the spiritual plane. The common
structure uniting aesthetic and spiritual experience is negation. The
spiritual communion of Voss and Laura is thus communicated
telepathically, for “[p]eople do not speak in an exchange of souls”, as the
quiet Stan Parker of The Tree of Man knows.3
It is Voss’s conviction in the self-sufficiency or divinity of the will,
however, that attracts and repels those around him. Voss utters words “cast
in metal”, invulnerable to the sneers of men like Turner who “vomited
words” or to those who, “to no earthly avail”, “coughed up their dry souls
in rebounding pea pellets”. The sublime vision of human sovereignty, by
which Voss turns the expedition into his personal coronation party, looms
before him in the sands of human failure like a “granite monolith
untouched”: “It was not possible, really, that anyone could damage the
Idea, however much they scratched it” (48). The colossal remains of
Shelley’s Ozymandias cast their shadow over Voss in the desert,
especially in his encounters with the Aboriginals, who know their harsh
land too well to ever follow the White Man’s terrifying vision of
conquering it. The linguistic gulf yawning between Voss and the
Aboriginals points to a spiritual one, the latter’s superior, primordial grasp
of “the distance between aspiration and human nature” (205).4 The
perilous crossing of the abyss exacts humbling recognition of human
weakness on the spiritual terrain of material life. In translation, as in
spiritual life, one proceeds in the certainty of failure. When Boyle warns
Voss that the Aboriginals Jackie and Dugald are neither “infallible guides”
nor “reliable companions”, Voss replies: “In general, it is necessary to
communicate without knowledge of the language” (181).
White described Voss as the fruit of “a struggle to create completely
fresh forms out of the rocks and sticks of words”.5 A struggle with words
affords the poet a glimpse into the ground of being. Words alone are
inadequate, for “words are not what make you see”, as Arthur words it in

3
White, The Tree of Man, 417.
4
White’s recovery of the classical view of human fallibility in the composite figure
of Christian/Aboriginal/Artist is consistent with the modernist aesthetic project as
outlined by T.E. Hulme and T.S. Eliot. The latent suggestion in Voss that a wisdom
superior to reason is stored in Aboriginal lore is made explicit in David Musgrave’s
Glissando, a carnivalesque parody of Voss in which the “spiritual superiority”
(166) of Aboriginals is expressed in laughter.
5
White, “The Prodigal Son”, 40.
32 Chapter Three

The Solid Mandala.6 Modernism finds its charter for experimentation in

this inadequacy. If words are to serve as vessels of spiritual insight, open
vistas onto the soul’s passional heights and depths, then the language of
the tribe must be wrenched from its everyday uses—as all modernisms
since Baudelaire have insisted. Frank Le Mesurier’s Rimbaud-inspired
prose poems are the novel’s central example of the effort to translate the
mystical truth of the human race into words, a poetry that fuses the
sapienza poetica of Aboriginal myth with Judeo-Christian myth. The lofty
poetry of White’s prose enacts this high purpose for long stretches of the
novel, particularly in descriptions of mortal illness:

Towards morning, Le Mesurier was wrestling with the great snake, his
King, the divine powers of which were not disguised by the earth-colours
of its scales. Friction of days had worn its fangs to a yellow-grey, but it
could arch itself like a rainbow out of the mud of tribulation. At one point
during his struggles, the sick man, or visionary, kissed the slime of the
beast’s mouth, and at once spat out a shower of diamonds. (299-300)

The rainbow serpent of Aboriginal myth merges horizons with western

resurrection myths, as Joan Newman pointed out.7 The rainbow recalls
God’s covenant with Noah after the flood, while the serpent recalls the
soul’s inescapable struggle with evil. The religious legacies of Aboriginal
and Christian are redeemed of their particularity in the language of myth
and located in a common heritage.
The poetic vision of Australia offered in Voss still fascinates and
offends. Its unforgiving judgement of suburban banality seems to reserve
the possibility of deliverance from “the Great Australian Emptiness” to a
select few.8 It has accordingly been hailed as a modern Divine Comedy
that charts the progress of the soul to God and reviled as elitist, pretentious
claptrap. In recent times, the endorsement of White’s mysticism by
Christian critics like Veronica Brady has fallen afoul of postcolonial
critics like Simon During. During indicts White’s novels in the courtroom
of the political unconscious, consigning them to the racist attitudes of the
past. “White’s primitivist use of Aboriginality in Voss” is all of a piece, for
During, with colonialist “descriptions of indigenous peoples that smoothed
the way for their conquest and naturalised their subjugation”.9 If White’s
racism is all the more harmful for its subtlety, then his vaunted mysticism

6
White, Solid Mandala, 51.
7
Newman, “The Significance of Christian Myth”, 116.
8
White, “The Prodigal Son”, 38.
9
During, Patrick White, 31.
 Mystical Translation in Patrick White’s Voss 33

lies at the root of the offence, underwriting the colonialist attitudes it

feigns to undermine. Perhaps aware that the charge of unconscious racism
is unlikely to stick—as it is virtually impossible to reply to—During levels
a related charge at the conscious calculation of Patrick White: The
mystical trimmings of White’s novels, which artfully manipulate the
transcendentalist assumptions of Cold War academic discourse, amount to
a stage managed bid for canonization. During’s own bid to establish the
radical credentials of postcolonial criticism takes aim at a Patrick White
metonymically fused with White Australia. Bringing down the big name
of Australian literature would then qualify as critique.
What caught the attention of the novel’s first reviewers and critics was
not its racism, which went wholly undetected, but its language, a densely
lyrical medium notoriously dismissed by A.D. Hope as “pretentious and
illiterate verbal sludge”.10 White had presumed to judge the Australian
character in luxurious prose that snubbed the prevailing conventions of
realism, and Hope could not forgive him for pitching his tent on the high
ground of artistic modernism. White reports in a letter that he wrote the
novel “drunk with music”, mostly Mahler, with Alban Berg’s Violin
Concerto on the gramophone during the composition of Laura’s illness.
Voss is an Expressionist epic penned in “the textures of music, the
sensuousness of paint”, its metaphysical theme and characters infused with
“what Delacroix and Blake might have seen, what Mahler and Liszt might
have heard”.11 The treatment in anti-naturalistic prose of treasured
historical material like the inland explorers confounded readers and
reviewers alike, “as if White were guilty of Un-Australian Activities”,
quipped James McCauley in Southerly.12
Distinguishing aestheticism from mysticism in Voss remains a
challenge to criticism, though White may well have deemed the task
redundant. Wary of the schemas of academic critics, of “Educated men
[that] bleach the meaning out of words”, as Amy Parker puts it, he made a
point of entrusting his work to the intuitions of his readers.13 But such a
task lies in the critic’s path like a sphinx. Does the riddle of the novel hold
the secret to the modern search for meaning or clumsily impose the
passion play over it? Is the code of its symbolism progressive or
reactionary? With greater sympathy for its symbolist design than During,
McCauley identified the problem of Voss as a failure to master the
implications of its central theme, which gave expression to a tension in

10
White, Patrick White: Letters, 105.
11
Marr, Patrick White: A Life, 318.
12
McCauley, “The Gothic Splendours”, 37.
13
White, The Tree of Man, 401.
34 Chapter Three

civilization apparent since Rousseau. The novel’s metaphysical framework

is designed to encompass the twin goals of modern thought: mastery over
nature and the realization of freedom. Voss’s titanic quest for autonomy,
to prove not just his independence from God and the religions of the past
but his superiority over them, dramatises the foundational event of
modernity. In Voss’s doomed bid for apotheosis, White questions the
legitimacy of the modern age, at least in its defiantly promethean posture,
from the standpoint of the classical religious view of human fallibility.
White compromises this framework, according to McCauley, in satirical
portraits of colonial life in Sydney that ironize “the fuzz of faith” (9) and
betray “the wary avoidance of ultimate commitment on the issues involved
that pervades the book”.14 The symbolic edifice of Voss wilts in the desert
landscape under an expressionist sun.
McCauley might have found confirmation for his suggestion in a 1958
letter of White’s confessing to passing acquaintance with Nietzsche and
Conrad, on the one hand, and saturation in Rimbaud, on the other hand.
Voss had suggested to its first reviewers the large-scale critiques of
western modernity in Nietzsche and Conrad, leaving White apologetic
“that I have not read half the people of whom I remind them”.15 A cold
bath in Conrad might have sobered White’s aestheticism, alerting him to
the decadence lurking within it. Rimbaud was one of the models for Kurtz
in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, which charts the descent into barbarism
that follows the rejection of the laws of civilization.16 Shedding one’s
detested civilised skin liberates only the barbarian. The positions of
Conradian critique gather in the background of White’s novel only to

14
Ibid., 43. Bliss (Patrick White’s Fiction, 11-12) suggests White’s irony—
regarding the personal failings of his characters and the expressive failings of
words thematised in his fiction—ultimately catches up with him. If failure is the
precondition of growth in White’s moral-spiritual universe, a failure that defines
individuality even as it promises transcendence of it, then White, the writer of
uniquely expressive prose, would seem caught in his own conviction in the
inadequacy of words, for he, too, could only succeed by failing.
15
White, Patrick White: Letters, 129.
16
As Ian Watt (Conrad, 164) points out, “Kurtz is a poet, a painter, a political
radical, a man with the power of words; and in his final liberation from all the
constraints of civilisation, he becomes a symbolic parallel to the career of Arthur
Rimbaud, who, in Verlaine’s words, had aspired ‘to be that man who will create
God’, but who turned his back on European civilization in 1875”. See Brady
(“Novelist and the New World”, 178), however, for an account of the moral
perception encoded in White’s aestheticism. The poetic emphasis in Voss on the
sheer mineral mass of the land, its granite compaction and quartz-like hardness,
exerts corrective resistance to the Romantic will.
 Mystical Translation in Patrick White’s Voss 35

disband, it seems, before the decapitation of Voss and the slaying of the
team horses by the Aboriginals. The scenes of ritual slaughter have piqued
critics who see in them little but racist depictions of tribal atavism, as if
they lay bare the reactionary politics of literary modernism and of the
patrician Patrick White. The decree written in the skies by the Great Snake
to behead the rival divinity of Romantic egotism disperses in the rarefied
spheres of modernist myth. Worse still, the killing of Voss by “savages”
sets off a chain of historical associations, reaching back to the slaying of
Captain Cook, that recall the very imperial myths of conquest the novel
had tried to displace. Like the myths of civilizing imperialism, White’s
mythmaking scandalously “inverts the historical reality of the mass
killings of Aboriginals”, insists Michael Wilding. Voss takes its place in
the shameful history of imperial lies as a late exemplar of decadent
modernism, its hollow symbolism an ideal medium for the subliminal
message “mystic European killed by Aboriginals”.17
Contemporary academic pieties consequently frown upon the marriage
of Aboriginal and Christian mysticism carried off in the ceremonial
symbolism of Voss. Such a marriage, scorned as miscegenation, sullies the
chosen ideal of cultural difference, which conceives cultural autonomy on
the model of an untranslateable essence. Even the attempt to understand
cultural difference outside the preferred terms of postcolonial criticism is
deemed reactionary. In accordance with those terms, the focus of critical
attention is seldom permitted to shift from the margins of the novel, that
charmed zone of blindness (the author’s) and insight (the critic’s) that
grounds the politics of difference as surely as any a priori. During directs
our attention to the margins of Voss so as to scold its representation of
Indigenous Australians, thus barring access to the novel’s central
metaphysical theme. The daunting task of grappling with White’s
immense novels, not to mention the bad conscience felt at shirking it, is
passed over in a sleight of hand. After all, metaphysics and symbolism
merely disguise White’s bid for critical approbation and whitewash all
claims to Aboriginal autonomy, or so runs the argument. In the case of
postcolonialism, the enormous condescension of posterity falls on the
recent past. For During, White “fictionalises contemporary Aboriginal life
away” when he fails to supply the Aboriginal guides with “a sense of
Aboriginal society and culture on its own terms”.18 He takes the scene
where Boyle introduces Voss to Dugald and Jackie as exemplary of such
whitewashing:

17
Wilding, “Patrick White: The Politics of Modernism”, 230.
18
During, Patrick White, 100, 32.
36 Chapter Three

In other circumstances, Voss would have liked to talk to these creatures.

Alone, he and the blacks would have communicated with one another by
skin and silence, just as dust is not impenetrable and the message of sticks
can be interpreted after hours of intimacy. But in the presence of Brenden
Boyle, the German was the victim of his European, or even his human
inheritance. (182)

Here, the inference, During suggests, is that “the Blacks are not really
human—Voss’s ‘human inheritance’, forced upon him by Boyle’s
presence, stands between him and the Aboriginals. This is to repeat the
metaphor that has done a great deal of political and ideological work in
Australia . . . The notion that indigenous peoples belong more to nature
than to humanity has helped discount their prior claims to the country”.19
No attempt is made to translate the narrative perspective, which is largely
Voss’s, into the sort of critical potential During claims to look for but in
fact refuses to see. Voss, like Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, hopes to slough
off his hated religious heritage the moment he is free of the constraining
influence of his peers. His sneering allusion to his own merely human
inheritance sums up the evolutionary optimism of the mid-nineteenth
century Victorian conviction in human perfectionism. The Blacks (Dugald
and Jackie) are not denied their humanity or cultural inheritance in this
passage; rather, the Whites (Voss and Boyle) are lumbered with theirs. For
Voss, humanity is not an honorific term but merely the extent of the
problem to be overcome, a point During concedes only to dismiss as
modernist transcendentalism.
I want to address these criticisms of the supposed cultural insensitivity
of White’s modernism from the standpoint of the novel’s central
metaphysical concerns, or from what might be called its figure of
“mystical translation”, to rescue Gaile McGregor’s term from her Freudian
use of it.20 White’s Aboriginals are bearers of a sapienza poetica lost to
modern Europeans, a point dramatised in scenes re-enacting the historical
moment of first contact and Jackie’s translation of the sacred meaning of
the cave paintings. When During traps White in the politics of
representation he neglects to ask why White sets such store on the
recovery this wisdom. For White, the intuitive wisdom of Aboriginal
myth, which can only be accessed by poetry and art, opens a path to
spiritual insight all but closed to Western rationalism. Hence the “superior,
almost godlike mien” (363) of the Aboriginals and the recoil of racist

19
Ibid., 31.
20
McGregor, Eccentric visions, 153.
 Mystical Translation in Patrick White’s Voss 37

utterances in the novel on the dim whitefellas who utter them.21 White’s
intention, at any rate, is to redeem the mythopoeic relevance of Aboriginal
culture, not fictionalise it away. Given the historical setting of the novel,
the criticism of White for failing to represent Indigenous Australians in a
contemporary setting seems obtuse. For During only a portrait of
Aboriginal banality, not Aboriginal spirituality, could support the
progressive claim for Aboriginal Land Rights, a movement that begins in
earnest a decade after the publication of Voss. Allegations of primitivism
should be framed within the critique of primitivism already offered in the
novel, however. Refocusing on the novel’s metaphysical framework
promises a fairer hearing for such charges than is available in the
courtroom of the political unconscious. The visionary communication of
Voss and Laura, the totemic kangaroo and Rainbow Serpent of Le
Mesurier’s prose poems can then be viewed as examples of “mystical
translation” that bear the potential for intercultural understanding. Frank’s
prose poems distil the wider narrative effort to translate mystical
experience into the hybrid form of myth, thereby implying that Christ and
the Rainbow Serpent are masks of the same God even as we know the tail
in the sky in fact belongs to a comet.
From the start Voss feels that he alone is able to grasp the
metaphysical significance of the expedition. Amidst the bustle of
commercial expansion, the colonial Sydney represented by Mr Bonner is
blind to matters of the spirit. Only Laura Trevelyan, solitary, cerebral,
spiritual, sees into the perverse heart of the expedition from her position
outside the giddy whirl of her social circle. Sensing disaster, Laura tells
Voss, “[t]his expedition of yours is pure will”, to which he concedes: “It
would be better that I should go barefoot, and alone. I know. But it is
useless to try to convey to others the extent of that knowledge” (74). Each
member of the expedition team is selected as a sacrificial lamb to “this
strange, seemingly inconceivable idea” (44) of radical autonomy or self-
sufficiency. Frank Le Mesurier grasps something of the hidden purpose of
the expedition, but is recruited—or seduced—by a vision of scorching
purity draped over the corrupt truth of “human substance” (39). “You will

21
In this ironic recoil, racist prejudice is repudiated as the product of inferior
minds, befitting the likes of Robarts, Boyle and Angus but not Voss, Laura,
Palfreyman or Le Mesurier. The contrast between Angus and Le Mesurier in the
following exchange is typical: “‘Did you ever see such a filthy race?’ asked Ralph
Angus, whose strength and looks prevented him from recognizing anything except
in his own admirable image. ‘We do not understand them yet’, said Le Mesurier”
(218). The critique of ethnocentrism indispensable to postcolonialism is available
in Voss, just not in the affirmative form of social realism.
38 Chapter Three

be burnt up most likely, you will have the flesh torn from your bones, and
you will be tortured probably in many horrible ways, but you will realize
that genius of which you sometimes suspect you are possessed, and of
which you will not tell me you are afraid” (38-39). To an educated young
man like Frank Le Mesurier, adrift in the backwaters of 1830s Australia,
Voss’ fiery words, smouldering with promethean defiance, are a tonic to
his need for distinction against the common grain of men.
The arrogant German hero of White’s Australian epic is as foreign to
the colonial society of 1840s Australia as White felt himself to be in mid-
twentieth century Australia. White voiced his misgivings about a culture
that faced away from its interior and clung to the coast, with all the
connotations of callowness such a stance implied, in the figure of the
scornful German: “‘It is a pity that you huddle,’ said the German. ‘Your
country is of great subtlety’” (13). The inability of the Bonners to see into
the depths of Voss is a measure of the shallowness of the society they
figure in so prominently. The brooding German cuts an awkward figure at
a social event in Point Piper, embarrassing his patron, Mr Bonner: “Some
pitied him. Some despised him for his funny appearance of a foreigner.
None, he realized . . . was conscious of his strength” (67). Despite the
“almost mystical banality” of the conversation at Point Piper (66), Voss
earlier declines lunch at the Bonners with a pang of longing for ordinary
fellowship, in a scene that foreshadows the ritual of communion taken in
the desert when Voss, humbled at last, eats witchetty grubs in an
Aboriginal ceremony imbued with transcultural significance: “The German
began to think of the material world which his egotism had made him
reject. In that world men and women sat at a round table and broke bread
together. At times, he admitted, his hunger was almost unbearable” (39).
Spiritual hunger finds little nourishment in the aloof stance of the anti-
humanist.
What makes Voss so foreign is less his nationality than his radical
modernism. The extent of his Kultur can be measured by the strength of
his desire to be rid of it, or of that detested religious part of his heritage
that would limit his autonomy. The mere idea of humility strikes him like
an attack of nausea, recalling Hegel’s use of the Christian at prayer to
illustrate his notion of alienation in The Philosophy of Right. Voss’s
attitude to Christianity is more complex than his ridicule of it suggests,
however. He is drawn to Brother Müller, Laura Bonner and Palfreyman
because their faith enables them to grasp the promethean nature of his
undertaking. The bold adventurer to foreign climes, motivated by the
utopian conviction in the boundless character of human achievement,
recalls Alexander von Humboldt, though the goal of Voss’s expedition is
 Mystical Translation in Patrick White’s Voss 39

not geographical but metaphysical, for “[k]nowledge was never a matter of

geography” but “overflows all maps that exist” (475). Proof of radical
autonomy means nothing less than his apotheosis. “Voss’s goal”, observes
Carolyn Bliss, “which becomes ludicrous as soon as it is formulated, is to
usurp the throne of heaven”.22 Voss’s vainglorious self-estimation is so at
odds with the natural order of things that he verges on being a comic
character, as C.S. Lewis said of Milton’s Satan.
The Satanic or German Romantic influence on White was noted by
Harry Heseltine when he called Voss the first Australian Übermensch.23
Voss’s philosophy of the will seems to stride straight off the pages of
Nietzsche, though White denied the influence.24 Ingmar Björksten thus
suggested White got his Nietzsche via Schopenhauer,25 though David Marr
fingers Spengler as the more likely suspect.26 At any rate, the uncertain
character of White’s debt to German Romanticism made Voss “one of the
most misunderstood epic works of the twentieth century”.27 Thomas
Tabbert’s monograph on the extent of the Faust motif in Voss, from its
hidden quotations of Goethe’s Faust to the allusion to the Faust motif in
the title, solves the scholar’s puzzle.28 The feminist and postcolonial
arguments that Laura and the Aboriginals are extras in the drama of a
white man’s salvation lose force in the light of the Faust motif, not least
because everyone is a supernumerary from Voss’s Faustian point of view.
Newman had already pointed out that the Christian myth of life in death
“is not only Voss’s story, for all men and women in the narrative are
shown to partake of the same struggle”.29 Nevertheless, the supernatural
communication between Voss and Laura in the desert, and the redemption
of Voss by Laura’s love, finds a precedent in the Faust motif that allows us
to set aside an otherwise awkward claim to its spiritual realism or, indeed,
its occultism. More broadly, the Faust myth gives expression to the

22
Bliss, Patrick White’s Fiction, 65.
23
Heseltine, Patrick White: Voss, 392.
24
White, Patrick White: Letters, 413.
25
Björksten, Patrick White, 59-60.
26
Marr, Patrick White: A Life, 151.
27
Scheller, “Voss by Patrick White”, 100.
28
Voss’s remark that“[k]nowing so much, I shall know everything” (30) translates
Wagner’s line from Goethe’s Faust: “Zwar weiss ich viel, doch möcht ich alles
wissen”. As Tabbert points out, after the minor nineteenth century German poet
Julius von Voss wrote Faust, Trauerspiel mit Gesang und Tanz (1823), a play that
influenced Heinrich Heine’s Faust ballet and was “rediscovered” in 1899, the name
“Voss” became synonymous with the Faust motif. White spoke German and paid
extended vists to Germany in the 1930s.
29
Newman, “The Significance of Christian Myth”, 114.
40 Chapter Three

Titanism of modernity, including our worries over the profane reach of

knowledge, in a coherent structure that implies social criticism.
In the tradition of European reactions to the antipodes Voss conceives
Australia on the basis of the sublime. Australia’s distance from European
civilization promises to unchain the self from its customary limitations.
“In this disturbing country”, Voss tells Frank Le Mesurier with some
dramatic irony, “it is possible more easily to discard the inessential and to
attempt the infinite” (38). The Aboriginals initially appear as prophets in
this vision, as they do in Rousseau: “Thus elevated, their spare, elongated
bodies, of burnt colours, gave to the scene a primitive purity that silenced
most of the whites, and appealed particularly to Voss” (362). Voss’s
conviction in the primitive goodness of the self inspires a belief in his
spiritual kinship with the Aboriginals. His crowning fantasy of mastering
Jackie’s “unimpaired innocence” (385) to become King of the Blacks must
be understood as a damning critique of Romanticism, its “bungling of
divinity” (286), in the framework of the Faust myth. The Christian poetics
of Beast and Man, salvation and damnation, et cetera that White avails
himself of in Voss further complicates the charge of primitivism, as all the
characters are referred to as trapped in their creaturely condition. “It was
[only] the mules and a few surviving horses that deserved pity, for these
were without benefit of illusion” (382).30
White’s hypnotic narration of the crucial desert sequences makes the
task of isolating his view of events from Voss’s a difficult one, however.
The fusion of mysticism and critique in the following passage, for
example, bedevils the novel: “Voss was jubilant as brass. Cymbals
clapped drunkenly. Now he had forgotten words, but sang his jubilation in
a cracked bass, that would not have disgraced temples, because dedicated
to God” (153). Is Voss simply deluded or is the supervention of the fallen
distinction between word and concept experienced in his jubilation
something “dedicated to God”? The ensuing reference to his conviction in
his divinity suggests the former, but White’s poetics nonetheless carves
out a space in his Faustian framework for a notion of intuition or
transcendence. Mirages in the landscape are thus also symbols of the
human need for illusion. Nietzsche’s aesthetic theodicy, which justifies the
need for illusion (or art and culture) as central to the capacity for enduring
suffering, a capacity more crucial to human vitality than the quest for
truth, is thereby recalled. As the explorers approach their physical limits,
“words that did not belong to them—illuminating, true, naked words—had

30
By contrast, the social realism of Katherine Susannah Prichard’s 1929 novel
Coonardoo refers to Aboriginals in animal metaphors that imply the sort of
evolutionary racism During objects to in White; see Corbould.
 Mystical Translation in Patrick White’s Voss 41

a habit of coming out” (355). Moments later the explorers lie down in the
grass with “wizened stomachs” to sing songs and “eat dreams” (356),
recalling the Lotus Eaters: “the land was celebrating their important
presence with green grass that stroked the horses’ bellies, or lay down
beneath them in green swathes”, until “the eyes of the men became sated
with the green of those parklands” (355). The land proves to be the
graveyard of such illusions, unyielding in its opposition to the utopian
strivings of the Romantic will. Here, however, it flatters to deceive, the
Aboriginals appearing on the scene like images from a reverie of
Rousseau’s:

Into this season of grass, game and songs burst other signs of victorious
life. In a patch of scrub stood a native, singing, stamping, and gesticulating
with a spear . . . Three or four companions were grouped about the singer
in the bower of the scrub, but the others were more diffident, or else they
lacked the gift to express their joy.
“He is doubtless a poet”, said Voss, who had grown quite excited.
“What is the subject of his song, Jackie?”
But Jackie could not, or would not say. . . .
Voss rode across, sustained by a belief that he must communicate
intuitively with these black subjects, and finally rule them with a sympathy
that was above words. (356)

Jackie declines to translate what is surely an unwelcome message.

Once again, the enchanted landscape of the narration merges with Voss’s
distorted view of events, fusing mysticism and madness. If Voss, by virtue
of his position as outsider, does indeed possess an intuitive bond with the
Aboriginals, then how do we reconcile it with his delusions of grandeur?
The enlightened decision to forbid any shooting after the killing of
Palfreyman, for example, is motivated by Voss’s fantasy that the Blacks
are “his” people (365), a delusion built on contempt for the memory of
pious German peasants scraping their knees in prayer. His fantasy of
taking the devoted Jackie as a “footstool” (385) suggests that the
primitivism in the novel is largely his, part and parcel of a Romantic god
delusion which reduces “all the members of the party” to “emanations of
the one man, their leader” (382). Even Frank Le Mesurier fades to an echo
in Voss’s mind. If we tug too hard at this seam, or assume Voss enjoys his
author’s approval, the symbolic design begins to unravel. The problem
emerges because of the deliberate blurring of narrative perspectives in
White’s poetics. If to McCauley this blurring was down to White’s failure
to master the intellectual implications of his theme, to During the failure
went deeper, and lay in the metaphysical theme itself.
42 Chapter Three

Voss’s supreme conviction falters when he reads Frank’s poems. The

aestheticism of Frank’s prose poems should not distract us from the
critique of Romantic egotism they imply. They bear the stamp of
Rimbaud, but they also grasp the unfolding of events as a re-enactment of
the spiritual history of the human race as a Fortunate Fall (see Bliss).
Frank confesses to Voss, “the mystery of life is not solved by success,
which is an end in itself, but in failure, in perpetual struggle, in becoming”
(289). Frank’s poems prefigure the sacrificial death of Voss in an ancient
rite, a blood sacrifice to an earth goddess that restores the land to fertility.
They offer not just an alternative to Voss’s arrogant view of Aboriginal
peoples as noble savages, but fuse an image of Christian and Aboriginal
divinity that reduces Voss to spluttering indignation.

They chase this kangaroo, and when they have cut off his pride, and
gnawed his charred bones, they honour him in ochre on a wall. Where is
his spirit? They say: It has gone out, it has gone away, it is everywhere. O
God, my God, I pray that you will take my spirit out of this my body’s
remains, and after you have scattered it, grant that it shall be everywhere,
and in the rocks, and in the empty waterholes, and in true love of all men,
and in you, O god, at last. (316-17)

The presiding divinity here is more pagan than Christian, invoked in

pastoral poetry from Theocritus to Wordsworth. Importantly for White, the
mediator of this spirituality is the artist. The kangaroo of Frank’s poem
was inspired by the ochre kangaroo on the cave walls and Jackie’s
translation of it. Voss baulks at the sight of the ochre kangaroo on the wall
as he does when he sees it again in Frank’s poem.

Under the influence of the reverent light, the black boy was murmuring,
but in his own tongue, because he was moved. . . .
Then Voss caught sight of the drawings.
“What do these signify, Jackie?” he asked.
The boy was explaining, in his own language, assisted by a forefinger.
“Verfluchte Sprachen!” cried the German.
For he was doubly locked in language. . . .
The man was yielding himself up to the simplicity of the drawings.
Henceforth all words must be deceitful, except those sanctioned by
necessity, the guardrail of language. . . . Although initiated by sympathy
into the mystery of the drawings . . . the German did retreat from the
kangaroo. (292-93)

Voss is doubly locked in language, his own and Jackie’s, because

language remains external to the mysterious workings of inner life, which
 Mystical Translation in Patrick White’s Voss 43

is ruled by laws autonomous of the language of outer perception. As

Thelma Parker discovers in The Tree of Man, “people do not or are not
able to tell what is flickering in them”.31 For this reason, Kafka remarked,
“[t]he inner world can only be experienced, not described”.32 The language
of inner or spiritual life is foreign to us all, “locked” as we are in the
anthropomorphic cells of conceptual discourse. Yet if the experience of
inner life is to be understood at all it requires translation out of its native
aesthetic language and into the conceptual and perceptual language of
outer life, a translation informed by the translator’s sure sense of how
words and concepts both mislead and guide insight, when they speak
falsely and when, “sanctioned by necessity, the guardrail of language”,
truly. Conceptual understanding, tempered with the awareness that all
knowledge is imperfect translation, remains the goal. The sign of
successful translation would not be greater ability to manipulate the world,
however, but greater awareness of the exercise of that ability, especially its
limits. The cave paintings thus translate us. The implication that
Aboriginals, communicating as much by “skin and silence” as by words
(182), are superior translators of the elemental language of spirituality
need not be filed away under the ambiguous heritage of the noble savage,
even if it remains in need of careful extraction from it.
Jackie’s chanting suggests a sacred relationship to the cave paintings,
which he can express in his own tongue but not fully translate. An initial
effort at translation at the mouth of the cave brings a smile to Jackie’s face
because he “could not explain his instincts” (292). There is nothing subtly
racist about this remark, for Voss, too, requires his instincts to make sense
of the cave paintings, one of which unlocks a childhood memory of flying
kites attached with messages. With this image, he begins to understand
Jackie’s translation of a second painting of the souls of ancestors:

“Men gone away all dead”, the boy explained. “All over”, he waved his
arm. “By rock. By Tree. No more men”, he said . . . “No more nothink . . .
Wind blow big, night him white, this time these feller dead men. They
come out. Usfellar no see. They everywhere”.
So that the walls of the cave were twanging with the whispers of the
tangled kites. The souls of men were only waiting to come out.
“Now I understand”, said Voss gravely.
He did. To his fingertips. He felt immensely happy. (293)

31
White, The Tree of Man, 354.
32
Kafka, The Blue Octavo Notebooks, 15.
44 Chapter Three

Voss grasps the spiritual meaning of the cave paintings when he reads
them as omens. He warms to the second because he reads in it a portent of
immortality, just as he retreats from the first because the kangaroo recalls
the image of God with a spear in its side, the divinity that rivals his own.
The passage implies aesthetic experience operates as an act of translation,
presupposing a wordless or instinctive sympathy at the basis of acts of
intercultural understanding. By “sympathy” (293) I take White to mean
empathy, the German for which is Einfühlung or “feeling into”. Frank’s
poem reaches back to the primordial act of artistic comprehension, the
cave painting, and reaches forward to the likes of Willie Pringle, the
fledgling artist whose initials invert Patrick White’s.33 It opposes a fusion
of Aboriginal and Christian spirituality to the Faustian claim of modernity.
Frank’s aesthetic attempt to make sense of his encounter with the
Aboriginals, with the place of their culture in his, is a version of White’s.
Such openness is at its profoundest when Romantic egotism is brought
down to earth. “Humility is my brigalow”, writes Frank; “Now that I am
nothing, I am, and love is the simplest of all tongues” (314).
White’s vision of Aboriginal spirituality is central to the novel’s
redemptive design. During insists we see Aboriginal culture with
Aboriginal eyes, but we can only ever see the difference he insists we
respect, the foreignness of another culture, with our own eyes. The
otherness of another culture is disclosed to us from a position outside that
culture. We grasp another culture in acts of translation that do not lose
footing in our own, in this case Christian, culture. Creative understanding,
Bakhtin reminds us, “does not renounce itself, its own place in time, its
own culture; and it forgets nothing . . . It is only in the eyes of another
culture that foreign culture reveals itself fully and profoundly. A meaning
only reveals its depths once it has encountered and come into contact with
another, foreign meaning: they engage in a kind of dialogue, which
surmounts the closedness and one-sidedness of these particular meanings,
these cultures . . . Without one’s own questions one cannot creatively
understand anything other or foreign”.34
For White, as for T.E. Hulme and T.S. Eliot, tradition individualises
where banality de-individualises, whether that tradition (or banality) be
Christian, Aboriginal or literary. The Aboriginal characters in Voss are
therefore not released from their duty as bearers of tradition or seen in the
condition of Aboriginal banality called for by During. If the noble savage
is the twin of the Romantic Ego, then White’s desert Aboriginal is the twin

33
Thanks to Professor Leon Cantrell for this observation.
34
Bakhtin, “Response to a Question from the Novy Mir”, 7.
 Mystical Translation in Patrick White’s Voss 45

of the classical modernist. The desert Aboriginal, like the classical

modernist, sees in nature the divine limit of human mastery. White’s
spiritualising poetics, which touches everything in the novel and not just
the indigenous characters, resists rather than underwrites the
conceptualising formulas of colonialist discourse and the utopian desire of
vanquishing nature that convulses the modern project. Pace During, the
empty continental interior is spiritualised in Voss as an abyss that
swallows the colonial project rather than supports it with an image of terra
nullius. “[I]t seems that this country”, says businessman Bonner early in
the novel, “will prove most hostile to anything in the nature of planned
development” (67). These figures of autonomy are united in the image of
the ochre kangaroo, where Symbolist art, Aboriginal song lines and
Christian myth meet as bulwarks against the Faustian ambition of
Enlightenment reason. White’s indigenes are servants not of Voss or the
white colonisers but of the land, of a principle of divine necessity that
resists the promethean will and desire of the modernity-bearing colonisers.
In fact, Voss is helpless to prevent the ritual slaying of his promethean
ambitions in “a high old Mass” (180), ironically foreshadowed by Boyle,
performed by the Aboriginal ministers of an ancient, sacred land. Far from
being envoys of a dying culture, the indigenous characters in Voss are
agents of necessity that correct and temper the promethean self-assertion
of the modern project.

Works Cited
Bakhtin, M.M. 1986. “Response to a Question from the Novy Mir Editorial
Staff”. In Speech Genres & Other Late Essays, edited by Caryl
Emerson and Michael Holquist, 1-9. Translated by Vern W. McGee.
Austin: University of Texas Press.
Björksten, Ingmar. 1976. Patrick White: A General Introduction.
Translated by Stanley Gerson. St. Lucia: University of Queensland
Press.
Bliss, Carolyn. 1986. Patrick White’s Fiction: The Paradox of Fortunate
Failure. Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Brady, Veronica. 1979. “The Novelist and the New World”. Texas Studies
in Literature and Language 21.2: 169-185.
Corbould, Clare. 1999. “Rereading Radical Texts: Coonardoo and the
Politics of Fiction”. Australian Feminist Studies 14, 30: 415-424.
During, Simon. 1996. Patrick White. Melbourne: Oxford University Press.
Heseltine, Harry. 1965. Patrick White: Voss. London: Heritage of
Literature Series.
46 Chapter Three

Kafka, Franz. 1991. The Blue Octavo Notebooks, edited by Max Brod.
Translated by Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins. Cambridge: Exact
Change.
Marr, David. 1991. Patrick White: A Life. Sydney: Random House.
McCauley, James. 1970. “The Gothic Splendours: Patrick White’s Voss”.
In Ten Essays on Patrick White, edited by G.A. Wilkes, 35-46.
Sydney: Angus & Robertson.
McGregor, Gaile. 1994. Eccentric visions: re constructing Australia.
Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfrid Laurier University Press.
Musgrave, David. 2010. Glissando: A Melodrama. Collingwood: Sleepers
Press.
Newman, Joan. 1995. “The Significance of Christian Myth Structures in
Voss”. In Prophet from the Desert: critical essays on Patrick White,
edited by John McLaren and Mary-Ellen Ryan, 106-117. Melbourne:
Red Hill Press.
Scheller, Bernhard. 1994. “Voss by Patrick White—a Novel about
Leichhardt?” In Australia: Studies on the History of Discovery and
Exploration, edited by H. Lampe and M. Linke, 99-103.
Frankfurt/Main.
Tabbert, Thomas T. 2005. Voss as epitome: The Faust Motif in Patrick
White’s novel “Voss” and the Meaning of its Title. Hamburg: Artslife
Press.
Tacey, David J. 1988. Patrick White: Fiction and the Unconscious.
Melbourne: Oxford University Press.
Watt, Ian. 1979. Conrad in the Nineteenth Century. Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press.
White, Patrick. 1994. Patrick White: Letters, edited by David Marr.
Sydney: Random House.
—. 1958. “The Prodigal Son”. Australian Letters 1.3 (April): 37-40.
—. 1966. The Solid Mandala. London: Eyre & Spottiswoode.
—. 1956. The Tree of Man. London: Eyre & Spottiswoode.
—. 1957. Voss. London: Eyre & Spottiswoode.
Wilding, Michael. 1997. “Patrick White: The Politics of Modernism”. In
Studies in Classic Australian Fiction, 221-231. Sydney Studies in
Society and Culture; Nottingham, UK: Shoestring Press.
 CHAPTER FOUR

TRANSLATING GIOVANNA CAPUCCI’S

TWIN TOWERS: POESIE—
SOUND AND SENSE

GILLIAN ANIA

Published in January 2002, only four months after the 9/11 attacks on
New York, Giovanna Capucci’s Twin Towers: poesie is a collection of 39
poems, written as a response to the images which dominated television
screens worldwide for so many hours, days and weeks. The poems are all
short (ranging between 5 and 19 lines), and each one focuses on a different
moment or aspect of the attack. They move from “frames” of the attack
itself to the aftermath and its multifarious consequences, and through
different perspectives, such as those of victim, witness, viewer, or
outsider. Each poem represents what we might see as a stage in the poet’s
unfolding conception of the whole, a sort of “working through” of
distressing images and realities—that is, as conveyed by the media, and
interpreted through personal sensitivities.1
The raw nature of the material implies expressions of shock, disbelief
and compassion, as well as of anger, outrage, and condemnation.
Nevertheless many poems manage to stay “light” in tone suggesting that
the emotions engaged have been channelled into their poetic shapes,
though a degree of reflection on the part of the poet.2 While some scenes
of horror are depicted starkly, even grotesquely, most are evoked through

1
Michael Heller has observed, in this connection, that poetry is “ever sensitive to
the nuances of its surroundings”, the poet “picking up the signals” around him or
her and “putting them somewhere into the work”; see Heller, Uncertain Poetries,
xiv.
2
One is reminded of Wordsworth’s definition of poetry, that it is “the spontaneous
overflow of powerful feelings”, and yet “takes its origin from emotion recollected
in tranquillity”; Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1802), in Poetical Works of
Wordsworth, 740.
48 Chapter Four

analogies, common objects and parallels, mementoes and buildings, with

subjects both human and animal, all affected by, and contributing to, the
significance and momentum of the Twin Towers disaster, then, as now.
The poems unfold like a narrative, with early references to details of
the crash (flames, smoke, black clouds) and later references to its effects
(grief, anger, fear, extended TV debates). Moreover, themes and metaphors
recur, as they are developed or modified, strengthened or questioned, from
the earlier to the later poems, with sound assisting, conveying or
determining sense.3 However the poetic medium further serves to isolate,
or throw into relief, particular moments of the drama, and—through the
ambiguities of language, the use of metaphor, juxtapositions and
oppositions—highlights aspects such as the confusion surrounding
attributions of responsibility, cause and effect. Metaphor, indeed,
characterizes almost half of the 39 poems, with contexts ranging, as we
will see here, from the Day of Judgement and the Apocalypse, to animals,
“falling”, and the media.
It was after reading and thinking about the first twelve or so poems,
appreciating the poet’s perceptiveness, the way she had distilled the
essence of the tragedy into these short lines, that I began to translate some
of them into English, going on, indeed, to complete the collection.4 The
poems employ assonance, rhyme and alliteration for their penetrative
effects, and thus, in embarking on their translation, I was aware that
equivalence or correspondence across all fronts would rarely be
achievable. On the other hand, however, the absence of formal metrical or
rhyme schemes proved helpful.5 In initial drafts I followed my instincts
and sought primarily to convey sense, while in revising the translations
(over a period of time, when competing or additional meanings seemed to
filter through from the original) I endeavoured to adhere to quite strict
parameters for each poem: privileging semantic content (including

3
Rhyme, for example, signals some kind of connection or opposition between two
or more elements. Capucci, from Faenza in Emilia Romagna, has said that the
poems were not conceived as a collection, but came about individually and
spontaneously, over the course of ten or so days, and were subsequently only
minimally revised for publication; interview with author, Milan, May 2010.
4
Capucci has granted permission for the poems, and their translations, to appear in
this essay. The poems are unnumbered in the original, and are numbered here (1-
39) for ease of reference. A selection of my translations (including two of those
discussed here) appeared as “Seven Poems”, in Stand, 11 (3&4), 199/200, 2013,
pp. 38-39.
5
In Capucci’s work poetic form tends to be subordinate to “message” (in all its
interpretative fullness). For a useful discussion of modern Italian poetry, including
motivations and trends, see O’Ceallachain’s Twentieth-century Italian Poetry.
 Translating Giovanna Capucci’s Twin Towers: poesie 49

metaphors, ambivalence, allusions and connotations); secondly conveying

expressive poetic devices (alliteration, rhyme, assonance) without
distorting content; and thirdly reflecting the visual, or aesthetic effects of
the poem on the page (line-length, overall shape).6
What follows is a presentation of six of the poems: a discussion of
their content and style, and a consideration of some of the elements of, and
problems associated with, their (poetic) rendering in English.

Poem 1

Il giorno del giudizio

universale
ci ha colto impreparati.
La ragione era in sonno
il cuore atrofizzato.
Ma dopo lo schianto
verticale
dalle due torri
siamo caduti in tanti.

Judgement Day
caught us all
unready.
Reason slept,
hearts shrunk away.
Yet after the smash
headlong
down from the towers
so many of us fell.

The perspective of the first poem is personal and collective (we/us),

though externalized through an onlooker or viewer (a composite perspective
assumed by only one other poem in the collection),7 and relates to a
moment during or immediately following the attack. It deals centrally with
the attack’s suddenness, the fact that “we” were not prepared for it (as we
would not be for “Judgement Day”, or our own death, despite its
inevitability). And while the religious or moral parallel may be dominant,
there is also implied criticism of “our” leaders, who failed to foresee such
a clash and consider their conduct; their “reason slept”, and the consequence

6
As Francis Jones has observed (“Unlocking the Black Box”, 70), poetry
translation typically involves multiple drafts, with a gradual shift occurring from
the focus on individual words and phrases to a more holistic approach.
7
Capucci, Twin Towers, poem 14, on the theme of conscience.
50 Chapter Four

of their inaction was the sudden death of so many people. The “falling”
motif, present here, occurs in six poems altogether—falling people, falling
stars, falling morally or emotionally;8 the themes of judgement and/or
reason are present in several poems, while the crash itself (“lo schianto”)
will be echoed in, and reinforced by, the very last poem (discussed below):
here we witness the actual destruction; there we will see its lasting effects.
Poetically, this first poem calls particularly on rhyme (present in about
a third of the poems in the collection)—although, and not untypically, a
single rhyme—and assonance (characterizing over half of the poems). The
rhyme, “universale” and “verticale” (lines 2, 7), is partially transferred, in
translation, to “unready” and “headlong” (lines, 3, 7), preserving the visual
effect but having necessitated a lexical shift (from “universal” to
“unready”); furthermore, the pivotal position and function in the original
of “universal” and “vertical” is unavoidably lost in English: while I played
with the lexemes (including their adverbial forms), the syntactical
inflexibility of English militated against their use.9 Rhyme is, however,
recovered in “day”/“away” (lines 1, 5), and assisted by “headlong”/“fell”
(lines 7, 9), though inevitably pointing to different emphases.
Assonance connects the five-syllable words “impreparati” and
“atrofizzato” (lines 3, 5), which lend a certain gravitas and rhythm to the
Italian stanza. Whilst these have become three-syllable units in the English
(“unready”, “shrunk away”, also lines 3, 5), there is compensation through
the use of multi-syllabic (and for that reason more striking) expressions in
other poems, if not here.10
Metaphor is present both explicitly and implicitly, and incorporating
lexical ambiguity.11 In English translation, however, it has not been
possible to capture the full resonance of the past participle “caduti” (“fell”
has been used, as opposed to “fallen” with its stronger connotations of

8
Ibid., poems 1, 2, 5, 13, 17, 22. Not unnaturally, the reportage of those falling
from the towers, as they sought to escape the flames and smoke, was one of the
most powerful images of the tragedy, encapsulating the unreality of the scene:
shock, but also compassion for those desperate individuals (none of whom
survived). Falling, literally and metaphorically, inspires and shapes Delillo’s 2007
novel on the tragedy, which opens: “It was not a street anymore, but a world, a
time and space of falling ash and near night” (Falling Man, 3).
9
As it happens, the use of “universal” is redundant in the expression “Judgement
Day”, and the Italian alliterative “g” (“giorno del giudizio”) is conveniently present
in the English term.
10
For example poem 20 (Capucci, Twin Towers) employs “lamentations” to
translate “pianto” (tears, crying).
11
Only a handful of poems in Capucci’s collection employ simile (poems 11, 17,
22).
 Translating Giovanna Capucci’s Twin Towers: poesie 51

war, the dead and remembrance).12 The poem falls into three sections:
situation, reason, and consequences; a tight, organic structure characteristic
of the collection as a whole.13

Poem 7

I cavalieri dell’Apocalisse
sono venuti dal cielo.
Quattro
dai quattro punti cardinali,
per colpire alla cieca
dopo un lungo allenamento.
Hanno colto in flagrante
colpendo al cuore
un mondo disattento.

From the four compass points

Apocalypse flies.
Four Horsemen abroad
swoop down from the skies.
They’re come to strike blind
after long years in harness,
to strike at the heart
of a world all unready
and catch folk in flagrante.

In the seventh poem suddenness, judgement and destruction are all

themes taken up again, with the last line of this poem linking directly with
line 3 of the first, and Capucci makes the link (as have many writers)
between 9/11 and the Apocalypse.14 As Michael Longley has observed on
the Holocaust as poetic inspiration, 9/11 is “an almost impossible subject”,

12
William Empson’s statement on poetic ambiguity (“a phenomenon of
compression”, 31) is relevant also to translation: ambiguity in itself is not
satisfying, he claims; “it must in each case arise from and be justified by, the
peculiar requirements of the situation”. See Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 31,
235; see also 251-56.
13
Most poems in the collection (Capucci, Twin Towers) are divided into either two
or three sections (not always echoed at the sentential level; there is minimal
punctuation throughout, in fact); four poems are divided into four sections; only
one into five sections (9), one into six (24), one into seven (36) and one poem
comprises a single section (19).
14
“Colto” and “cuore” are also reprised from poem 1, strengthened here by
“colpire”; such lexical cohesion reinforces the essential organicity of mode and
motif.
52 Chapter Four

but a nightmare that poets nevertheless should be prepared to face.15

The voice here is impersonal: that of an external commentator on the
event. The focus, however, has shifted to the perpetrators (for the first,
though not the last time) seen metaphorically as four horsemen descending
on America.16 Four planes, four pilots, with the irony that the “long years
in harness” were spent in America. Four Angels of Death (following
Revelation 6: 1-8), with the suggestion that conquest, pestilence, famine
and death are imminent, inevitable, even endemic—as Iraq and Afghanistan
have subsequently demonstrated. Religious images recur throughout the
collection, and indeed Capucci includes images from both Judaeo-
Christian and Islamic traditions; whilst the perspective, overall, tends to be
“Western”, there is clear sympathy expressed for Muslim women (seen as
prisoners, poem 29), anger at bigotry and intolerance, and a condemnation
of fanaticism, arrogance, blind faith, and self-satisfied complacency—
wherever it is manifested.17
Like poem one, poem seven is in three sections and gives the attack the
force of an event with shocking global repercussions, even of finality,
reinforcing the impact of the first poem, and Judgement Day; yet, the Twin
Towers collection also represents, perhaps (as Michael Heller observes
with regard to some of Primo Levi’s poems), a sort of “bridge of words”,

15
Longley, Judge’s Report, 19. Capucci’s third poem, in fact, refers to the
Holocaust; it opens: “Olocausto del 2001. | Cenere è diventato | il cuore mio”
(“Holocaust 2001. | My heart | has turned to ash”). A number of the Twin Towers
poems allude to the end of the world, or to war, while one poem (35) links the
attack to rape. In this poem (35) the catastrophe is felt “by reference to our own
bodies”, provoking a “visceral shudder” (as Frank Kermode terms such a response;
see “Eliot and the Shudder”, 13): “Stuprati | i grattacieli di Manhattan | rampicanti
al cielo. | Stuprati | da lupi solitari | usciti dalla tana” (“Raped | are the towers of
Manhattan | reaching up into the sky. | Raped | by lone wolves | unleashed from
their lairs”). Poem 7, here, is the only poem to refer explicitly to the Apocalypse.
16
Two poems are especially explicit, in this respect. Poem 9 states “Allah ha
ucciso | Dio”, balanced subsequently by “Dio ha nascosto | il volto” (“Allah has
killed | God. […] God has veiled | his face”). Poem 26 states: “Bin Laden | principe
orientale | sguardo metallico | volto crudele: | CI HAI FATTO PAURA!” (Bin
Laden | Eastern Potentate | eyes metallic | cruel face: | YOU SCARED US!).
17
While three poems allude to Christ’s blood, stigmata, and crucifixion (Ibid.,
poems 11, 12, 30), many more make reference to the confrontation between Allah
and God, or their followers: the gods of East and West are portrayed, variously, as
separate and distinct (9), as confused or conflated (16), or as two halves of the
same (“un dio bifronte”, a “Janus god”, poem 32), and believers on “both sides”
are seen as blasphemous (34) and irreconcilable (39, discussed below).
 Translating Giovanna Capucci’s Twin Towers: poesie 53

or “pathway back from the dead to the living”.18 In this sense, Capucci’s
approach is not dissimilar to that of Lee Masters in his Spoon River
Anthology.
Poem seven features assonance, end-rhyme and alliteration (the
dominant poetical feature here).19 All such effects help to focus the ear on
the parallels, assisting the flow of meanings within the poem, and have
been recreated in some way in the translation.20 The Italian plosive
consonants “c”/“q” and lateral “l”, for instance, are reflected by the
English plosive “c” and fricatives “f” and “s”. The noun “folk”, however,
has been preferred (as the object of “to catch”) less for its alliterative
qualities than to avoid the use of an explicit pronoun (“us”, “them”).
While the final rhyme is a strong one in Italian (“disattento”, echoing
“allenamento”, line 6), in English the full rhyme occurs earlier (“skies”
echoing “flies”, lines 2, 4); however, other devices have been used towards
the end of the poem (lines 6-8) to lend balance to the whole: “harness”
leads to “heart” (alliteration and assonance), which in turn leads on to
“unready” (a form of visual harmony).21
Finally, a number of fundamental shifts, both semantic and syntactical,
have been incorporated, notably from “past action” in the Italian to
“intention” in the English: from the Italian perfect of “hanno colto” (line
7) to the English infinitive “to strike” (line 7) in order to avoid an
inelegant past participle (“struck” or “hit”). Such changes are linked to the
syntactical reordering of several sections, and not just of lines 1-4:

Past action: Intention (in the present):

“sono venuti” (line 2) “swoop down” (line 4)
“Hanno colto” (line 7) “to strike” (line 7)
“colpendo al cuore” (line 8) “and catch” (line 9)

18
See Heller, 156-57. Poetry (reading or writing it) can be one of the things people
turn to, to try to cope after a tragedy, to express despair, hope, or relieve tension. In
Delillo’s novel, the character Lianne, who leads a reading group, comments:
“People read poems. People I know, they read poetry to ease the shock and pain,
give them a kind of space, something beautiful in language, to bring comfort or
composure” (Falling Man, 42).
19
Alliteration is usefully discussed by Empson in chapter 1 of his volume (Seven
Types of Ambiguity).
20
Unproblematic also was the internal lexical repetition, which underlines the
symbolism (“quattro”/“four”).
21
Note also the grammatical changes affecting the repetition of the Italian “colto”
and “cuore” (poems 1 and 7): the English translation switches from “caught”
(poem 1, line 2) to “catch” (line 9 here) and from “hearts” (poem 1, line 5) to
“heart” (line 7 here).
54 Chapter Four

The translation of this poem, indeed, proved to be one of the more

testing. In the next poem we hear the voice of a personal “I”.

Poem 18

Canto
per infrangere
il muro del pianto.
Per dire
che esisto
per farmi largo
fra la folla impazzita
per urlare la rabbia
il dolore
d’aver perduto la vita.

I sing
to pierce
the wall of tears.
To cry that I
exist
to thrust through
the madding crowd
to howl my rage,
my grief,
at forfeiting my life.

Here the themes of grief and remembrance are prominent as elsewhere,

through reference for example, to candles, flowers or photographs. Central,
also, is the expression of a furious anger, a personal outrage in the face of
loss or death.
The poem is a “canto” (or chant), and offers, in four sections (or parts),
the four reasons for singing.22 Consider the first three, interconnected
reasons: to “pierce the wall of tears”, to “cry that I exist”, and to “thrust
through” the crowd. In Italian the use of “folla” (“crowd”, line 7)
anticipates the contiguous “impazzita” (“folle”, or mad)—and who is
being seen as crazed? Not only the anxious crowds gathering at the base of
the towers, but also, implicitly, those behind the attack, the culpable on all
sides; and even those lost souls crowding around Charon awaiting their
passage across the Acheron to Hell; this last metaphor has been

22
Perhaps not coincidentally, this is the only poem of those presented here to have
an even number of lines. In the collection as a whole, a small majority have odd-
numbered lines (21/39).
 Translating Giovanna Capucci’s Twin Towers: poesie 55

strengthened in translation by allusion to Hardy and the “confused”

context of his use of the adjectival.23
While structurally the Italian poem contains four “statements”, there
are only two divisions, or sentences, with enjambement (especially in lines
5-6) lending ambiguity—a quality that is preserved in the English, despite
the strong temptation to replace the fourth infinitive (“to howl”, line 8)
with a more common connective (“and howl”).24
The poem displays two full rhymes—the first instance of this in
Capucci’s collection—together with assonance and alliteration. All such
aspects are transferred, if not necessarily in the same way, across to the
English: “canto”/“pianto” (lines 1, 3) and “impazzita”/“vita” (lines 7, 10)
are replicated by “cry”/“I” (line 4), and by “crowd”/“howl” (lines 7, 8); the
assonance of Italian line 6 (“farmi largo”) becomes alliteration in English
(“to thrust through”, line 6); and the effects of plosive “p” and fricative
“f”, are conveyed through the plosive “t” and fricatives “th” or “f”, the
latter quadrupled over the final two lines to provide a strong ending,
furnished in the Italian by the final ryhme.25
The mirroring, through the course and swelling sense of this poem, can
thus be represented as follows:

rhyme: “canto” + “pianto” > assonance: “pierce” + “tears”

assonance: “dire” + “esisto”
assonance: “farmi largo”
alliteration: “f”
alliteration: “p”
rhyme: “impazzita” + “vita”
> rhyme: “cry” + “I”
> alliteration: “t” + “th”
> assonance: “sing” + “pierce”
> rhyme: “crowd” + “howl”
> alliteration: “f”

The last line of the poem establishes a new kind of ambiguity. Halfway
through the fourth reason for singing (“per urlare la rabbia”, or “to howl
my rage”), the expectation built up in the previous nine lines is
transformed at a stroke—or destroyed and re-created—by the dramatic
irony of this line, creating a ‘frisson’. Suddenly we realize that this “I” is a
victim.26

23
Dante is the likely original point of reference (Inferno 3). The whole mood of
these poems carries distant echoes of Caproni’s Il seme del piangere and Il muro
della terra, both of whose collection titles are taken from Inferno.
24
What kind of a pause should we allow between “esisto” and “per” (“exist” and
“to”)?
25
It may be worth noting that most of the Italian alliterations in the six poems
discussed in this essay involve “unvoiced” consonants, echoing the overall
unwillingness to believe, or speak out.
26
Heaney, Eliot and Kermode speak, variously, of a “frisson” a “shudder” or a
56 Chapter Four

In the next poem the themes of violence and madness are extended,
and applied to the media and their violent intrusion into people’s homes.

Poem 27

Un bombardamento mediatico
una barbarie in diretta
dal salotto di casa.
Un incubo reale
che all’ora di cena
impedisce di mangiare.
Follia planetaria
distruzione
morte
che la ragione
rifiuta di capire.

A media offensive
barbarity coming live
from living rooms.
A nightmare real
at supper time
that stops us eating.
Destruction
death
global madness
that reason will not
encompass.

An impersonal, external view here suggests that the attack is,

paradoxically, immediate (direct) and mediated.27 It is shown live, or
virtually live, once, and then repeatedly in news broadcasts, in conjunction
with attempts to project it more widely and understand it more fully
(including for political ends), as reports came in. Through this use of
opposition (“mediatico”/“diretta”, lines 1, 2), and the reference to
“barbarity”, we see that the event, this violence “coming live / from living
rooms”, upsets common, or everyday sensibilities and realities. The media
intrusion, like the attack, is barbaric, an intimate and shocking presence in
our homes, with viewers becoming victims of sensationalism.

“shiver” (see Kermode, 13-16). This is the fourth of five poems in the Twin Towers
collection written from the victim’s point of view.
27
The perspective resembles that of poem 7 (see above), also involving a “review”
or comment.
 Translating Giovanna Capucci’s Twin Towers: poesie 57

Ambiguity, or ambivalence, is reiterated through the phrase “impedisce

di mangiare” (line 6). Are we unable to eat because the scenes are so
horrific to watch? Could we even be irritated by the “interruption”? The
translation of this phrase, indeed, was less straightforward than it might
seem (literally, “prevents [us] from eating”). An earlier draft included
“disrupts our meal”, to resonate with “supper”, “Destruction”, and “real”,
but the phrase was not entirely satisfactory, partly for the excessive
resulting rhyme, but largely for the purely negative connotation of
“disrupt”. And whilst “stops us eating” introduces the explicit (and
difficult to avoid) object pronoun in English, “eating” reinforces
assonance, while the staccato “stops” appropriately interrupts the poetic
flow.28
In three sections, semantically and syntactically, the first and second in
Italian employ assonance, the predominant ‘a’ vowel of the first seven
lines (eg ‘barbarie’/‘reale’/’mangiare’), which the third “tercet” turns to
the dissonant “i” (of “capire”). The ear, anticipating ambiguity, rhyme or
assonance, is, perhaps, disturbed by its final absence in Italian.29 And the
eye also picks this up. Thus, the final line of the translation offers the
English verb “encompass” (rather than the more “natural” choice of
“believe” (for “capire”), since “believe” would have continued,
inappropriately, to echo “reason” (as well as “media” and “real” and
“eating”), while the use of “encompass” not only effects a change of pace
(an acceptable alternative device to account for the Italian changed vowel
sound), but gently picks up “madness”: the madness, death and
destruction, which, the poetic voice implies, reason cannot comprehend.
The world has “gone mad” (as well as badly wrong), and we are at a loss
to understand the event with our mind.30 Here, as in many other instances,
Capucci appears to share Eugenio Montale’s view as expressed in his
“Intervista immaginaria” (1946): the poet should “sing of everything that
unites man to other men but not deny what separates him from them, what
makes him unique”.31

28
An almost inverse process saw “supper” (line 5) favoured over the potentially
misleading “dinner”; news bulletins in Italy are typically aired around 8.00pm to
coincide with the evening meal.
29
The poetic ear is “trained” to expect these devices, according to Empson, 30.
30
This less conspicuous final linking of “madness” and “encompass” (lines 9, 11)
balances the Italian stronger (but non-final) rhyme of “distruzione” and “ragione”
(lines, 8, 10); furthermore, incorporated in the word “encompass” is the sense of
“compass”, the device for finding one’s way in the world when lost.
31
“Che canti ciò che unisce l’uomo agli altri uomini ma non neghi ciò che lo
disunisce e lo rende unico e irrepetibile” (Montale, “Intervista immaginaria”,
58 Chapter Four

On an initial reading, the next poem appears to be one of the lighter,

less sombre poems in the collection. It makes use of an impersonal
viewpoint and an animal metaphor to warn of attack or assault.32

Poem 33

Salta il fosso
leprotto
scappa via!
Il fucile
è spianato
il cane fiuta
l’odore.
Calma il cuore
leprotto
la tana è vicina
metti il sasso
alla porta
chiudi fuori l’orrore
e non maledire
di essere nato.

Leap over there

little hare,
speed away!
The rifle
is cocked
and the dog
sniffs your scent.
Still your heart
little hare,
your lair is not far.
Put a stone
at the door,
keep the horror at bay
but don’t rue the day
you were born.

1479); with thanks to MariaTeresa Girardi for directing me to this source. The
violence of the attack is the theme of at least nine poems, overall; madness is
present in seven; selfishness in five; while poem 28 extends the specific theme of
violation by the media.
32
It is also one of the more visual poems. Many poems conjure up visions of the
towers, the flames and smoke, while others portray less obvious aspects, such as
losing a shoe, cherishing a photograph, or seeing a cat with scorched paws.
 Translating Giovanna Capucci’s Twin Towers: poesie 59

While the impersonal voice counsels moving to a place of safety, the

imperatives in the poem appear to be tinged with irony: an animal, or
human being, may think he can escape what others suffer, yet by so doing
not only does he delude himself, but also disassociates himself from
showing solidarity with the victims. Such an attitude, furthermore, echoes
an earlier implied criticism (in poem 23) of certain humans who hide away
(in the “Kabul café”), fearful not only for their own physical safety, but of
being in the metaphorical line of fire. And yet the hare also recalls the
little cat of an earlier poem (25), who got his paws burnt during the attack,
eliciting a more obvious reaction of sympathy. Capucci herself has stated
that the hare of poem 33 stands for “all those who must suffer infamy and
who fear violence, with no one to protect them, and yet it is an illusion,
and the ‘dangers’ will overcome them”.33
Poem 33 (like poem 18) is divided into four sections, although with
three full clauses in this instance. It contains one strong rhyme (“odore”,
line 7, followed by “cuore” and “orrore”, lines 8, 13), replicated in English
by “there”/“hare”/“lair” (lines 1, 2, 10), with the “there” and “hare”
matching the Italian assonance of the opening lines (“fosso”/“leprotto”).
There is one further rhyme in the Italian (“spianato”/“nato”, lines 5, 15)
which is transferred in English to a near-final position, with “bay”/“day”
(lines 13, 14), picking up “away” (from line 3). There are further instances
of Italian assonance in addition to “fosso”/“leprotto” (lines 1, 2, 9):
“fucile”/“vicina” (lines 4, 10) and “cuore”/“fuori” (lines 8, 13), furnished
in English by “cocked”/“dog” (lines 5, 6), “heart”/“far” (lines 8, 10), and
“leap”/“speed” (lines 1, 3). Finally, both the lexical repetition (“leprotto”)
and the original alliteration (“s”, “f”, “c”) are carried over into the English
(“hare”; “s”, “h”, “b”).
As is also evident here, at times I have been able to reconstruct rhyme
as rhyme in the translation, and preserve the quality of assonance; at other
times rhyme has undergone transformation to become assonance, and vice
versa. In all cases, however, due consideration was given to the overall
effect of these changes on the poem as a whole.
The concluding Twin Towers poem returns to the collection’s most
prominent themes: destruction, judgement, division and remembrance.
The first two propositions of the poem set out the stark division between
the citizens of the modern world mourning the victims (lines 1-5), and the
people who are bound to the past, rejoicing at the deaths and insensitive to

33
“I ‘leprotti’ sono tutti quelli che devono subire indifesi, l’infamia e la paura della
violenza, che scappano, illudendosi di mettersi in salvo e di allontanare da loro i
‘pericoli’ che li sovrastano”; Capucci, personal communication, 13 September
2010.
60 Chapter Four

the pain experienced (lines 6-10). The final three lines of this poem stand
as a powerful closing statement.

Poem 39

Piange
il popolo decadente
i seimila morti
nella cattedrale
afflosciata.
Ride
il popolo medievale
per quei morti
di cui non gl’importa
niente.
Due mondi
uno scontro
nessun incontro.

The decadent state

weeps
for six thousand dead
in the wracked
cathedral.
The medieval state
laughs
at those dead
it cares not
one jot for.
…………..
…………..
………......

Written from a detached perspective, the poem focuses initially on the

site of the crash and the number of victims (according to early
estimates).34 Rather than representing a religious building (as for the
commemoration service), “cathedral”, here, evokes the site of the World
Trade Centre, formerly symbolic of power, economy and commerce, and

34
Six thousand was the figure initially suggested by journalists, subsequently
corrected to just under 3000. The figure of 6000 recurs in three other poems
(poems 4, 17, 37), although poem 37 points to the uncertainty over the number of
victims. Capucci has confirmed that as she was writing, the exact figure was less
important than the strength of feeling, the incredulity and the horror; personal
communication, 13 October 2011.
 Translating Giovanna Capucci’s Twin Towers: poesie 61

latterly serving as a place of prayer or quiet reflection for those

remembering the victims.
Poem 39 contains the highest concentration of poetic devices (rhyme,
especially), and for this reason, perhaps, it was the translation that went
through the most transformations, until the present version emerged. It
employs assonance (“mondi”/“scontro” and “morti”/“importa”, for which
the English offers “decadent”/“dead” and “weeps”/“cathedral”), lexical
repetition (“morti”, “popolo”/“dead”, “state”), and the semantic oppositions
of weeping and laughing (“piange”/“ride”). One striking element of this
poem is the adjective “afflosciata” (literally, “gone limp” or “collapsed”),
a metaphor suggesting a number of interlinked images. Not only does it
describe the state of the towers, two structures that had fallen, or sunk in
on themselves like a (concrete) soufflé, but also the terrible impact on the
victims, those who had been working or meeting there that morning, as
well as those later grieving for them. Furthermore, behind “afflosciata”
hovers the sound of the more natural “affollata” (“crowded”). This lexeme
therefore proved particularly taxing.35 The final choice of “wracked”
points to both physical and metaphorical destruction; it suggests pain,
distress and grieving (also spelt “racked”), and hints at “wrecked”.36
This final poem contains three distinct full rhymes (the only poem in
the collection to do so): “cattedrale”/“medievale” (lines 4, 7); “deca-
dente”/“niente” (lines 2, 10); “scontro”/“incontro” (lines 12, 13). The first
pair was unproblematic, yielding “cathedral”/“medieval” (lines 5, 6). A
second rhyme was condensed into “not” and “jot” (lines 9, 10), while the
last three lines of the Italian, with their powerful image and final rhyme,
constituted a further challenge.
The sense and force of the Italian is clear: literally, “two worlds | a
clash | no meeting”. The use of “encounter”, or “meeting” for “incontro”
(in the final line) led to nothing of value. “Scontro” proved more promising,
eliciting “crash”, “clash”/“culture clash”, or “flash”/“newsflash” (less so).
“Collision”, on the other hand, suggested “terrorism”, even “symbolism”,
and led to a version I favoured particularly for its metaphorical impact:
“Two worlds | a collision | on television”. In the end, the lines settled into:

35
An earlier draft used the adjective “sagging”, conjuring up a sense of walls that
were giving way, as well as shoulders that were “weighed down”, yet also echoing
an unfortunate kinship with “soggy”.
36
In Act I scene II of The Tempest Ferdinand mourns his father (“Weeping again
the king my father’s wrack”). Eliot re-uses these lines in the third section of “The
Wasteland” (“Musing upon the king my brother’s wreck”).
62 Chapter Four

Two worlds
in collision—
endless division.

There is, in the Italian, no meeting of minds, hearts or wills, no

possibility of agreement, negotiation or compromise, while the English
lines emphasize the eternal nature of religious and/or cultural conflict. And
the emphasis on rhyme reinforces, it seems, rather than contradicts, the
notion of the symbiosis of good and evil.
After the collection’s build-up of dramatic intensity, Capucci’s
concluding poem returns to the original, startling, head-on crash. The
Italian text presents, furthermore, a violent reduction from “6000” to “2”
(“due mondi”), to “1” (“uno scontro”), to “none” (“nessun incontro”),
reflecting the widespread tendency to reduce the complexities of the case
to simplistic solutions.
And while Capucci’s closing rhyme (“scontro”/“incontro”) may be
familiar to Italian audiences (TV debates are commonly introduced as
“scontro/incontro”, in the sense of “for and against”), it remains a forceful,
apt conclusion, and, moreover, highlights the essential role of television in
the dramatization of 9/11.
Capucci responded swiftly to the disaster and its immediate aftermath,
imagining some of the “personal histories” that were abruptly “terminated”
on that day in 2001, some of the related moments of anguish, or being.37
Sometimes it takes years for reactions to set in, and be expressed in poetry
or prose. Sometimes they never get to the surface or appear—as Heller
forcefully reminds us: “Poetry is always about to happen and also about to
disappear, to be drowned out by conventional thought”.38
One of the most significant features of Twin Towers is a poetic
synthesis in which the poet presents an observation (a simple picture or
image) followed by a momentous consequence, in just a few lines, a
structure that was important to seek to preserve in translation.39 Yet, just as
a “veil” does not represent “Muslim”, and “towers falling” does not
signify only grief or sympathy or anger, or any one response, it is
important to see the six poems discussed as representative examples,
rather than as standing for the whole. The collection comprises 39 closely

37
Heller’s terms, in relation to Holocaust poetics (Uncertain Poetries, 152).
38
Ibid., xiii.
39
We might see this as akin to Coleridge’s “drama of Reason”, with each poem not
so much a parenthesis (presenting the developing thought), as part of a series of
satellites dotted (in time and space) around a central spot, now an absence. See
Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 282.
 Translating Giovanna Capucci’s Twin Towers: poesie 63

connected poems, 39 snapshots of what was a dramatic and horrific

exhibition, 39 stages (or ‘steps’) in one person’s attempt to investigate, to
fathom, to represent.40
Elsewhere, for instance, an anonymous voice laments losing a shoe in
the fall, begging someone to take care of it if they find it, “perché di me |
non è rimasto niente” (“since there’s nothing left | of me”, poem 13);
another asks for “our remains” to be gathered “come petali di fiori |
sanguinanti” (“like petals of flowers | that are bleeding’, poem 22), while a
third voice, an external I, regrets now not being able to visit the Twin
Towers (and this is the only occasion where they are referred to directly in
this way): “Una follia | le ha spazzate via. | Peccato. | Peccato | non poterle
vedere” (“An act of madness | has swept them away. | Too bad. | Too bad |
I can’t see them”, poem 36). A shocking statement, showing indifference
to all but a selfish plan.41
The different patterns of sound and sense in Twin Towers certainly
presented a challenge as I sought to recreate the poems in English. Above
all a willingness to experiment freely was required, together with some
discipline—in the sense that certain false ‘solutions’ led me to rewritings
that either brought in new or confusing connotations, or distorted the
proportion (or balance) of rhyme. What my translation sought to do above
all was to replicate the sonic qualities of each section or segment, and
where this was not possible, transfer such aspects elsewhere—mostly
within individual poems, as I’ve illustrated, although occasionally across
the collection. Thus, besides adhering to the parameters referred to above
(the hierarchy of semantic content > poetic devices > aesthetic effect), a
second level of priorities came into play. Faced with a range of linguistic
choices which satisfied all the parameters, consideration was naturally
given to the contingent effects of a particular word or phrase on relevant
lines, and to the effect on the individual poem, having overall regard for
sense, elegance and balance. The final revisions took due cognisance of
potential conflicts between poems in the collection as a whole. However,
as we have seen, very few problems thrown up by the symbiotic rapport
between sound and sense were resolved without some sort of ‘exchange’,
or compromise. The transfer of semantic content, however (the different
perspectives, forces and tensions) proved unproblematic, largely because

40
Capucci has stated that there is no conscious parallel intended in the number of
poems (“Solo la casualità. Istinto e casualità sono le caratteristiche che
accompagnano abitualmente i ‘programmi della mia mente’, e rappresentano,
credo, il mio limite e la mia forza”); personal communication, 13 October 2011.
41
This links back with an earlier image of “cut flowers” (“fiori recisi”, poem 11),
in the sense of “flowers, or lives, cut short”.
64 Chapter Four

of the global (as opposed to Italian) context. This was also the case with
most of the matching, or reworking, of metaphor.
Tensions are evoked throughout between an evident pain felt for the
victims, and a confused sense of anger, guilt or regret. In his widely cited
discussion of the symbolism of the World Trade Centre, Baudrillard
stresses particularly the dual, ambiguous attraction of the towers: they
represented a “perfect” symmetry, a twinning which had an aesthetic
quality, but which was also, and above all, a crime against form, a crime
that contained within it the temptation (or invitation) to break it.42 And the
destruction of the towers, as Baudrillard and others have discussed,
respected that symmetry. The tensions in the poems, then, arise not from
contradictions inherent in the collection, but from the factors affecting
individual, local and national sympathies, the internal, crazed “logic” of
the attack and its aftermath, that is, the dialectics of cause and effect.
A strong central theme of the collection, and clearly visible in the
above selections, is that of judgement—on God for abandoning “us”, on
the West for ‘not being ready’ (interpreted primarily in a moral sense,
though also perhaps as a security issue), on the East for its intransigence,
cruelty and disrespect for women. Ultimately, judgement is passed on both
East and West (whether from a religious or secular standpoint), on
thoughtless collective action and selfish individual reaction, on one-sided
arguments, on narrow-mindedness, on indifference, and all forms of
extremism. In charting her reactions to the tragedy in this way, with the
focus on “other” rather than on “self”, on external more than internal
experience, Capucci articulates both conviction and doubt. The author
nevertheless filters the global content through her personal sensibilities,
not least her expectations of what she can and can’t say (in the context)
and how she can say it. Consequently, the reader is invited to question his
or her own response, understanding and prejudices, and be alert to
alternative realities. We may even, for instance, stand back from the
poetry, and see the collection as an entreaty to those (in positions of
power) who can make a difference in world affairs, a plea to listen to an
inner voice of reason, to consider blame and responsibility on “both”
sides, and to press for peace, respect and freedoms.43
Capucci’s short, staccato stanzas oblige us above all to remember the

42
See Baudrillard, Power Inferno, 11-12. (The essay was originally published in
Le Monde: “L’esprit du terrorisme”, 2 November 2001.) See also Richard (“The
WTC image complex”, 129-30), on the power of symbolic images.
43
None of the poems discussed here have a specified addressee—in common with
the majority of poems in the collection. Exceptions are those poems addressed
explicitly to Bin Laden, the Talebans, victims and survivors.
 Translating Giovanna Capucci’s Twin Towers: poesie 65

smaller (though no less significant) details of the tragedy, as well as the

measure of actual or potential realities, which the 21st century has yet to
come to terms with. As the poet Valerio Magrelli writes, despite the
towers’ fall and despite our poeticising of the tragedy, “nothing has ended,
and nothing will end” (“nulla è finito e nulla finirà”).44 The Twin Towers
poems are neither sentimental, nor musical, nor particularly erudite in
construction. On the contrary they are simple and direct. Each poem is
unique, but also part of a whole where sense is cumulative, layers are
multiple and there is no single all-defining message. And in this way and
for these reasons I believe they capture—and convincingly—not only a
moment, but something of the whole turn-of-the-century Zeitgeist.

Works cited
Alighieri, Dante. La Divina Commedia: Inferno.
Baudrillard, Jean. 2002. The Spirit of Terrorism. Translated by C. Turner.
London: Verso.
—. Power Inferno. 2003. Translated by A. Serra. Milan: Raffaello Cortina
Editore.
Caproni, Giorgio. 1959. Il seme del piangere. Milan: Garzanti.
—. 1975. Il muro della terra. Milan: Garzanti.
Capucci, Giovanna. 2002. Twin Towers: poesie. Venice: Edizioni del
Leone.
Chomsky, Noam. 2001. 9-11. New York: Seven Stories.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. 1956-71. Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor
Coleridge. Edited by Leslie Griggs, 6 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press,
vol. 3.
Debord, Guy. 1995 [1967]. Society of the Spectacle. Translated by D.
Nicholson-Smith. New York: Zone Books.
Delillo, Don. 2007. Falling Man. London: Picador. Italian translation,
L’uomo che cade, by Matteo Colombo. Turin: Einaudi, 2008.
Eco, Umberto. 2003. Mouse or Mat: Translation as Negotiation. London:
Weidenfield & Nicolson.
Eliot, T. S. 1963 [1922]. “The Waste Land”. In Collected Poems 1909-
1962. London: Faber & Faber.
Empson, William. 1961 [1930]. Seven Types of Ambiguity. Harmondsworth:
Penguin/Peregrine.
Hardy, Thomas. 1974 [1874]. Far from the Madding Crowd. London:
Macmillan.

44
Magrelli, “12 settembre 2001”, from Disturbi del sistema binario, 16.
66 Chapter Four

Heller, Michael. 2005. Uncertain Poetries: Selected Essays on Poets,

Poetry and Poetics. Cambridge: Salt.
Jones, Francis R. 2006. “Unlocking the Black Box: Researching Poetry
Translation Processes”. In Translation and Creativity: Perspectives on
Creative Writing and Translation Studies, edited by Eugenia Loffredo
and Manuela Perteghella, 59-74. London: Continuum.
Kermode, Frank. 2010. “Eliot and the Shudder”. London Review of Books
32, 9 (13 May): 13-16.
Longley, Michael. 2010. Judge’s Report. Poetry London 67 (Autumn).
Lee Masters, Edgar. 2008 [1915]. Spoon River Anthology. London:
Penguin.
Magrelli, Valerio. 2006. Disturbi del sistema binario. Turin: Einaudi.
Manaza, Paolo. 2006. Sulle finalità dell’arte dopo l’11 settembre. Milan:
ObarraO edizioni.
Montale, Eugenio. 1996 [1946]. “Intervista Immaginaria”. In Il secondo
mestiere. Arte, musica, società, edited by G. Zampa. Milan:
Mondadori.
O’Ceallachain, Eanna. 2007. Twentieth-century Italian Poetry: A Critical
Anthology. Leicester: Troubador.
Parks, Tim. 2007. Translating Style: A Literary Approach to Translation;
A Translation approach to Literature. Manchester: St Jerome
Publishing.
Richard, Birgit. 2003. “The WTC Image Complex: A critical view on a
culture of the shifting image”. In 9/11 in American culture, edited by
N.K. Denzin and Y. Lincoln, 129-133. Walnut Creek Ca.: Altamira
Press.
Sánchez, María T. 2009. The Problems of Literary Translation. Bern:
Peter Lang.
Shakespeare, William. 1611. The Tempest.
Wordsworth, William. 1960. Poetical Works of Wordsworth, edited by
Thomas Hutchinson. London: Oxford University Press.
Žižek, Slavoj. 2002. Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five essays on
September 11. London: Verso Books.
 CHAPTER FIVE

FLAGGING DOWN THE FLÂNEUSE

IN HAZEL SMITH’S CITY POEMS

JOY WALLACE

She dreams that the streets are empty and she is standing alone naked in
the middle of the square. Her arms are outstretched, her palms are turned
upwards. On one hand there is a bird, on the other a kettle.

She never really read the map, but half read and half guessed at it. She
would walk down a street and only then would she check that she was
walking the right way. Sometimes she had to turn the map upside down. It
was good this balance between freedom and control though it meant
walking further than was really necessary. She didn’t want to check herself
too much.1

In this vignette from Hazel Smith’s “The Body and the City”, we have
spotted the flâneuse—the female stroller of city streets, a woman privately
patrolling the streets for her own purposes, Baudelaire’s flâneur,
feminised. This is the figure that Janet Wolff, writing some twenty-five
years ago, pointed out was missing from the literature of modernism.2 We
are pleased finally to see her. For, despite Elizabeth Wilson’s charge that
Wolff had exaggerated the invisibility of women in nineteenth-century
society, the poetry and fiction of the period suggest that Wolff was right
about the literary situation. It may well be true, as Wilson argues, that at
least in England during the nineteenth century, “women were emerging
more and more into the public spaces of the city”, but we would look long
and hard to find a female counterpart of the flâneur in the literature of the
period.3 The Sherlock Holmes stories reveal the prototypes for female
figures in the modernist literature of the city: either distraught and needy,

1
Smith, The Erotics of Geography, 22.
2
Wolff, “The Invisible Flâneuse”, 206.
3
Wilson, “The Invisible Flâneur”, 67.
68 Chapter Five

or avaricious and scheming. Holmes rescues the first, and thwarts the
second. Neither escapes from his clutches to walk the streets alone,
managing her own fate.
Most importantly, the female figures that inhabit the literature of the
modern city are not subjects of art, with the power of the Romantic poet to
shape the city for their own purposes. In contrast, Baudelaire, as Wolff
notes, a poet of modernism but not a modernist poet, has all the power of
the Romantic writer to score his own assertive subjectivity upon the
cityscape—both its geographical and human aspects—in a gesture of
entirely fictional self-effacement.4 As such, Baudelaire’s flâneur both
liberates and confines Hazel Smith’s flâneuse. In the beginning, the
tradition of the flâneur as a writer who salvages an imperilled subjectivity
through writing bequeaths a certain facility to the discourse of the flâneuse
once it gets going in literature. Yet, the concomitant dilemma for even the
most postmodern flâneuse is that her tradition is imbricated with aspects of
modernism that will prove impervious to a feminist exploration of being in
the city. The facility and the dilemma are both evident in Hazel Smith’s
city poems. Smith’s second volume of print texts, Keys Round Her
Tongue, and the work, “The Body and the City”, reveal a poet keenly
interested in cities and the female figures that inhabit them. We will find
that two of Smith’s city poems, “The Body and the City” and “Returning
the Angles”, interact with the literary tradition of the flâneur as found
respectively in two of the seminal poems about the modern city,
Baudelaire’s Tableaux parisiens, from Les Fleurs du mal, and Eliot’s The
Waste Land.5 This interaction yields a discourse of the flâneuse, one that
recognisably runs counter to the discourse of the flâneur. Yet, we will see
that, as long as Smith’s flâneuse takes her cues from the male writers, she
remains to some extent caught up in their limitations and offers at most a
criticism or creative reworking of their terms—which are the terms of
modernism.
Smith’s flâneuse does, however, eventually escape the modernist bind.
In “Returning the Angles” we find, as well as a re-imagining of Eliot’s
“unreal” London from the perspective of the flâneuse, a tentative

4
Wolff, “The Invisible Flâneuse”, 202.
5
Smith, “The Body and the City”, in The Erotics of Geography, 22-28. This page-
based text was first published as “The City and the Body” in Meanjin 60/1 (2001),
270-75. The original hypermedia version, Wordstuffs: The Body and the City by
Roger Dean, Hazel Smith and Greg White was commissioned by the Australian
Film Commission for their StuffArt project in 1998. It is now on the ABC website
at http://www.abc.net.au/arts/suff-art/stuff-art99/stuff98/10.htm. Smith, “Returning
the Angles”, in Keys Round Her Tongue, 73-82.
 Flagging Down the flâneuse in Hazel Smith’s City Poems 69

interruption to that modernist discourse. The nature of the interruption is

such that the very terms of the relation between flâneuse and city are
refigured, as the subject-object relation that so ably served Baudelaire’s
flâneur breaks down in the face of a more taxing feminist metaphysics.
This metaphysics is further explored, and modernism further dismantled,
in a group of shorter “city” poems in Keys Round Her Tongue. To
understand this final development in Smith’s discourse of the flâneuse,
and the distance she has put between herself and Baudelaire’s flâneur, we
will need to look beyond literary tradition to considerations of identity and
community contemporary with Smith’s writing.
First, then, to Hazel Smith’s “The Body and the City” and some
preliminary observations of the flâneuse. We need to investigate her
modus operandi and indeed, the very conditions of her existence. We want
to understand in what sense she might she be a site of translation: a re-
imagination of the flâneur figure from Baudelaire’s Paris streets. Finally in
this next section, we will be intrigued by what she reveals about her
master original.

Strolling between heaven and hell: the bold flâneuse

in the hyperscape
If we look at the two vignettes that serve as epigraphs to which we
began this discussion, we find Smith’s flâneuse taking a swipe at the
patriarchal symbolic order that controls Baudelaire’s great poem of the
city, Tableaux parisiens, from Les Fleurs du mal. Baudelaire, in William
Chapman Sharpe’s reading, is an embattled sign maker who turns what he
sees into what he can read, and thereby master. In Tableaux parisiens,
women feature prominently in the material for sign-making.6 To counter
this, Smith frees the flâneuse of “The Body and the City” from the
confines of a real city (like Baudelaire’s Paris) to the hyperscape, out of
the symbolic order and into her own realm of sign-making. In “The Body
and the City”, the modern city of Baudelaire has become the postmodern
city, the cityscape an imaginative space that is part analogy, part
projection. Smith notes of the hyperscape that it is a “heterogeneous,
global, constantly changing site characterised by difference”. It “occurs
when the body and the city are dismantled and reconstituted”.7 The
hyperscape of “The Body and the City” is already breaking down the

6
Sharpe, Unreal Cities, Chapter Three.
7
Smith, The Erotics of Geography, 25.
70 Chapter Five

subject-object distinction essential to the poise of Baudelaire’s flâneur in

his alter-ego as poet of the city.8
Smith’s flâneuse is assertively a subject. Walking for her is an iterative
gesture (“she would walk”).9 As de Certeau remarks, “the act of walking is
to the urban system what the act of speaking . . . is to language”.10
Walking scores the flâneuse on the cityscape and gives her the creative
power to shape—not just reflect—the city, a power traditionally associated
in Romantic and modernist poetry with her male counterpart. The flâneuse
demonstrates her control by never really reading the map. It seems that the
“right way” through the city for the flâneuse might be autocreative.11
Yet this autocreativity cannot be reduced to a female autoeroticism that
merely inhabits the masculinist tradition of city poetry. The parallel texts
that serve as epigraphs to this discussion (beginning “She dreams” and
“She never really read the map”) inhabit and challenge the classic flâneur
and passante scenarios in Romantic and modernist poetry of the city.12
“She” dreams that she is “standing naked in the middle of a square”,
reminiscent of the enticing female figure of Baudelaire’s Tableaux
parisiens, a figure that echoes in turn the “harlot” of Blake’s “London”.13
Yet, “the streets are empty” and she is standing “alone”, unspecularised by
the male gaze. Lest, it be thought, though, that the vision is autoerotic—
standing in for the male gaze—the description continues: “her arms are
outstretched, her palms turned upwards. On one hand there is a bird, on
the other a kettle”. The very arbitrariness of the metonymic link between
bird and kettle stops any reader who may think of standing in for Blake’s
or Baudelaire’s flâneur from too readily making a sign out of the woman.
Sharpe, developing de Certeau, remarks of Baudelaire that “to pace the
city . . . . is to become an active—and embattled—sign maker”.14 While
Sharpe argues that the “textuality” of Baudelaire’s passante is hard to pin
down, there is no doubt that the flâneur who observes her tries hard and
does not find any contradictions in the alternatives he suggests.15 By
contrast, it would puzzle even Baudelaire’s energetic poet-flâneur to make

8
For an extended discussion of the hyperscape, see Smith, Hyperscapes, Chapter
One.
9
Smith, The Erotics of Geography, 22.
10
Cited by Sharpe, Unreal Cities, 42.
11
Smith, The Erotics of Geography, 22.
12
Sharpe, Unreal Cities, 11-15; 56-61.
13
Ibid., 12.
14
Ibid., 42.
15
Ibid., 60-61.
 Flagging Down the flâneuse in Hazel Smith’s City Poems 71

something coherent for the patriarchal symbolic out of a naked woman, a

bird and a kettle.
The “she” of the parallel text further contests Baudelaire’s scenario by
collapsing flâneur/se and passante into one another. In Baudelaire’s “A
une passante”, the (male) poet is distraught at the thought of never seeing
the beautiful passer-by again.16 “The Body and the City” can be seen to
have fun with this distraught vision. Not only is there no male observer to
wonder where the woman is going but also the woman herself doesn’t
really know and doesn’t really care.
Following the two vignettes we’ve examined, the assault made by
Smith’s flâneuse on the specularising tendency of the traditional modernist
poetry of the city intensifies:

She throws down her eye into the middle of the road. Passers-by walk over
it and squash it, unconcerned, unnoticing, uncaring. But the eye winks at
her as she bends down, picks it up, and returns it to its socket.17

The Lacanian framework used by Sharpe to analyse the motif of the

eye in Baudelaire’s Tableaux parisiens suggests that the male poet’s gaze
has remorselessly phallic pretensions. But the flâneuse escapes this phallic
economy of the gaze. While the relationship between poet and crowd is
central to the poet’s participation in a phallic specular economy in
Tableaux parisiens, the crowd of “The Body and the City” behaves
differently. It avoids the intense one-on-one encounter typical of the
Tableaux and instead merely walks over the flâneuse’s eye and squashes
it, “unconcerned, unnoticing, uncaring”. Thus the flâneuse is saved from
being either gazer or gazed upon. The gesture might have liberated her to
use the gaze for new, non-patriarchal ends. Certainly the eye behaves as
though it has been an accomplice in some movement towards a freer
creativity as it “winks at her”: behaviour very different from the “piercing
glance of the Other” that distresses the male urban poet caught up in the
Lacanian nightmare Baudelaire can be seen to invoke.18
For all her boldness, though, the flâneuse of “The Body and the City”
ultimately meets her match in the modernist inheritance of the link
between the city, writing and sexuality. Hazel Smith’s creative
transformation of the link as found in Tableaux parisiens cannot finally
escape Baudelaire’s terms. Although the flâneuse achieves moments of
transcendence and creative liberation, and has her fun with Baudelaire’s

16
Adam, Baudelaire: Les Fleurs du mal, 103-104.
17
Smith, The Erotics of Geography, 24.
18
Sharpe, Unreal Cities, 46.
72 Chapter Five

fantasies of penetration and family life—see the Oprah Winfrey-type

scenario that compresses all the latest reproductive and social
developments affecting the composition of the postmodern family—the
fun comes at a price.19 This strand of the text culminates in a vision that
decisively reverses the movement of Baudelaire’s Tableaux parisiens vis-
à-vis the relation between the flâneur/se and the city. Throughout his
chapter, Sharpe analyses the development in Baudelaire from the poet’s
early attempt at detachment, when he merely gazes down on the city from
his studio window, through the fluctuations in his involvement with
members of the Paris crowd, to a final, highly sexualized, admission of his
fascinated implication in the city as poet of city life. The flâneuse of “The
Body and the City” moves in the opposite direction. From her early dream
of the absence of barriers between herself and the city, where she stood
naked in the middle of the street, she has graduated strangely to the
detachment with which, according to Sharpe, Baudelaire’s poet began his
pilgrimage:

They took her to the edge of the city where she gazed at abortion hotels,
hermaphrodite clinics, designer motels, infant supermarkets, embryo
farms. She didn’t really know where she wanted to go, so dazzling was the
array of goods, so consummate the consumer-possibilities.20

Her earlier insouciance in the face of not knowing her way—when the
not knowing seemed a matter of choice—gives way to a bemused
passivity in the face of a vision of commodified sexuality.
The capacity of the flâneuse of “The Body and the City” to see the city
for what it is means she cannot or will not retreat, as Sharpe argues
Baudelaire’s flâneur retreats, behind an allegorising tendency that
transmutes sexually disturbing sights into fantasies of genealogy, in which
he figures as either absent father of husband.21 By contrast, Hazel Smith’s
flâneuse recoils from the vision of a literalised sexuality she conjures up
late in the text—a vision akin to Adorno’s fear of untrammelled
productionism. She can do no more that implicitly re-pose the question
that Elizabeth Wilson reminds us is still unanswered today: “whether
sexuality is being or has been entirely commodified by capitalism, whether
urban reform could prevent or has prevented this and what, really, we
think about it”.22 In the face of this modernist dilemma, the flâneuse

19
Smith, The Erotics of Geography, 25-26; Sharpe, Unreal Cities, 49-50.
20
Smith, The Erotics of Geography, 26.
21
Sharpe, Unreal Cities, 50.
22
Wilson, “The Invisible Flâneur”, 75-76.
 Flagging Down the flâneuse in Hazel Smith’s City Poems 73

disappears from “The Body and the City” and we are left only with an
echo of the travelogue voice that opened the text, sounding now like a
taped message in a lift plummeting groundwards out of control:

Welcome to the city and the body hotline arms and legs are flying round us
here at an enormous rate and so are ears and street lamps. At the moment
we are not anticipating the end of the world or the demise of reproductive
organs. But who knows now that sound is only time warps? Schools are
going half-speed and universities are closing. Elections will only be held
on racial issues. Young women may die from stress unless we treat them
for their age. Whatever happened to socioeconomic solutions?23

The reiterated last line of this section, “Are we going to write poems
until all heaven breaks loose?”, daredevilish in the beginning, is desperate
now.24

Re-energising the unreal city

“Returning the Angles”, another city poem of Hazel Smith, which
exists in page-based and multi-media versions, offers a more optimistic
resolution to the link between the city, the body and creativity.25 In order
to do this, it recedes from the more radical hyperscape of “The Body and
the City”, and sets the action in either London or Sydney, or at least in
places (such as the house or flat in which the opening vignette is set) that
could realistically be located in either city. As with “The Body and the
City”, the context that most suggests itself as a way of reading Smith’s
work is a literary one: this time, T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, a seminal
modernist text in which the flâneur figures.26 The background of Tableaux
parisiens is still there, though, as we watch Smith’s flâneuse begin to find
her way towards an alternative link between sexuality and genealogy that
might be said to re-fashion the intrusive practices of Baudelaire’s poet-
flâneur.27
The city of London re-energises the flâneuse of “Returning the Angles”
and she re-energises it. There is a collapsing of subject-object distinction

23
Smith, The Erotics of Geography, 26.
24
Compare Smith, The Erotics of Geography, 22; 26.
25
“Returning the Angles” was commissioned by the ABC and broadcast in 1998.
This version is available on Soma CD-R 900, with sound and interactive animation
by Roger Dean.
26
The subject of Chapter 5 in Sharpe, Unreal Cities.
27
Sharpe, Unreal Cities, 50.
74 Chapter Five

between self and city that that retrieves the Romantic mastery of Tableaux
parisiens and pre-empts the experience of ennui that plagues Eliot’s
mythical flâneur figure Tiresias—and, indeed, all the voices of The Waste
Land. Yet, this is no return to the fantasies of penetration that fuelled the
sense of creative mastery achieved by Baudelaire’s flâneur. Nor does the
flâneuse of “Returning the Angles” attain her sense of poetic mastery
through inhabiting the opposition between poetry and sexuality found in
The Waste Land.28 Whereas poetry substitutes for the sex in the city that
brings no comfort to any of the voices in The Waste Land, sexuality is
increasingly revealed as a source of release and creativity in “Returning
the Angles”. In the opening vignette, the flâneuse recounts the after-party
return of a guest who says he’s forgotten his jacket. They talk; he rises to
leave,

But then suddenly, effortlessly, and in way that seemed utterly appropriate,
he picked me up with both arms and swung me through the air, looping
and turning me, looping and turning me towards the ceiling, towards the
walls, towards the floor, sliding me past his face and the sweet smell of
breath. Looping and tuning, he swung me through a million different
angles.29

Sexuality, genealogy and creativity are brought together in “Returning

the Angles” as the flâneuse observes the same creative energy in her
relationships with both her partner and her sister. Helen Simons gradually
reveals her relationship with Chris to be a major source of creativity,
afforded a new occasion by London, as they collaborate on a piece,
exchanging “ideas like gifts”.30 London is likewise the site of a restorative
process at work in Helen’s relationship with her sister, and the outcome
appears to feed her creative as well as emotional needs:

the sisters peel away gilt-edged secrets

the sisters skip through the loop of their childhood
the sisters hang their past on a lifeline

the echoes are bouncing back truth and error

the shadows exchange their rewritten stories
the mirrors merge between dying and birth
as sisterhood melts into musical memories31

28
Ibid., 102-103.
29
Smith, Keys Round Her Tongue, 73.
30
Ibid., 81.
31
Ibid., 75.
 Flagging Down the flâneuse in Hazel Smith’s City Poems 75

This contrasts sharply with the visions of family in The Waste Land,
which are either aristocratic, the stuff of literary myth, and merely alienate
the poetic voice from its present context (“the arch-duke, my cousin”) or
working class and a source of burden, like Lil’s too-many children in “A
Game of Chess”.32
Yet, there is also some unfinished business about family in “Returning
the Angles”. This is the major source of unease in the text. Suddenly, in
the feminist theory section of Dillon’s famous bookshop in London, the
hitherto content flâneuse finds herself confessing, “The things I really
need to say cower, like objects in a darkened room”.33 The hints scattered
through “Returning the Angles” as to the source of an emotional
wilderness at the heart of the flâneuse suggest that it might be her family
and its past:

He had taken her passport away to stop her travelling. She remembered
him coming into her room and saying you can’t do this it will kill all of us,
the whole family and she said I can do this and I will. I will. I will and she
did.34

We might infer that the “he” of this section is the speaker’s father but
we don’t know. And, while we know that the sister referred to in one of
the emails is Helen Simons’, we don’t know whether Helen is the one who
experienced the conflict with “him”. Another group of Smith’s poems in
Keys Round Her Tongue takes up the hints about family dropped in
“Returning the Angles” and expands them into an even more profound
exploration of the ethics of being in the city than either “The Body and the
City” or “Returning the Angles”. Here we find the deepest feminism of the
city poems, as they offer a real alternative vision to Baudelaire’s ghastly
fantasy of penetration and Eliot’s vision of a sterile sexuality divorced
from the poetic impulse. In imagining the flâneuse of this other group of
city poems, Smith breaks down and reconstitutes the very subject-object
distinction on which the masculinist—Baudelairean—tradition of the
flâneur is based.

The city and the Diaspora: the stranger in the family

“Fullers’ Walnut Cake”, “Imagining Cities” and “Unbendable” leave
the London of “Returning the Angles” behind to invoke the Northern cities

32
Eliot, Collected Poems, 61; 66-67.
33
Smith, Keys Round Her Tongue, 76.
34
Ibid., 78.
76 Chapter Five

of Leeds and Manchester. In these poems, Smith’s flâneuse shows herself

to be prepared to rethink the kind of poetry appropriate to the depiction of
the postmodern city and its female subjects. The logic of the rethinking
goes something like this. In quest of the relational subjectivity appropriate
to the female subject of postmodernity, the flâneuse of “Fullers’ Walnut
Cake”, “Imagining Cities” and “Unbendable” finds that rethinking
subjectivity entails rethinking subject-object relations and this in turn
entails accepting that the city is not just physical space but also familial
space. This sees her embark on a rethinking of the source of the “illusions”
of “selfhood and identity” and finding that the source is in history rather
than in language.35 This, in turn, yields a rethinking of how the poetry of
the postmodern city is generated.
What the city “is” for the flâneuse of these three short poems by Hazel
Smith is very different from the hyperscape of “The Body and the City” or
the London of “Returning the Angles”. It is regional (Leeds, in the north
of England), ethnically defined as Jewish (far from the cosmopolitan
world of “Returning the Angles”) and profoundly relational, the central
relationship being that of the flâneuse and her father.
Hazel Smith’s thinking in these three short poems has been influenced
by the geographer, David Harvey, who, in Christine Battersby’s account,
defined postmodernism as “involving a change in the relations between
subjects and objects that has occurred as a consequence of developments
in the modes of capitalist production”.36 Battersby relates this notion to
Adorno’s suggestion that subject-object thinking was in any case
historically specific, and that as subject and object together undergo
historical change, forgotten things emerge to consciousness again.
According to Adorno, these forgotten “singularities and patternings”
emerge from unstable groupings of schematised particulars he and
Benjamin called “constellations” of thought.37 Hazel Smith uses the term
“constellation” to describe the way ideas are brought together to create
complex mixes of history and contemporaneity in the poems of Frank
O’Hara, whose hyperscapes have clearly inspired some elements of her
own work.38 The short city poems in Keys Round Her Tongue use an
O’Hara-like situating of the personal within the global, and vice-versa, in
Smith’s own constellations. This move enables her to undertake the kind

35
Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 211ff, cited in Battersby, The Phenomenal Woman,
135.
36
Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, cited in Battersby, The Phenomenal
Woman, 141.
37
Battersby, The Phenomenal Woman, 133-34.
38
Smith, Hyperscapes, 28.
 Flagging Down the flâneuse in Hazel Smith’s City Poems 77

of historicised exploration of female identity, embedded in shifting

subject-object relations, that Christine Battersby asks for.39 The texts are
not “walk poems” in the generic sense identified by Roger Gilbert,40 but if,
as Smith says in “Imagining Cities”, “maps are only psychic charts”, they
do offer their own kind of itinerary.41 The placing of the city in the past
also enables a fragmentation and rebuilding of what the city “is” that
prevents objectification and leaves the flâneuse always aware of the way it
exceeds her capacity to symbolise, or otherwise objectify, it.
The three poems trace a troubled relationship between the flâneuse and
her Jewish heritage, seeing her alienated from the extended family who
turned up in droves at her father’s funeral, “blocking” her in her grief.42
“Fullers’ Walnut Cake” reveals a relational self, adrift, not on the streets of
Leeds, but on a psychic chart composed of unwanted family relationships.
This reconstituting of the city for the flâneuse emerges more explicitly in
“Imagining Cities”. She is alienated from what her family regards as the
homeland—Lithuania—and endures a weight of unresolved conflict with
her father, centred on her relationship to her own Jewishness. Despite her
claim to be free of nostalgia, she cannot avoid the psychical significance
of her grandfather’s town in Lithuania, even while she refuses to visit it. In
“Imagining Cities”, as the flâneuse confronts the stranger in the family
that is the stranger in herself, she finds that the imagined city is all that is
left to her.
After this realisation, the flâneuse finds herself involved in a final
fragmenting and rebuilding of city and self. In “Unbendable”, she radically
breaks up the identity of Leeds in the service of restoring or rebuilding a
relational self, one that contains the measure or mark of difference within
identity.43 The poem sorts through the elements of her life in Leeds with
her father as it documents the power of those elements to estrange. The
warehouse, decrepit and site of only partially understood activities (how
could stuffing pound notes in a pocket and forgetting them, and storing
orders in the head amount to “business”?), wool (set fire to in a bizarre
proof of identity but serving only to frighten a child), Charlie Chaplin
films and Jewish grace are in turn invoked as signs of alienation as the
flâneuse recalls her father and herself “skat(ing) awkwardly together

39
Battersby, The Phenomenal Woman, 136.
40
Smith, Hyperscapes, 61, uses Gilbert’s term when analysing O’Hara’s city
poems; c.f. Gilbert, 8-9.
41
Smith, Keys Round her Tongue, 12.
42
Ibid., 37.
43
Ibid., 68.
78 Chapter Five

across (their) difference”.44 Something restorative of the relationship only

happens after the father’s death:

But the day he died

the secret pleasures of his working life
staggered out from cracks
along with the unknown millions
who reclaimed him.45

Her father’s identity emerges, not in some abstract essence, and not
straightforwardly as a businessman but materially, erotically, in a way that
diffuses any sense of her father existing only in relation to her. The
eroticisation, materialisation and multiplication of her father’s identity in
turn transform the flâneuse as daughter:

These days we have plans for the warehouse:

we will rebuild.
The Great Dictator makes me weep.
And I wear wool jumpers in Australia.46

In the recuperation of the warehouse, the wool, and Chaplin’s films, in

the shape of The Great Dictator, with its parody of the anti-Semitic Hitler,
the flâneuse as daughter achieves a resolved, relational identity, one made
out of difference. This identity for Smith’s flâneuse stands as a hard-won
alter-ego to the bemused spectator of late-capitalist sexualised consumerism
who brought the curtain down on “The Body and the City”. The journey
back into the father’s work practices, standing as they do in opposition to
the streamlined productionism of modernity, offer the flâneuse what
Adorno might term a “constellation” though which she can locate
something of permanent value.

Unoppressed in the city

In looking back on the larger itineraries of Hazel Smith’s flâneuse
throughout the city poems, and the fluctuating distances she puts between
herself and Baudelaire’s flâneur, we find a closely related exploration of
the metaphysics of the female city dweller and of the idea of the
“unoppressive city” defined, in what proved to be a seminal essay, by Iris

44
Ibid., 68.
45
Ibid., 68.
46
Ibid., 68.
 Flagging Down the flâneuse in Hazel Smith’s City Poems 79

Marion Young.47 Young discussed the potential oppressions of community

and the need to move away from them. She argued that the city should be
regarded, not as source of alienation from traditional ideas of community,
but as opportunity for forging new, freer understandings of human
association. Such a movement of sensibility explains one direction of the
movement of Smith’s flâneuse from Leeds, site of the oppressive
community of the Jewish Diaspora of “Fullers’ Walnut Cake”, to the
celebration of the metropolis found in “Returning the Angles”. But the
hyperscape, logical extension of the modern city, holds its own
oppressions, as “The Body and the City” found. “Imagining Cities” is a
transitional stage for Smith’s flâneuse, as, armed with the academic
discourse about postmodernism, she tries to negotiate the past provincial
oppressive community from the fearfully liberatory space of the
postmodern city. Finally, in “Unbendable”, the flâneuse moves back to the
community she had left and re-imagines it from the vantage point of her
father’s death. The ending of the poem, in which we saw the completion of
a relational subjectivity out of irreducible difference, reflects Young’s
ideal of a community not based on unitary nature.48 Young saw this ideal
as one different from the traditional village-based idea of community and
one appropriate to living in cities. The hard-won ethical resolution of
“Unbendable” goes a step further and embraces the contradiction of
accepting a metropolitan ideal of community, based on difference,
imaginatively located in the traditional provincial community of the Leeds
Diaspora.

Works Cited
Adam, Antoine, ed. 1961. Baudelaire: Les Fleurs du mal. Paris: Garnier
Frères.
Adorno, Theodor. 1973. Negative Dialectics. Translated by E.B. Ashton.
Routledge and Kegan Paul: London and New York.
Battersby, Christine. 1998. The Phenomenal Woman: Feminist Metaphysics
and the Patterns of Identity. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Eliot, T.S. 1936. Collected Poems 1909-1935. London: Faber & Faber.
Gilbert, Roger. 1991. Walks in the World: Representation and Experience
in Modern American Poetry. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

47
Young, “The Ideal of Community”, 317.
48
Ibid., 304.
80 Chapter Five

Harvey, David. 1990. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Inquiry into the

Origins of Cultural Change. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Basil
Blackwell.
Sharpe, William Chapman. 1990. Unreal Cities: Urban Figuration in
Wordsworth, Baudelaire, Whitman, Eliot and Williams. Baltimore and
London: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Smith, Hazel. 2000. Hyperscapes in the Poetry of Frank O’Hara:
Difference/Homosexuality/ Topography. Liverpool: Liverpool University
Press.
—. 2000. Keys Round Her Tongue: Short Prose, Poems and Performance
Texts. Woolooware: Soma Publishing.
—. 2008. The Erotics of Geography: Poetry, Performance Texts, New
Media Works. Sydney: Tinfish Press.
Wilson, Elizabeth. 1995. “The Invisible Flâneur”. In Postmodern Cities
and Spaces, edited by Sophie Watson and Katherine Gibson. Oxford:
Basil Blackwell.
Wolff, Janet. 1985. “The Invisible Flâneuse: Women and the Literature of
Modernity”. Theory, Culture and Society 2, no. 3: 37-46.
Young, Iris Marion. 1990. “The Ideal of Community and the Politics of
Difference”. In Feminism/Postmodernism, edited by Linda J.
Nicholson. New York and London: Routledge.
 CHAPTER SIX

LADY WORTLEY MONTAGU:

FROM ENGLAND TO ITALY

ALESSANDRA CALVANI

It is not uncommon to find women translators in the history of

translation: due to the lower status of translation in comparison with
“original” writing, women were generally permitted to translate provided
they did not deal with classical authors. The supposed lack of creativity in
translation, usually mirrored in translation metaphors, offered to women
the opportunity to write and to choose what had to be translated. In this
context, it is noteworthy that two different translators, Maria Petrettini and
Cecilia Stazzone, chose to translate into Italian Lady Mary Wortley
Montagu’s letters respectively in 1838 and 1880. On account of the
scarcely relevant presence of women authors in nineteenth-century Italy
the instrumental role played by translation communication conduit
amongst women, this represents an interesting choice. Particularly, the
analysis of both translations reveals the translators’ concern for specific
topics like female education, a topic which links them to international
women rights campaigners.
Yet, the fact remains that translating the same original often results in
distinct translations. In contrast with Petrettini, Stazzone differs quite a lot
from her original, cutting and rewriting passages in accordance with her
particular way of thinking. Manipulations on sensitive issues reveal the
translators’ ideologies. If in Petrettini’s translation it is possible to read the
traditional translating concern for the mimesis as traditionally conceived,
Stazzone’s translation presents the mimetic faculty of translation as the
starting point for the act of literary creation.
82 Chapter Six

Introduction1
The letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu were first published in
1763, soon after her death. They were immediately received with great
appreciation in England, and thanks to their translation, Lady Montagu
soon became well-known across Europe. Notwithstanding the great
success of her letters in other European countries, Italy appeared to merely
observe her popularity from a distance. Among many French translations,
the first translation into Italian of Lady Montagu’s Letters was published
in 1838, after nearly a century of astonishing silence. 2 It is quite likely that
her works had been read in French in the divided Italy of the time. French
culture influenced Italy, especially due to the country’s political situation.
As a matter of fact, many Italian scholars did not deem necessary to
translate at all.
The substantial appreciation for Italian Renaissance literature in the
rest of Europe and the overwhelming influence of Latin literature were
offered as evidence of the alleged superiority of Italian culture, especially
when compared to other cultures. Literature had to be constituted by
original literary works only, there was no place for translations, an
assumption that made Mme de Stael accuse Italy of “provincialism”. The
only permissible exception was for Greek and Latin literary works, read in
the original language—with translations seen as evidence of literary
ability.
Foreign literary works reached Italy through French translations, the
authority of the French culture serving as filter for what could be read. The
low recognition attributed to translation, which was perceived as an
inferior literary activity marked by an absence of originality and a general
lack of knowledge of the English language were the primary causes of the
general Italian negligence about translation. Indeed, Foscolo’s concern
about his version of Sterne testifies well to this peculiar situation.3
If indifference was the usual reception reserved for translation, an
additional factor complicated matters in this particular situation: the
translated literary work had been originally written by a woman. Few
women dared write and publish in those days—and even if they did, their
work was usually attacked for lack of erudition and accuracy. Translation
was the ordinary means used by women to get out of their forced silence.

1
All the translations from Italian into English are my translations.
2
In 1768 the second French edition of the letters was published. See
http://farum.it/publifarumv/n/03/pdf/Raus.pdf
3
See Calvani, Il viaggio italiano di Sterne, 2004.
 Lady Wortley Montagu: From England to Italy 83

Thanks to the assumed lack of originality in translation, female writers

could enter the literary world and eventually speak.
Translation, even though it was devoid of the honours reserved to
writers, at least had the advantage of saving them from being criticized for
content. The absence of original creation in translation together with the
lack of knowledge of the original language pushed the translator more in
the direction of the writer, without the risks of writing. Love of foreign
authors was not the only reason for translating. Many female translators
used translation in order to speak to other women about particular topics.
A case in point is Giustina Renier’s translation of Shakespeare, who
selected three particular plays to be translated in accordance to her main
concern, female education.4
With such a premise, the translations of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s
letters present themselves as an interesting case history. The translation
analyses point out the close relationship between gender and translation.
They also underline the differences found in the translations, particularly
in connection with their distinct underlying purposes. In particular, I
would like to argue that the first concern of Maria Petrettini’s translation is
to give evidence of the importance of education for women, presenting to
her readers an unquestioned example of learned woman and specifically to
her female readers a model to be imitated.5
Cecilia Stazzone’s translation seems to be conceived with a similar
gender concerned purpose in mind.6 If the choice of Lady Mary as her
author could be connected with the “anxiety of authorship” typical of the
first women writers, it could be argued that her translation wants to give
evidence of the existence of past women writers who nineteenth-century
women could refer to as a point of reference.7 In her anxiety of justifying
her presence in a male literary world, the image that Stazzone presents to
Italy is that of a successful learned woman, universally appreciated for her
writing. A writer herself, she shows her literary abilities, as the line of
female connections created by women through translation. With this
purpose in mind, she decides in favour of a free translation, subsequently
manipulating the text in order to make the original speak in accordance
with her thinking and personal style.

4
See Calvani, Translating in a female voice.
5
Petrettini, Lettere di Lady Montague, 1838.
6
Stazzone, Lettere di Lady Montagu, 1880.
7
Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, 49.
84 Chapter Six

Petrettini’s Preface: an Introduction to Translation

The Greek countess Maria Petrettini published her Italian translation
in1838. In fact, it was not her first publication. She was a learned woman
who came to Italy in 18048 and spent part of her life in Venice, her
“second motherland”, as she called it.9 Being the sister of Spiridone
Petrettini, a popular contemporary scholar, she soon made the acquaintance
of Venetian scholars. In one of his letters to Giustina Renier, the first
Italian Shakespeare translator, Cesarotti refers to Petrettini as a “modest,
quite open-minded and very learned” woman.10
Her acquaintance with learned women as Giustina Renier and Isabella
Teotochi Albrizzi, both of whom held literary salons in Venice,
immediately suggests a possible connection with female nineteenth-
century authors. Female education being one of their main concerns, an
example of female writing specifically conceived for a female audience
can be found in Giustina Renier’s translations. As an answer to the
ignorance in which young women were kept and in accordance with what
the so called “bluestockings” were writing on this subject, Renier used her
pen to provide women a simultaneously instructive and pleasurable text. In
line with these first “feminist” writings, the young Maria Petrettini
published her Vita di Cassandra Fedeli in 1815, her stated purpose is to
promote female education, whose lack she defines as “detrimental to
society”, offering to women an example of female scholar.11
As Gilbert and Gubar have argued, one of the main features of female
writing is the “anxiety of authorship”, a phenomenon connected to the
absence of previous women authors to whom they could have referred.
Women in England, France, Greece and Italy attempted to escape the
silence, writing for women about women and, in the process, turning
translation into their means of communication. They did not merely want
to improve their situation in their individual countries, they also aimed for
all women to get access to an appropriate education. By speaking to each

8
In Vita di Mario Pieri (http://casatorenier.blog.tiscali.it/?doing_wp_cron).
9
In Petrettini, Vita di Cassandra Fedeli, 3.
10
In Malamani, Cento lettere inedite di Melchiorre Cesarotti a Giustina Renier
Michiel.
11
In particular in the Preface she states: “Nè io qui crederò di dovermi distendere
sull’importanza dell’educazione delle donne, nè in rammentare ad uno ad uno i
danni, che dalla mancanza di questa vengono alla società, non essendo chi non
sappia quale influenza si abbiano le donne su i costumi, sulle passioni, sulle
abitudini, sullo spirito del secolo, della nazione, della città e della famiglia in cui
vivono”, Petrettini, Vita di Cassandra Fedeli, 4.
 Lady Wortley Montagu: From England to Italy 85

other through translation, they created connections amongst women across

Europe and furnished many examples of learned women. Therefore, it is
not surprising that following the biography of a learned woman, Maria
Petrettini decided to publish a translation of another learned female
author’s work, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.
From the very start Petrettini points out her commitment to gender
issues. In the Preface she states that she translated Lady Mary’s work
because it could be useful not only to Anglicists but to the wider public,
particularly women. It is the difference between male and female writers
that she is claiming. Travel literature was very popular at the time, with
many books dealing with the subject of Lady Mary’s letters. Petrettini
seemed to be worried about it: why should anybody read a new travel
book? Because its author is a woman, that is Petrettini answer. Male
writers were wrong in their assumptions about Turkish people to the extent
as male travelers could not get entrance into their houses and talk with
Turkish women.
But even if she managed to convince people to read the book,
something else still troubled the translator. Lady Mary was a learned
woman living during the Enlightenment, her love of knowledge making
her travel and write. But her passion for reason and her specifically
English point of view made her comment frequently on the topic of
religion. She could not help herself being sarcastic, her eyes observing
everything and her wit challenging the Catholic Church. Maria Petrettini
could not deny it and did not try to justify her author to her Catholic Italian
readers. On the contrary, she asserted that Lady Mary’s attitude to religion
had to be “condemned”, whilst stating that Montagu’s witty comments
deserved appreciation.
The final obstacle that could have prevented people from reading her
translation was the argument she had with Alexander Pope. Petrettini
refers to the episode as “dishonorable” for the great English poet. Lady
Mary was an accomplished writer with widely-recognized talent, but as
Petrettini was a woman translator, her views risked being ignored. In order
to better serve her purpose she referred to popular Italian scholars, such as
Algarotti and Baretti. Due to the bias attached to women erudition, her
opinion could not be taken into consideration: the citation of male scholars
lent her the cover of their authority and protected her from any possible
charge.
The solidity of Baretti’s name makes her eventually go as far as
expressing her negative opinion on the translated extracts of Lady Mary’s
letters. Using his words about translation as a shield, she criticizes his very
86 Chapter Six

work as “watered-down”.12 In order to soften her daring opinion, she

expresses her astonishment at such a bad attempt, all the more so because
it must be attributed to Baretti’s negligence. She finally blames Baretti for
his lack of a “faithful” translation. Referring to the Anglicist scholar’s
suggestion to prospective writers namely to aspire to be good translators
instead of bad authors, she presents her work with the emphasis that it has
been translated by a woman.

Memoir translation
As a further demonstration of her commitment to her work, Petrettini
premised her translation with the translation of the Memoir of Lady Mary
Wortley Montagu. It is an important choice because it tells the audience
something about her working method. In her preface, she states she
translated the Memoir from an English edition of 1811. It was the sixth
Philips edition of Lady Mary’s works, authored by Mr Dallaway.
In a note, she informs the reader that she omitted some passages
concerning Mr Wortley’s business matters, as they were not deemed
“useful” and declares that she only included the 52 letters originally
selected for publication. This observation is of some interest because no
evidence of cuts emerges from the comparison between the English
original and the translation. Actually she seems to quote the very words
contained in Lord Wharncliffe’s 1837 edition, published just one year
before her publication. In fact, the second statement about the selection of
the letters merely seems to be a reply to Lord Wharncliffe’s decision to
publish a greater selection of letters than Mr Dallaway, including those
from her time abroad, considered spurious by the last editor.13 There is
another note that seems to confirm the presence of the 1837 edition. At the
beginning of the Memoir, Dallaway refers to Anne Wortley as the mother
of Mr Wortley. Lord Wharncliffe inserted a note in his edition, where
informed the reader that Anne was actually Mr Wortley’s sister, indicating
the previous observation as Dallaway’s mistake. Petrettini substituted the
original “son” with “sister”, subsequently explaining in a note that the
editor was not wrong in his assumption since the epithet of “Mistress” was
also conferred upon unmarried girls. Therefore, she states Dallaway was
not wrong in assuming Mrs Wortley was married and adds cryptically that
“today better opinions have been expressed”.14 These two references seem

12
“stemperato”; Petrettini, Lettere di Lady Montague, 7.
13
Montagu, Letters and Works, 4-5.
14
“Ora di quell’opinione migliori giudizj si riferirono detur regressus ad veniam”;
 Lady Wortley Montagu: From England to Italy 87

to suggest that she read the new edition of Lady Mary’s works and it is
likely that she used it alongside other editions.
As far as the Memoir translation is concerned, in the preface she
expressed her preference for “faithful” translation. In her opinion, this
indicates a recreation of the original style by the translator, as opposed to a
literal translation. This can be deduced from her previously mentioned
comment on Baretti’s translation, as well as from other statements. In fact,
in reference to translation she said that the not “vulgar” translator must
“keep, as much as possible, the original character of his author”.15 She
compares her author’s style of writing with painting, a metaphor quite
common for translation as well. Like a painter, the translator had to imitate
nature, giving voice to an original written in another language. In the
process, the translator creates an exact copy that due to its proximity to the
original looked like it—something real and alive.
Renier, Foscolo and Cesarotti talked about translation in the same
terms. In particular they considered the lively “colour” as one of the main
features of a “lively translation”. In the same metaphor, Petrettini speaks
about “lively colour, perfect drawing and excellent beauty”, seemingly
linking her to those scholars and to their thinking about translation.16 As
Foscolo before her, she seems concerned about literary achievement in
translation. The exact drawing is insufficient to constitute an artistic
picture, just like a close translation of a literary work is not necessarily a
literary work in itself. In order to have an original in a new “dress”, the
translator must reinvent her author’s peculiarities and style: in other
words, she must be a writer. It is what could be argued from Baretti’s
quote, which demanded more “original” translations in lieu of “old”
originals.
Actually, Petrettini concedes her imperfections as a writer but hopes
her translation will win her readers’ approval. Notwithstanding these
commonplace expressions of modesty, her satisfaction with her literary
achievement becomes obvious. She knows that she is a scholar and makes
it clear through quotation. Further, she takes the chance offered by her
translation to clearly state her merits, mentioning to her readers that she is
both a good translator and a writer.17
In fact, the Memoir translation demonstrates minor discrepancies from
the original—the first instance occurring in the notes. As already said,

Petrettini, Lettere di Lady Montague, 43.

15
“Di conservar, cioè, per quanto è in lui, il carattere originale del suo autore”;
Ibid., 3.
16
“Del vivace colorito, del perfetto disegno, e della venustà più squisita”; Ibid., 4.
17
Ibid., 7.
88 Chapter Six

Note 3 is not present in the Dallaway edition. Moreover, there is a

reference to Parini in Note 11 that has been added by Petrettini, as well
Note 12 of her edition, in which she corrects a Dallaway mistake.
Sometimes, even numbering and position of the notes is different. For
example, the two different notes at page 59 and 60 of the original become
Note 9 in the Petrettini version. Thus, the wrong note is positioned at the
corresponding place while the note at page 15 of the original does not exist
in Petrettini’s translation. Concerning the translation, similar minor
discrepancies emerge.
She deletes several passages, for instance the citation of the bills
introduced by Mr Wortley in the House of Commons18 and the representation
of Henry Fielding’s genealogical tree.19 Petrettini may have assumed that
her readers would deem these passages uninteresting. Additionally, there
are a few sentences missing from translation, as well as three lines from
one of Mr Hervey letters.20 Furthermore, she omitted two lines about Lady
Mary’s Italian retirement of which the original says that she “was happy in
the superintendence of her vineyards and silk-worms”.21 It is likely that
Petrettini cut them intentionally: the first one being too overtly romantic,
Petrettini translates it as “I have to be Daphne in the Aminta”, thus
deleting the reference to Thomas of Dydimus.22 The second sentence has
been modified because of its reference to a material working activity:
tending for vineyards and silk-worms was not considered appropriate for
aristocratic people in general, but absolutely nonsensical for an aristocratic
woman in particular.
There are also some mistakes in the references to dates, for example
“11 December” in the original23 has been changed to “2 December”24 and
the year “1724” of the original25 becomes “1824” in the translation.26 The
original direct speech has been changed to indirect speech several times27
and in the quoted passages from the letters, the date, the address and the

18
Montagu, Letters and Works, 11.
19
Ibid., 55.
20
“I must tell you too that Thomas of Dydimus and I are so alike in our way of
thinking that ******** I must be confuted in the same manner, that Daphne”;
Ibid., 50.
21
Ibid., 58.
22
“io abbisogno di essere Dafne nell’Aminta, laddove dice”; Petrettini, Lettere di
Lady Maria Wortley Montague, 31.
23
Montagu, Letters and Works, 19.
24
Petrettini, Lettere di Lady Maria Wortley Montague, 9.
25
Montagu, Letters and Works, 34.
26
Petrettini, Lettere di Lady Maria Wortley Montague, 19.
27
Montagu, Letters and Works, 60; Petrettini, Lettere di Lady Montague, 39.
 Lady Wortley Montagu: From England to Italy 89

closing formulae are missing.28 She says explicitly in Italian what was
merely indicated in English, for purposes of clarity,29 frequently resulting
in additions of both short sentences30and adjectives.31
Curiously, whereas most French sentences are left in French,32 some
French terms have been translated, a case in point being the word “adieu”.33
The Italian quotations present in the original have been slightly amended.34
It must be noticed that also some sentences have been slightly changed.35
This is particularly so in a series of sentences in which Petrettini reveals
her society’s gender roles. She translates that “among celebrated characters
of the nobility, Lady Mary could rank Sarah Duchess of Marlborough”36
as “among the ladies celebrated for their nobility and for their character
with whom she vied there was Sarah Duchess of Marlborough”,37
implying that a woman could only compete with another woman.
Secondly, she rendered “the respect of her equals”38 as “the respect for her
female equals”39 implicitly stating that only women could respect other
women. Finally, she says that “The delicacy of her style, in early youth,
corresponded with the soft and interesting beauty, which she possessed”40
as “the delicacy of her style corresponds to that tender interest which her
lovely beauty aroused in the spring of her age”,41 meaning that only young
girls could be attractive, not adult women.

28
Montagu, Letters and Works, 52; Petrettini, Lettere di Lady Montague, 33.
29
Montagu, Letters and Works, 59; Petrettini, Lettere di Lady Montague, 38.
30
Montagu, Letters and Works, 48, 53, 56; Petrettini, Lettere di Lady Montague,
29, 34, 36, 37.
31
Montagu, Letters and Works, 36, 37; Petrettini, Lettere di Lady Montague, 21.
32
Montagu, Letters and Works, 47; Petrettini, Lettere di Lady Montague, 29.
33
Montagu, Letters and Works, 50; Petrettini, Lettere di Lady Montague, 32.
34
Montagu, Letters and Works, 50, 41; Petrettini, Lettere di Lady Montague, 25,
31.
35
Montagu, Letters and Works, 17; “the embassy to Constantinople was formerly
of great commercial importance, when the treasures of the east were brought by
caravans to the different ports of the Levant” translated as “l’ambasciata di
Costantinopoli era allora di una grande importanza pel commercio, mentre I tesori
del Levante recavansi con le caravane da’ suoi varii porti in quella piazza”;
Petrettini, Lettere di Lady Montague, 7-8.
36
Montagu, Letters and Works, 50.
37
“fra le dame celebri per nobiltà e per carattere con le quali la Montague
gareggiava una era Sara Duchessa di Marlborough”; Petrettini, Lettere di Lady
Montague, 32.
38
Montagu, Letters and Works, 52.
39
“il rispetto delle sue simili”; Petrettini, Lettere di Lady Montague, 33.
40
Montagu, Letters and Works, 58.
41
“la delicatezza del suo stile corrisponde a quel tenero interesse che la sua amabile
90 Chapter Six

Maria Petrettini’s translation

The Letters translation used one of the early editions of the Letters as
its point of reference. In fact, Petrettini only translates the 52 letters
presented in the first editions, while both Dallaway’s 1811 and Lord
Wharncliffe’s 1837 editions presented a greater variety of letters,
including those written before and after her travelling experience.
Furthermore, apart from minor exceptions, (10 letters out of 52), the
addressee’s name does not appear in her translation, just like in the first
editions of the original. The first Dallaway edition of 1803 presented all
the names.42
As far as the letters are concerned, the same changes already noticed in
the Memoir translation can be found here. She uses to retain all foreign
terminology in the original language, apart from “adieu”, which she
translates every time. Some sentences are slightly changed: a case in point
can be seen in Letter XXXIV, in which the sentence referring to a mosque,
“Idle people of all sorts walk here for their diversion, or amuse themselves
with drinking coffee, or sherbet”43 has been translated as “people of all
sorts walk here, some for their idleness, others for their diversion”.44 There
are additional differences in the sentence order45 and instances of direct
speech passages transitioning to reported speech.46
But the comparison with the original points out many more important
changes. There are some sentences whose meaning in translation differs
from the original. For example, in one of Lady Montagu’s letters to
Alexander Pope, she comments on the Turkish poetry and writes: “I think
he very artfully seems more passionate at the conclusion, as ‘tis natural for
people to warm themselves by their own discourses”.47 Petrettini’s
corresponding translation transforms a characteristic said to be common to
all the people into a peculiarity of the Turkish people. In fact, she
translates: “there is more warmth and more variety, which I think to be
artificially created in order to have a more passionate conclusion. Those

bellezza destava nella primavera dell’età sua”; M.Petrettini, Lettere di Lady

Montague, 41.
42
Montagu, Works in five volumes, London, 1803.
43
Montagu, Works in five volumes, 200.
44
“Ogni sorta di gente vi passeggia chi per ozio, e chi per per diletto, pigliando chi
il caffè, e chi il sorbetto”; Petrettini, Lettere di Lady Montague, 158.
45
Petrettini, Lettere di Lady Montague, 103; Montagu, Works in five volumes, 104.
46
M.Petrettini, Lettere di Lady Montague, 151; Montagu, Works in five volumes,
188.
47
Montagu, Works in five volumes, 167.
 Lady Wortley Montagu: From England to Italy 91

people naturally hot use to communicate part of their warmth also to the
discourse”.48 In another letter, a comment on the threshing and churning,
unknown in Turkey, has been referred to threshing and in the very same
letter the expression “other nations, that imagine themselves more polite”49
has been translated as “the other nations even more polite”,50 changing
what Lady Montagu was stating into a positive observation.
There are also differences in the dates of some letters, the punctuation
has been regularly changed and the brackets have been usually omitted.
Some words have been added in the translation, while others have been
omitted. As for the minor omissions, it is likely that the translator deemed
the deleted words to be unnecessary. This could be the case with the
absence of words such as “the house”51 or “and so easily”.52 On the
contrary, the presence of longer sentences in Italian seems to be due to the
translator’s desire for clarity, while the short English sentences seem to be
insufficient for the translator, who prefers more emphatic sentences. This
is the case with the expression “due to their stupidity”53 added to describe
the German soldiers, the word “terrible”54 added to “strength” and “very
beautiful”55 added to “cloisters”.56 The presence of some added adjectives
is revealing of the translator’s thinking about particular subjects: indeed,
there is no evident reason for their presence than an immediate association
made by the translator with certain words. A case in point could be the
aforementioned association of “very beautiful” with “cloisters”. However,
there are many more, such as the word “instigating”57 added to “Jesuit”,

48
“ed ha più di calore e di movimento, il che io credo artifizio, onde la chiusa
riesca più affettuosa. Questo popolo naturalmente ardente suole del suo ardore
comunicare parte anche al discorso”; Petrettini, Lettere di Lady Montague, 140.
49
Montagu, Works in five volumes, 161. My emphasis.
50
“le altre Nazioni, anche più culte”; Petrettini, Lettere di Lady Montague, 136.
51
Petrettini, Lettere di Lady Montague, 107; Montagu, Works in five volumes, 110.
52
Petrettini, Lettere di Lady Montague, 100; Montagu, Works in five volumes, 98.
53
“Stante la loro male intelligenza”; Petrettini, Lettere di Lady Montague, 108;
Montagu, Works in five volumes, 112.
54
“Terribile”; Petrettini, Lettere di Lady Montague, 84; Montagu, Works in five
volumes, 69.
55
“Bellissimi”, Petrettini, Lettere di Lady Montague, 162.
56
Montagu, Works in five volumes, 206.
57
Petrettini, Lettere di Lady Montague, 101; Montagu, Works in five volumes, 100.
92 Chapter Six

“learned”58 joining “curiosity”, while the “idle temper”59 of the Turkish

people becomes “natural”.60
Of equal interest is the attribution of the female gender to English
neutral words. Instances of this approach include “for everybody that waits
on her”61 translated into “for every woman that waits on her”,62 “all the
friends or relations of the lady”63 translated into “the female friends or
female relations of the lady”64 and “the Duchess of Blankebourg is not
without hers”65 turning into “the Duchess of Blankebourg is not without
her female dwarf”.66
As for the adjectives, I do believe that the gender attribution in these
cases is an effect of the translator’s social conditioning. The education
system, the social relations women were permitted to maintain and the
bias attached to female behavior suggested to the translator’s mind a
female presence connected to female characters. This was in accordance
with contemporary social rules which envisaged a strict separation of men
from women. Again, the cuts in the Italian translation must be imputed to
ideological and social mores of the era. Despite Petrettini not cutting all
the delicate passages related to religion, she felt compelled to delete those
passages which could be construed as offensive by the Catholic Church.
An example is the cut of fifteen lines of Letter IV,67 seven lines from
Letter V68 and 6 lines from Letter XII.69 She also cuts several lines on the

58
“Dotta”; Petrettini, Lettere di Lady Montague, 137; Montagu, Works in five
volumes, 163.
59
Montagu, Works in five volumes, 200.
60
“Naturale”; Ibid., 158.
61
Montagu, Works in five volumes, 35.
62
“da ciascuna di quelle cha le servono”; Petrettini, Lettere di Lady Montague, 65.
63
Montagu, Works in five volumes, 54.
64
“le amiche ele aderenti della Dama”; Petrettini, Lettere di Lady Montague, 76.
65
Montagu, Works in five volumes, 91.
66
“la Duchessa di Blakenbourg non è senza la sua nana”; Petrettini, Lettere di
Lady Montague, 96.
67
“rubies, bestowed on the adornment of rotten teeth and dirty rags. I own that I
had wickedness enough to covet St. Ursula’s pearl necklace; though perhaps this
was not wickedness at all, an image not being certainly one’s neighbor; but I went
yet further, and wished the wench herself converted into dressing plate. I should
also gladly see converted into silver, a great St. Christopher, which I imagine
would look very well in a cistern. These were my pious reflections; though I was
very well satisfied to see, piled up to the honour of our nation, the skulls of the
Eleven Thousand Virgins. I have seen some hundreds of relics here, of no less
consequence”; Montagu, Works in five volumes, 10-11.
68
“The Lutherans are not quite free from these follies. I have seen here in the
 Lady Wortley Montagu: From England to Italy 93

ordinary credulity of travelling books readers,70 maybe because those

could be construed as offensive. There are two further notable instances:
the first one is Petrettini’s observation in the translation that she cut Lady
Montagu’s poetical translation of the Turkish poem presented to
Alexander Pope.71 Interestingly, this offers some clues about what had to
be the translator’s thoughts on translation. In fact she states she did not
translate Lady Montagu’s second translation because the first literal one
could be sufficiently explicative of the Turkish poetry.
Further, notwithstanding the above-mentioned differences, Petrettini
seems to favour a “faithful” translation. This was commonly defined as a
translation that had to be respectful of the original, both in style and
content. If the cuts relating to religion seem to charge her with
“unfaithfulness”, one has to consider that at the time, merely referring to
certain topics could mean danger. She dared translate Lady Montagu’s
letters, the work of an Anglican woman who frequently rails against the
Roman Catholic Church and presented them to one of the most Catholic
countries.
Indeed, she accords so much importance to what she considers the
content of the text that she seems unaware of the incoherence of her
approach. In fact, she did not translate her author poetical translation in her
opinion the first literal translation conveying all the information needed by
the reader. Instead, she translated Lady Mary’s comments on that
translation, maybe because they expressed the translator’s interpretation of
the original, offering to the reader the chance of observing what happens
prior to the writing process. She certainly does not consider Lady Mary’s
message that poetical translation differs from literal translation.
Finally, it is possible to read the presence of the translator in the notes.
She makes several observations in note form, usually preferring to insert
explanations within the translation, but in one particular circumstance she

principal church, a large piece of the Cross set in jewels, and the point of the spear,
which, they told me, very gravely, was the same that pierced the side of our
Saviour”, Montagu, Works in five volumes, 14-15.
69
“But I could not forbear laughing at their shewing me a wooden head of our
Saviour, which, they assured me, spoke, during the siege of Vienna; and, as a proof
of it, bid me mark his mouth, which had been open ever since. Nothing could be
more becoming than the dress of these nuns”, Montagu, Works in five volumes, 56.
70
“She is very angry that I won’t lye like other travellers. I verily believe she
expects I should tell her of the Anthropophagie, men whose heads grow below
their shoulders; however, pray say something to pacify her”, Montagu, Works in
five volumes, 95.
71
Petrettini, Lettere di Lady Montague, 140.
94 Chapter Six

could not prevent herself from speaking in the first person. In Letter
XXVII, Lady Montagu talked about the Quran, claiming that it was very
likely that the Greek priests that translated it, did it wrongly on purpose.
Petrettini, who writes in Italian but was of Greek origin, felt compelled
note that “this is to find malice where it is not possible to have it: if the
Greek priests altered the meaning for ignorance, there was no malice, and
if there was, why the Turkish Effendi did not say it?”72

Cecilia Stazzone’s translation

Cecilia Stazzone published her translation in Palermo in 1880. It is
difficult to find information about her life. As Petrettini before her, she is
also an original writer, but in her literary ambition she pushes herself a
long way from her predecessor. She wrote some novels and theatre plays
and a travel book about her experience travelling through Italy. Just as
Petrettini, she is a learned, aristocratic woman with an interest in women’s
literature, as her choice of author underlines.
Writing as a female author in a male literary world, she addressed
herself to the women writers of the past in order to justify her presence. It
could be argued that many more similarities between Petrettini’s and
Stazzone’s translations will emerge from the translation analysis. Actually
these seem to be the only things that they have in common, this being
evident since the very cover of their book. Petrettini’s first page is
completely dominated by the name of the author and title, with the
translator’s name written in italics at the end of the page and under the
name, the indication of her Greek origin typed with bigger characters.
Stazzone’s first page presents Lady Montagu’s name too, but not the
full title of her book, with the specification “free translation” typed under
the title. In the middle of the page there is the name of the translator, in big
letters and her aristocratic title, Marquess De Gregorio. At the end, we
have the name of the preface author, Paolo Lioy, in bold letters.
Petrettini’s first page mirrors exactly her main purpose in translation. First
of all she wants her author to be known in Italy and in accordance with her
main purpose Lady Montagu’s name dominates the page.
The translator is only the author’s instrument used to speak in another
language, as the metaphor chosen by Petrettini to describe her work, Lady

72
“Quest’è voler trovar malizia dove non la ci può essere: se i preti Greci
alterarono il senso per ignoranza, non ci fu malizia, e se ci fu come gli Effendi
Turchi non l’avrebbero rilevata?”; Petrettini, Lettere di Lady Montague, 121.
 Lady Wortley Montagu: From England to Italy 95

Montagu’s journey in Italian dresses, points out.73 She is aware of her

achievement, especially in light of the fact that she is not Italian and she
takes care to make it evident to the readers. However, she is also a
“faithful” translator in her projects. Stazzone’s first page speaks as well as
Petrettini’s, but it speaks another language. The name of the original
author appears just as in Petrettini’s version, but no relevance has been
given to the title. The name of the translator is in the middle of the page, in
smaller characters and finally there is the name of the preface author. She
seems to present authors in descending order of importance, in a sort of
reverse pyramid: first of all, there is the original author, secondly the
translator and finally the author of the preface. Her main concern is with
original writing.
If Petrettini focused on the author and the book emphasised the
significance of female education, Stazzone seems more concerned about
the original features of Lady Mary’s book. In fact it is not an ordinary
novel, but an epistolary book, which seems to be the main relevant thing
for Stazzone. She does not care too much about the content and her
statement on “free translation” seems to confirm it. Her main concern is
not about the content, but the manner in which things have been said.
Consequently, in order to stress the writing style, she wants to be free of
passages which she thinks do not serve her purpose. She is primarily a
writer and wishes to be considered as such. Indeed, she has been subjected
to the bias of her time against translation, secondary literary work not
deemed equivalent to literary creation. As a woman writer, she feels
compelled to justify her presence in the literary world by relying on the
presence of other women before her. Yet, to stress her literary
achievement she emphasises her personal contribution to the original and
her reading of the text.
It is Paolo Lioy, politician, scientist and writer, who immediately
confirms the reader’s assumptions: it is the lively style of the author that is
of interest, her descriptions being softened by the “eye of the artist”.
Stazzone does not preface her translation herself, quite common in the
case of scholarly ambitious prefaces. If a woman could translate, only a
man could be learned enough to write. The bias attached to women seems
not to have saved the aristocratic translator who was not learned enough to
write an appropriate introduction. It is again Lioy himself that gives
evidence of what was the common opinion about women’s literary works.
He says Lady Montagu was able to observe, a quality which happens to be
found among women. He assumes that women are sensitive and delicate

73
Petrettini, Lettere di Lady Montague, 8.
96 Chapter Six

but he states “it is not true that in this regard the heart and feeling always
soften the solidity of judgments and the intelligence of the analysis”,
women can see what men cannot, they catch details.74
He goes on in explaining what he assumes to be the main feature of
women’s literature. In his opinion, all the popular women writers did not
write as they “naturally” would. In particular, he says “in Lelia and in
Irma, George Sand and Berthold Auerbach created characters more human
than feminine, and instead it could be argued that the peculiar nature of
femininity happens to be found only very few times in works meant to be
published, because the thought of their publication spoils them, changing
in objective what is more spiritually subjective”.75
If the typical feature of women writing is the manner in which secret
feelings are expressed—an impartial comment being the exclusive
prerogative of male writers—Lady Montagu presents herself as an
extraordinary female author. Her writing being “objective”, since her work
was famous and celebrated, the “logical” consequence was that she had to
be different from those “delicate sensories of thinking” that, in the words
of Lioy, had written the best books a woman could write.76 Lady Montagu
possesses “manly self-assurance” and she is learned which seems to be a
fault as “sometimes it substitutes the immediate and direct impression”.77
In his account of Lady Mary merits, he stresses her knowledge of Greek
literature, a prerequisite for recognition as a scholar.
But the bias against women is not the only type of prejudice voiced by
Lioy. In particular the author does not conceal his evident disdain for
Oriental society. He refers to “the stench of a putrid society where the
woman is only an instrument of pleasure”.78 In his opinion, despite her
scholarship, her analysis of the Turkish society had to be taken with a
pinch of salt, as she took artistic licence by embellishing Muslim life with

74
“Non è vero che in questo il cuore e il sentimento disgradino sempre la sodezza
dei giudizi e l’acume dell’analisi”; Stazzone, Lettere di Lady Montagu, 3.
75
“In Lelia e in Irma, Giorgio Sand e Bertoldo Auerbach crearono tipi assai più
umani che femminei, potrebbe anzi sistenersi che la squisita indole della femineità
rarissime volte si manifesti in opere destinate a essere conosciute, poiché il
pensiero della pubblicità basta a sciuparle, trasformando in obbiettivo ciò ch’è più
spiritualmente soggettivo”; Ibid., 4.
76
“delicate sensitive del pensiero”; Ibid.
77
“Ha disinvoltura virile. Trabocca in essa da ogni pagina una erudizione, sempre
gaja e spigliata, ma che pur qualche volta si sostituisce alla impressione immediata
e diretta”; Ibid., 4-5.
78
“lezzo di una società putrida, ove la donna non è che un arnese di voluttà”; Ibid.,
9.
 Lady Wortley Montagu: From England to Italy 97

“an ornament that conceals the most despicable ugliness”.79 He states that
“if she has to be blamed it is for her use of very rosy colours in her
pictures” and as reference he quotes the book of Melek-Hanum, Thirty
Years In The Harem.80 He seems particularly concerned about the
treatment of women. He talks about the odalisques as “the intended
victims of the jealousy of their mistress and of the brutality of their
master” and about marriages as just a “market”.81
He requests the readers to read Lady Montagu’s letters in the light of
Melek-Hanum’s book, to have a better idea of Lady Mary’s euphemistic
account. His personal disdain seems linked to politics, as he makes
reference to the “immobility” of the Oriental society, further stereotype,
“unworthy of the sympathies, self-interested anyway, of the English
liberals, and of those so vigorous ones that from the galleries of our
Parliament, declares the deputy Musolino”.82 He suggests to philosophers
and psychologists to read the letters as an account of the social influence
of polygamy. In accordance with his scientific method, he concludes his
preface with a reference to another book, A Lady’s Life Among The
Mormons, which together with Stazzone’s translation and Melek-Hanum
book could offer a true representation of Turkish society, being the result
of its direct observation.
When comparing the translation with the original, it becomes
immediately evident that the number of the translated letters has been
substantially cut. Stazzone translated 37 out of 52 letters contained in the
first English edition. From the fact that all the names have been reported in
translation, it can be assumed that Stazzone used one of the Dallaway
editions as her point of reference even though she only selected the letters
published in the first edition of Lady Mary’s works.
In accordance with the back cover, her translation is a very free
selection of Lady Mary’s letters, with deletions present all over the book.
The first evident cut regards the correspondence addressed to Alexander
Pope. Stazzone cuts all her letters save one, from Belgrade, in which she
talks about her everyday life. In this letter she only cuts one quotation,
maybe because it could weigh down the discourse. However, she wrongly

79
“un orpello che ne cela le più abiette brutture”; Ibid.
80
“Se questa ha un torto, è di avere impiegate nei suoi quadri tinte assai rosee”;
Ibid., 8.
81
“vittime predestinate della gelosia delle padrone e della brutalità dei padroni”;
Ibid., 10.
82
“ben poco meritevole delle simpatie, del resto interessate, dei liberali inglesi, e
di quelle così ardenti che dalla tribuna del nostro parlamento proclama il deputato
Musolino”; Ibid., 12.
98 Chapter Six

quotes a Latin phrase by Virgil, an indication that she probably did not
know Latin. Further, she cuts one short letter, Letter XVI and all the letters
following her departure from Constantinople, from Letters XLIV to LII.
The lively descriptions of the Viennese court and Turkish society were
considered more interesting than those from North Africa and Italy. Her
main concern is stylistic in nature. She does not seem particularly
interested in Lady Mary’s narration, but her lively writing.
In accordance with what could be assumed from the beginning,
Stazzone’s translation tries to reproduce the very same conversational
style of the original. In order to recreate it, Stazzone cuts all the
stereotyped salutations as well as the closing formulae, typical of written
correspondence which slows down the rhythm. In her effort to reproduce a
conversation in writing, she tries to keep her Italian sentences short and
frequently resorts to rhetorical questions and direct speech. For the same
purpose, many historical references83 and some detailed descriptions have
been cut.84
But not all the cuts seem to be owed to stylistic needs. First of all, as
Petrettini before her, she cuts many parts relating to religion. One example
is the comment on the “popish miracles”85 in Letter XX, the reference to
the differences between the Roman Catholic and Anglican Churches in
Letter XXVII86 as well as passages about the persecution of non-
Catholics.87 She also uses to cut all the references to money and to the
shopping she had to do for her English friends:88 it is likely that her
aristocratic status made her consider these passages inappropriate. She
also cuts references to extramarital relationships, including those involving
the King of Poland89 and a Viennese Count.90 She softens the references to
sensuality in Letter XXXIII91 and deletes comments on slavery92 and
adoption.93 In accordance with Lioy’s views on Oriental society, she
changes the description regarding the dervishes into something

83
Ibid., 53.
84
Ibid., 163.
85
Ibid., 48.
86
Ibid., 63.
87
Ibid., 64.
88
Ibid., 97; 20.
89
Ibid., 43.
90
Ibid., 37.
91
Ibid., 86.
92
Ibid., 119.
93
Ibid., 125.
 Lady Wortley Montagu: From England to Italy 99

ridiculous.94 Conversely, she turns a satirical reference to the rule of

poverty of a Christian church into something admirable.95
It is interesting to note that the extracts about religion cut by Petrettini
are present in the Stazzone version, even if slightly altered. Stazzone also
deleted Lady Mary’s comments about absolutism, probably due to the
complicated politics of contemporary Italy.96 As a matter of fact, the lack
of Lady Mary’s ideas about translation confirms her carelessness vis-à-vis
translation.97 Notwithstanding all her cuts, it must be noted that when she
translates she manages to approximate the original, without adding
adjectives or short explanatory sentences like Petrettini. The final result is
a lively text with short conversation-like sentences, easy to read and easy
to understand.

Conclusion
In conclusion, if we consider the different purposes that Petrettini and
Stazzone intended to realise in translation, it can be said that both
translations have been successful. Petrettini’s main concern is the
education of women. In her reading of the text, Lady Mary’s narration was
important for the provision of useful information and examples of female
erudition. She opted for a “faithful” translation to realise her purpose, a
translation that gives priority to what is narrated. The fact that she made
minor amendments is evidence of the fluidity of literal translation and one
of the reasons why some authors like Byron regarded it with suspicion.
Stazzone’s first concern is for original writing. She accepts the challenge
to write a book in a fresh style. To achieve her purpose, she chose a free
translation, allowing her to write without the restrictions imposed by the
original: the result is a lively and fluent narration, proximate to the original
style of the author.
Both the translators have been forced to make choices, but once the
decision about what should be translated had been taken, their choices
were consistent with their project. Petrettini’s and Stazzone’s respective
translations highlight the very subtle line existing between free and close
translation. They exemplify the importance of the translator’s purpose in
translation and the uselessness of the concept of “fidelity”, since it is
possible to be close to the original even through rewriting. Petrettini used

94
Ibid., 120.
95
Ibid., 24-5.
96
Ibid., 68.
97
Ibid., 94.
100 Chapter Six

the mimetic faculty offered by translation to reproduce the content of her

original and to speak to women on gender issues. On the other hand,
Stazzone used the mimetic faculty of translation to reproduce the creative
process of the literary creation: translation served as a metaphor for
socially and politically concerned discourse on the one hand and of literary
creation on the other.

Works Cited
Bassnett, S. 2002. Translation Studies. London: Routledge.
Benjamin, W. 1999. “The Task of the Translator: An introduction to the
translation of Baudelaire’s Tableaux Parisiens”. In The Translation
Studies Reader, edited by Lawrence Venuti, New York, Routledge.
Cesarotti, M. 1826. Epistolario scelto. Venezia: Tipografia di Alvisopoli.
—. 1884. Lettere inedite a Giustina Renier Michiel, proemio e note di V.
Malamani, Ancona: Gustavo Morelli Editore.
Calvani, A. 2004. Il viaggio iataliano di Sterne, Cesati Editore, Firenze.
—. 2011. “Translating in a female voice: the case history of Giustina
Renier Michiel”. In Translation Journal, edited by Gabe Bokor, Vol.
16, No. 3, July.
Gilbert, Susan and Gubar, Sandra. 1979. The Madwoman in the Attic. New
Haven and London: Yale University Press.
Gossy, S. 1998. Freudian Slips: Women, Writing, the Foriegn Tongue. Ann
Arbor: The University of Michigan Press.
Lefevere, A. 2002. Traduzione e riscrittura, Torino: UTET.
Malamani, V. 1884. Cento lettere inedite di Melchiorre Cesarotti a
Giustina Renier Michiel. Gustavo Morelli Editore, Ancona.
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. 1837. The Letters and Works, edited by
Lord Wharncliffe in three volumes, London.
—. 1803. The Works of the Right Honourable Lady Mary Wortley
Montagu in five volumes, printed for Richard Philips, London.
Petrettini, M. 1838. Lettere di Lady Maria Wortley Montague, Tipografia
del Governo, Corfù.
—. 1815. Vita di Cassandra Fedeli. Imperial R. Stamperia Pinelli,
Venezia.
Robinson, D. 1991. The Translator’s Turn. Baltimore and London: Johns
Hopkins University Press.
Sperber D., and D. Wilson. 1995. Relevance. Oxford: Blackwell.
Stazzone, C. 1880. Lettere di Lady Montagu. Tipografia di Pietro
Montaina & C., Palermo.
 CHAPTER SEVEN

PROMOTING FEMINISM
AND AN INTERNATIONAL
COMMUNITY OF LETTERS:
HELEN MARIA WILLIAMS’ PAUL AND VIRGINIA

BARBARA PAUK

Metaphors for translations traditionally feminise the translation and the

translator in relation to the “original” and its author. While the latter is
seen as creative, the translation passes as a copy, faithful in the best case,
but always inferior. In the same vein of ideas, translators are reproducers
of creative works. Their merit often remains unacknowledged. In spite of
the currency of such images, many women in history tried to get a voice of
their own through translation, especially at times when other genres of
writing were not accessible to them.1 In some instances, translation
became a means to express political and social concerns, which contrasted
with those of the author. The “hijacked” translation may differ in content,
genre and function from the source text and have a significant impact on
the evolution of literature and thought.2
This paper will reflect on translators’ roles and the impact of their
works, focusing on the most successful English translation of Paul et
Virginie (1788), written by the radical Dissenter Helen Maria Williams.
Her translation, published in 1795, went through at least sixteen new
editions until 1850.3 Investigating the reception and long-lasting afterlife

1
Sherry Simon, “Gender in Translation”, in The Oxford Guide to Literature in
English Translation, ed. Peter France (Oxford; New York: Oxford UP, 2000), 27.
2
Sherry Simon, Gender in Translation: Cultural Identity and the Politics of
Transmission (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 15.
3
Philip Robinson lists fifteen editions without counting editions included in
collections of works such as for instance: “Paul and Virginia”, in Jones’s Cabinet
Edition of Classic Tales. Comprising one Volume of the Most Esteemed Works of
102 Chapter Seven

of her Paul and Virginia, I will argue that, as a consequence of Williams’

unconventional translation, her text carried on for decades the concerns
she had during her life, her desire for women, including herself, to have a
voice, and her wish for a republic of letters across national boundaries
which included men and women.
The pastoral novel Paul et Virginie was an immediate international
bestseller and became probably the most successful text in French
literature. It was translated into many languages and the first English
edition was published in 1789. The author of Paul et Virginie, Jacques-
Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, a friend and disciple of Rousseau, had
published the tale originally as part of his philosophical and naturalist
work Etudes de la Nature, in order to illustrate his ideas on the harmony of
humans and nature. The novel is set on the île de France, as Mauritius was
then called, and portrays two women, Madame de la Tour and Marguerite,
who live in an Edenic environment with their children, Paul and Virginia,
and their slaves. This exotic paradise is disrupted when Virginia has to go
to her great-aunt in France and, on returning to the island, dies in a
shipwreck. All the other characters, except the narrator, die in the wake of
this event.
The translator Helen Maria Williams (1761-1827) started her writing
career as a poet.4 Encouraged by the family friend and Presbyterian
minister Dr. Andrew Kippis she published her first poem Edwin and
Eltruda in 1782. The success of this poem and the support of Kippis

Imagination (London: Jones) 1827, or editions of her translation published in

America. Philip Robinson, “Traduction ou trahison de ‘Paul et Virginie’?”
L’exemple de Helen Maria Williams”, Revue d'histoire littéraire de la France 89: 5
(1989): 846. For more detail about English translations of Paul et Virginie, see
Paul Toinet, Paul et Virginie. Répertoire bibliographique (Paris: Maisonneuve et
Larose, 1963), 63-105 and Hinrich Hudde, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre: Paul et
Virginie (München: Wilhelm Fink, 1975), 88-92.
4
In earlier publications her birth date was given as 1762. Deborah Kennedy, in her
biography of Williams, published in 2002, quotes her death note, which indicates
that she was 66 at the time of her death in 1827, to argue that she was born in
1761. Deborah Kennedy, Helen Maria Williams and the Age of Revolution
(Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2002), 21, fn.1. In her article on Williams
in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, however, Kennedy indicates 1759
as her date of birth. Kennedy, “Helen Maria Williams”, Oxford Dictionary of
National Biography (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004) online edn, Sept 2010.
http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/29509 (accessed Nov. 8, 2011). For
biographical information see also Lionel-D. Woodward, Une anglaise amie de la
Révolution Française: Helen Maria Williams et ses amis (Paris: Librairie Ancienne
Honoré Champion, 1930).
 Promoting Feminism and an International Community of Letters 103

allowed her to enter literary and political circles. She became acquainted
with the writers Samuel Johnson, Fanny Burney, Charlotte Smith, Anna
Seward, Samuel Rogers and Hester Piozzi, the dissenting intellectuals
Richard Price and Joseph Priestley, the political theorist and novelist
William Godwin, the American revolutionary Benjamin Franklin and the
salon hostess Elizabeth Montagu.5 In the 1780s Williams was a well-
known poet of sensibility, who expressed her liberal opinions in her
works: An Ode on the Peace (1783) commemorates the end of the war
with the American colonies and Peru, a Poem (1784) is a critical view of
the colonization of Peru, depicting the negative consequences of Pisarro’s
conquest for the indigenous population. The Poem on the Bill Lately
Passed for Regulating the Slave Trade (1788) refers to the “Dolben Act”,
which regulated the British slave trade, and is a plea for the abolition of
slavery.6
Williams was enthusiastic about the Revolution, as were many of her
English contemporaries at first. The Revolution was seen in parallel to the
Glorious Revolution, liberating France from its oppressive government.
The Whig and Dissenting circles among which she had “gained a place of
some prominence” hoped that the spirit and ideas of the French Revolution
would influence Europe and lead to a commitment to human rights and the
abolition of slavery.7 They were also optimistic concerning the repeal of
the Test and Corporation Acts, which restricted religious freedom. Like
her contemporary, the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, Williams believed
that the Revolution would bring equality, and consequently improvements
to the condition of women. Her first writing on the Revolution, the poem
“The Bastille”, which was inserted in her only novel Julia (1790), is a first
expression of her enthusiasm for the Revolution. In the same year she
went to France to witness the revolutionary events firsthand. She
published her observations of the Revolution in a series of eight works
Letters from France, published in 1790, 1792, 1793, 1795, and 1796.
Unlike most English contemporaries, she was still pro-revolutionary in
1793 and later, writing in volume three of her letters at the beginning of
1793:

5
Neil Fraistat and Susan S. Lanser, “Introduction” to Helen Maria Williams,
Letters Written in France, in the Summer 1790, to a Friend in England;
Containing Various Anecdotes Relative to the French Revolution (Mississauga,
Canada: Broadview, 2001), 18.
6
Fraistat and Lanser, “Introduction”, 19.
7
Kennedy, Helen Maria Williams, 52.
104 Chapter Seven

But, when we consider the importance which this event [the Revolution]
may have in its consequences, not only to this country, but to all Europe,
we lose sight of the individual sufferer, to meditate upon the destiny of
mankind.8

This passage clearly reflects her optimism at a time when public

opinion in England had already turned against the Revolution.
By the time Williams published her translation Paul and Virginia in
1795 she was a household name in England owing to her Letters. She was
still in France, where she spent most of her life, and was very familiar with
the French language and culture. Having probably learnt French as a
young girl, she engaged a French emigrant Monique du Fossé to tutor her
in French when she was in her twenties, in 1785. Monique and her
husband Augustin François Thomas du Fossé informed her about the
social and political situation in ancient regime France and invited her to
France in 1790. Williams arrived just in time for the anniversary of the
new federation celebrated on the Champs de Mars, which she describes
enthusiastically in Letters Written in France, in the Summer 1790, to a
Friend in England; Containing Various Anecdotes Relative to the French
Revolution. According to her Letters, she started translating Paul et
Virginie in the second half of 1793, at the time of the terror.
While translation theory has often evolved around the idea of
equivalence, which implies faithfulness to an original and the danger of
treason, Williams explicitly states in her introduction that her work is not a
faithful translation, that she took some liberties with the text, inserting
sonnets and eliding several passages of philosophical explanation.9 The
eight sonnets are typically introduced by a couple of sentences, for
example:

Although Madame de la Tour appeared calm in the presence of her family,

she sometimes communicated to me the feelings that preyed upon her
mind, and soon after this period gave me the following sonnet:10

8
Helen Maria Williams, Letters from France: Containing a Great Variety of
Interesting and Original Informatioon concerning the most Important Events that
have lately occurred in that Country and particularly respecting the Campaign of
1792, 3:1 reprinted in Anne K. Mellor and Matlak Richard E., British Literature
1780-1830 (Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1996), 524.
9
Helen Maria Williams, “Preface” to Paul and Virginia, Translated from the
French of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre [sic.] by Helen Maria Williams (London: G.G.
and J. Robinson, 1795), vii-ix.
10
Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Paul and Virginia. Translated from the French of
Bernardin Saint-Pierre [sic.] by Helen Maria Williams (London: G.G. and J.
 Promoting Feminism and an International Community of Letters 105

The “Sonnet to Disappointment” which follows the narrator’s

comment, as well as the other seven sonnets are attributed to Madame
de la Tour and reflect her melancholy mood.
Substantial modifications of the source text were not unusual at an age
when copyright laws were often ignored. Jane Dalton for instance,
changed the name of the protagonists to Paul and Mary in in the first
English translation of Paul et Virginie, titled Paul and Mary, an Indian
Story (1789). Dalton explains these changes with cultural incompatibility:
Virginia is not simple enough for English readers. The female slave, Marie
in the original, becomes Frances and the dog Fidèle should not have the
same name as all the dogs in London and is therefore called Tayo.11
Another translation published in the same year, The Shipwreck: or, Paul
and Mary. An Indian Tale, which is significantly shortened, uses the same
names for the main characters but also calls the slave Mary. There are
numerous modified translations of Paul et Virginie.
More recent scholarship, represented by André Lefevere, for instance,
has acknowledged that translation always rewrites the source text in order
to adapt it to its new cultural and ideological context and the constraints
determining its production and distribution.12 Williams’ modifications of
the source text can be seen in this context. As I have argued elsewhere, in
transforming the text she provokes a shift in its genre, reducing the
characteristics of the philosophical and naturalist tale, marked by the
enlightenment, and likening it to a sentimental novel, hence adapting the
work to the aesthetic conventions of English romantic literature of her
time.13 Romantic novels often contained poems, for instance Charlotte
Smith’s Emmeline or Williams’ Julia.
Williams’ changes have also to do with what scholars such as Sherry
Simon investigate, namely the possibilities of translators to actively
transform texts in order to make them conform to the their personal beliefs

Robinson, 1795), 35.

11
Malcolm Cook, “Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s English Correspomdents During
the French Revolution”, in British-French Exchanges in the Eighteenth Century,
ed. Kathleen Hardesty Doig and Dorothy Medlin (Newcastle-upon-Tyne:
Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007), 11.
12
Lefevere subsumes these influences in the terms “patronage”, the persons or
institutions which have the power to influence the production and distribution of
the text, and “poetics”, the expectations of the form and the content of the work.
André Lefevere, Translation, Rewriting, & the Manipulation of Literary Fame
(London and New York: Routledge, 1992).
13
Pauk, “Romanticising Paul et Virginie: Helen Maria William’s Translation”,
unpublished.
106 Chapter Seven

and therefore to turn translation into activism. Williams’ modifications

clearly change the ideology of Saint-Pierre’s work, which was infused by
Rousseau’s ideas, portraying two women with their children leading a
retired life in harmony with nature. Williams, attributing the poems she
inserts to one of the women, Madame de la Tour, characterizes her as an
individual and gives her a voice. At the same time she reduces the
narrative interventions of an old and well-educated hermit, who lives
nearby and observes the family and their fate. The elision of many of his
philosophical considerations redresses the gender balance of the narrative
and consequently its ideological implications. As Gary Kelly has argued,
Williams “further feminizes Saint-Pierre’s already powerful representation
of the feminized culture of Sensibility”.14 Williams’ Paul and Virginia
conveys her version of Rousseau’s ideas, marked by feminism.
At the same time Williams challenges the relationship between source
text and translation as well as author and translator. According to
Lawrence Venuti, fluency is nowadays the crucial if not the sole argument
in reviews of translations.15 In other words, a translation should be easily
readable, written in standard English, without traces of the fact that it is
actually a translation. Translators, although normally mentioned on the
cover page, are often elided in reviews and publicity. At the end of the
eighteenth century and later for that matter, it was common practice for
translators to remain anonymous, like for instance Jane Dalton whose
translation of Paul et Virginie was long attributed to her cousin Daniel
Malthus.16 Malthus, who may have helped her with the negotiations with
the editor, was subsequently described as the translator of Paul and Mary
in a postscript to his obituary in the Gentleman’s Magazine.17 Unlike
Dalton, Helen Maria Williams clearly marks her Paul and Virginia as a
translation and signs her preface with her name. She foregrounds her own

14
Gary Kelly, Women, Writing and Revolution 1790-1827 (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1993), 57.
15
Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation
(London: Routledge, 1994), 1-5.
16
As Malcolm Cook shows, based on correspondence between Dalton and Saint-
Pierre, the translation can be attributed to her without any doubt. The same
translation was published in Dublin in the same year by Byrne, Grueber and
McAlister, J. Jones, J. Moore and William Jones. Cook, “Bernardin de Saint-
Pierre’s English Correspondents”, 8-11.
17
“Mr. Malthus was the admired, though hitherto unknown, translator of ‘The
Sorrows of Werter;’ [sic.] of an Essay on Landscape, from the French of the
Marquis d’Ermenonville; and of the elegant translation of ‘Paul et Virginie’,
published by Mr. Dodsley, under the title of ‘Paul and Mary’. “Additions and
Corrections in former Obituaries”, Gentleman’s Magazine 70 (1800): 177.
 Promoting Feminism and an International Community of Letters 107

person further in the preface, which outlines in detail the difficulties she
encountered while translating the text in a French prison during the
Revolution. She spent six weeks in prison in October and November 1793
and many of her Girondist friends and acquaintances were guillotined.18 In
April 1794 she moved to a village near Marly because foreigners had to
leave Paris and, as it was dangerous to stay in France; she spent the second
half of this year on a tour through Switzerland. She completed and
published Paul and Virginia in the following year. Whether her statement
that she translated the pastorale in prison is historical or not, it certainly
appealed to readers’ imagination.
Juxtaposing her own name with that of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre and
adding elements, which were openly characterized as her own creation,
Williams challenges the boundaries between author and translator, a
difference, which is usually perceived as hierarchical. Sherry Simon states:
“the reason translation is so overcoded, so overregulated, is that it
threatens to erase the difference between production and reproduction which
is essential to the establishment of power”.19 The difference between
original and translation is overlaid with the opposites active / passive and
masculine / feminine. Williams rejects the role of the seemingly passive,
invisible translator, positioning herself as a creator. As Ann Barker puts it,
Williams is “usurping the productive authorial function” and “challenges
the traditional translational notions of original masculinity in the source
text and derivative femininity in the translation”.20 Williams’ translation
can be considered as a feminist practice, an assertion of her own voice.
Williams kept being treated as an author rather than a translator and
her work as an “original”, even when it was no longer in her power to
exercise any influence on the text’s distribution, and long after her death.
The marketing of Paul and Virginia further blurred the boundary between
“original” and “reproduction”. For instance, the title page identified her as
“Author of Letters on the French Revolution, Julia a novel, Poems, etc”.
The editor draws on her previous success as a poet and historical writer—
not Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s—to sell the work. Her name is in larger
print than that of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre. Her visibility and image as a
creator was similarly enhanced by the publicity for the work, which often
included the phrase “with original sonnets”.21 Since women such as

18
Kennedy, Helen Maria Williams, 107.
19
Simon, Gender in Translation, 10.
20
Anna Barker, “Helen Maria Williams’ Paul and Virginia and the Experience of
Mediated Alterity”, in Translating Women, ed. Luise von Flotow (Ottawa:
University of Ottawa Press, 2011), 66.
21
See for instance: “This day was published”, Star, no. 2387 (Monday, April 11,
108 Chapter Seven

Charlotte Smith, Anna Seward, Mary Robinson as well as Williams

herself had been instrumental in the revival of the sonnet they were a
popular genre. While reviewers of translations, as Venuti argues, often
ignore the work of translators, Williams’ investment in the text was
acknowledged.22 The anonymous reviewer of the Critical Review, for
instance, commences his review thus:

It is not surprising that a tale so beautiful as the Paul and Virginia of

Bernardin Saint Pierre [sic.] should have had numerous translators.
Fortunate is the author who meets with one so eminently qualified (as,
from the specimen before us, we cannot hesitate to pronounce Miss
Williams), not only to transfuse every beauty of the original, but to
embellish it with new and peculiar graces.23

Except the first sentence on Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s work, the

review exclusively focuses on Williams’ personal circumstances while
translating (the constraints imposed on her and her literary activity in the
French prison during the Terror) and the quality of her work, in particular
the sonnets. The quotations, which often represented the major part of
reviews at the time, are taken from Williams’ preface and her poems. The
reviewer reproduces two sonnets, “to Disappointment” and “to the Torrid
Zone”, which in his opinion were both “written in the same spirit of
plaintive elegance that characterizes the poetry of Miss Williams”.24
Williams’ translation is indeed reviewed as a creative work in its own
right.
A comparison with another review by the same reviewer and in the
same volume of the Critical Review reveals the particularity of Williams’
position. It is a review of a translation of Studies of Nature (1796), which
contains Paul and Virginia translated by Reverend Henry Hunter, who
also translated texts by Johann Kaspar Lavater and Leonard Euler. After
remarks on Bernardin de Saint-Pierre and his work, and quotations from it,
the reviewer states after more than ten pages, on the second last page:

It remains only to speak of the translation of these volumes. It is such as

may be read with pleasure; but though not deficient in elegance, it is not
quite free from inaccuracies, some of which we shall take the liberty to
point out.25

1796), and “Elegant editions …”, Sun. no. 2357 (Friday, April 11, 1800).
22
Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility, 8
23
“Miss Williams’ Paul and Virginia”, Critical Review 18 (1796 oct.): 183.
24
Ibid., 184.
25
“Studies of Nature. By James-Henry Bernardin de Saint Pierre”, trans. Henry
 Promoting Feminism and an International Community of Letters 109

The translation and the translator are clearly marginalized, the criteria
of the translation being “elegance” and “accuracy”.
At the end of the eighteenth and during the nineteenth centuries, for
many translators Williams’ Paul and Virginia was at least as much the
work of reference as Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s “original” although they
often criticized her work.26 For instance, in two editions of Paul and
Virginia published in Paris, one in 1815 by Lefèvre and the other in 1825
by Baudry, the preface reads:

It was also judged necessary to preserve every part of this pleasing writer,
without omitting several pages, as Miss Williams acknowledges to have
done in the translation she has published; nor do the reasons alleged by her
for such omissions appear sufficiently conclusive. The sonnets which she
has also added (however poetical in themselves) are certainly foreign to a
simple translation.27

Instead of remarking on the importance of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s

work the editor compares his product to its concurrence. His criticism does
not aim at Williams’ text in itself but at the fact that it does not correspond
to generally held expectations of a translation.
Criticising Williams’ translation does not prevent editors from
adopting her text. The publishers of the Orr edition, for instance, claim,
without naming Williams, in the preface to this richly illustrated luxury
edition of 1839 that “All the previous editions have been disfigured by
interpolations, and mutilated by numerous omissions and alterations”.28
Nonetheless they use her text, only slightly modifying it, omitting the
poems and adding the passages she omitted probably in a translation by
Sarah Jones.29 Hence, this edition, which contributed much to Paul and
Virginia’s fame in Victorian England, was based on Williams’ translation.
Several editors seem to have modified her translation instead of translating
Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s French text. As Philipp Robinson noticed, the

Hunter, D.D. Minister of the Scots Church, Critical Review 18 (1796 Oct.): 176.
26
Much later, in 1987, the line between Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s original and
Williams’ translation was completely erased, as Anna Barker points out. Williams’
translation with the sonnets and her omissions was published as Paul and Virginia
by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, the cover page and preface by Andrew Lang
offering no indication that the work was a translation. Barker, “Helen Maria
Williams’ Paul and Virginia”, 65.
27
“Advertisement”, Paul and Virginia translated from the French of J. B. H. de
Saint-Pierre (Paris: Lefèvre, 1815), v-vi.
28
[the publishers], “Preface”, Paul and Virginia (London: Orr, 1839), 3.
29
Robinson, “Traduction ou trahison”, 848.
110 Chapter Seven

“new translation” presented by J. E. Dove in 1828 includes two mistakes

Williams made, for instance the date 1774 instead of 1744 for the arrival
of Virginia’s ship.30 These details suggest that the editor/translator
modified her text instead of producing a new translation. Another editor, J.
Oxlade in 1800 likewise adopted Williams’ Paul and Virginia, taking out
the sonnets and altering the first two paragraphs, however, without
removing the introductory sentences to the sonnets.31 In these works
Williams’ translation lived on as an “original” which was in its own turn
modified and thus challenges the binary between original and translation
or creation and reproduction.
Williams’ feminist vindication of her own voice as a translator/writer
lived on in her translation as there were many re-editions of her original
text and her name was closely associated to translations of Paul and
Virginia. By creating a work, which had such an afterlife, Williams
challenged the boundaries between supposedly female and male
intellectual activities, as she had done before. Lia Guerra rightly states,
“She tested herself in all the aesthetic forms in which male writers
excelled”.32 Although she was criticized for her activity as a political
journalist, for instance in Laetitia Matilda Hawkins’ Letters on the Female
Mind Addressed to Miss Helen Maria Williams (1793), her Letters from
France were widely read in English as well as in French translations. She
also challenged the contrast between public and political, and private
spheres. Her historical political works are marked by a sentimental,
personal approach; history is seen through the lens of the personal and
private.
Another of Williams’ concerns, which is closely linked to her
feminism and the transcendence of the boundaries between the private and
public, is her willingness to transcend national boundaries. Her translation,
as well as the epistolary form of her Letters from France, testifies to this
endeavor of overcoming distance and building a bridge between cultures.
She remained in Europe even at the time when many of her
contemporaries considered it to be an unpatriotic move and friends
recommended her to return to England.33 Williams saw herself as a

30
These mistakes can be found from the 3rd edition of her text onwards. Ibid., 848.
31
Saint-Pierre, Paul and Virginia. 1800.
32
Lia Guerra, “Helen Maria Williams: the Shaping of a poetic identity”, in
Romantic Women Poets: Genre and Gender, ed. Lilla Maria Crisafulli and Cecilia
Pietropoli (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2007), 76.
33
Anna Seward for instance tells her to respect her own country and to return to it.
Remaining in France means danger and alienation for her. “Letter from Miss
Seward to Miss Williams”, The Gentleman’s Magazine (Feb. 1793): 108-10.
 Promoting Feminism and an International Community of Letters 111

“citizen of the world” an idea which recalls Price’s writings. Describing

the aforementioned celebrations of the anniversary of the federation, the
oath of the king and the president of the National Assembly, and the
acclamations of the people, she writes in her Letters:

You will not suspect that I was an indifferent witness of such a scene. Oh
no! this was not a time in which the distinctions of country were
remembered. It was the triumph of human kind; it was man asserting the
noblest privileges of his nature; and it required but the common feelings of
humanity to become in that moment a citizen of the world.34

Humanity and enthusiasm for the ideals the Revolution represents

make national boundaries seem unimportant. At the same time, claiming
to be a citizen of the world herself, she makes a feminist claim for civic
and political rights.35
Williams hoped for an international community of letters which
included women. Angela Keane states:

Ironically, although Williams’s Letters would leave her in exile, she

seemed to write in the hope of joining an international community. As an
epistolary correspondent, she sought membership of the French republic of
letters and tried to extend its boundaries across the English Channel.36

Keane explains how Williams had witnessed a transformation of the

literary public spheres in France from a literary sphere which was
markedly influenced by salonnières “who governed the actual production
of polite letters”, to political forums from which women were often
excluded, or at least not admitted as active members.37 Williams had
throughout her life aimed at creating a space for intellectual exchange. She
was a literary hostess in London in the 1780s and her salon in France was
a meeting place for French, English and American Girondists. In her
letters she gave a testimony of a feminised public sphere which may have
appeared to later readers as “anachronistic”.38

34
Helen Maria Williams, Letters Written in France, in the Summer 1790, to a
Friend in England; Containing Various Anecdotes Relative to the French
Revolution, ed. Neil Fraistat and Susan S. Lanser (Mississauga, Canada:
Broadview, 2001), 69.
35
Kennedy, Helen Maria Williams, 14.
36
Angela Keane, Women Writers and the English Nation in the 1790s: Romantic
Belongings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 55.
37
Ibid., 53.
38
Ibid., 55.
112 Chapter Seven

Williams’ translation of Paul et Virginie continued her endeavour to

present and preserve a community of letters which included women.
Whilst translation traditionally builds bridges between two languages and
cultures, Williams’ translation had this function to an unusual extent,
because it created some kind of community of letters, of readers, rewriters,
editors and translators in both countries. Her translation was published in
France, England and America. Moreover, as it was used to learn
languages, it helped establish contacts. During the period, it was not
unusual to learn languages by reading bilingual works. Paul et Virginie
was repeatedly used for this purpose. The publishers of an edition in 1803,
as well as those of A New Method for Studying the French Language,
published in London in 1820 and Paul et Virginie, en français et en
anglais published in France in 1833, used modifications of Williams’
text.39 The books contained two translations, an English translation word
for word and a freer translation. Given that learning French became one of
the female accomplishments in England in the first decades of the
nineteenth century, Williams’ work helped them to be part of an
international community. Williams’ translation of Paul et Virginie, also
created cross-cultural exchanges in other ways: the eight sonnets she
inserted, were translated into French by the poet marquis Stanislas de
Boufflers (1738-1815), a member of the Academy and friend of Williams,
and published in 1808 in a collection of Williams’ poems.40 Williams’
Paul and Virginia thus brings back elements into the source culture.
Williams’ translation of Paul et Virginie, its success, long-lasting
afterlife and wide response reveals two aspects of such a ‘creative
translation’. Her translation remains problematic because it represents an
appropriation of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s work and therefore only
reverses the traditional power relation between author and translator.
Ideally, the author and the translator would be in a dialogue out of which
the new work would emerge, a process which is often used nowadays.
Although Williams was a friend of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre and
according to her letters had tea with him on the day before she was

39
At the same time the editor of the 1803 edition by Delalain explains his changes
to Williams’ text by stating that it was not close enough to the original text: “La
traduction … donnée par miss Williams … n’était pas assez fidèle pour
accompagner le texte français”. Quoted in: Robinson, “Traduction ou trahison”,
850.
40
Helen Maria Williams, Recueil de poésies, extraites des ouvrages d’Helena-
Maria Williams, traduites de l’Anglais par M. Stanislas de Boufflers, Membre de
l’Institut de France, de la Légion d’honneur, etc. et par M. M. Esménard (Paris: Fr.
Cocheris fils, librairie, successeur de Charles Pougens 1808).
 Promoting Feminism and an International Community of Letters 113

arrested, there is no evidence about any collaboration in relation to the

translation.41 Neither does Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s immense
correspondence reveal any reactions to the translation. We know that he
could not read it, as he did not understand English. In the case of
Williams’ translation of Humboldt’s two major works Researches,
Concerning the Institutions and the Monuments of the Ancient Inhabitants
of America (1814) and Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial
Regions of the New Continent (1814-29), which were based on his journey
to South America with André Bompland, the collaboration seems to have
been closer. At least we know that Humboldt, who was a long-standing
friend of Williams, wrote to her in 1810 to express his pleasure that she
was translating his work.42
Williams’ response to Paul et Virginie and her creative translation is
not only an appropriation of a French text but an interesting result of
intertextuality, which was obviously appealing for an English readership.
Williams’ version of Rousseau’s ideas certainly influenced English
thought as her work was reedited and reprinted throughout the nineteenth
and until the twentieth centuries.43 Discussions on the so-called “woman
question” were markedly informed by Rousseau. Williams’ feminist
interpretation of Rousseauan ideas may have inspired authors who were
very interested in women’s condition. Maria Edgeworth and Charlotte
Brontë, for instance, rewrote tropes of Paul et Virginie in their novels.44

Works Cited
“Additions and Corrections in former Obituaries”. Gentleman’s Magazine
70 (1800): 177.
“Advertisement”, Paul and Virginia translated from the French of J. B. H.
de Saint-Pierre. Paris: Lefèvre, 1815.

41
Helen Maria Williams, Letters Containing a Sketch of the Politics of France,
from the Thirty-First of May 1793, till the Twenty-Eighth of July 1794, and of the
Scenes which have Passed in the Prison of Paris (London: G.G. and J. Robinson,
1795), 1: 6.
42
Kennedy, Helen Maria Williams, 185.
43
As Anna Barker states, Williams’ translation was published, only slightly altered,
and with the sonnets, as late as 1987 by Howard Fertig in New York. It is a reprint
of an edition from 1899 with an Introduction by Andrew Lang. Barker, “Helen
Maria Williams’ Paul and Virginia”, 64.
44
The research for this paper was funded by a University of Western Australia
Research Grant. I would like to thank my mentors Professor Judith Johnston and
Professor Srilata Ravi for their support.
114 Chapter Seven

Barker, Anna. 2011. “Helen Maria Williams’ Paul and Virginia and the
Experience of Mediated Alterity”. In Translating Women, edited by
Luise von Flotow. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press.
Cook, Malcolm. 2007. “Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s English Correspondents
During the French Revolution”. In British-French Exchanges in the
Eighteenth Century, edited by Kathleen Hardesty Doig and Dorothy
Medlin. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
“Elegant editions ..”.. Sun no. 2357 (Friday, April 11, 1800).
Fraistat, Neil, and Susan S. Lanser. 2001. “Introduction”. Williams,
Letters Written in France, in the Summer 1790, to a Friend in
England; Containing Various Anecdotes Relative to the French
Revolution. Mississauga, Canada: Broadview.
Guerra, Lia. 2007. “Helen Maria Williams: The Shaping of a Poetic
Identity”. In Romantic Women Poets: Genre and Gender, edited by
Lilla Maria Crisafulli and Cecilia Pietropoli. Amsterdam and New
York: Rodopi.
[Hawkins, Laetitia Mathilda]. 1793. Letters on the Female Mind, its
Powers and Pursuits. Addressed to Miss H. M. Williams, with
particular reference to her Letters from France. London: Hookham &
Carpenter.
Hudde, Hinrich. 1975. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre: Paul et Virginie.
Muenchen: Wilhelm Fink.
Keane, Angela. 2004. Women Writers and the English Nation in the
1790s: Romantic Belongings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kelly, Gary. 1993. Women, Writing and Revolution 1790-1827. Oxford:
Clarendon Press.
Kennedy, Deborah. 2002. Helen Maria Williams and the Age of
Revolution. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press.
—. 2004. “Helen Maria Williams (1759-1827)”. Oxford Dictionary of
National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press; online edn, Sept
2010. http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/29509 (accessed Nov. 8,
2011).
Lefevere, André. 1992. Translation, Rewriting, & the Manipulation of
Literary Fame. London and New York: Routledge.
“Letter from Miss Seward to Miss Williams”. The Gentleman's Magazine
(Feb. 1793): 108-10.
Mellor, Anne K., and Richard E. Matlak. 1996. British Literature, 1780-
1830. Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace College.
“Miss Williams’ Paul and Virginia”, Critical Review 18 (1796 Oct.): 183-
84.
A New Method for Studying the French Language, By the Aid of which
 Promoting Feminism and an International Community of Letters 115

may be learned at Home, without a Master, in the Course of three or

four Months. 2 vols. London: G. and W. B. Whittaker, 1820.
Pauk, Barbara. “Romanticising Paul et Virginie: Helen Maria William’s
Translation”, unpublished.
[the publishers], “Preface”, Paul and Virginia. London: Orr, 1839.
Robinson, Philip. “Traduction ou trahison de ‘Paul et Virginie’?
L’exemple de Helen Maria Williams”. Revue d'histoire littéraire de la
France 89: 5 (1989): 843-55.
Saint-Pierre, Bernardin de. 1795. Paul and Virginia. Translated from the
French of Bernardin Saint-Pierre [sic.] by Helen Maria Williams.
Author of Letters on the French Revolution, Julia A Novel, Poems, etc.
London: G.G. and J. Robinson.
—. 1800. Paul and Virginia. Translated from the French of Bernardin St.
Pierre [sic.]. A new edition. London: J. Oxlade.
—. 1833. Paul et Virginie, en français et en anglais avec deux traductions,
l'une interlinéaire, l'autre suivant le génie de la langue anglaise.
Ouvrage destiné aux personnes qui veulent se diriger elles-mêmes
dans l'étude de la langue anglaise. 2 vols. Paris: Lance.
[Saint-Pierre, Bernardin de]. 1789. Paul and Mary, an Indian Story. 2
vols. Translated by Jane Dalton. London: J. Dodsley. The Shipwreck:
or, Paul and Mary. An Indian Tale. 2 vols. London: W. Lane, 1789.
—. 1796. Studies of Nature. By James-Henry Bernardin de Saint Pierre.
Translated by Henry Hunter, D.D. Minister of the Scots Church,
Critical Review 18 (Oct): 164-77.
“This day was published”. Star no. 2387 (Monday, April 11, 1796).
Simon, Sherry. 1996. Gender in Translation: Cultural Identity and the
Politics of Transmission. London and New York: Routledge.
—. 2000. “Gender in Translation”. In The Oxford Guide to Literature in
English Translation, edited by Peter France. Oxford and New York:
Oxford University Press.
Toinet, Paul. 1963. Paul et Virginie. Répertoire bibliographique et
iconographique. Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose.
Venuti, Lawrence. 1994. The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of
Translation. London: Routledge.
Williams, Helen Maria. 1795. Letters Containing a Sketch of the Politics
of France, from the Thirty-First of May 1793, till the Twenty-Eighth of
July 1794, and of the Scenes which have Passed in the Prison of Paris.
London: G.G. and J. Robinson.
—. 2001. Letters Written in France, in the Summer 1790, to a Friend in
England; Containing Various Anecdotes Relative to the French
Revolution, edited by Neil Fraistat & Susan S. Lanser. Mississauga,
116 Chapter Seven

Canada: Broadview.
—. 1795. “Preface”. Paul and Virginia, Translated from the French of
Bernardin de Saint-Pierre [sic.] by Helen Maria Williams. Author of
Letters on the French Revolution, Julia A Novel, Poems, etc. London:
G.G. and J. Robinson.
—. 1808. Recueil de poésies, extraites des ouvrages d'Helena-Maria
Williams [sic.], traduites de l'Anglais par M. Stanislas de Boufflers,
Membre de l'Institut de France, de la Légion d'honneur, etc. et par M.
M. Esménard. Paris: Fr. Cocheris fils, librairie, successeur de Charles
Pougens.
Woodward, Lionel-D. 1930. Une anglaise amie de la Révolution
Française: Helen Maria Williams et ses amis. Paris: Librairie
Ancienne Honoré Champion.
 CHAPTER EIGHT

LITERARY LANDSCAPING AND THE ART

OF SOCIAL REFORM:
REPERCUSSIONS OF TƿSON’S RECEPTION
OF TURGENEV IN TRANSLATION

DANIEL C. STRACK

In March of 1906, Shimazaki Tǀson, known until then primarily as a

modern verse poet, published his novel Hakai (in English, The Broken
Commandment). Both its style and content were unprecedented in
Japanese literature. With respect to style, the acclaimed novelist Natsume
Sǀseki went so far as to call it “the first novel worthy of the name to have
appeared in the Meiji era”.1 As for its content, the novel successfully drew
attention to a group of people that had been subjected to long-standing
discrimination within Japanese society. Addressing such a taboo subject
was risky and could have resulted in public approbation. Instead, it
brought Tǀson immediate acclaim. Attracting reviews in no less than 28
newspapers and journals and garnering enough demand for 5 editions in its
first year,2 the novel was a “runaway bestseller” and, due to its reputation
as one of the cornerstones of modern Japanese literature, has never been
out of print.3
Not surprisingly, the work has been the object of extensive critical
analysis. Within this discussion, the influence of Dostoevsky’s Crime and
Punishment on the main characters and the plot has been well-
documented.4 Although various scholars have noted Ivan Turgenev’s
general influence on Tǀson5 and Momiuchi Ynjko has highlighted how

1
Keene, Dawn to the West, 255.
2
Strong, “Translator’s Introduction”, viii.
3
Naff, Kiso Road, 274.
4
Ibid., 281.
5
Ibid., 225.
118 Chapter Eight

certain lexical choices in Chikuma River Sketches reflect idiosyncrasies

found in the English and Japanese translations of A Sportsman’s Sketches,
thus far little attention has been paid to exactly how the original drafts of
these literary sketchbooks eventually contributed to the success of The
Broken Commandment.6
In fact, the Chikuma River Sketches, written as they were under the
influence of Turgenev, were crucial to the The Broken Commandment’s
success not primarily because of their poetic nature but because of the
ways in which Tǀson later adapted them for use in the plot. Specifically,
Tǀson’s strategy of concealing metaphors in the landscape closely mimics
Turgenev’s modus operandi of linking poetic depictions of natural settings
to the inner emotional states of his story’s characters.
It must be clearly stated, however, that Turgenev’s influence on the
budding Japanese author was necessarily indirect because Tǀson’s exposure
to A Sportsman’s Sketches came by way of Constance Garnett’s English
translation (loaned to him by Tayama Katai and read in 1901 and 1902)
and (in all likelihood) Futabatei Shimei’s translation of a single chapter of
the work into Japanese.7 The dual question then is exactly what sort of
indirect influence did Tǀson receive by way of translation and what does
this instance of indirect reception tell us about the kinds of influence that
translation can serve as a conduit for?
As noted previously, Momiuchi has documented how translations of
Turgenev exerted “lexical” influence on Tǀson. Such lexical borrowing is
evident judging from his title alone. Given the timing of Tǀson’s reading
of the Garnett translation, at the very least the transliteration of the English
word “sketch” (in Japanese, a relatively atypical loan word) in Chikuma
River Sketches may be taken as evidence that the English translation had at
least some influence on the Japanese author’s work. In reality, however,
the decision to include the word “sketch” in the title probably amounts to
an overt reference to Turgenev, an allusion that any reader of that time
with knowledge of world literature would be unlikely to miss. When the
fact that some of Tǀson’s chapter titles also echo Turgenev is further taken
into consideration, the possibility that writing strategies employed by
Turgenev found their way into Tǀson’s fiction seems all the more
probable.
The borrowed titles aside, Momiuchi has also noted how certain
atypical Japanese expressions used in Chikuma River Sketches seem to
result either from an awareness of Garnett’s English language wording or

6
Momiuchi, “Shimazaki Tǀson to TsurugƝnefu”, 403-408.
7
Ibid., 402.
 Literary Landscaping and the Art of Social Reform 119

from Tǀson’s verbatim borrowing of idiosyncratic expressions from

Futabatei’s translated text. While this research is exceedingly valuable in
that it further confirms Turgenev’s influence, citing minute instances of
word-choice correspondence with reference to A Sportsman’s Sketches and
Chikuma River Sketches fails to account for the thoroughgoing consonance
of innovation apparent in the respective landscape depiction strategies in
the two works, a consonance that cannot be explained away by vaguely
asserting that the two authors shared a preoccupation with precise
observation.
The true extent of the similarity comes into sharp focus with the
realization that various passages from Chikuma River Sketches were
adapted for use in The Broken Commandment. For in light of this
realization, the fact that fundamental egalitarian shifts in two separate
societies were more or less directly incited by both A Sportsman’s
Sketches and The Broken Commandment cannot simply be written off as
coincidental. Indeed, it would seem natural to speculate that the latter
work proved highly influential precisely due to some effective writing
strategy borrowed from the former.
After making such a case, this paper will conclude by noting how key
aspects of the influence in question remained vital enough in translated
form to be detected and adapted. Additionally, it will be asserted that had
there been no translation, or if the translation had failed to retain certain
peculiar qualities of the Russian language original text, the resulting
repercussions on Japanese literature and Japanese society either would not
have occurred or would have been significantly delayed.

It is generally acknowledged that after twenty-two of Turgenev’s short

vignettes were published in book form in 1852, the collection served as a
catalyst for the peasant emancipation which followed. Historian Terence
Emmons views A Sportsman’s Sketches as the “culmination” of a
gradually developing “moral argument against serfdom” among Russian
intellectuals.8 To quote Emmons, Turgenev’s Sketches “were of enormous
significance in bringing the general public to an awareness of the Russian
peasant as a human being, indeed as a noble human being”.9
That the book should have had the effect it did was apparently the
result of careful calculation on the part of the author. Turgenev’s
understated, disinterested narrative style proved to be an ideal voice for
getting his subversive views past the very active government censors of

8
Emmons, Russian Landed Gentry, 34-35.
9
Ibid., 35.
120 Chapter Eight

his day. Turgenev scholar Frank Seeley has noted that censors of the time
“could have read fourteen or fifteen of the original twenty-two sketches
without discerning in them any attack on serfdom”.10 In fact, even when
Turgenev does challenge the institution of serfdom, he does it through
indirection. According to Seeley, his desired effect is achieved by
selectively portraying “ordinary” landowners as being subtly corrupted by
their power within the system while portraying serfs according to their
“most attractive types”.11
In this sense, ideological aspects of Turgenev’s fiction are well-
camouflaged when reading individual stories but were readily apparent to
Russian readers of Turgenev’s day when the collection was brought
together as a single volume. The social implications of these stories, while
subtle, were not incidental, but rather the result of the author’s long-held
hatred for the cruelties of serfdom.12
Perhaps the crucial issue, however, is not the fact that Turgenev’s
realistic stories were able to pass the censor’s desk but rather that those
same understated stories had such an outsized influence on public
discourse. Whether by design or happy accident, Turgenev’s unassuming
realism proved to be more psychologically compelling than the unlucky
censor who approved the collection could possibly have imagined.
One distinctive feature of Turgenev’s narrative style in Sketches is its
resistance to active “preaching” against serfdom. As often as not, sympathy
for the serfs is generated as the author depicts their appreciation of nature’s
beauty and unpretentious connections to it. Seeley has perceptively noted
that although Sketches is replete with evocative depictions of natural
beauty and the seasons, none of these “occurs in any of the gentry portraits
and only one in close proximity to a landowner”.13
Although these “still life” depictions of nature accomplish a number of
functions, Seeley points out how they “serve as keynotes” that amplify
certain aspects of the sketches in which they appear. Seeley mentions in
particular the “autumn day that opens and concludes “The Tryst” which
foreshadows “the end of Akulina’s love and dreams of happiness”.14 In
this depiction, shimmering sunlight in the birch grove is checkered by rain
and the impending cold of winter. In the following two passages, the first a
description of the sky and the second of Akulina, note the strongly implied
but ultimately circumstantial connection between the mutability of the

10
Seeley, Turgenev, 103.
11
Ibid., 111.
12
Ibid., 19.
13
Ibid., 117.
14
Ibid., 118.
 Literary Landscaping and the Art of Social Reform 121

sky’s appearance and the changeability of the young serf’s emotional state
on this day in the wood:

From early morning a fine rain had been falling, with intervals time to time
of warm sunshine; the weather was unsettled. The sky was at one time
overcast with soft white clouds, at another it suddenly cleared in parts for
an instant, and then behind the parting clouds could be seen a blue, bright
and tender as a beautiful eye. […] Wet with the rain, the copse in its
inmost recesses was forever changing as the sun shone or hid behind a
cloud[.]15

The description of Akulina, whom the narrator is surreptitiously

observing from a hidden vantage point, is as follows:

I looked attentively; it was a young peasant girl. . . . I was especially taken

with the expression on her face; it was so simple and gentle, so sad and so
full of childish wonder at its own sadness. She was obviously waiting for
someone; something made a faint crackling in the wood; she raised her
head at once, and looked round; in the transparent shade I caught a rapid
glimpse of her eyes, large, clear, and timorous, like a fawn’s. . . . Through
the thicket quickly appeared a figure of a man. She gazed at it, suddenly
flushed, gave a radiant, blissful smile, tried to rise, and sank back again at
once, turned white and confused, and only raised her quivering, almost
supplicating eyes to the man approaching, when the latter stood beside
her.16

Note the almost mystical correspondence between Akulina’s emotional

state and the narrator’s subjective impressions of her surroundings. This
description is not merely “impressionistic” but subtly metaphorical. The
shimmering, “flushed” description of the wood is described in the way it is
precisely to accentuate the reader’s later appreciation for Akulina’s
unaffected innocence.
In many cases, Turgenev’s depiction of the changing of seasons and
weather conditions as being inextricably interwoven with peasant life
creates the strong impression that to the extent the peasants themselves are
in tune with nature, their innocence is established. Moreover, this
ennobling depiction has been accomplished while maintaining a neutral
narrative standpoint, strictly avoiding the excesses of both heightened
artifice and seemingly omniscient narrated speculation concerning any
particular character’s psychology.

15
Turgenev, Sportsman’s Sketches II, 92.
16
Ibid., 94-96.
122 Chapter Eight

A prime example may be found in the chapter entitled “Raspberry

Spring” in which the oppressive heat that the narrator and three peasant
characters are experiencing is materially and then metaphorically linked to
the oppression being experienced by the serfs at the hands of the local
landowners. After extensive descriptions of both the heat and also the
heartless treatment of Vlass by his master in Moscow despite the recent
death of his son, the following exchange takes place.

“Oh, things are in a sad way, brother Vlass”, Tuman ejaculated

deliberately.
“Sad! No!” (Vlass’s voice broke.) “How hot it is!” he went on, wiping
his face with his sleeve.17

In this conversation, while denying that his predicament is in any way

sad, Vlass wipes away tears, pretending the moisture on his face is simply
perspiration.
By repeatedly emphasizing the heat up until this conversation,
Turgenev has carefully laid the groundwork for his metaphor, PEASANT
CIRCUMSTANCES ARE NATURAL CONDITIONS. As the two discrete
issues are juxtaposed in this conversation, a basis for comparison has been
hinted at, and all this without a single disapproving word from the
narrator.
While the presence of such subtle artifice in the original Russian has
been amply documented, the work that actually became available to Tǀson
was the 1892 English translation “A Sportsman’s Sketches” by Constance
Garnett (1861-1946). Garnett, who went on to translate works by Tolstoy,
Dostoevsky, and Chekhov, among others, was so prolific between 1912
and the Second World War that her name became “synonymous with
translations from Russian”.18 Although some critics have noted “her
tendency to smooth over the stylistic differences among the various
authors she translated”, it cannot be argued that her translations failed to
communicate “political significance” to their Western readers.19
Given that Tǀson had been exposed to Garnett’s translation of
Turgenev’s Sketches when he was writing the local color sketches upon
which parts of The Broken Commandment would later be based, one key
issue is discovering whether Tǀson, like Turgenev before him, uses natural
settings to ennoble the characters subject to discrimination in his novel.

17
Ibid., I 54.
18
Heilbrun, Garnett Family, 185.
19
May, Translator in the Text, 40; 14.
 Literary Landscaping and the Art of Social Reform 123

Although the most obvious similarities between Tǀson’s Chikuma

River Sketches and Garnett’s translation of A Sportsman’s Sketches are
found in the chapter titles and the use of the word “sketches” to
characterize the work as a whole, similarities extend to the precise yet
poetic ways in which natural scenery and local customs are related.
Consider the following passage:

The sleet begins again. I go down to the boat landing on the banks of the
Chikuma River. On the long pontoon bridge that undulates off to the far
bank I see that the only touch of brown is the single line of footprints
crossing it. From time to time I meet men wearing high straw snow boots,
but there are few passersby. Takayashiro, Kazahara, Nakanosawa, and the
other peaks that stand along the Shinano-Echigo line are only vaguely
discernible and the distant villages are lost in snow. The melancholy waters
of the Chikuma River flow silently past.
Yet when I walk out onto the pontoon bridge, the snow crunching
under my feet, I find that the waters are moving as swiftly as an arrow.
Looking out from here over the floodplain, there is nothing to be seen but a
sea of snow—that’s it, a white sea! And this whiteness is no ordinary
whiteness; it is a fathomless, melancholy whiteness. It is a whiteness that
makes one shiver to look at.20

These vivid lines serve the twin purposes of evocation and idealization
but, in the end, the passage is indeed just a sketch, a stand-alone image
unharnessed to serve any greater dramatic purpose. Absent exposure to
Turgenev, one might be tempted to claim Ruskin as the Japanese author’s
primary influence, a stance adopted by Naff.21
When placed within the narrative context of The Broken Commandment,
however, these same images, reordered and reworded, now serve to
harmonize the setting with the mood of the protagonist. Segawa
Ushimatsu stands near a pontoon bridge and stares into the water.

Travellers crossing to and from Shimotakai made a long black line against
the surrounding snow. . . . From the mountains to the north, toward
Echigo—Kosha, Kazawara, Nakanosawa, and the rest—to the village on
the farther bank, and the trees in the forest nearby, everything lay buried
under snow . . . Why had he been born into such a world? Lost in a maze
of questions, Ushimatsu stood for a long while on the riverbank staring at
the water below. . . . Everything he saw—a flock of famished crows
wheeling low in search of food, river boatmen busy checking their boats
before setting out, peasants trudging homeward with a can of kerosene—

20
Shimazaki, Chikuma River Sketches, 91.
21
Naff, Kiso Road, 223-25.
124 Chapter Eight

conveyed the harshness of life in the Shinshu winter. The river water, a
sullen, turbid green, murmured derisively as it sped past with the speed of
an arrow, in a pitiless display of its power to drown. The deeper his
thoughts probed, the darker they grew.22

In this passage, the “turbid” waters of the river clearly reflect

Ushimatsu’s troubled mental state and the melancholy appearance of the
waters in the original “sketch” has been recast as antagonistic, deeply
disturbing, and potentially lethal. The surrounding scenery, the distant
mountain range, the impression made by the river’s great speed, and the
image of people trekking through the snow are all the same but the
metaphorical implications have been amplified and harmonized with the
mental state of the protagonist. While one could mention multiple
examples of such metaphorical manipulation of weather or natural settings
in Western literature (for example, the parallels between the king’s rage
and the depicted storm in King Lear), in fact, before Tǀson lent his poetic
talents to this sort of “metaphorical landscaping”, such freighted depiction
was almost entirely absent in Japanese literature.
Another metaphorically replete episode is the “slaughterhouse” scene.
In The Broken Commandment, the first bull to be killed in this extended
depiction is the “prized bull from all of Nishinoiri” a splendid, black
animal which was a cross-breed of American and local stock.23 While the
first bull mentioned in the corresponding sketch from Chikuma River
Sketches is also black, it has no special pedigree to differentiate it from the
others.24 Furthermore, the bull in the Sketches is simply being butchered
for its meat while the bull in the novel is being “put down” because it had
gored Ushimatsu’s father to death.
This connection between the bull and Ushimatsu’s father is noteworthy
because, upon closer analysis, we find that this scene has been used to
foreshadow the fact that Ushimatsu, the pride of his village and the
product of a first-rate Western style education, will be symbolically put
down by society at the end of the novel because he disregarded his father’s
advice to keep his identity a secret.
Read in the context of Tǀson’s Chikuma River Sketches, this
slaughterhouse episode comes across as simply one among many “bits of
scenery here or depictions of local customs there”.25 Framed by the
novel’s storyline, however, the episode both buttresses the plot and creates

22
Shimazaki, Broken Commandment, 209-10.
23
Ibid., 110.
24
Shimazaki, Chikuma River Sketches IX, 82-83.
25
Naff, Kiso Road, 285.
 Literary Landscaping and the Art of Social Reform 125

sympathy for the protagonist. Needless to say, this metaphorical strategy

was exactly the method of appeal employed by Turgenev.
Having come to the provisional conclusion that Tǀson adapted
Turgenev’s metaphorical depiction strategy to his own prose, can we state
that, regarding the subject matter, The Broken Commandment was written
in hopes of freeing the “serfs” of Japan? Put differently, can we locate not
only a similarity of technique but even a similarity of goals between the
two authors?
In Japan’s case, the feudal system had already been largely relegated to
the dustbin of history by post-Meiji Restoration land reforms. While
certain feudal aspects of Japanese society did remain, the reforms had
made all citizens equal in theory and this equality was gradually working
itself through the system in practice. There was one group of people,
however, who it seemed would never come to realize the benefits of their
new constitutional status. This group was the “eta”, a “pariah class” of
people that had been forced to do various “ritually polluting” jobs and had
been denied upward mobility for hundreds of years.26 While the 1871
“Edict of Emancipation” legally gave them equal status with the rest of the
citizens of Japan, in fact their mistreatment had continued largely
unabated.27 According to Azuma Eizǀ, discrimination was commonplace
at that time, even among supposedly enlightened educators. Azuma states:

At a time long before the social equality movement had been established,
even intellectuals like school teachers displayed bias against those in the
group discriminated against and so discrimination seemed the natural state
of things.28

Indeed, before Tǀson, no public figures championed their cause and

there was little general awareness that this long-standing yet well-
concealed problem was even worthy of society-wide remedial measures.
Consequently, it is reasonable to state that if Tǀson had not written his
novel, or if it had failed to generate sympathy for the group depicted,
subsequent egalitarian efforts would have been significantly delayed at
best.
Tǀson first heard of such discrimination from Itǀ Yoshitomo, the
headmaster of a local primary school.29 Moved by the plight of ƿe
Isokichi, a young school teacher forced to resign from his position due to

26
Strong, “Translator’s Introduction”, ix.
27
Ibid., xii.
28
Azuma, “Hakai to buraku kaihǀ”, 55; Strack translation.
29
Ibid., 52.
126 Chapter Eight

discrimination relating to his background, Tǀson set about writing a

realistic account of a fictional teacher modeled partially on ƿe but still
drawing from his own teaching experiences in the rural area depicted. In
that Tǀson’s novel broke a social taboo by highlighting discrimination in
society and did so in a convincing realistic style, it may be said that the
very points at which Tǀson’s novel succeeded most spectacularly were
exactly the points at which the influence of Turgenev is most evident.
Concerning Tǀson’s level of success in these sections, Naff concludes:
“Overall, the strongest parts of The Broken Commandment tend to be
those that come from the Sketchbooks, while many of its weaknesses come
from unsuccessful efforts to emulate Dostoevsky”.30 Indeed, the decision
to mount a literary siege on prejudice in one’s own culture, and the
method of doing so, namely ennobling subjects of discrimination by
depicting their sensitivity to natural beauty and metaphorically linking
them to natural settings, owed little to Dostoevsky but a great deal to A
Sportsman’s Sketches.
Having said this, it must be kept in mind that Tǀson’s success was
contingent upon the respective successes of Constance Garnett and
Futabatei Shimei. Although translations are often viewed in commercial
terms, a service provided for those hapless individuals unable to read the
language of the original, in this case the contributions of the translator to
world literary tradition clearly rises above mere commerce. While various
critics have complained that Garnett often failed to capture the distinctive
Russian voices in her translations of authors such as Dostoevsky, her
demure, gentrified English was a relatively good match for the narrator’s
voice in A Sportsman’s Sketches.31 More importantly, however, the crucial
metaphorical elements in Turgenev’s landscape depictions were not “lost
in translation”. On the contrary, his innovative strategy not only survived
but propagated itself.
While there are those that belittle the potential for literary translations
to convey stylistic elements of the original, in this case we find that, even
after translation, Turgenev’s subtly metaphorical stories unleashed
simultaneous political and stylistic epidemics in Japan. For just this
reason, translation can never be brushed aside as a “marginal activity” but
should rather be rightly understood, as Susan Bassnett has suggested, “as a
primary shaping force in literary history”.32 One might add that, on
occasion at least, it is not merely the course of “literary” history that may
be affected, but history in its broadest sense.

30
Naff, The Kiso Road, 285.
31
c.f. May, Translator in the Text, 25-36.
32
Bassnett, Comparative Literature, 142.
 Literary Landscaping and the Art of Social Reform 127

Works Cited
Azuma Eizǀ. 1989. “Hakai to buraku kaihǀ”. Kokubungaku: Kaishaku to
kyǀzai no kenkynj [National Literature: Research on Interpretation and
Educational Materials] 34, no. 4 (Special Issue: March 25), 51-57.
Bassnett, Susan. 1993. Comparative Literature: A Critical Introduction.
Oxford: Blackwell.
Emmons, Terence. 1968. The Russian Landed Gentry and the Peasant
Emancipation of 1861. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Heilbrun, Carolyn G. 1961. The Garnett Family. London: George Allen
and Unwin.
Keene, Donald. 1984. Dawn to the West: Japanese Literature of the
Modern Era. New York: Henry Holt.
May, Rachel. 1994. The Translator in the Text: On Reading Russian
Literature in English. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Momiuchi Ynjko. “Shimazaki Tǀson to TsurugƝnefu: Tǀson ga kƯta oto,
mita shizen”. [Shimazaki Tǀson and Turgenev: The sounds Tǀson
heard and the nature he saw.] 2001. In Roshia bunka no mori e: Hikaku
bunka sǀgǀ kenkynj [Into the Russian woods: General comparative
cultural research], edited by Tomiko Yanagi, 402-417. Tokyo: Nada
Publishing Center.
Naff, William E. 2011. The Kiso Road: The Life and Times of Shimazaki
Tǀson. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press.
Seeley, Frank F. 1991. Turgenev: A Reading of his Fiction. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Shimazaki Tǀson. 1967 [1911-1912.] “Chikuma-gawa no sukecchi”. In
Tǀson zenshnj, vol. 5. Tokyo: Chikuma Shobǀ.
—. 1991. Chikuma River Sketches. Translated by William E. Naff.
Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press.
—. 1966 [1906]. “Hakai”. In Tǀson zenshnj, vol. 2. Tokyo: Chikuma
Shobǀ.
—. 1974. The Broken Commandment. Translated by Kenneth Strong.
Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press.
Strong, Kenneth. 1974. “Translator’s Introduction”. Introduction to The
Broken Commandment, by Shimazaki Tǀson. Tokyo: University of
Tokyo Press.
Turgenev, Ivan. “Aibiki”. Translated by Futabatei Shimei. [1888.] In
Futabatei Shimei zenshnj, vol. 2. Tokyo: Chikuma Shobǀ, 1985.
—. 2008 [1895]. A Sportsman’s Sketches, vols. I and II. [Ɂɚɩɢɫɤɢ
ɨɯɨɬɧɢɤɚ, 1852.] Translated by Constance Garnett. London: Faber
and Faber.
 CHAPTER NINE

CENSORSHIP AND REWRITING

IN A CHINESE WRITER’S TRANSLATION

WENJING LI

Literary translation has long been a field that held creative

opportunities for writers. Some writers, such as Vladimir Nabokov in
Russia and Xun Lu in China, are known not only for their literary
achievements, but also for their translation practice and their views on
translation. It is easy to assume that when a writer starts to translate, his
identity shifts from creative writer to (re)creative translator. However, it is
nearly impossible to make a clear-cut distinction between a person’s
double or even multiple identities along with the behavior associated with
each identity, which is to say, a writer is still a writer even when he is
translating others. The concept of identity is no longer stable and fixed in
postmodernist discourse; rather, the boundaries between source and target,
author and translator are all too easily blurred.1 The hybrid identity of a
translator who is also a writer is one of the many factors which may leave
traces in the translated text. A study of the identity of the translator
requires “investigation of how this identity is constituted linguistically (by
patterns in the target text) within the historical, cultural and ideological
frameworks of the publications and the translator’s themselves”.2 In other
words, the linguistic marker of the translator’s identity cannot be divorced
from the ideologies of belief systems and the institutions with which they
interact. In the case I will discuss in this paper, the primary translation
decisions are driven by the irresistible power of censorship. But as the
translator’s personal features cannot be overlooked, I will also look into
the influence of the translator’s creative activity on the translated work,
and, in turn, the influence of the translated work on the creative activity of
the writer when he returns to his own creative works.

1
Munday, Style and Ideology in Translation, 197.
2
Ibid.
 Censorship and Rewriting in a Chinese Writer’s Translation 129

The strategy of translation/rewriting

Jun Cai, the translator/rewriter of Amy Tan’s recent novel Saving Fish
from Drowning (2005), is a young Chinese writer who specializes in
suspense fiction. He has published over a dozen of suspense novels and a
number of short stories. Some of his novels have been adapted for
television and made into horror movies. Though Jun Cai has never been
known for his translation or any kind of foreign language practice, his
name is highlighted in the Chinese version of Amy Tan’s latest work. The
belly band of the book states:

ь㾯ᯩॾӪц⭼єབྷ᮷ᆇ儈᡻㚄㺲ࠪᤋˈ
㖾ഭॾ㼄֌ᇦㅜаӪ䉝ᚙ㖾‫࣋ٮ‬ᐘ֌ˈ
ѝഭᛜ⯁֌ᇦㅜаӪ㭑 㭑傿䈁߉.
Two literary masters from the Eastern and the Western Chinese Society
join hands. Written by Amy Tan, the Chinese American best-selling writer;
Translated/rewritten by Jun Cai, the leading suspense writer in China.3

This tagline reveals some peculiar features of the translation. Despite

Cai’s ignorance of English, it appears Cai plays a crucial role in the
translation, though not the one we conventionally associate with the term.
The tagline neglects to point out to Chinese readers that, besides the strong
personal signature of Cai, the book they are going to read is a complex
rewriting which surveys the social, political and cultural conditions of
China, America, and Myanmar (formerly Burma). In his preface, Cai
briefly explains that he is listed as a “Yixie Zhe” (translator/rewriter)
instead of a “Yi Zhe” (translator) because of the unconventional
translation method adopted. According to Cai, the original text is rendered
into Chinese word for word by someone else who remains anonymous.
The literally translated version is then assigned to Cai, whose task is to
polish it “so that the target text could cater for local preferences”.4 This
process is acknowledged by both the Cai and his publisher.
Controversy has arisen from the concerns voiced by readers and critics
about the validity of Cai’s signature as a translator, as he does not
technically read the original English text before rendering it into Chinese.
In his own defense, Cai talks about another controversial translator in
Chinese history. Despite the fact the he has no knowledge of any foreign
languages; Shu Lin (1852-1924) introduced Western literature to a whole

3
Cai, Chenmo zhi Yu, book cover. Original italics. Unless otherwise stated, all
translations in this article are mine.
4
Cai, “Preface”, 7.
130 Chapter Nine

generation of Chinese readers in the late Qing Dynasty collaborating with

those who had. Lin’s achievement is well recognized and studied without
questioning his qualification, or lack of it, as a translator. In the case of
Jun Cai, the only signed translator/rewriter for the translation of Saving
Fish from Drowning in China and responsible for most of its ‘polishing’
(assuming the validity of the publisher and Cai’s statement regarding the
literal translation of the first draft), it can hardly be denied that his work
(i.e. his revision and rewriting of the literally translated draft) forms an
indispensable part of the translation. Therefore, in this paper I will put the
controversies aside and focus on his role as a translator who also writes.
Another major concern raised by readers and critics is whether the
author has agreed to the strategy with which her work is translated and
whether the author’s copyright is violated if her work is rewritten without
authorization. In response to this concern, Amy Tan said that if it were her
English original works to be published, she would not allow the alteration
of a single word, and that for her no translation is good enough no matter
whose work it is. Since she had no control over translation, however, her
concern is that her family in China be allowed to read and understand the
story.5
Tan’s comments provide us with a glimpse of the powerlessness of
authorship in the face of political censorship, which turns out to be the
major reason for the extensive rewriting of the story.

Political censorship and fictionalizing

Amy Tan’s Saving Fish from Drowning traverses a number of political
themes by giving a dramatic account of how a group of American tourists
handle their abduction by an ethnic minority in Burma. The Burmese tribe
believes that one of the American tourists has the power to liberate them
from the ruling military junta and its reign of torture, forced labor,
relocation and other abuse. Through the story, the author sets out to
explore questions like “what happens when our good intentions don’t lead
to good consequences? And how do we best deal with the suffering of
others?”6 The author’s exploration is deeply rooted in the thick of Burma
and its oppressive regime. However, when the book is introduced to
Chinese readers, its root in realism has been ripped out and replanted in a
fictional world.

5
Zhang, “Tan Enmei: Wei Muqin er Xiezuo”.
6
Shaffner, “Meditation on Suffering”.
 Censorship and Rewriting in a Chinese Writer’s Translation 131

Tan develops a realistic approach in her composition so as to “play

around the notion of truth”.7 First, the story is set in a truthful depiction of
the social and political conditions in China and Burma; Tan even travelled
to China and Burma to familiarize herself with these conditions. Second,
Tan tries to convince her readers that the novel is inspired by a true
story—an automatic writing delivered to her by Bibi Chan, the first person
omniscient narrator with whom Tan was acquainted.8 Yet the author’s
effort to make the story sound real to her readers is exactly what the
Chinese version tends to undermine. Though the main plot and characters
remain intact in Chinese, the whole story has been fictionalized, starting
with a disclaimer before the translator’s preface:

ᮏḎᷢᑠ宜ࠋḎ୰ேྡࠊே≀ࠊᆅྡ࿴஦௳ⓙ᫝స⪅ⓗ⹫ᯊ㸪ዴ୚䍘
⭆୰ⓗே≀ࠊබྖࠊᆅྡ࿴஦௳┦ྠ㸪乗ᒓᕦྜࠋ
This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are
the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual
persons, companies, locales or events are purely incidental.9

If such a disclaimer is made out of legal obligation, the decision to

relocate the story from Burma to a fictional kingdom detaches it further
from the real world. Chinese readers find the story happens in “Lan’na
Kingdom” but not Burma, which is “an ancient country in South East
Asia”.10 To patch up the incompleteness caused by this change, a brief
history of the mysterious ancient country is added in the Chinese version.11
All this legal effort has been made to accommodate the strict censorship
imposed on the publishing industry by the Chinese government.
International relations concerning the human rights condition in Burma
were delicate and intense at the time when the novel and its Chinese
version were published. The U.S. and European Union were trying to
place sanctions against Myanmar, while the Chinese government insisted
on its policy of non-interference and remains the most powerful supporter
of Burmese regime. Under strict censorship in China, it is reasonable to
argue that the rewriting can be the result of self-censorship implemented
by the publisher for fear that a “faithful” translation may be banned by the
authorities. Nonetheless, whether it is imposed through state censorship or
it is a conscious choice made by a private institution does not change the

7
Tan, “About the Book”, 1-15.
8
Tan, Saving Fish, 4.
9
Cai, Chenmo Zhi Yu, front page.
10
Cai, “Preface”, 4.
11
Cai, Chenmo zhi Yu, 82-86.
132 Chapter Nine

fact that the severe publishing environment in China is the essential reason
behind the rewriting strategy.
The delicacy of the human rights issues and politics among Burma,
China and some Western countries (represented by the U.S. in this story)
makes it impossible for a novel with politically sensitive content to be
published in China without anychange. However, deletion of the sensitive
parts, the most commonly used strategy to bypass the censors, would not
have worked here because of the lengthy and substantial discussions over
human rights conditions both in China and Burma that surround the plot,
which concerns the Burmese military junta and rebellion against it. A
certain amount of rewriting is thus deemed necessary, which then explains,
to some extent, why a writer rather than a translator is assigned the task of
its translation. It is arguable that the publisher assigned this task to Jun Cai
in the belief that a fiction writer, able to tailor a novel without jeopardizing
its quality, would be best placed to meet the requirements of publication in
China.

Suspensizing of the novel

Though the political censorship turns out to be the invisible hand
behind the whole rewriting strategy, Cai’s involvement in effect brings his
personal identity into the Chinese version of the novel. As a matter of fact,
Cai takes his role as a translator/rewriter not just as any writer, but a
successful suspense writer.
The publisher asked Cai and not other writers to “translate” as they
believe “Cai’s language [style] is suitable for telling the story”.12 The
narrator of the story has died in mysterious circumstances weeks before
she is due to lead a dozen American travelers on a tour to China and
Burma. Her “ghost” finds herself able to read their minds and decides to
join their journey in spirit only. The fact that the story is narrated from
beyond the grave and that the American tourists are kidnapped by a
Burmese tribe in the jungle allows it to join the “ghost story” and
“adventure story” titles on publication, which then gives the publisher an
excuse to invite Jun Cai, a suspense writer, to translate it. The publisher
said in an interview that “as Saving Fish from Drowning was published as
a suspense novel in the US, and as Cai is the best-selling suspense writer
in China, it is reasonable to choose Cai as the translator/rewriter for Tan’s
work”.13

12
Shu, “Tan Enmei Xinzuo Yixie Moshi Zhao Zhiyi”.
13
Ibid.
 Censorship and Rewriting in a Chinese Writer’s Translation 133

Furthermore, both the publisher and Cai are quite frank about their
intention to promote the book’s selling record by exploiting Cai’s
readership in China. Considering translations of Amy Tan’s other works
did not sell well in China, the publisher intends to enlarge Amy Tan’s
Chinese readership through Cai’s existing readers of suspense novels by
adopting the “translating/rewriting” strategy and presenting Jun Cai as a
high-profile author.14 A reviewer comments that, “It is Jun Cai, instead of
Amy Tan, who brings this book its popularity”.15 Even Cai himself says
that “I cannot deny that my name on the cover has contributed to this
book’s selling record in China”.16 Eventually, Saving Fish from Drowning
sold three times better in China than any of Tan’s earlier translated works.
The above two reasons that contribute to Cai’s involvement in the
translation have left traces in the target text, the most obvious one being
the rewriting of the title. The English title, not immediately understandable
as it is, is derived from the practice of Burmese fishermen who “scoop up
the fish and bring them to shore. They say they are saving the fish from
drowning. Unfortunately. . . the fish do not recover”.17 The title works as a
metaphor of the good intentions of human beings which might not lead to
a good result. The book title of the Chinese version turns out to be
“Chenmo zhi Yu”, which means “the sunken/sinking fish”. The translator
states in his preface that the change is to make the title more like Chinese.
“Chenmo zhi Yu” does fit into the four-character structure of Chinese,
which is considered balanced and is commonly used in titles of Chinese
novels and movies and a number of Cai Jun’s owns works are titled with
four-character structure. However, the translator’s attempt to familiarize
the title to Chinese readers is at the expense of losing the metaphorical
meaning of the English title—though the translator claims his version of
the title is similar to the original.18 The connotation of “saving” is lost and
what is left—the sunken/sinking fish—fails to express the latent theme of
the novel.
Except for the title, other kinds of rewritings in the text are carried out
with an effort to “make the Chinese version suitable for Chinese
readers”.19 The rewritings demonstrate distinct characteristics of Cai’s
professional style as a suspense writer. In suspense fiction, the writer
makes use of various techniques to sustain the narrative tension, propelling

14
Zhang, “Tan Enmei: Wei Muqin er Xiezuo”.
15
Ibid.
16
Cai, “Yixie”, 206.
17
Tan, Saving Fish, i.
18
Cai, “Preface”, 7.
19
Ibid.
134 Chapter Nine

the readers forward by, for example, foreshadowing the impending doom
of the central characters. While the technique of foreshadowing is
commonly used in suspense fictions, Cai tends to use it for effect in his
practice of translation/rewriting. Take the following additions as an
example:

Addition 1
㏻ ℘㑣⋤ᅜⓗ኱斐ᕬ乷ᩏᘙ㸪㖞斜᫝㸪௒ኳࠋᡃᅾ㯭ᬯ୰♳⚏ᡃⓗ
᭸཭ẔᖹᏳ㸪௚Ẕ༶ᑗ㋃ධᮍ▱ⓗ᪑⛬㸪࿨㏅அἙᶓரன௚Ẕ㊦๓㸪
⪋௚Ẕ⮬ᕫ亾乯㉳஢୍⯺ᑠ⯪㸪ᑗΏ彯඘㺉⒡䕈ⓗἼᾧ㸪樞ྥ㑣Ỉ宜
୰⚄⛎ⓗᙼᓊࠋ
The gate to Lan’na Kingdom has been wide open. It is, today. I pray in the
darkness the safety of my friends. They are about to enter into an unknown
journey, with the river of fate lying in front of them. In a boat built
themselves, they will cross surges of pestilence and sail to the other shore
of mystery and legend.20

Addition 2
ᡈ孠㸪ᑵ徆᪁ⵐⰷ·㔠征㟟ⓗᜍᛧᑠ宜኱ⶰ㸪㒔晦௨᝿ീ௚Ẕ༶ᑗ㐼
฿ⓗᝒ᝺孭࿺ྱࠋ
Perhaps, even the master of horror fiction, Steven King, cannot imagine the
miserable curse which is going to fall upon them.21

Cai not only transfers the foreshadowing in the original text, but also
tries to strengthen the tension by adding more. As a writer who writes only
suspense fictions, Cai has formed a writing style of his own which finds its
way into the Chinese version. Other kinds of rewritings, about which
Chinese readers are told in the translator’s preface, also serves the same
purpose of “suspensizing” the story, including pruning back the plot,
simplifying “lengthy” details, breaking up original chapters into smaller
sections and naming them.22 Together with the fact that the novel is
labeled as an “adventure story” and a “ghost story” in its publication, these
rewritings have given Tan’s Saving Fish from Drowning the inappropriate
veneer of suspense fiction.

20
Cai, Chenmo zhi Yu, 77.
21
Ibid., 52.
22
Cai, “Preface”, 7.
 Censorship and Rewriting in a Chinese Writer’s Translation 135

The translator’s personal identity

If the above mentioned suspensizing effect is the result of the writing
habits of a suspense writer polishing the translation, the following example
can be seen as a note of more personal signatures of Cai. It is a dialogue
between the narrator Bibi Chan and her stepmother, with the latter
describing the scene of the former’s birth and her mother’s death in
childbirth:

The source text

“You were too big to come out between her legs, so the midwives had to
slice her nearly in two and pull you out like a fatty tapeworm. You weighed
over ten pounds, and you had bloody hair down to your shoulders”.23 (my
italics)

The translated/rewritten version

“఼ฟ⏕㖞ኴ኱஢㸪晦ṏ㸪᥋⏕፠ዲ୙ᐜ᫆ᢕ఼ᢪฟ᮶㸪㺉㌟᫝⾑ࠋ”
“晦㐨ᡃⓗฟ⏕ᑵ᫝୭㜿㰯ᆅ䊙⎿㸽”
“You were too big. It’s a difficult labour. You were taken out by the
midwives with great difficulty, covered in blood”.
“Was my birth an Avici Hell?”24

The original text is plain yet stirring, with a detailed and vivid
description of the scene which is crucial in understanding the relationship
between Bibi and her two mothers. However, it is rendered into Chinese in
a rough and careless way with vague expressions like “too big”, “difficult
labour”, “with great efforts” and “covered with blood”.
Though the vivid description of child birth is diluted in Cai’s
translation, certain compensation is made for the loss. Chinese readers will
find the narrator thinking to herself: “Was my birth an Avici Hell?” This
psychological depiction is added by Cai. “Avici hell”, which is the lowest
level of the hell realm, works as an important component in at least two
suspense stories of Jun Cai, i.e. Diyu de Di Shijiu Ceng (The Nineteenth
Level of Hell, 2005) and Hudie Gongmu (The Butterfly Cemetery, 2007).
Apparently, the translator/rewriter is conscious of his understatement in
rendering the scene of childbirth and tries to compensate with what he is
familiar with, resulting in replacing the author’s style with his own.
The intertextual connections between Cai’s translation and his
suspense writings are mutual. Cai’s four-part novel Tian Ji (Mysterious

23
Tan, Saving Fish, 25.
24
Cai, Chenmo zhi Yu, 23.
136 Chapter Nine

Messages, 2007-08), published not long after the Chinese translation of

Saving Fish from Drowning, is about the adventure of a Chinese tourist
group to the Lan’na Royal Mausoleum in Thailand. Though they are
distinct from each other, it is not hard for readers to discern the points of
resemblance between the two: both begin with a tour to a country in
Southeast Asia; both groups of tourists undergo mysterious encounters;
and, in the most obvious resemblance, both tours have “Lan’na” as their
destination.
At this point, it is reasonable to argue that the replacement of “Lan’na
Kingdom” for Burma—or more specifically, the choice of the name
“Lan’na”—could be one of Cai’s schemed build-ups for his forthcoming
thrilling story. The translation of Saving Fish from Drowning is
manipulated not only for the sake of politics, but also for the personal
interest of the writer translator. Considering the strong presence of Cai’s
identity in this translation, it is interesting to find that while claiming
credit for promoting Tan’s work in China, Jun Cai secretly uses this
opportunity to build up his own audience for his next work.
Further evidence of Cai’s high profile in the translation can be find in
the introductions to the author and the translator on the head page, where a
contrast is clearly discernible. Amy Tan is introduced very briefly:
“Famous Chinese American female writer. The author of The Joy Luck
Club, The Kitchen God’s Wife, and The Bonesetter’s Daughter”. In
contrast to the prosaic description of Amy Tan, which takes no more than
two lines, Cai’s introduction is detailed and complimentary, taking up
almost half the page.

Conclusion
The translation/rewriting of Amy Tan’s Saving Fish from Drowning is
a complicated case in which social, cultural, political and personal factors
play their parts. The issue of national/cultural identification in the
rewriting of this story is the focus of another article of mine.25 In this
article, I focus on the more political and personal factors in the rewriting
strategy. The need to pass censorship laws, which require careful tailoring
of the novel, is the main reason the suspense writer Jun Cai was assigned
the role of translator/rewriter of Tan’s novel. His involvement is further
used to promote Tan’s selling record in China by asserting his strong
presence in the translation. However, it is argued in this article that Cai’s
rewriting of the story carries a strong sense of personal writing style, as

25
Li “Identities”, 49-64
 Censorship and Rewriting in a Chinese Writer’s Translation 137

well as a hidden agenda. Not only does he mark the translation with his
style acquired in suspense writing, but also, more significantly, he has
made use of the translation to push his own interests as a suspense writer.
In the case of the translation/rewriting of Saving Fish from Drowning in
China, the translation is a site where the two parties of writing and
translating strive for their own personal agendas behind the invisible hand
of censorship.

Works Cited
Cai, Jun, trans. 2006. Chenmo zhi Yu (Saving Fish from Drowning),
written by Tan Enmei (Amy Tan). Beijing: Beijing Publishing House.
—. 2006. “Preface”. In Chenmo zhi Yu (Saving Fish from Drowning),
written by Tan Enmei (Amy Tan). Beijing: Beijing Publishing House.
—. 2007. “Yixie: Yizhong Fanyi de Xinchangshi”. (Rewriting: A New
Way of Translation). Yilin (Translations) no.2: 205-207.
Li, Wenjing. 2010. “Identities of the Translator: The Chinese
translating/rewriting of Saving Fish from Drowning”. In CTIS
Occasional Papers, Vol. 5, edited by A. Elimam and V. Flippance.
Manchester: University of Manchester.
Munday, Jeremy. 2009. Style and Ideology in Translation: Latin American
Writing in English. New York: Routledge.
Shafner, Rhonda. 2005. “Meditation on Suffering: Amy Tan’s Newest
Novel Explores How we Deal with Pain in Others”. Star-News,
December 18, 4D.
Shu, Jinyu. 2006. “Tan Enmei Xinzuo Yixie Moshi Zhao Zhiyi” (Way of
Amy Tan’s Latest Work Translated Calls into Question), Zhonghua
Dushu Bao (China Reading Weekly), November 1, A1, A3.
Tan, Amy. 2006. Saving Fish from Drowning. London, New York,
Toronto and Sydney: Harper Perennial.
—. 2006. “About the Book–A Conversation with Amy Tan”. In Saving
Fish from Drowning. London, New York, Toronto and Sydney: Harper
Perennial.
Zhang, Ying and Tan Enmei [Amy Tan]. 2006. “Tan Enmei: Wei Muqin
er Xiezuo” (Amy Tan: Writing for my Mother). Southern Weekly,
November 2, D27.
 CHAPTER TEN

LITERARY AND CULTURAL TRANSLATION

IN THE MUSIC, ART, SCIENCE
AND POLITICS OF 1890S MELBOURNE

MATTHEW LORENZON

The artists, criminologists, musicians, and politicians of 1890s Melbourne

exhibited a fascination for translations of European philosophy and
literature.1 While professionals could afford new hardback translations of
Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, or Zola, artists could buy paperbacks broken
into shilling instalments or, at a pinch, steal them from Cole’s spectacular
book arcade. This lust for translation did not stop at the joy of possessing a
plush volume of Nietzsche, but extended to the freedom and relish with
which the cultural elite, following their European counterparts, borrowed
from neighbouring disciplines. Beneath this conceptual economy was a
material economy of book swapping and citation that reveals the porous
social character of Melbourne’s cultural elite.
This essay brings to light one particular nexus of intellectual exchange:
That of the artists Norman and Lionel Lindsay, the solicitor Marshall Lyle
and his circle of criminologists, the first professor of music at the
University of Melbourne George William Louis Marshall-Hall, and the
lawyer and politician Alfred Deakin. The essay traces their intellectual
exchanges through and around a copy of the first published volume of
Alexander Tille’s The Collected Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, showing
how a work of linguistic translation prompted conceptual translations
between music, philosophy, etching technique, political ideology,
literature, and criminal anthropology.2

1
For an account of these material flows see Lorenzon, “The Literary Works of G.
W. L. Marshall-Hall: 1888–1915”.
2
Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner.
 Literary and Cultural Translation of 1890s Melbourne 139

On 1 August 1898 Marshall-Hall quoted the volume at a performance

of the Melbourne Liedertafel. His speech, using Nietzsche’s words to
praise war and condemn religion, set in train a series of events that
eventually saw him expelled from the university in 1900.3 What appeared
as the over-excitation of an artistic disposition can be read as a political act
of non-translation in the web of late nineteenth-century intellectuals
including the artists Norman and Lionel Lindsay.

Norman and Lionel Lindsay: Translating music into art

It is possible that Marshall-Hall introduced the Nietzsche volume to the
painter Lionel Lindsay in the months leading up to the Liedertafel concert,
during which the artist helped paint the sets for a Trinity College
production of Euripides’ Alcestis.4 Marshall-Hall—a vigorous proponent
of Wagner’s music5—turned his assignment to compose incidental music
into an opportunity to compose with the tropes of grand opera, including
background music throughout the entire play, an aria for the dying
Alcestis, and double choruses.6 If Marshall-Hall privileged Wagner’s
overblown aesthetics, Lionel followed Nietzsche in praising the succinct
melodies and unencumbered harmonies of Bizet’s Carmen. He translated
this aesthetic preference into a stark etching style evident in his 1902
illustrations for a publication of Prosper Mérimée’s Carmen (see Fig. 10-1).
Lionel writes in his autobiography, within a 1902 context, that
“Nietzsche’s Contra Wagner had long been my book of hours, had fortified
my love of Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert, and confirmed my distaste of
Wagner’s windy romanticism; that music without edges which can never
satisfy an exacting sense of form”.7 In contrast to Wagner’s music without
edges, his illustrations for Carmen are etched with stark contrasts. Writing
during his trip to Spain in 1902, Lionel tells that “the sun of Spain is a great
draughtsman and, struck by a happy slant of light, the farmhouses and
cultivated uplands with their lines of olives seemed nearer in the clear air”.8
In Lionel’s etching of a Dominican friar the character in the foreground is

3
For an account of the effect of Alexander Tille’s editorial rationale on the
Liedertafel speech, see Lorenzon, “The militant musician”.
4
Radic, G. W. L. Marshall-Hall, 12.
5
For an account of Marshall-Hall’s writings on Wagner see Lorenzon, “Marshall-
Hall Contra Wagner”.
6
Radic, G. W. L. Marshall-Hall, 16.
7
L. Lindsay, Comedy of Life, 119.
8
L. Lindsay in Holden, Lionel Lindsay in Spain, 18.
140 Chapter Ten

set against the brilliant white of the wall behind him and the dark window
in the background.

Fig. 10-1 Lionel Lindsay, “Untitled Illustration”, 1902, etching. Prosper Mérimée,
Carmen (Cammeray: Southern Cross Books, 1984), 28.
 Literary and Cultural Translation of 1890s Melbourne 141

It is hard not to read Lionel’s description of “windy romanticism” and

the clear air of sunny Spain and not think of these opening lines of
Nietzsche’s The Case of Wagner:

With Bizet one takes leave of the humid north, and all the steam of the
Wagnerian ideal. Even the dramatic action saves us therefrom. It has
borrowed from Mérimée the logic in passion, the shortest route, stern
necessity. It possesses, above all, what belongs to the warm climate, the
dryness of the air, its limpidezza.9

It is an open question as to whether Marshall-Hall introduced the

volume to Lionel, or the other way around, or neither. Lionel claims that
“[t]he Contra Wagner and The Antichrist had been my discovery”,10 while
the formidable cost of the volume, not to mention its scarcity in England,
may have prevented him from purchasing it.11 Though Lionel’s younger
brother Norman remembers his own method of book subsidy: “Those that
I had no money to pay for I filched, risking detection as a sneak-thief”.12
Norman developed a contrasting reading of Nietzsche’s works with a
corresponding etching technique. While his direct stroke method of the
early 1900s resonates with Lionel’s art with edges, his philosophical turn
in the 1920s, centred upon Thus Spake Zarathustra, sees the development
of a painstaking pointillist style and praise of Wagner’s music without
edges.13 The 1906 work The Scoffers,14 depicting the rake Panurge
mocking Christ from the foot of the cross, was made in the “direct stroke
method”.15 To Norman, the direct stroke method represented the freshness
and spontaneity possible in pen drawing, of “hitting the value at the first

9
Nietzsche, Case of Wagner. 7-8.
10
Lindsay, Comedy, 122.
11
In England the 1896 edition of The Case of Wagner was priced at 10s 6d and
Thus Spake Zarathustra at 17s. These were “prices which put them quite out of the
reach of the average book buyer” according to David Thatcher, and put the
publisher Henry and Company out of business in one year. Thatcher, Nietzsche in
England 1890-1914, 23.
12
N. Lindsay, My Mask, 82.
13
Norman most likely discovered Common’s 1898 translation of Thus Spake
Zarathustra under the imprint of William Reeves in 1899. He recalls reading
Nietzsche’s “Midnight Song” from Thus Spake Zarathustra in “one of the shilling
parts Thomas Common was translating of Nietzsche’s works, in a bookshop in my
student days”. N. Lindsay, Letters of Norman Lindsay, 574.
14
N. Lindsay, Pen Drawings of Norman Lindsay, Plate 21.
15
N. Lindsay, Letters of Norman Lindsay, 385.
142 Chapter Ten

essay, and never going back over the stroke to build up tone if required”.16
Norman’s philosophical turn from his earlier anti-religious period to the
pessimistic philosophy of the 1920 book Creative Effort is accompanied
by a technical shift from the direct stroke method to pointillism.17
Possibly in reaction to the First World War, Norman developed a
reading of Nietzsche’s eternal return in 1920, arguing that the artist was to
eternally proceed in creative effort amongst the “primitive mud of earth,
through eternal savagery, in the midst of brutal sights”.18 It is no wonder
Norman found company in Wagner’s “creative despair”,19 the Wagner who
is quoted by Norman as asking:[w]hat man during a whole lifetime can
gaze into the depth of this world with a calm reason and cheerful heart,
when he sees murder and rapine organised; lies, impositions, hypocrisy?
Will he not avert his head and shudder in disgust?20 Norman explicitly
translated this philosophy of dogged perseverance into the pointillist
etching technique that he began to use in his pen drawings.21 The woman in
his c.1920 pen drawing Wagner is lifted by an angelic being in what is
possibly an allegory for the creative experience (see Fig. 10-2). Though the
figures of Wagner appear weightless, disappearing into the page, they are
the products of crippling repetition.
In 1926, turning against Nietzsche and Wagner, Norman complained of
“etching pessimism”.22 He asked “what sort of possible achievement can
there be to an art which is done by hand which permits one to cover half-
an-inch of copper with dots and then becomes so cramped that one must
rest it?”23 Norman repudiated Wagner and his own philosophy in terms of
philosophy without edges, writing that he felt the “over-diffuseness in
Wagner” to be a product of “the effect of uncertainty as to emotional
definition, and an intellectual effort to force concentration by overloading
forms as we are all inclined to do when the central principle of a work
becomes uncertain”.24

16
Ibid.
17
N. Lindsay, Creative Effort.
18
Ibid., 253. The influence of the First World War may be read here. When his
brother Reginald died in the First World War Norman received the notebook that
he had given him “splodged with his blood”. N. Lindsay, My Mask, 43.
19
N. Lindsay, Creative Effort, 253.
20
Wagner in Ibid., 251.
21
N. Lindsay, Letters of Norman Lindsay, 385.
22
Ibid., 259.
23
Ibid.
24
Ibid.
 Literary and Cultural
C Translaation of 1890s M
Melbourne 143

Norman and Lionel’s pen and etchiing techniquess are artistic trranslations
of two verry different musical aestthetics mediaated by two sides of
Nietzsche’s philosophy: The
T Bizetian, affirmative N Nietzsche of Thhe Case of
Wagner andd the suppossedly pessimistic, Wagneriian Nietzschee of Thus
Spake Zarathustra. Trannslated into sccientific term
ms by Lyle, Nietzsche’s
N
writings beccame anthropoological specim
mens.

Fig. 10-2. NNorman Lindsaay, “Wagner”, c. 1920, pen and ink on paper.
p Pen
Drawings, eddited by Francis Crosslé (Syd
dney: Arthur M
McQuitty and Company,
1924). n.p.
144 Chapter Ten

Marshall Lyle: Translating literature into science

Fig. 10-3 “Melbourne, 1897”, Lionel Lindsay, Comedy of Life (Sydney:

Halstead Press, 1967), 14.

In 1900 Marshall-Hall and the Lindsays’ mutual friend Marshall Lyle

took an interest in the Nietzsche volume, communicating with Marshall-
Hall through four annotations on the book’s contents page.25 Though Lyle
is best known for defending the serial killer and Jack the Ripper contender
Frederick Bailey Deeming with Alfred Deakin in 1892, he is a marginal but
fascinating figure in the biographies of Australian artists and musicians of
the period.26 In Lionel’s autobiography he is found lounging on a chair in
front of the sketcher and governor of Melbourne Gaol J. B. Castieau, the
artist Norman Lindsay, and the playwright and journalist Montague Grover
(see Fig. 10-3). Marshall-Hall’s rival to the Ormond Chair William
Adolphus Laver later recalled evenings spent with Marshall-Hall and Lyle,
claiming that Marshall-Hall shared Lyle’s interest in the founder of

25
Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner, National Library of Australia, Canberra, RB
MOD 2613.
26
See Weaver, The Criminal of the Century.
 Literary and Cultural Translation of 1890s Melbourne 145

criminal anthropology Cesare Lombroso.27 It is likely at meetings such as

these that The Case of Wagner was passed back and forth, the conversation
of the evening continuing in the margins of the book (see Fig. 10-4).
Lyle’s annotations reveal the solicitor translating the philosophical
work into an anthropological specimen. Straight away he identifies
Nietzsche’s encroaching dementia:

Note the flat contradictions of himself contained in this volume regarding

the question of criminals.
Note the inability (apparently) to continue logical reasoning, and
sentences started but not finished about which asylum inspectors can tell
you a lot.
Note amidst clever witticisms the most palpable errors as to accepted
fact.
Note the egoism.
If Nietzsche be a sane guide, why keep thousands of equally sane in
our asylums? Yet, society must protect itself, or try to.

In diagnosing Nietzsche, Lyle is following the lead of his “master”

Lombroso.28 Lombroso diagnosed symptoms of evolutionary recidivism in
famous artists, writers, scientists, and musicians in The Man of Genius, his
only book available in English at the time.29 Lombroso argued that artistic
prowess was only achieved at the cost of physical vitality, that:

[j]ust as giants pay a heavy ransom for their stature in sterility and relative
muscular and mental weakness, so the giants of thought expiate their
intellectual force in degeneration and psychoses. It is thus that the signs of
degeneration are found more frequently in men of genius than even in the
insane.30

Few intellectual giants were spared Lombroso’s diagnosis, with an

extensive catalogue of Darwin’s quirks providing evidence of his own
dreadful atavistic characteristics.31
In Australia the novelist Émile Zola was singled out for his supposedly
recessive traits. The Argus published doctor Edouard Toulouse’s diagnosis
that “passive memory seems but little developed in him”, that his gift for

27
Laver, “Professor G. W. L. Marshall Hall”.
28
“Editorial”, Argus, March 30, 1898.
29
Lombroso, The Man of Genius.
30
Ibid., vi.
31
Ibid., 356-57.
146 Chapter Ten

writing detracted from his “oratorical gift” and rendered him tone deaf.32
On 11 December 1897 you could read on the same page that Nietzsche’s
“nerves are as delicate and sensitive as they were in the days he enjoyed
good health” and that Zola was “extremely nervous when he is at work
upon one of his novels”.33 As Rachael Weaver shows, when Lyle defended
Deeming in 1892 criminal anthropological language was already
widespread in the press, leading to spectacular depictions of the
condemned man.34

Fig. 10-4 Contents page of The Case of Wagner with annotations by Lyle and
Marshall-Hall. Image courtesy of the National Library of Australia.

But criminal anthropologists did not just see literary works as evidence
that their authors were evolutionary throwbacks. They also drew examples
from fictional scenarios to justify their theories. In 1897 the anthropologist
Samuel Rosa (describing Zola as a “powerful writer”, presumably because

32
Toulouse, E, “Zola: His physique and his mind”, Argus, February 6, 1897.
33
“Literary Gossip”, Sydney Morning Herald. December 11, 1897.
34
Weaver, The Criminal of the Century, 68.
 Literary and Cultural Translation of 1890s Melbourne 147

he was now serving the cause of criminal anthropology) compared the

character Jacques Lantier from Zola’s La Bête Humaine to Deeming, or
more probably to descriptions of Deeming in the newspapers:

At the time of the trial of the miscreant Deeming I was struck by his
resemblance to the instinctive criminal Lantier as depicted by that powerful
writer and student of anthropology, Zola, In “La Bête Humaine”. I drew
the attention of Deeming’s solicitor, Mr. Marshall Lyle, to the
resemblance, and that gentleman thoroughly agreed with me that Deeming
was a congenital criminal.35

Rosa reinforces his advocacy of criminal anthropology by quoting an

absolutely banal letter from Lombroso: “Tout ce que vous avez dit sur
l’importance de l’examen du cerveau est très vrai”. Through their reading
of European literature and philosophy Australian criminal anthropologists
took the same literary and philosophical propositions that transformed the
Lindsays’ art and translated them into evidence for their theories. As the
Australian colonies approached federation this scientific credibility was
then translated into political power, an exchange that was resisted by the
Marshall-Hall’s reading of the Nietzsche volume.

Towards Federation: Translating science into politics

As the Australian colonies approached federation, the criminal
anthropologists were busy translating scientific authority into political
power. Lyle approached George Reid, then Premier of New South Wales,
during the 1898 Melbourne Federal Convention to ask for photographs
and criminal records of prisoners in New South Wales. The informality of
Lyle and Reid’s communication may explain the complete lack of
correspondence from Lyle in Reid’s correspondence held at the National
Library of Australia. Reid, who according to The Argus “share[d] with
Lombroso the opinion that criminology is a study that ought to be
encouraged”, sent “photographs of and records of all the leading New
South Wales criminals, male and female, for many years past, to be
forwarded to the ‘master’ in Italy” apparently without question.36 These
photographs appear to have been shared freely. Havelock Ellis, the
translator of The Man of Genius, mentions the photographs in his
introduction to The Criminal. He writes that he had received from Lyle “a

35
Rosa, S, “Criminal Anthropology”, Sydney Morning Herald, November 13,
1897.
36
“Editorial”, Argus, March 30, 1898.
148 Chapter Ten

valuable series of photographs of Australian criminals (belonging,

however, not to Victoria but to New South Wales)”.37
In 1898 Lyle sent a letter to Alexander Peacock, Chief Inspector of
Victorian prisons and member of the federal convention, asking for “some
photos and records attached of criminals in Victoria”.38 The Victorian
penal system prisons had seen significant reform since Captain John Evans
“inherited a prison system that was tainted by allegations of corruption and
mismanagement”.39 During his time as Inspector General 1890-1903,
Evans saw prisons “treating each prisoner as an individual and addressing
their specific needs” through “classification and separation”.40 Lyle name-
dropped Evans to convince the Chief Secretary of the importance of his
research: “If you will permit me, I will give to Captain Evans, with whom
I am well acquainted, full details as to the sorts of criminal photographs
which are of scientific value”.41 Evans acceded that “[a]s this request is
made in the interests of science I see no objection to supplying the
photographs and criminal histories”.42 Though Evans expressed suspicion
about Lombroso’s motives, particularly his need for names and records to
be attached to the photographs, he wrote that “Mr. Lyle has, as he says,
perfect faith in the Professor’s conclusions”.43 On 29 July 1898, Lyle
wrote a warm letter of thanks to Evans for “the receipt of 40 photos with
records attached of Victorian criminals” including, amongst others,
Frederick Deeming and Edward Kelly, adding that he would “call and see
[Evans] in a few days” concerning some additional photographs that he
would like in the collection.44

37
Ellis, The Criminal, xvii.
38
This letter held at the Public Records Office of Victoria is cited as VPRS 3992,
Unit 989, G3155 in the on-line catalogue notes to VPRS 8369: Correspondence,
Photographs and History Sheets of Certain Male Criminals at the Public Records
Office of Victoria. The correspondence currently resides in VPRS 3992, Unit 707.
The initial piece of correspondence marked G3155 was “top-numbered” and filed
with the proceeding pieces of correspondence as H3155.
39
O’Toole, The History of Australian Corrections, 207.
40
Ibid.
41
Lyle, “Letter to Chief Secretary of Prisons Peacock, M.P”.
42
Evans, “Accession of Request by Marshall Lyle”. 1898, Public Records Office
of Victoria, Melbourne, 3992 707, H3155.
43
Ibid.
44
Lyle, “Letter to Captain Evans, R.M”.
 Literary and Cultural Translation of 1890s Melbourne 149

Non-translation as a political act

By reading Nietzsche’s text in relation to its philosophical genealogy
Marshall-Hall resisted Lyle’s brand of politicised translation. The result
was by no means apolitical, but rather fuelled a mystical nationalism that
became evident through his involvement with Alfred Deakin in the years
leading up to federation. Maintaining the Schopenhauerian idea that the
artist had unparalleled access to the true nature of the world, Marshall-
Hall disagreed with Lyle’s empirical evaluation of human beings.45 In the
margins of the Nietzsche volume he argues that:

[i]t requires us great observation of life to perceive that the intellect is

altogether without permanent influence uppon [sic] the life-course of men.
It merely carries out more or less cunningly the imperious demands of
instinct.46

But instinct was not to be understood in terms of hereditary traits.

Though his vitriol against scientific approaches to social reform from 1899
seems to echo criminal anthropological language of “symptoms of
weakness”, the weakness he is referring to is a vitalist, spiritual one:

Has anything which tends to the strength and stability of a nation ever yet
been effected by your visionaries, your fanatics, who would reconstruct the
world according to their own pseudo-philanthropic imaginations?
Psychologically examined, it turns out that their wonderful ideals, their
reforms, their spirituality are merely a symptom—a symptom of weakness.
It means they have not the necessary robustness, energy, hardness, to front,
to understand, to use life as it is.47

To Marshall-Hall, one’s nature could not be diagnosed with a cranial

map. Rather, he understood power in aesthetic terms. This is evident in
comparing their variously aesthetic and scientific attitudes towards
Napoleon. Lyle and Lombroso identified Deeming as a “Napoleonic”
criminal type, a “murderer” and a danger to mankind. In a letter to
Lombroso dated 4 November 1897, currently held at the Museo di
Antropologia Criminale in Turin, Lyle wrote:

45
For a discussion of Marshall-Hall’s reading of Schopenhauer see Lorenzon,
“Marshall-Hall Contra Wagner”.
46
Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner, 178-79.
47
Marshall-Hall, “The Essential in Art I”, 25.
150 Chapter Ten

I think it is highly desirable in the interests of morality that a big scoundrel

should be shown up. Just at present we have a sort of hero-worship going
on; we have Napoleon plays in our theatres, and the people who will
execrate the name of a Deeming, will worship a bigger murderer,
Napoleon! I have no love for militarism, but I confess I have a loving for
the Duke of Wellington. For as you know he smashed up Bonaparte.48

Marshall-Hall, on the other hand, considered Napoleon a “human

avalanche”49 and condemned the populism of Australian politicians, Reid
in particular.50 For Marshall-Hall, the image of an avalanche was tied up
with Schopenhauer’s aesthetics. In 1899 he related almost being trapped
in an avalanche while experiencing the Schopenhauerian sublime:

I remember many years ago, when on an expedition among the Savoy Alps
with my father, staying for luncheon on a ridge of rock at the foot of an
enormous precipice at least 1000 feet in height. It was in the spring, and
the huge rocks in front of us were crowned by towering heights of snow.
All of a sudden, with a crescendo of sound that was terrifying, this vast
mass began to move, bearing with it enormous rocks, and whole clouds of
debris. As it swung over the edge of the precipice it appeared as if the very
mountains were being heaved from their resting-place, and were toppling
upon us. The end of the world seemed to have come. So wrapt was I in awe
and wonder at this disastrous cataclysm of nature, that I remained
motionless without a thought of our personal danger, which was not
inconsiderable; while my father, springing up without a moment’s
hesitation, seized me by the collar and dragged me off behind a sheltering
rock. Thus did destiny decree that Schopenhauer’s doctrine of the beautiful
and the sublime should be exemplified by us some hundred years after its
formulation. On the whole, however, I recommend those who wish to
exercise their faculty of pure contemplation on an avalanche, to do so
through a telescope.51

Marshall-Hall’s translation of nature into philosophy and politics was

not limited to European examples. He also came to hear the Australian
landscape as containing the sublime power of a Schubert symphony:

Who can hear the Introduction to Franz Schubert’s colossal Symphony in

C without feeling that he is in the presence of immense masses of

48
Lyle, “Letter to Cesare Lombroso”.
49
Marshall-Hall, “The Essential in Art I”, 25.
50
See annotations on an article about New South Wales Premier George Reid
getting hit by a bag of flour glued in Nietzsche, Case of Wagner, 201.
51
Marshall-Hall, “The Essential in Art III”, 10.
 Literary and Cultural Translation of 1890s Melbourne 151

inorganic nature? I remember on the track to the Wellington Falls, near

Hobart, at a certain point suddenly that stupendous work of the Titans
reveals itself. One giant rock lies piled on the other, mountain high, so that
the heavens above, and the holy gods, and Zeus himself, seem small and
impotent, and of another feebler existence. Then I understood for the first
time the fable of the war between the gods and the Titans—then for the
first time I saw the physical embodiment of Schubert’s sublime opening to
the Symphony.52

He praised the Australian landscape in similarly Euro-centric terms in

his 1899 “Australian National Song”.53 When the Protectionist Alfred
Deakin praised the song, Marshall-Hall gushed in response:

I was very delighted to hear that you were favourably impressed by my

Federal Ode. You are one of the few men out here whose opinion I value
highly. Mr Mackey tells me you wish to recite it in your peroration next
Monday. I can assure you that this would be an event which I should be
proud to my Dying Day.54

Marshall-Hall’s lionising of German culture may have resonated with

Deakin’s mythologising of Australia’s white migrant population, in
particular with his policies of racial exclusion, as stated in 1901:

The ultimate result is a national determination to make no truce with

coloured immigration, to have no traffic with the unclean thing, and to put
it down in all its shapes without much regard to cost. Those Chinese,
Japanese, or coolies who have come here under the law, or in spite of it,
are not to be permitted to increase.55

However, as has been shown, Marshall-Hall did not advocate theories

of evolution based on physical characteristics such as can be found in
Deakin’s speech where he refers to “lower Latin types” and “Caucasian
separateness” from the “Aryan family”.56 Rather, it is likely that Marshall-
Hall was here performing the sort of slavish, self-serving political
behaviour he criticised in others.
Rather than in Protectionist policy, it is more conceivable that
Marshall-Hall influenced Deakin in his literary sources. Marshall-Hall
could even have been an important influence on Deakin’s reading of

52
Marshall-Hall, “The Essential in Art I”, 27.
53
Marshall-Hall, G. W. L., “Australian National Song”, Argus, July 20, 1899.
54
Marshall-Hall, “Letter to Alfred Deakin, 1899”.
55
O’Neal and Handley, Retreat from Injustice, 698.
56
Ibid.
152 Chapter Ten

Nietzsche. In extant sources pertaining to Deakin’s reading the earliest

reference to Nietzsche is in a letter to Walter Murdoch from 1906:
“Nietzsche I found very valuable for though he acts as ‘advocatus diaboli’
he pricks so many conventional bubbles & sounds the shallows of
masquerading ‘morality’ so well that he helps to drive one to deeper
foundations & more sincere inspiration”.57 It is unlikely that, as John La
Nauze writes, Deakin was “impressed” by Nietzsche in his “youth”,58 as
Deakin was 40 years old when the first translations of Nietzsche’s works
appeared in 1896 and did not appear to read German.59 However, the
literary bond between Marshall-Hall and Deakin is evident, with Marshall-
Hall advising Deakin upon his retirement from politics in 1913 to write a
novel, adding that Deakin was “a soul saved from the fire—from the point
of view of Art. You have done enough for politics, now return to your
natural element”.60
In late nineteenth-century Melbourne linguistic translation fed into
economies of intellectual translation and social exchange. The latest
translations allowed artists, scientists, and politicians to keep an eye on
each other and develop their spheres of intellectual influence by either
translating between disciplines or, in the case of Marshall-Hall, refusing to
do so. With Nietzsche’s works striking pre-Federation Melbourne like a
thunderbolt, the question became whether to look inward for artistic
inspiration or develop a rationalist, empirical point of view. When
translated into artistic terms this distinction produced strikingly different
and even self-contradictory aesthetics in the works of Lionel and Norman
Lindsay. When translated into scientific terms literature became a
specimen for examination and science was translated into literature in the
form of depictions of the criminal type. The period examined here did not
see the full extent of the political implications of translation between
literature and other disciplines. Racialised views on citizenship would
haunt Australia in law for over half a century and persist as a cultural stain
for longer, while the spiritualism of Wagner’s music and Nietzsche’s
philosophy would find themselves bound up in the aestheticisation of
politics in Nazi Germany. While these future events cannot be seen as the
direct product of Melbourne’s cultural elite passing books around at dinner
parties, there are nevertheless larger stakes to these microscopic acts of
translation.

57
La Nauze and Nurser, Walter Murdoch and Alfred Deakin on Books and Men:
Letters and Comments 1900-1918, 24.
58
La Nauze, Alfred Deakin, 232.
59
Norris, “Deakin, Alfred (1856–1919)”.
60
Marshall-Hall, “Letter to Alfred Deakin, 1913”.
 Literary and Cultural Translation of 1890s Melbourne 153

Works Cited
Ellis, Havelock. 1901. The Criminal. London: Walter Scott.
Evans, John. 1898. Accession of Request by Marshall Lyle, April 4, 3992
707: H3155. Public Records Office of Victoria. Victorian Archives,
Melbourne.
Holden, Colin. 2003. Lionel Lindsay in Spain: an antipodean abroad.
Carlton: Miegunyah Press.
La Nauze, John Andrew. 1965. Alfred Deakin: A Biography. Melbourne:
Melbourne University Press.
La Nauze, John Andrew and Elizabeth Nurser, eds. 1974. Walter Murdoch
and Alfred Deakin on Books and Men: Letters and Comments 1900-
1918. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.
Laver, William. Professor G. W. L. Marshall Hall: A Few Personal Notes.
Transcription. Private Collection of Geoffrey Blainey, Melbourne.
Lindsay, Lionel. 1967. Comedy of Life. Sydney: Halstead Press.
Lindsay, Norman. 1918. The Pen Drawings of Norman Lindsay. Art in
Australia. Edited by Sydney Ure Smith. Sydney: Angus and Robertson.
—. 1920. Creative effort: an essay in affirmation. Sydney: Art in
Australia.
—. 1970. My Mask: For What Little I know of the Man Behind it. Sydney:
Angus and Robertson.
—. 1979. Letters of Norman Lindsay, edited by R.G. Hogwarth and A.W.
Barker. Sydney: Angus and Robertson.
Lombroso, Cesare. 1891. The Man of Genius. Translated by Havelock
Ellis. London: Walter Scott.
Lorenzon, Matthew. 2010. “The Literary Works of G.W.L. Marshall-Hall:
1888-1915”. University of Melbourne.
—. 2011. “‘The Militant Musician’: G. W. L. Marshall-Hall and the Uses
of Nietzsche in Australia”. Journal of Australian Historical Studies 42,
no. 3: 357-71.
—. 2012. “Marshall-Hall Contra Wagner”. In Marshall-Hall’s Melbourne:
Music, Art and Controversy 1891–1915, edited by Thérèse Radic and
Suzanne Robinson, 125-38. Melbourne: Australian Scholarly
Publishing.
Lyle, Marshall. Letter to Cesare Lombroso, November 4, 1897. Museo di
Antropologia Criminale, Turin.
—. Letter to Chief Secretary of Prisons Peacock, M.P., March 30, 1898.
3992 707: H3155. Public Records Office of Victoria. Victorian
Archives, Melbourne.
—. Letter to Captain Evans, R.M., July 29, 1898. 3992 707: H3155. Public
154 Chapter Ten

Records Office of Victoria. Victorian Archives, Melbourne.

Marshall-Hall, G. W. L. 1899. “The Essential in Art I”. Alma Mater 4, no.
3: 24-29.
—. 1899. “The Essential in Art III”. Alma Mater 4, no. 5: 9-13.
—. Letter to Alfred Deakin, July 4, 1899. 11.1.4: 11/97-8. MS1540.
National Library of Australia, Canberra.
—. Letter to Alfred Deakin. January 31, 1913. 1.32: 1/3133-4. Papers of
Alfred Deakin. National Library of Australia, Canberra.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1896. The Case of Wagner; Nietzsche Contra
Wagner; Twilight of the Idols; The Antichrist, edited by Alexander
Tille. Translated by Thomas Common. In The Collected Works of
Friedrich Nietzsche, 11 vols. Vol. 11. London: Henry and Company.
RB MOD 2613. National Library of Australia, Canberra.
—. 1898. Thus Spake Zarathustra: a Book for All and None. Translated by
Thomas Common. London: William Reeves.
Norris, R. “Deakin, Alfred (1856–1919)”. Australian Dictionary of
Biography (2006),
http://www.adb.online.anu.edu.au/biogs/A080275b.htm.
O’Neal, N. and Handley, R. 1994. Retreat from Injustice: Human Rights
in Australian Law. Sydney: Federation Press.
O’Toole, Sean. 2006. The History of Australian Corrections. Sydney:
University of New South Wales Press.
Radic, Thérèse. 2002. G. W. L. Marshall-Hall: A biography & catalogue.
Melbourne: Marshall-Hall Trust. Revised 2010.
Thatcher, David. 1970. Nietzsche in England 1890-1914. Toronto:
University of Toronto Press.
Weaver, Rachael. 2006. The Criminal of the Century. North Melbourne:
Australian Scholarly Publishing.
 CHAPTER ELEVEN

TRANSLATIONS FROM THE UNKNOWN:

HANS BLUMENBERG’S ABSOLUTE METAPHOR

ROBERT SAVAGE

This essay takes its cue from two attempts to grapple with the task of
translation. The first is philosophical. In 1960, Hans Blumenberg
published his pathbreaking Paradigms for a Metaphorology in the Archive
for the History of Concepts (Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte), a journal
established by Erich Rothacker five years earlier to promote research in
the history of ideas.1 The central claim of the book, announced in its
foreword, was that the traditional rhetorical classification of metaphor as
translatio was something of a misnomer. Blumenberg posited the
existence of what he called “absolute metaphors”, which, unlike those
metaphors which can (at least in theory) be transferred back into proper
speech, remain stubbornly untranslatable. Such metaphors cannot be
expressed “in other words”; any attempt to convert them into the non-
figurative and unambiguous language of concepts, as Descartes had
envisaged, would be both futile and impoverishing. Blumenberg writes:
“Metaphors can . . . be foundational elements of philosophical language,
‘translations’ that resist being converted back into authenticity and
logicality. If it could be shown that such translations, which would have to
be called ‘absolute metaphors’, exist, then one of the essential tasks of
conceptual history . . . would be to ascertain and analyse their conceptually
irredeemable expressive function”.2
What, then, is the “expressive function” served by absolute metaphors?
According to Blumenberg, the need for such metaphors arises whenever
we find ourselves confronted by broadly “existential” problems which

1
Blumenberg, “Paradigmen zu einer Metaphorologie”, 7-142; trans. Savage,
Paradigms for a Metaphorology. The text simultaneously appeared in book form
with the Bouvier Verlag in Bonn.
2
Blumenberg, Paradigms, 3.
156 Chapter Eleven

must be addressed, since neglecting them would entail overwhelming

anxiety or disorientation, but which cannot adequately be addressed with
rational means: “absolute metaphor leaps into a void, inscribing itself on
the tabula rasa of theoretical unsatisfiability”.3 Absolute metaphor may be
likened to a dike erected by the human imagination to hold at bay the
sheer mass of the unknowable, occasionally breached here and there as
individual metaphors no longer prove up to the task of delimiting a space
for human self-assertion. These metaphors are absolute in a twofold sense:
in them, the absolute is metaphorized, “translated” into significations that
address certain vast, theoretically unanswerable, yet pragmatically
uncircumventable questions about our place in the universe; and it is
metaphorized absolutely, made “untranslatable” through their function of
opening up a horizon within which translations between figurative and
non-figurative speech (in the conventional sense) could first take place. To
be sure, Blumenberg concedes a limited validity to the substitution theory
of metaphor hallowed by tradition, according to which, in the words of
Paul Ricoeur, the metaphorical term “carries no new information, since the
absent term (if one exists) can be brought back in”, and hence has “only an
ornamental, decorative function”.4 Some metaphors may well be “leftover
elements” that ought to be purged from philosophical discourse as so
many obstacles to clear expression. Yet absolute metaphors say more than
this, and they say it differently: they are “foundational elements”,
incommensurate with the order of discourse in which metaphor appears as
a local disorder to be tolerated, at best, for its poetic effect, if not
eliminated altogether in the interest of terminological exactness.
Absolute metaphors compensate human beings for their lack of fit with
a world in which they must act in order to stay alive, but in which they can
only act at all purposefully if their actions are informed by a
foreknowledge of what that world is and how they stand in relation to it.
Such foreknowledge, which tends to be prescient rather than prescientific
in nature, is acquired by projecting conjectures about the totality of the
real onto the blank screen of the absolute, which henceforth (although
there is nothing anthropologically “prior” to this “henceforth”) projects
back an image which helps us to find our way in the world: that of a
divinely ordained cosmos, for instance, or a prison cell for the soul, or a
clockwork universe. These metaphysical conjectures are at once
unfounded, for they cannot be verified or falsified, and founding, since
they disclose possibilities for making sense of what would otherwise have

3
Ibid., 132.
4
Riceour, Rule of Metaphor, 21.
 Translations from the Unknown 157

been senseless. In some cases, notably in Galileo and Kepler, absolute

metaphors set the parameters within which the incremental progress of
“normal science” can take place; in others, existing scientific
achievements are pressed into the service of human self-understanding
through their metaphorization, as the history of the Copernican reform
demonstrates. The vicissitudes of metaphor—the replacement of one
metaphor by another, or the accretions in meaning undergone by a single
metaphor over time—form the subject of a new kind of historiography that
probes texts for evidence of the conceptually irrecoverable presuppositions
on which they operate, the “cultural subconscious” to which they give
involuntary expression.5 As Blumenberg remarks in the incomparably
dense closing sentence to the foreword of Paradigms: “Metaphorology
seeks to burrow down to the substructure of thought, the underground, the
nutrient solution of systematic crystallizations; but it also aims to show
with what ‘courage’ the mind pre-empts itself in its images, and how its
history is projected in the courage of its conjectures [wie sich im Mut zur
Vermutung seine Geschichte entwirft]”.6
So much for the first, philosophical point of departure of this essay.
The second starting-point is both personal and practical. In 2008,
convinced that Blumenberg was a major figure in twentieth century
philosophy who deserved a wider audience in the anglophone world, and
equally convinced of the importance of this, his first book—both in its
own right and for the light it sheds on its author’s subsequent intellectual
development—I resolved to translate Paradigms from German into
English; the translation was published by Cornell University Press in
2010. Blumenberg’s meditations on the necessity and impossibility of
translating the absolute could not fail to resonate with me as I sought, and
sometimes floundered, to recast them into readable English prose. In the
months of work that followed, I found myself dwelling on his formula for
how the mind, in wresting absolute metaphors from the void, owes
everything to the “courage of its conjectures”. This struck me as a
particularly apt description of those moments, familiar to every translator,
when reproduction and creation seem to fuse in a single intuitive leap.
Indeed, the very phrase “courage of its conjectures” represented just such a
leap on my part, an attempt to convey both the meaning and the assonant
pithiness of the German phrase, Mut zur Vermutung.

5
I borrow the term “cultural subconscious” from Rüdiger Zill, who describes
metaphorology as “the cultural-historical pendant to the psychoanalysis of the
individual”. Zill, “Der Fallensteller: Hans Blumenberg als Historiograph der
Wahrheit”, 31.
6
Blumenberg, Paradigms, 5.
158 Chapter Eleven

As I worked on the translation, I also pondered whether the conceptual

tools developed by Blumenberg in Paradigms, as well as in his other
metaphorological writings, could be usefully turned on the author himself.
What theoretically unjustifiable yet indispensable metaphors informed
Blumenberg’s own thinking? Conversely, did a metaphorologically
enlightened philosophy have no need for the kind of speculations which it
so deftly uncovered in the metaphors employed by older thinkers? I was
emboldened to pursue these questions further when I read—and
subsequently translated—his 1976 essay on Georg Simmel. Blumenberg
states there: “If one wants to make more or less meaningful statements
about such general topics as life and the cosmos, one would be well
advised to select an orienting schema, a metaphor. This may entail a
certain arbitrariness. It is therefore more convincing to show that, if an
assault on the universal is to be ventured, one must already have the
metaphor at hand”.7 Could I show that Blumenberg already had a
metaphor at hand when, in Paradigms, he ventured just such an assault on
the universal?
In the afterword to my translation, I identified a likely candidate for the
position, introduced by Blumenberg in a seemingly apologetic aside:
“What I am submitting here is only semi-finished product [Halbzeug]”.8
Anselm Haverkamp has noted that Halbzeug, a term used in industrial
manufacture to designate material that is midway between a raw and a
finished state, very precisely captures the “half-conceptual” status that
Blumenberg ascribes to metaphor, which still reveals traces of a human
lifeworld—the inexhaustible primary resource, as it were, from which all
significations arise—that can no longer be discerned in the end state of
conceptual refinement.9 “Semi-finished product” thus refers as much to the
material of metaphorology as it does to the paradigms towards a
metaphorology (as the book’s title could also be rendered) in which that
material is incompletely processed. Both are “worked on” and “worked
up” rather than fully “worked out”; and while this means that they lack the
functional specificity proper to concepts (and to investigations into
concepts), they are for that reason more flexible and versatile in the uses to
which they can be put.

7
Blumenberg, “Geld oder Leben”, in Blumenberg, Ästhetische und
metaphorologische Schriften, 179; my translation of this essay is forthcoming in
Theory, Culture and Society.
8
Blumenberg, Paradigms, 17.
9
Anselm Haverkamp, “Editorisches Nachwort”, in Blumenberg, Theorie der
Unbegrifflichkeit, 115.
 Translations from the Unknown 159

The metaphor of Halbzeug, then, seemed anything but casually chosen,

and in the afterword I went on to excavate its subterranean connections to
Rothacker’s contemporaneous project of a history of concepts, on the one
hand, and Heidegger’s slightly older yet still influential project of a history
of Being, on the other. But was it really an absolute metaphor, in the
emphatic sense outlined by Blumenberg, or merely symptomatic of how
he was seeking to position himself in the post-war German intellectual
scene? Only after my English version had been published did I realise I
had missed a vital clue. It appeared in a sentence that I had (mis)translated
as follows: “Our analysis must be concerned with detecting the logical
‘perplexity’ for which metaphor steps in . . .”10 The German word
rendered here as “perplexity”—the scare quotes, themselves redolent of
perplexity, are Blumenberg’s—is Verlegenheit. This term ordinarily
connotes embarrassment, and this meaning can certainly be detected in the
sentence. Clear and distinct thinking blushes to the roots, as it were,
whenever its conceptual apparatus breaks down before the unknown. Here,
absolute metaphor takes on the role of a white knight, gallantly riding to
the rescue to help reason extricate itself from an awkward situation of its
own making. What I failed to consider when translating the sentence,
however, is that Verlegenheit is primarily a spatial metaphor designating
an obstruction to a path, hence an impasse or aporia. Accordingly, the
image suggested by the text is one of metaphor offering the mind a
makeshift escape route from a situation in which all exits are blocked.
Metaphor is a way out of a dead end. With that, it seemed to me, I had
stumbled across Blumenberg’s own absolute metaphor: not just the
absolute metaphor underwriting Paradigms, but equally what Blumenberg
might call the Hintergrundmetaphorik (or “background metaphorics”)
informing his entire philosophical project.
That is a very large claim, and unpacking it would take more space
than I have at my disposal. I want at least to increase its plausibility by
bringing it into connection with Blumenberg’s later, anthropological
writings, where his absolute metaphor emerges from the semi-obscurity in
which it had still been shrouded in Paradigms. Were one to try to sum up
in a single sentence the theory of anthropogenesis that underpins those
writings, and the philosophy of culture in which they issue, that sentence
might read: man is a way out of an evolutionary dead end. Although
Blumenberg never states this theorem in so many words, it can be gleaned
without difficulty from the opening pages of Work on Myth, as well as
from the “biological preamble to a philosophical anthropology” elaborated

10
Blumenberg, Paradigms, 3.
160 Chapter Eleven

at length in his posthumous Description of Man.11 The theorem receives

perhaps its most trenchant formulation, however, in a text recently
published as an appendix to his correspondence with Carl Schmitt. There,
Blumenberg outlines two competing models for reconstructing the broad
sweep of human evolutionary history, two narrative templates of human
self-understanding which have their roots in the social contract theories of
Rousseau and Hobbes, respectively. Either man has risen from humble
beginnings to become the great winner in the struggle for existence,
proceeding in a straight line from a more primitive to a less primitive
state—the “up from the ape” model popularized by the likes of Ernst
Haeckel; or he owes his emergence as a species to his defiance of
evolutionary odds which were massively stacked against his survival, and
hence to a phylogenetic birth trauma which cannot be inscribed into any
teleological tale of gradual progress or ascent. Whereas the former
scenario expresses confidence in the fundamental beneficence of nature, at
least in so far as human beings are concerned, the latter maintains that our
hominoid forebears managed to avoid extinction only by sheltering from
the fierce selective pressures to which all other species were and are
exposed. Whereas, in the first case, man is nature’s favourite, in the
second he emerges after and in spite of nature, bucking the evolutionary
trend popularized by Herbert Spencer as the “survival of the fittest”.
Blumenberg leaves his reader in no doubt that he holds this second model
to be the more convincing:

If anthropogenesis was itself already the crisis of all crises, since it made
the non-extinction of humankind a biological inconsequence of evolution,
then it is equally the production of living conditions which merit the title of
an absolutism, and this in the most general sense (a sense completely
untouched by theology): that of an absolutism of reality itself. Having fled
from a situation of near-total non-viability, man had put the absolute
hostility of nature behind him by surviving; but he had put it only so far
behind him that he still continually had to ensure his survival under the
most factually unfavourable, selectively favourable conditions imaginable.
Whatever absolutisms man was still to bring forth over the course of his
history, this absolutism of his genesis was not to be surpassed. Indeed, all
the others helped him overcome it. The creature that emerged was a master
in dealing with the absolute in its always already depotentiated forms.12

In declaring his preference for the Hobbesian option, Blumenberg

claims to have the most up-to-date scientific research on his side. Yet what

11
Blumenberg, Beschreibung des Menschen, 572.
12
Blumenberg, “Politische Theologie III”, 171.
 Translations from the Unknown 161

is presented here as an accomplished paradigm shift in palaeoanthropological

theory could more justly be termed a science-fictional myth of origin, a
proto-drama of self-assertion that must have been even if it cannot be
empirically verified. Faced with a situation of extreme danger into which
he has been driven by environmental factors beyond his control, the hero
of the proto-drama is forced to improvise an emergency exit from the
inhospitable, potentially lethal “Darwin world” in which he is trapped—
the status naturalis idealized by Rousseau—into the transformed “Darwin
worlds” in which he will henceforth make himself at home, the self-
fashioned cultural and techno-scientific habitats which have become
“second nature” to us.13 For Blumenberg, the possibility of self-
preservation amidst a hostile nature lies precisely in finding a way out of
it, in grasping a viable alternative to biological non-viability.
Anthropogenesis is the life-saving leap from the aporia of origin.
The flight into culture, with all the richness and diversity it brings in its
wake, is at once a definitive break with what preceded it and an ongoing
process. It is a definitive break because the institutions of his own self-
fashioning protect man from direct threats to his “naked” existence,
ensuring that he will never again be compelled to risk the all-or-nothing
stakes of the primal scene: “Human culture is a front line of contestation
with nature, pushed out far beyond the boundary of the body . . . , which
serves to buffer the impact of selection on mind and body”.14 Yet the exit
is equally an ongoing process, an exiting, since it remains defined by its
relationship to that which it simultaneously produces and leaves behind it
as its terminus a quo. For the human animal, complete autonomy is a
chimera. The strategies of self-assertion continually being provoked by the
various successor and reaction formations to the “absolutism of reality”—
the absolute monarchy consented to in Hobbes’ civil contract, for
example, or the “absolutism of wishes and images” that prevails inside the
cave, the imagined birthplace of human culture,15 or the theological
absolutism of the Middle Ages discussed in The Legitimacy of the Modern
Age, or Gehlen’s “absolutism of institutions”16—can all be traced back to
the desperate gesture of assertion that gave rise to the self in the first place.
These reprisals of the primal scene in different guises and in different
historical settings are mythic in a twofold sense: they exemplify what
Blumenberg, in Work on Myth, calls the “the constructive principle of
myth, the repetition of the prototype as a ritual of functional

13
Blumenberg, Arbeit am Mythos, 183.
14
Ibid.
15
Blumenberg, Höhlenausgänge, 29ff.
16
Blumenberg, Ästhetische und metaphorologische Schriften, 415.
162 Chapter Eleven

reoccupation”;17 and they distil the receptive achievement of myth, its

containment “in always already depotentiated forms” of the primordial
forces that once threatened us with annihilation. Indeed, all forms, insofar
as they neutralize the objectless dread (Angst) induced by the absolutism
of reality, are always already depotentiated; the overwhelming point of
departure which they displace in the unending series of functional
reoccupations we call “history” is an abyss. To put it paradoxically,
Blumenberg’s myth of origin narrates the impossibility of narratively
recuperating the origin of myth.
The primal scene not only tells of a way out of an original aporia, it is
such a way out in a metaphorical, indeed absolute-metaphorical sense. In
Paradigms, as we have seen, Blumenberg had identified an “aporia” that is
given whenever certain questions which cannot be answered in a
conceptually rigorous fashion must be answered nonetheless, “since we do
not pose them ourselves but find them already posed in the ground of our
existence”.18 Absolute metaphors offer a way out of this impasse by
providing a point of orientation around which conceptual formations,
attitudinal comportments and philosophical systems can then crystallize.
To the extent that they attenuate the sheer contingency and riskiness of
human existence by “creat[ing] the ineliminable subjective space
necessary for human self-preservation and cultural reproduction”,19
absolute metaphors represent the most basic and potent of the
compensatory absolutisms developed in response to the absolutely
absolute “absolutism of reality itself”. Their substitution of something
known and familiar for what is unknown, unfamiliar, and ultimately
unknowable describes the basic operation of catachresis, already identified
by Cicero as the origin of metaphorical speech. In revealing the
constitutive reliance of metaphysics upon such enabling fictions, however,
the metaphorologist makes clear that the aporia of origin had always been
dragged along by the answers which appeared to lead away from it, that
the dead end inheres within the way out as its perpetuation by other
(namely, metaphorical) means. The metaphorologist, that is to say,
confronts us once again with the aporia that absolute metaphors had
succeeded in covering up for as long as they had been taken at their word,
that is, for as long as the spell of metaphysics had remained unbroken.
Now, it seems to me that the question which explicitly underwrites
Blumenberg’s primal scene—namely, “How is man possible?”20—numbers

17
Blumenberg, Arbeit am Mythos, 549.
18
Blumenberg, Paradigms, 3, 14.
19
Pavesich, “Hans Blumenberg’s Philosophical Anthropology”, 442.
20
Blumenberg, Beschreibung des Menschen, 535.
 Translations from the Unknown 163

among those whose answer will necessarily contain a metaphorical surplus,

for the reason spelled out by Blumenberg in his essay “An Anthropological
Approach to the Topicality of Rhetoric”: “Man only grasps himself via
what he is not. Not just his situation, but his constitution is already
potentially metaphorical”.21 The implicit answer he gives to this question
—man is possible as a way out of an evolutionary dead end—fulfils in an
exemplary way the basic orienting function that all absolute metaphors are
called on to perform. It invests with meaningfulness the strictly
meaningless void that lies on the threshold to anthropogenesis, retroactively
humanizing the prehuman, terrifyingly inhuman zero-point from which the
narrative of hominization takes its leave. To that extent, it is dogged by the
same structural anachronism common to all narratives of cultural
foundation.22 But because Blumenberg’s foundational narrative tells us
that the state of nature from which our first ancestor fled must have been
one of chronic disorientation, its effect is to heighten our awareness of our
own contingency rather than to attenuate it. The absolute metaphor of the
“way out” makes comprehensible why absolute metaphors are indispensable
to our being-in-the-world, but it also relativizes their absoluteness by
confronting them with the anthropological limits to their effectiveness. It
is a post-metaphorological absolute metaphor, so to speak, and hence a
way out that remains acutely, indeed “embarrassingly,” aware of its own
aporia of origin.
The relationship between the metaphorical displacement of this aporia
and Blumenberg’s primal scene, which both re-enacts and explains that
displacement through the metaphor of the “way out”, may be further
clarified by examining the manner in which he adopts and adapts for his
own purposes his chief scientific source, Paul Alsberg’s book The Riddle
of Mankind (1922). So far as I am aware, Blumenberg mentions Alsberg
on only a single occasion in the writings he published in his lifetime,
recognizing him as having been the first to have demolished the
substantialist premises of anthropology by demonstrating the “artificiality”
of the “supposedly ‘natural’”, its functional value in establishing and
maintaining the “elementary human achievement of life”.23 Coming from
someone who all but identified the task of philosophy with the dismantling
of whatever seems self-evident, this was high praise indeed. The
posthumous publication of Description of Man has since revealed the full
extent of his reliance on Alsberg’s theory of anthropogenesis, a reliance

21
Blumenberg, Ästhetische und metaphorologische Schriften, 431.
22
See Koschorke, “Vor der Gesellschaft”, 245ff; Koschorke, “Zur Logik
kultureller Gründungserzählungen”, 5ff.
23
Blumenberg, Ästhetische und metaphorologische Schriften, 415.
164 Chapter Eleven

which—in my opinion—goes far beyond his debt to the much better-

known speculations of Max Scheler, Helmut Plessner, and perhaps even
Arnold Gehlen.
Blumenberg prefaces his discussion by claiming that any scientifically
respectable account of the origins of mankind “can only yield compelling
answers if every supposed forward step in evolution was not an add-on,
but the solution of an acute dilemma of self-preservation”.24 The
advantage of the account offered by Alsberg accordingly lies in its
“demonstration of an acute situation that might correspond to the
endogenously acquired capacity to seize the opportunity for a decisive
developmental leap forward”.25 That situation may be summarized as
follows: the hero of the primal scene, the animal ancestor whom Alsberg
christens Pithekanthropogeneus or man-engendering ape, finds itself
pursued by a predator which it cannot defeat in direct physical combat,
since it has evolved to flee at the first sign of danger, yet which it also
cannot afford not to fight, since the flight paths by which it habitually
scuttles to safety have been cut off.26 Its situation, in other words—
Blumenberg’s words, not Alsberg’s—is one of a “fatal impasse” (tödliche
Verlegenheit), a description that immediately recalls the “logical
‘impasse’” (logische ‘Verlegenheit’) to which absolute metaphor was said
to respond.27 The parallels between the two aporetic scenarios are indeed
striking. In both cases, a tried and tested path has been blocked (here one
taken by the body, there one taken by the mind), leaving the hapless
subject with no option but to dare a leap into the unknown. If it is to
establish the safe distance necessary for survival, the creature imagined as
the forebear of mankind must somehow launch a pre-emptive strike across
the space that still separates it from its rapidly approaching opponent. Its
only option is to reach for a nearby rock and throw it at the aggressor
before the latter has had a chance to land the first blow: this is the birth of
foresight from the spirit of self-preservation.
For both Alsberg and Blumenberg, the casting of the first stone marks
the authentic moment of anthropogenesis, notwithstanding the fact that the
creature which cast it still resembles an ape in all anatomical particulars.28
In his masterful résumé of the theory, Blumenberg proposes the term
“cryptogenesis” for this process, condensing it into the pregnant
formulation: “Man emerged with a single blow, or more precisely, with a

24
Blumenberg, Beschreibung des Menschen, 575.
25
Ibid.
26
Alsberg, Das Menschheitsrätsel, 402.
27
Blumenberg, Beschreibung des Menschen, 576.
28
Alsberg, Das Menschheitsrätsel, 366.
 Translations from the Unknown 165

single throw”.29 In making the switch from flight behaviour to fight

behaviour in this way, the hero has embraced a new and specifically
human developmental principle, that of “elimination of the body”
(Körperausschaltung), which stands in the sharpest possible contrast to the
principle of “adaptation of the body” (Körperanpassung) that holds sway
in the animal world. Once the switch has been made it cannot be reversed,
since any organ eliminated in favour of a more powerful extra-bodily
substitute would quickly have atrophied through lack of use. Hominization
is therefore an autocatalytic process, meaning that the organic system we
call “man” is as much the product of his artificial life- and labour-saving
devices as he is their producer. The principle of elimination of the body
allows Alsberg to posit a continuous line of human development extending
from primitive tool use, via the synthesizing and ordering operations of the
understanding, right up to the higher-order achievements of reason,
without having to fall back on teleological or finalistic assumptions.
Alsberg explains in the revised version of his book: “Once tool use was
taken up, a breach was gouged in the intactness of the body, since the
bypassed organs became subject to a physiological regression. . . . Therein
is expressed the progressive and dynamic character of the human
developmental principle: that the principle knows no ‘backwards,’ only a
‘forwards,’ which it relentlessly compels”.30
Blumenberg is uncharacteristically forthright in his assent to Alsberg’s
theory, suggesting only a few minor improvements and changes of
emphasis designed to make the primal scene more plausible. The most
significant of these is that, whereas Alsberg—at least in the first edition of
his book, from which Blumenberg quotes—fails to specify the nature of
the locale in which the encounter is set, Blumenberg has
Pithekanthropogeneus abandoning the shrinking tertiary rainforest that
was its native biotope to step out into the open landscape of the savannah.
Here, its upright gait and lack of ground cover would have made it
especially vulnerable to attack, but it could also have found enough
ammunition to defend itself in case of emergency.31 Blumenberg further
criticises Alsberg for placing unnecessarily excessive demands on the
primal scene’s protagonist, whose odds of survival (in Blumenberg’s
view) were somewhat shortened by his already enjoying the advantages of
upright gait and stereoscopic sight.32 Far more important than any
differences in how the primal scene is scripted, however, is the varying

29
Blumenberg, Beschreibung des Menschen, 581-2.
30
Alsberg, Der Ausbruch aus dem Gefängnis, 104.
31
Blumenberg, Beschreibung des Menschen, 557.
32
Ibid., 586.
166 Chapter Eleven

choice of image used to make sense of it for us, its spectators and
beneficiaries. Alsberg advertises his guiding metaphor in the title he gave
to the revised edition of the book, which appeared in 1937 in English
exile: “The Escape from the Prison”. For Alsberg, the elimination of the
body entails liberation from the body, the fundamental basis of all human
freedom; and just as man has progressively liberated himself from the
constraints imposed upon him by his native environs, so the realm of
freedom has expanded to the same extent. Accordingly, Alsberg can end
his book—even in 1937, as the storm-clouds were gathering over
Europe—by confidently looking forward to a golden age of autonomy, an
epoch of perpetual peace in which the blind dictates of instinct will have
been overruled by the claims of reason: “For since man now understands
his ‘development’ and can envisage the possibility of a harmonious,
judiciously balanced final state of evolution, he cannot remain blind to
such a topical insight for much longer. By keeping in mind and striving to
realise the ideal future image of mankind, however, his need for expansion
of the extra-bodily sphere, which previously was purely egoistic, has taken
on an ethical character”.33
Blumenberg, as we have seen, prefers to view anthropogenesis as a
“way out” (Ausweg) of a “dead end” (ausweglose Sackgasse), a metaphor
that appears on no fewer than five occasions in the pages of Description of
Man devoted to the primal scene.34 Blumenberg was not the first to apply
this metaphor to the human condition. Max Scheler had introduced it in his
notes to his unfinished Philosophical Anthropology, proclaiming “spirit”
to be the antagonistic, counter-natural principle to “life”, a “way out” of
the “dead end” as which man appears when regarded solely through the
prism of evolutionary biology.35 Earlier still, the comparative anatomist
and anthropologist Herrmann Klaatch, upon whose work both Scheler and
Alsberg were to draw heavily, had argued that man’s organological
primitivism had prevented him from entering the evolutionary “cul de
sacs” into which the process of specialization had driven his nearest
animal relatives, whose fate was sealed by their need to carve out a niche
for themselves in the jungle (one could call this the “Simiate or perish!”
principle).36 The metaphor was thus very much in the air in the first two
decades of the twentieth century, part of a broader trend amongst
contemporary evolutionary theorists seeking to reinstate man’s privileged

33
Alsberg, Der Ausbruch aus dem Gefängnis, 198.
34
Blumenberg, Beschreibung des Menschen, 564-5, 575, 576, 586, 627.
35
Scheler, “Menschwerdung”, 101.
36
Herrmann Klaatsch, “Die Stellung des Menschen im Naturganzen”, 349
 Translations from the Unknown 167

position in creation under post-Darwinian discursive conditions.37 But the

most important antecedent for Blumenberg’s “way out” is neither a
scientific text, nor a philosophical treatise, but a work of fiction that
rehearsed many of the tropes of philosophical anthropology several years
before the movement officially got underway: Kafka’s evolutionary fable,
“A Report for an Academy” (1919). And it is in Kafka’s tale that we find a
possible solution to one of the most vexing problems posed by
Blumenberg’s presentation of the primal scene: what sense does it make to
speak of a way out of a situation defined as one that admits of no such way
out? How can the aporia of origin be left behind, and the conditions for the
future existence of homo sapiens safeguarded, if the origin is genuinely
aporetic?
The dilemma confronting the hero of Blumenberg’s primal scene is
remarkably similar to that faced by Rotpeter, the anthropoid ape captured
in the jungles of Africa by agents of zoo director and exotic animal dealer
Carl Hagenbeck and shipped back to Hamburg. In Blumenberg’s words:
“The creature of flight that is imagined as the forerunner of mankind finds
himself in a dead end, unable to resort to a way out when confronted by
his pursuers”.38 In the words of Rotpeter: “Up until then I had had so many
ways out, and now I no longer had one. I was tied down. . . I had no way
out, but I had to come up with one for myself. For without that I could not
live”.39 Rotpeter contemplates Alsberg’s exit strategy—the dash for
freedom evoked by the title “The Escape from the Prison”—but rejects it
in favour of the option that will secure him the minimal goal of survival:
“No, I didn’t want freedom. Only a way out—to the right or left or
anywhere at all. I made no other demands”. Rather than leading him out
into the open, hominization thus gains him entry into a suite of roomier
and more livable prison cells, into “other, yet no final imprisonments”, to
quote the title of the final part of Blumenberg’s Exits from Caves: “and so
I ceased to be an ape”. What interests me in this context is the fact that the
way out of hominization, unlike the flight paths available to Rotpeter
before he was driven out of his native jungle, can only be a metaphorical
one. The literally aporetic point of origin described by Kafka and
Blumenberg in almost identical terms—the agonising, near-paralytic
cringe of a creature that has nowhere to run, nowhere to hide—can be set
at a distance, and thereby made endurable, through the flight into
metaphor, which thus becomes the first line of defence against the

37
See Bowler, The Eclipse of Darwinism.
38
Blumenberg, Beschreibung des Menschen, 575.
39
Franz Kafka, “A Report for an Academy”. Subsequent quotes in this paragraph
are taken from Johnston’s on-line translation.
168 Chapter Eleven

absolutism of reality. Rotpeter concedes that his way out might be an

illusion, but it is, he insists, an illusion that will more reliably ensure his
survival than were he to forsake his cage in pursuit of the quixotic dream
of freedom: “even if the way out should be only an illusion: the demand
was small; the disappointment would not be any greater”. It is the same
vitally indispensable illusion that Blumenberg describes under the heading
of absolute metaphor, and to which he himself resorts in conjuring up his
primal scene.
Kafka’s story has often been read as a parable for the dilemmas of the
German-Jewish condition, and I am likewise tempted to trace
Blumenberg’s metaphor of the “way out” to a biographical primal scene,
the literally life-saving Ausweg that took him, the so-called “half-Jew”,
from internment in a labour camp during the war to a precarious refuge in
the house of his future wife. At any rate, I do not think it overly
speculative to suggest that this experience informs the typically evasive
confession he offers at the end of “A Possible Self-Understanding”, a
confession that translates his absolute metaphor into something
approaching a universal human truth: “I do not want to answer the
question concerning what, for me, is the most important simple truth, a
truth that does no-one any harm and which, even though it might not make
everybody happy, might brighten up some people’s lives. It was expressed
by Seneca with all the delicacy that his language has acquired for us: Qui
potest mori non potest cogi. In German perhaps: Wer sich davonzumachen
weiE, ist nicht bedrückbar”.40 In English perhaps: if you know how to give
them the slip, you can never be defeated.

Works Cited
Alsberg. Paul. 1922. Das Menschheitsrätsel. Jena.
—. 1975. Der Ausbruch aus dem Gefängnis. Zu den Entstehungsbedingungen
des Menschen. Giessen.
Blumenberg, Hans. 1979. Arbeit am Mythos. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
—. 2001. Ästhetische und metaphorologische Schriften, edited by Anselm
Haverkamp. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
—. 2006. Beschreibung des Menschen. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
—. 1975. Der Ausbruch aus dem Gefängnis. Zu den Entstehungsbedingungen
des Menschen. Giessen.
—. 2000. Die Verführbarkeit des Philosophen. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
—. 1989. Höhlenausgänge. Suhrkamp: Frankfurt.

40
Blumenberg, Die Verführbarkeit des Philosophen, 143.
 Translations from the Unknown 169

—. 2010. Paradigms for a Metaphorology. Translated by Robert Savage.

Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
—. 2007. „Politische Theologie III”. In Hans Blumenberg and Carl
Schmitt, Briefwechsel 1971-1978, edited by A. Schmitz and M.
Lepper. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
—. 2007. Theorie der Unbegrifflichkeit. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Bowler, Peter. 1983. The Eclipse of Darwinism. Anti-Darwinian
Evolutionary Theories in the Decades around 1910. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press.
Kafka, Franz. “A Report for an Academy”. Translated by Ian Johnston.
http://www.kafka-online.info/a-report-for-an-academy.html. Accessed
June 14, 2012.
Klaatsch, Herrmann. 1911. “Die Stellung des Menschen im Naturganzen”.
In O. Abel et al. (eds.) Die Abstammunglehre. Zwölf gemeinverständliche
Vorträge. Jena.
Koschorke, Albrecht. “Vor der Gesellschaft. Das Anfangsproblem der
Anthropologie”. In Urmensch und Wissenschaften. Eine Bestandsaufnahme,
edited by Bernhard Kleeberg et al. Darmstadt: WBG, 245-58.
—. 2007. “Zur Logik kultureller Gründungserzählungen”. Zeitschrift für
Ideengeschichte I/2, 5-12.
Pavesich, Vida. 2008. “Hans Blumenberg’s Philosophical Anthropology:
After Heidegger and Cassirer.” Journal of the History of Philosophy
46.3: 421-448.
Ricoeur, Paul. 2003. The Rule of Metaphor. Translated by Robert Czerny.
London: Routledge.
Scheler, Max. 1987. “Menschwerdung”. In Schriften aus dem Nachlass,
Band III. Philosophische Anthropologie. Bonn.
Zill, Rüdiger. 2007. “Der Fallensteller: Hans Blumenberg als Historiograph
der Wahrheit”. Zeitschrift für Ideengeschichte I/3: 21-38.
 CHAPTER TWELVE

CROSSING BORDERS:
CROSS-CULTURAL TRANSLATION
IN PARENTAL AUTISM MEMOIRS

RACHEL ROBERTSON

One noticeable feature of the “memoir boom” of the last two decades
has been the increasing number of disability memoirs published, in
particular those about autism. As Neil Genzlinger complained in the New
York Times, there has been a recent proliferation of memoirs by parents
and siblings writing about their autistic family members.1 Genzlinger
suggests that three out of every four contemporary memoirs should never
have been written and regrets the “lost art of shutting up”.2 He does,
however, suggest that memoirs that express a “shared discovery” with the
reader are worth publishing and reading. This paper analyses two memoirs
written by parents of autistic children using the literature on ethical
translation to argue for the value of parental memoirs which challenge and
decentre dominant cultural mores about difference and disability.3 I argue
that the act of writing a memoir about an autistic child can be viewed as a

1
Genzlinger, “The Problem with Memoirs”.
2
Ibid.
3
I use the term autistic child rather than child with autism in acknowledgement
that being autistic may be an integral part of a person, not an add-on or something
they have which could be removed or cured. While medical practitioners use the
term Autism Spectrum Disorder, I use the term autism for shorthand and in
response to autistic people’s concerns about the term “disorder”. I use the term
neurotypical to refer to those who are presumed to be (or presume themselves to
be) neurologically typical; in this case, I am generally using the term to refer to
non-autistic people. A diagnosis of autism is based on perceived impairments in
communication, play, and social interaction and the presence of repetitive
behaviour and unusual interests.
 Crossing Borders 171

form of cross-cultural interpretation which may enhance readers’ knowledge

and result in progressive cultural change.
Clara Park’s 1967 book The Siege is generally considered to be the
first parental memoir about autism, with a flood of such narratives being
published over the past two decades. In 2005, Waltz noted that “there are
over fifty published accounts of autism by parents”4 and the number would
be greater now.5 Neurodiversity.com lists fifty-nine books by parents on
autism and the UK-based specialist publisher Jessica Kingsley includes
sixty-three autism memoirs in their current catalogue, sixteen of which are
written by parents.
Coinciding with, and connected to, the growth in parental autism
memoirs and in autobiographical books by autistic people has been the
growth of the autism rights movement. This movement is grounded in a
social-cultural paradigm of disability, as developed by disability rights
activists, where a condition like autism is viewed as one type of difference
in a neurodiverse world.6 This view contests the medical paradigm, where
autism is considered a disorder and the key features of autistic life viewed
as deficits.7
Savarese and Savarese argue that, “A concept of neurodiversity can
help us to remain attentive to a different sensibility—indeed a different
way of being in, and perceiving, the world”.8 As some autistic people have
noted, this “different way of being” in the world can be viewed as a form
of culture. Camille Clark suggests on her Autism Diva website that
autistics are not claiming that autism is a culture but that when autistics
meet (online or in person) they share a particular culture.9 In 2004, Amy
Nelson posted a Declaration from the “autism community” on the internet,
calling for autistics to be formally recognised as a minority group, for
autistic self-determination, and the removal of discrimination, including
the effort to find a “cure”.10 The call for recognition as a minority group is
based on the likely genetic origin of autism, the unique social networks
created online by autistic people, and the existence of “cultural

4
Waltz, “Reading Case Studies”, 428.
5
If there are over one hundred professionally published parent memoirs (in
English), then there are also likely to be many self-published works and, of course,
works in other languages.
6
Savarese and Savarese provide a concise summary of the development of the
neurodiversity movement in their article “The Superior Half of Speaking”.
7
See, for example, American Psychiatric Association, DSM IV and DSM 5.
8
Savarese and Savarese, “The Superior Half”, np.
9
Clark, “Conferences, Culture, Communications”, np.
10
Nelson, “Declaration from the autism community”, np.
172 Chapter Twelve

differences” such as stimming (repetitive hand or body movements),

differing perspectives on life and different language use.11
Autistic culture (or cultures) might best be understood by taking a
cultural studies definition, which views culture as a “collective subjectivity”
or “a way of life or outlook adopted by a community or social class”.12 As
more people on the autism spectrum are being diagnosed, including
parents with their children, and as autistic-led groups become more
influential, it seems possible that autistic differences may soon be
considered characteristics of a minority culture. At the very least, autistics
are likely to be seen as a minority group with some distinctive linguistic
and cultural features.
Autistic writer and scientist Temple Grandin has famously described
herself as “an anthropologist on Mars” when she tries to understand the
neurotypical world.13 When considering autism as a culture, neurotypical
parents of autistic children may well find that Grandin’s trope of being an
anthropologist is reversed.14 The parent can feel like the anthropologist, or
ethnographer, in the foreign culture of autism. And just as ethnography has
been described as the “translation” of another culture into a form
comprehensible to the west, so might a parent feel she is translating the
alien world of her child to others.15 As in translation and ethnography,
there is a power imbalance, with the ethnographer/parent being the one
who comes from the dominant culture and is the agent of translation.16 The
result of this process of translation will be the life writing text, the parent
completing translation as both process and product.
In understanding the act of translation that parent-narrators undertake,
the literature on ethical cross-cultural translation is important, in that it
addresses the act of translation or interpretation as a politically charged act

11
These views are not shared by all autistic people writing on the web or
elsewhere. There are a wide range of positions held by autistic people on these
matters. There are also debates among professionals and family members of
autistic people about these matters, with some family members arguing that the
idea of autistic culture is only relevant to high functioning autistic people and is of
no benefit to less able autistic people.
12
Pertti, Researching Culture, 25.
13
Grandin quoted in Sacks, An Anthropologist on Mars, 248.
14
There are autistic parents of autistic children, but the majority of memoirs about
autistic children are written by parents who are either neurotypical or who were not
aware of being autistic when they became parents (as in the case of Valerie
Paradiž).
15
Dingwaney, “Introduction”, 4.
16
The parent, of course, has an additional source of power by virtue of his or her
role as parent and care-giver.
 Crossing Borders 173

that can work to erase difference, to exaggerate difference through

“othering”, or to record difference in a way that allows it expression and
value but not freak status. Anuradha Dingwaney suggests that contemporary
translation theory calls for self-consciousness or self-reflexiveness and
making translation visible in the work.17 She argues that the process of
translation always entails violence, most especially when there is a power
asymmetry involved (for example when westerners translate material from
developing countries). This violence can involve cultural differences being
assimilated and familiarised, erasing their difference through the desire to
render them accessible. Dingwaney calls for translators to allow difference
to be “mediated and recorded, not sacrificed or appropriated”.18 Lawrence
Venuti, arguing that translation is always interpretation, suggests that an
ethical translation avoids forcibly assimilating the foreign to dominant
values and thus erasing all sense of foreignness.19 He notes the west’s
preference for “fluency” and suggests the need for “resistant strategies” to
allow the translation to function as a “locus of difference”.20 The notion
that cultural differences risk being erased by the dominant culture is highly
relevant to neurotypical writings about autism. In fact, it mirrors
(neurotypical) therapeutic interventions with autistic people, as therapists
and parents aim to prevent their children from stimming, demonstrating
other “inappropriate” body manoeuvres and from speaking in scripts or
quotes (echolalia).
Carol Maier argues that there is a space between languages, where
language breaks down under the pressure to transmit the unknown, and
that translators may try to avoid this space because of their discomfort
with it.21 She says: “Hence, there is an almost resolute avoidance of the
“between” in which that breakdown occurs and a failure to acknowledge
the potential for human interaction that occurs when one language proves
inadequate in the presence of another”.22 While Maier is speaking about
different languages here, again, there is a similarity between this and the
unknown “between” space that neurotypicals may experience when faced
with autistic communication (which may be read as non-communication).
Venuti argues that translation “wields enormous power in constructing
representations of foreign cultures” and calls for ethical translations to
decentre ethnocentric views and create texts that are potential sources of

17
Dingwaney, “Introduction”.
18
Ibid., 10.
19
Venuti, The Scandals of Translation.
20
Venuti, quoted in Maier, “Toward a Theoretical Practice”, 24-5.
21
Maier, “Toward a Theoretical Practice”.
22
Ibid., 22.
174 Chapter Twelve

cultural change.23 Maier, however, warns that a focus on difference can act
to blur the existence of inequality between translator and translated.24 Her
focus on untranslatability or withholding translation acknowledges the
“between” place of breakdown and leads to a focus on the process of
translation, rather than just the product. She argues that translators need to
become intimate readers through close association with the translated. She
suggests that once discussion about translation ceases to focus on terms of
equivalence and the finished product, it can be considered instead as “a
practice in which it is possible to approach both difference and inequality
interrogatively”.25 The translator can then seek new conceptual frames that
will present one culture to another. She argues that if translation is a
practice not a product, then its end is “the prompting of rather than the
resolution of an inquiry”.26
Just as the western translator comes from the dominant culture, so does
the parent translator, making power inequalities relevant to parent
memoirs. My analysis of parental memoirs by Collins and Paradiž uses the
work of Dingwaney, Maier and Venuti as a frame to examine how the
practice of writing about an autistic child may allow the parent to address
difference and inequality in self-reflexive ways that give space to both the
“foreignness of autism” and the breakdowns in translation.
In 2004, US historian and editor Paul Collins published Not Even
Wrong: A Father’s Journey into the Lost History of Autism. The book is a
collection of vignettes of the author’s family life as he and his wife
discover their son is autistic, and a series of stories about current and
historical figures who might have been autistic or who studied or study
autism. Morgan, Collins’ son, is between two and four years old in this
book. As the book progresses, Morgan goes from diagnosis to early
intervention and he starts using language to make requests. His parents
don’t know whether he’ll attend a mainstream school, how much language
he’ll learn, how well he will be able to function in daily life or social
situations. The life of their son has suddenly gone from the normal,
predictable developmental path to something completely unknown to
them: “How can it be that we left our house an hour ago with a healthy
toddler, and returned with a disabled one?”27 As the unknown strikes,
Collins starts narrating his son’s life for a book.

23
Venuti, The Scandals of Translation, 67.
24
Maier, “Toward a Theoretical Practice”.
25
Ibid., 29.
26
Ibid., 31.
27
Collins, Not Even Wrong, 8.
 Crossing Borders 175

In his representation of his son, Collins, like Dingwaney’s ethical

translator, mediates between Morgan and the reader, allowing but not
judging difference. We first see Morgan looking closely at a steamer
basket and saying “Da-ya dicky-doe”, making his father realise that having
a child “forces you to retrace the steps of things you’ve forgotten you ever
learned, like . . . how to stare so intently at a kitchen implement that it
becomes a completely abstract object”.28 Morgan runs into the bedroom
and turns the pages of Merck Manual, a medical text. His father tickles
him and Morgan “collapses against me in hysterical giggling”.29 In this
way, Collins presents Morgan as a happy, alert toddler with a strong
relationship to his parents. But he also shows that Morgan’s speech and
interests are unusual for a two year old. He pre-empts the way Morgan is
going to force his father to take a new view of the world.
There are many scenes of Morgan doing unusual things and following
strange routines and impulses. When Collins takes Morgan for an
evaluation with child development experts, the adults try to get Morgan to
respond to them and do certain activities, but Morgan wants to play with
the camera videoing the session instead. In this and many other
descriptions of Morgan, even those where he is unhappy or doing things
his parents don’t want him to do, there is energy and intent. Collins
doesn’t try to make Morgan look or sound like a typical toddler. He is
clear that Morgan’s actions and speech are odd and often puzzling and he
allows the unknowability into his text. He is not assimilating or erasing
Morgan’s differences but rather mediating and recording them, meeting
Dingwaney’s criterion for good translation.30
We see Morgan moving wood chips from one area to another in the
park, eating ice cream without smiling, collecting “broken bits of language
like a magpie”, singing the alphabet, demanding popcorn and plucking the
wires inside a piano at the local store.31 We are also shown that he
sometimes bites people when he’s upset, that he will refuse to do certain
things and will throw a tantrum in the supermarket. His actions are
presented as purposeful, even when their purpose is unclear. Collins is
able to represent Morgan and his difference without either minimising this
difference or turning him into a freak. He is able to “send the reader
abroad” rather than domesticate autism by erasing its strangeness for the
non-autistic reader.32 By recording Morgan’s behaviour in language that is

28
Ibid., 3.
29
Ibid., 5.
30
Dingwaney, “Introduction”.
31
Collins, Not Even Wrong, 81.
32
Venuti, The Scandals of Translation.
176 Chapter Twelve

free from overt judgement, Collins presents it (and by implication the

behaviour of other autistic people) on its own terms. He avoids using
medical terms to describe his son, unless he is reporting the dialogue of
medical professionals.
It is interesting to compare this approach to Catherine Maurice’s in her
classic autism “recovery” memoir, Let Me Hear Your Voice: A Family’s
Triumph Over Autism.33 First published in 1993, the book tells the story of
how two of Maurice’s children were diagnosed with autism and her five
year journey to move them into “recovery” through the use of intensive
behavioural therapy. Maurice’s descriptions of her children’s autistic
behaviours are presented in general terms such as crying, twirling strings,
grinding teeth and sitting in corners. She adopts medical language such as
“stereotypical” and “self-stimulatory” to describe her children’s behaviour.
This can be read as the foreign being forcibly assimilated into dominant
values—in this case, medical discourse and taxonomy. Similarly,
Maurice’s children do not become clear characters until they are “normal”
and their foreignness is erased. As her children “recover” and exhibit what
she calls more “normal” behaviour, they finally come alive for the reader.
She can’t capture the specifics of her children when they are autistic, only
when they act like neurotypical children. In contrast, Morgan’s character is
clear to us from the beginning of Collins’ memoir, even though we may
not understand his speech or why he is doing what he does.
Collins does not avoid what Maier describes as the space where
language breaks down and the unknown lies.34 In fact, he dramatises this
space in his story about Morgan suddenly saying, “I feel all alone”.35
Collins is very upset to hear his son say this and keeps telling Morgan that
he’s not alone. Morgan continues to say, “I feel all alone”, and Collins
gets distraught trying to comfort him and trying not to dwell on his own
fears for Morgan’s future. Eventually, Collins realises that Morgan is
actually singing along with a tape and that the words he is singing are
“Pastry all day long!”36 The purpose of this anecdote is not about
Morgan’s articulation but rather about the large gulf that Collins
recognises lies between him and his much-loved son, a domestic version
of the space between mainstream and autistic culture.

33
The term “recovery” is used by Maurice to refer to her interpretation that her
children are no longer autistic. I use the scare quotes to signify the dilemmas raised
by a belief that autism is like an illness that one can recover from, rather than a
neurological difference or a diagnosis given to people based on certain criteria.
34
Maier, “Toward a Theoretical Practice”.
35
Collins, Not Even Wrong, 170.
36
Ibid., 175.
 Crossing Borders 177

When Morgan is three and a half, he is enrolled into a specialist autism

class. As soon as the family arrives on the first day, Morgan joins in,
playing alongside other autistic children, and his parents feel as though
they are watching “a family reunion”.37 Looking at the room full of
autistic children, Collins says,

There is no awkwardness among them: they are equals. It is as if we have

brought a seal to the ocean and watched him shuffle awkwardly off the
land to glide effortlessly through the waves, finally within the world he
was made for all along.38

The metaphor of the seal is telling: not only does it link to dilemmas
about mainstream education and life (as opposed to life in a tributary), it
also avoids the common stock of derogatory autism metaphors (puzzles,
battles, aliens and so on).39 While it is an animal metaphor, it involves a
reversal, whereby neurotypical culture (the land) is challenging and autistic
culture (the sea) is represented as natural, welcoming and egalitarian.
The suggestion in Collins’ title that autistics are “not even wrong”
might be read as an attempt by Collins to seek (in Maier’s words) a new
conceptual frame to present one culture to another.40 Collins doesn’t talk
overtly about autistic culture as such—his focus is on autistic
individuals—but the idea is implied nonetheless. By researching and
writing about several generations of autistics, Collins has given himself a
familiarity with autistic culture, the sort of intimacy that Maier argues self-
reflexive translation requires.41 Visiting a special school for autistics,
Collins recognises both that their behaviour would be unacceptable in a
mainstream school and that this behaviour seems appropriate for autistics,
including his own son. Even as he sees the potential benefits of integrating
Morgan into mainstream society, Collins questions the values inherent in
these benefits.

Autists are the ultimate square pegs, and the problem with pounding a
square peg into a round hole is not that the hammering is hard work. It’s
that you are destroying the peg. What if normal school makes you
abnormally miserable? And what if growing up into normal society makes

37
Ibid., 223.
38
Ibid., 224.
39
Mitzi Waltz (“Metaphors of Autism”) demonstrates that there are a number of
key metaphors that recur in narratives about autism, most of which demonise or
dehumanise autism or the autistic person.
40
Maier, “Toward a Theoretical Practice”.
41
Ibid.
178 Chapter Twelve

you a miserable adult? Is that success? Is that normal? Do you want to be

in the mainstream if it’s going to drown you?42

As both parent and ethnographer, Collins raises questions here rather

than providing answers. This gives the book a kind of openness that allows
readers to make different interpretations and to interpret the “lost history
of autism” in their own ways.
With his focus on autistic history, Collins has decentred dominant
cultural mores in his narrative and interrogated both difference and
inequality. In his act of cross-cultural translation, Collins uses his
privileged role as a member of a dominant culture to present and begin to
validate a peripheral culture. His memoir provides an example of how a
parent can mediate between two cultures and create a text which allows for
the possibility of cultural change. This cultural change is not enacted in the
book, leaving Collins’ project of validating autistic culture unfinished.
Morgan is still very young at the end of the book and most of the complex
dilemmas of life as an autistic person in a neurotypical world, and
narrating that life, are therefore necessarily left unexplored.
In contrast, Elijah’s Cup: A Family’s Journey into the Community and
Culture of High-Functioning Autism and Asperger’s Syndrome by Valerie
Paradiž explores these issues and takes Collins’ project one step further. In
her book, first published in 2002, Paradiž describes the seizures Elijah
experienced, his diagnosis with autism and their joint exploration of
autistic culture. Unlike Collins, Paradiž clearly identifies autistic culture
and says in her preface that she is publishing her book in the hope that
readers will learn, as she has, “to think of autism not as a mental illness
that absolutely needs a cure, but rather as a way of life that possesses a
deep history and a rich culture”.43 Her book picks up where Collins’ leaves
off, taking his social history of autism a step further and embracing the
notion of a distinctive and valuable autistic culture and community.
Early on, Paradiž identifies herself as someone who likes “crossing
cultural boundaries” and, interestingly, she works as a German-English
translator.44 She also notes that she has a deep familiarity with aspects of
autism. In retrospect, she sees that her father, paternal grandmother and
she herself seem to possess “autistic shadow” traits or manifest a “broader

42
Collins, Not Even Wrong, 225. Emphasis in original.
43
Paradiž, Elijah’s Cup, xi. Emphasis in original.
44
Ibid., xi.
 Crossing Borders 179

autism phenotype”.45 When Elijah is diagnosed, she knows very little

about autism, but she is not afraid of it.
Paradiž finds Elijah’s behaviour challenging, but is not threatened by
the diagnosis itself. She has one foot in autistic culture and one foot in
neurotypical culture. She does her parental translation partly from within
the foreign culture. This doesn’t make it easy. Paradiž describes how she
must learn how to “wear Elijah’s” autism and to adapt to her new role: “I
have become a single mother of a disabled child”.46 She follows the
suggested therapeutic interventions but she struggles with the pressure she
feels she is placing on Elijah to be “normal”. She wonders if echolalia is
just the pointless repetition of words or a “particular expression of
consciousness”.47 She finds the medical language around autism to be
demeaning and yearns to hear Elijah’s own “voice of experience”,
unencumbered by expert observers or even her own voice.48 In the end,
she agrees with the specialists that it is right to teach Elijah to speak, self-
care and make friends. But she doesn’t want to adopt the cultural attitudes
that frame autism within the health system. She continues to want her son
to be able to express himself, in all his foreignness: “I want to cross
borders with Elijah and help him find the authentic expression for his
experience”.49
In spite of her success in decoding autistic culture, Paradiž clearly
recognises the “space between” that Maier speaks of and expresses this
through her use of glass/mirror imagery. Describing the two year old
Elijah looking through a window but not looking at what she is pointing
towards, she says, “The glass had something to do with it. Glass has
inscrutable importance. It’s one of the places where we stray from one
another. One of the places where communication fails us”.50 She links the
notion of glass with borders: “Glass is the symbolic medium of division
between autistic and nonautistic life . . . [Autistic vision is] another order

45
Ibid., 87. Some years later and not alluded to in the first edition of this memoir,
Paradiž was actually diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome (Paradiž, Leaving the
Ivory Tower). In a second edition of the book published in 2005, she adds an
Epilogue describing how she recognised herself as having Asperger’s Syndrome
and was diagnosed in 2004 (Paradiž, Elijah’s Cup 2nd edition). When writing
Elijah’s Cup, however, she considers herself neurotypical but with some shadow
autistic traits.
46
Ibid., 74.
47
Ibid., 104.
48
Ibid., 71.
49
Ibid., 72.
50
Ibid., 3.
180 Chapter Twelve

of vision that in spite of a translucent medium causes profound

separations”.51 Glass is an interesting image for the divide between autistic
and neurotypical life because it is invisible, as autism often is, and yet is
about vision. Glass appears neutral, but we each see something different
through it. It provides a clear border between inside and outside or one
room and another room and yet glass windows and doors can be opened
(or shattered). It acts as a subtle but effective representation of the
“pressure to transmit the unknown” and the breakdown that happens when
“one language [or culture] proves inadequate in the presence of another”.52
Elijah’s Cup is an artfully written book but one which never succumbs
to mere fluency or polish. There is always narrative resistance. Elijah’s
seizures are described using images of flowers and blossoming, creating
dissonance for the reader to convey the dissonance and loss of seizure.
After twenty-five pages describing the seizures and medical treatments, we
are suddenly confronted with a passage from Kafka’s The Castle, which
Paradiž is translating for a client. When Paradiž is trying to think about
Elijah’s diagnosis, she reads Nietzsche (as part of her PhD examination
preparation). These leaps within the text work to defamiliarise. We are
made to question the language and efficacy of medicine by Paradiž’s
quotation from Nietzsche’s The Gay Science. The transitions, which
include repetitive phrases and questions, also convey a life of both
interruption and repetition. Paradiž shows Elijah’s repetitive behaviour but
also replicates it in the structure of the book. In this way, she presents the
difference of autism, both in her scenes with Elijah and in the larger
pattern of her memoir. The disruptions are particularly noticeable leading
up to a scene where Paradiž experiences a breakdown from too much
work, worry and pressure.
Soon after her breakdown, Paradiž describes going with Elijah to buy
and then release a helium filled balloon, this being his fixation of the
moment.

There are moments such as these when life with Elijah becomes so narrow,
so rigidly charted and overdetermined in every action and word, that I
could burst out in fits of anger and resentment. But—I don’t know what
comes over me—I suddenly see the poignant humour of it all, and I laugh
out loud at this crazy, lonely comedy routine we’ve put together, the one I
have no chance of escaping.53

51
Ibid., 169.
52
Maier, “Toward a Theoretical Practice”, 22.
53
Paradiž, Elijah’s Cup, 116.
 Crossing Borders 181

From this moment, the text seems less dislocated, as if Paradiž had
now accepted that her life would be full of disruption and repetition. She
starts to wonder about the social history of autism, doing research on
Einstein, Andy Warhol, Wittgenstein and comedian Andy Kaufman. The
second half of Elijah’s Cup is more expository and less lyrical than the
first half. The focus is on autistic culture and the text is written perhaps as
much to educate the reader as to tell the personal story of Paradiž and her
son. Elijah continues to develop and change, deciding, for example, that he
wants to be a comedian. But he also continues to demonstrate autistic
preferences—repetition, concrete language, stimming—and his mother
doesn’t try to stop him.
Unlike Collins, Paradiž clearly identifies the borderland between
neurotypical culture and autistic culture and suggests that she is happy to
cross over that border and traverse between two cultures. Like Collins, she
considers herself to come primarily from the dominant culture but presents
and validates the peripheral culture. Where Collins suggests possible
change in the future, Paradiž’s work enacts this change through her
embrace of autistic culture. As an ethnographer and translator, she fully
immerses herself in the other culture and argues for social and political
change. Indeed, in the second edition of Elijah’s Cup, she outlines how
she founded a school for autistic teenagers to provide them with the
education not available in mainstream schools. Collins decentres dominant
cultural mores, but Paradiž goes further to put autistic cultural mores
centre-stage. Her translation does not assimilate the autistic child into
mainstream culture but rather offers the reader a positive experience of
autistic culture. Such an act of translation challenges pejorative views of
autism, and of disability in general, and represents a small step towards
greater community acceptance of neurodiversity.
Reading these two books through the lens of ethical translation theory
allows us to recognise the value of the memoir form in presenting personal
narratives that challenge conventional views and record cultural difference
in a way that values diversity without either effacing or exaggerating it.
The intimacy that parents have in writing about their children, which may
be limiting in some types of family memoir, becomes, in this reading, a
strength that allows for ethical mediation and interpretation. The parent’s
discoveries about autism and autistic culture, including those about
communication breakdown, are shared with readers, foregrounding difference
and inequality through self-reflexive writing. Far from endorsing
Genzlinger’s call for ordinary individuals to “shut up” about their lives, I
182 Chapter Twelve

would argue that these types of border-crossing memoirs provide an

important contribution to both autistic and neurotypical cultures.54

Works Cited
American Psychiatric Association. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of
Mental Disorders DSM IV. 1994. 4th ed. Washington DC: American
Psychiatric Association.
—. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders DSM-5. 2013.
5th ed. Washington DC: American Psychiatric Association.
Clark, Camille. 2006. “Conferences, Culture, Communication, Ages,
Aegis and Diagnosis” (22 Aug). Autism Diva Blogspot. (Accessed 30
August 2008, no longer online).
Collins, Paul. 2004. Not Even Wrong: A Father’s Journey into the Lost
History of Autism. New York and London: Bloomsbury.
Dingwaney, A. 1995. “Introduction: Translating ‘Third World’ Cultures”.
In Between Languages and Cultures: Translation and Cross-Cultural
Texts, edited by A. Dingwaney and C. Maier. Pittsburgh: University of
Pittsburgh Press.
Genzlinger, Neil. January 28, 2011. “The Problem with Memoirs”. The
New York Times,
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/30/books/review/Genzlinger-
t.html?pagewanted=all (accessed 9 September 2013).
Jessica Kingsley Publishers. Online Catalogue of Titles.
http://www.jkp.com/catalogue/aspergerautism (accessed 9 September,
2013).
Maier, C. 1995. “Toward a Theoretical Practice for Cross-Cultural
Translation”. In Between Languages and Cultures: Translation and
Cross-Cultural Texts, edited by A. Dingwaney and C. Maier.
Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.
Maurice, Catherine. 1993. Let Me Hear Your Voice: A Family’s Triumph
Over Autism. New York: Fawcett Columbine.
Nelson, Amy. 2004. “Declaration from the Autism Community that they
are a Minority Group” (18 November).
http://amynelsonblog.blogspot.com.au/2004/11/declaration-from-
autism-community-that.html (accessed 9 September 2013).
Neurodiversity.com. http://www.neurodiversity.com/main.html (accessed
9 September, 2013).

54
Genzlinger, “The Problem with Memoirs”.
 Crossing Borders 183

Paradiž, Valerie. 2002. Elijah’s Cup: A Family’s Journey into the

Community and Culture of High-Functioning Autism and Asperger’s
Syndrome. New York: The Free Press.
—. 2005. Elijah’s Cup: A Family’s Journey into the Community and
Culture of High-Functioning Autism and Asperger’s Syndrome. 2nd
edition. London: Jessica Kingsley.
—. 2010. “Leaving the Ivory Tower of Asperger Syndrome”, Disability
Studies Quarterly 30.1: np, http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/1053/1240
(accessed 9 September, 2013).
Park, Clara Claiborne. 1995 [1967]. The Siege: A Family’s Journey into
the World of an Autistic Child. Boston: Little Brown.
Pertti, Alasuutari. 1995. Researching Culture: Qualitative Method and
Cultural Studies. London: Sage Publications.
Sacks, Oliver. 1995. An Anthropologist on Mars. London: Pan Macmillan.
Savarese, Ralph James and Emily Thornton Savarese. 2010. “‘The
Superior Half of Speaking’: An Introduction.” Disability Studies
Quarterly 30.1 np, http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/1062/1230 (accessed
9 September, 2013).
Venuti, Lawrence. 1998. The Scandals of Translation: Towards an ethics
of difference. London: Routledge.
Waltz, Mitzi. “Metaphors of Autism, and Autism as Metaphor: An
Exploration of Representation”. Paper presented at the Making Sense
of: Health, Illness and Disease, 2nd Global Conference, nd, http://inter-
disciplinary.net/ptb/mso/hid/hid2/waltz%20paper.pdf (accessed 9
September, 2013).
—. 2005. “Reading case studies of people with autistic spectrum disorders: a
cultural studies approach to issues of disability representation”.
Disability and Society 20.4: 421-435.
 CHAPTER THIRTEEN

“RITUALLY UNREADABLE”:
AESTHETICISING THE ECONOMIC
IN COSMOPOLIS

SARAH COMYN

Subsequent to a disturbing conversation concerning his son’s

correspondence with a murderous prisoner, Jack Gladney, protagonist of
Don DeLillo’s White Noise, has an experience with an ATM that verges
on the spiritual:

In the morning I walked to the bank. I went to the automated teller

machine to check my balance. I inserted my card, entered my secret code,
tapped out my request. The figure on the screen roughly corresponded to
my independent estimate, feebly arrived at after long searches through
documents, tormented arithmetic. Waves of relief and gratitude flowed
over me. The system had blessed my life. I felt its support and approval . . .
What a pleasing interaction. I sensed that something of personal value, but
not money, not that at all, had been authenticated and confirmed.1

Similarly, in Cosmopolis, the ATM becomes a site of idolatry for the

outcast, failed stockbroker and ultimately assassin, Benno Levin:

I still have my bank account that I visit systematically to look at the last
literal dollars remaining in my account. I do this for the ongoing
psychology of it, to know I have money in an institution. And because
cash machines have a charisma that still speaks to me.2

In both these passages the value of money takes on qualities beyond

the conceptions of financial worth, moving to the realm of the personal

1
DeLillo, White Noise, 46.
2
DeLillo, Cosmopolis, 60.
 “Ritually Unreadable”: Aestheticising the Economic in Cosmopolis 185

and even spiritual; evoking in the characters a role of reader in the act of
translating the value of this economic information. Simultaneously, they
hint at the fundamental role translation plays in the realm of global finance
through exchange. Exchanges of currency, exchanges of information, and
exchanges of value are the lifeblood of the global financial system.
Exchange necessarily hints at notions of gains and losses and there is one
particular loss I would like to mention as it is pertinent to the theme of this
collection and that is: translation loss. In financial circles the term
“translation loss” refers to the loss encountered when trading back and
forth between floating currencies where there has been a change in value
(often a depreciation in value of the currency originally bought). On the
metaphoric and the literal level, then, the financial system hints at a
fascinating characteristic of translation: that while translation exposes
work to a new audience, by its very nature it simultaneously draws
attention to notions of exclusion, loss and the unreadable. These qualities,
I would like to suggest, are never more apparent than in the increasing
digitalization of economies and financial information.
This paper will examine these moments of disjunction through Don
DeLillo’s novel, Cosmopolis (2003), which explores the translation of
money into information through the virtual financial markets that arose
towards the end of the twentieth century. Set “In the Year 2000: a day in
April”, Cosmopolis can be read as an appropriate epitaph to a decade of
accelerating capitalism—the Dow Jones Internet Index collapse in April
2000 signaling the beginning of the end for the information technology
boom.3 The novel traces the journey of megalomaniac asset manager Eric
Packer, across Manhattan over a single day that ultimately leads to his
(un)timely death. During this time Packer manages to crash the global
markets by borrowing massive amounts of Yen with which to “speculate
heavily in stocks”.4 Unfortunately for Packer—and it turns out the rest of
the world, as he is in fact “too big to fail”—the Yen continues to rise
beyond expectations and his ability to pay back the loans. This crash,
however, is only the backdrop to the crisis of value depicted in the novel
through the characters of Packer and his assassin Benno Levin, who, using
opposite forms of interaction with the evolving economy, underscore the
processes (and crises within) translation, transmission and interpretation.
In his depiction of the virtual economy, DeLillo aestheticises the
transmission of economic data and problematises the process of reading

3
Schiller states that the “Dow Jones Internet Index had its all all-time peak on
March 9, 2000. In a little more than a month, by April 14, it had lost more than half
its value” Schiller, Irrational Exuberance, 83.
4
DeLillo, Cosmopolis, 97.
186 Chapter Thirteen

and establishing meaning. Economic data—indeed, the world—becomes

spectacle, increasingly unreadable due to the acceleration of information
exchange the new digital economy creates, underscoring the moments of
unreadability present in the act of translation inherent to aestheticisation.
From the mid-1990’s America was experiencing a boom that was
largely technologically driven. Significantly, the advent of this new
technology was firmly information based and was, thus, to have a
profound impact on the transfer and reception of financial information.
This change was coupled by a sense of optimism and excitement
surrounding the market, clearly captured in the label the “Roaring
Nineties”, but equally evident in the attempts to analyse and map this
accelerating economy. The evolving technology and the New Economy it
beckoned were cast in a glorious light with the belief that this foretold the
conclusion of the boom and bust cycle. Furthermore, the speed with which
technology delivered its myriad benefits is interlinked with the mythic
qualities it imbued, as financial historian Steve Fraser argues, “The World
Wide Web was the future; it conveyed mastery; it was intimate, deeply
personal technology, unlike say superconductive alloys or nanotechnology;
it wasn’t even so much a technology as it was myth”.5
Packer embodies the mythic entrepreneur firmly engrossed in
technophilia. Describing himself as “self-made”, Packer embraces the
innovative force driving capital.6 This force and the acceleration of
people’s lives it entails, provide the primer for understanding Packer’s
irritation with objects and their names that in his mind have become
obsolete. Amongst the objects that inspire Packer’s distaste—skyscrapers,
airports, phones, walkie-talkies—money is the one which aggravates him
the most: “Hundreds of millions of dollars a day moved back and forth
behind the walls, a form of money so obsolete Eric didn’t know how to
think about it. It was hard, shiny, faceted. It was everything he’d left
behind or never encountered, cut and polished, intensely three-
dimensional”.7 In contrast, virtual data—information—represents a life force
for Packer:

In fact data itself was soulful and glowing, a dynamic aspect of the life
process. This was the eloquence of alphabets and numeric systems, now
fully realized in electronic form, in the zero-oneness of the world, the
digital imperative that defined every breath of the planet’s living billions.

5
Fraser, Every Man a Speculator, 578.
6
DeLillo, Cosmopolis, 72.
7
Ibid., 64.
 “Ritually Unreadable”: Aestheticising the Economic in Cosmopolis 187

Here was the heave of the biosphere. Our bodies and oceans were here,
knowable and whole.8

In a key moment of the novel, Packer has been discussing the

relationship between capitalism and time with his chief of theory, Vija
Kinski, when he takes her to look at the electronic financial displays; here
“speed is the point . . . the thrust, the future. We are not witnessing the
flow of information so much as pure spectacle, or information made
sacred, ritually unreadable”. Packer suggests: “The small monitors of the
office, home and car become a kind of idolatry here, where crowds might
gather in astonishment”.9 DeLillo positions Packer and Kinski in this
encounter as readers attempting to interpret the increasingly fast-paced
information exchange. Like the ATM for Jack Gladney and Benno Levin,
the electronic financial data of the stock-market screen represents
something of value beyond the prices for Packer.
Unlike the people that surround him, however, Packer is able to
interpret the information reflected on these screens and translate it into its
“true” monetary value. Packer as technocrat thrusts himself into the future
the virtual appears to contain and is seen by those around him as an oracle,
Kinski describes him as a “polymath, the true futurist”.10 Indeed, Packer’s
limousine journey is illustrative of this thrust into the future economy
described by economist Joseph Stiglitz as “a shift from the production of
goods to the production of ideas, entailing the processing of
information”.11 Throughout his journey Packer and his staff engage in a
bartering of occasional banter and more often, serious theorising regarding
techno-capitalism and its consequences. These verbal exchanges can be
likened to a bidding war based on intellectual ego and the prize of esteem.
An important example of this is the discussion regarding security that
occurs between Packer and his chief of technology, Shiner:

“Yesterday. At the complex. Our rapid-response team. There’s no

vulnerable point of entry. Our insurer did a threat analysis. We’re buffered
from attack”.
“Everywhere”.
“Yes”.
“Including the car”.
“Including, absolutely, yes”.
“My car. This car”.

8
Ibid., 24.
9
Ibid., 80.
10
Ibid., 95.
11
Stiglitz, The Roaring Nineties, 4.
188 Chapter Thirteen

“Eric, yes, please”.

“We’ve been together, you and I, since the little bitty start-up. I want
you to tell me that you still have the stamina to do this job. The single-
mindedness”.
“This car. Your car”.
“The relentless will. Because I keep hearing about our legend. We’re
all young and smart and were raised by wolves. But the phenomenon of
reputation is a delicate thing. A person rises on a word and falls on a
syllable. I know I’m asking the wrong man”.
“What?”
“Where the car was last night after we ran our tests?”
“I don’t know”.
“Where do all these limos go at night?”
Shiner slumped hopelessly into the depths of the question.12

It is important to note the use of words that carry economic intent, such
as rise, fall and slumped. Packer’s description of the delicate character of a
person’s reputation, in this case Shiner’s, could easily be transcribed to the
nature of the stock market: “[a] person rises on a word and falls on a
syllable”. Equally, it demonstrates the significance that information carries
in this new economic exchange, with a single word determining value. It is
clear that Packer emerges as triumphant at the end of this exchange,
whereas Shiner’s value takes a dive. These verbal exchanges not only
reveal the evolving economy of information, but the manner in which
information changes the individual’s relationship to the market economy.
Knowledge and ideas emerge as an exchangeable commodity, whilst
information simultaneously affects the interaction with the market as it
becomes a contributing factor to the mythology encasing the New
Economy. Furthermore, this exchange involves the reader of the novel in
the interpretation of value. DeLillo’s aestheticisation of economic
exchange into verbal exchange forces the reader to embody a similar role
to that of Packer and Kinski gazing at the spectacle of financial data made
virtual and attempting to trace value back to its source, in this instance,
words
Whereas Packer thrives on the virtual, Levin reflects a conservative
approach to the anxiety posed by the turbo-charged techno-capitalism,
noting in his “Confessions” that he is “living off-line now”.13 Although
Levin is alienated from society, he has an almost fetishized relationship
with the physical and tactile qualities of “real” money. In his
“Confessions”, Levin writes of his need to touch Packer’s money: “I

12
DeLillo, Cosmopolis, 13.
13
Ibid., 149.
 “Ritually Unreadable”: Aestheticising the Economic in Cosmopolis 189

wanted his pocket money for its personal qualities, not its value so much. I
wanted its intimacy and touch, the stain of his personal dirt. I wanted to
rub the bills over my face to remind me why I shot him”.14 This physical
relationship with money is present from an early age, as Levin admits he
“used to lick coins as a child . . . I lick them still, sometimes, but worry
about the dirt trapped in the milling”.15 Hard currency represents,
therefore, something of great personal value to Levin and to appropriate
Gladney’s words that I began this paper with: “something of personal
value, but not money, not that at all, [is] authenticated and confirmed”
through Levin’s physical interaction with money.
Levin’s attempts to participate in the new economy fail, however, and
in response he withdraws from society. Indeed, Levin falls prey to the new
technology, suffering the symptoms of diseases he says he contracts from
the internet: “When I try to suppress my anger, I suffer spells of hwabyung
(Korea). This is cultural panic mainly, which I caught on the internet”.16
All his illnesses represent psychological responses to change, as Levin,
himself, acknowledges: “On the one hand it’s all a figment and myth. On
the other hand I’m susceptible”.17 These symptoms are indicative of the
state of flux that the constant evolution of techno-capitalism creates.
Levin’s symptoms equally come to represent the Third-World
currencies that suffered from the economic contagion during the Asian
Financial Crisis because they could not adapt rapidly enough to the
increasing pace at which financial speculation could take place. Just as
Levin could not adapt quickly enough to Packer’s systems of economic
taxonomies, the currency he studied, the Thai Baht could not stay afloat in
the new virtual economy. Levin’s interaction with the economic system,
thus, comes to symbolise what is diseased within the system itself. Levin,
therefore, embodies the more sinister elements of transmission and
translation through disease and contagion; an outcast, he falls victim to
mythic diseases. The “spectacle” that Packer celebrates and thrives under,
becomes in Levin’s mind a contagious disease he has contracted and
which forces him to live on the fringes of society.
The contrast between Packer's relationship with virtual money and
Levin's relationship with hard currency represents a dichotomy in the
novel between the virtual (future) and the physical (past). This dichotomy
mirrors the history of money and its interrelationship with representation
underscores the novel’s concern with the erasure of value and the anxiety

14
Ibid., 58.
15
Ibid., 154.
16
Ibid., 56.
17
Ibid., 152.
190 Chapter Thirteen

expressed over authenticity. In his aptly titled article “Cash, Check or

Charge?” Jean-Joseph Goux distinguishes between three forms of money
and their relationship to value and representation in the history of
capitalism. The two forms I will focus on in relation to Cosmopolis are
physical money and virtual money.18 Goux argues that “Each buyer enters
by his own choice into a system of operations which situates him in a
different order of exchange”.19 In a sense we can see that Packer and Levin
are situated in two different stages of the “historical sequence”. Levin is
still reliant on the tactile qualities of money whereas for Packer there are
only “mechanographical operations, literal monetary signs are nowhere to
be found, but only “transfer orders”. Bits of information”.20 Goux
responds to this rise of the virtual money with a question that underscores
an anxiety present throughout the novel: “And what if this mutation of the
sign and this mourning of representation were only the prelude to a still
unknown ascendancy: the total bankerization of existence, by the
combined powers of finance and computers?”21
Goux’s question raises the additional questions of what underwrites the
value of money and what are the consequences for the value of money that
becomes purely information based—virtual money? As C.R Macaulay
argues, underscoring the inherent difficulty in locating any firm foundations
for the valuation of this new information based economy: “[f]inancial
market capitalism makes no requirement regarding productivity”.22 This
anxiety is expressed in the novel through the anti-globalisation protest
where a rat is launched as the unit of currency for the capitalist system—
capturing the exchangeability, and ultimately meaninglessness, of monetary
signs:

“There’s a poem I read in which a rat becomes the unit of currency”.

“Yes. That would be interesting”, Chin said.
“Yes. That would impact the world economy”.
“The name alone. Better than the dong or the kwacha”.
“The name says everything”.
“Yes. The rat”, Chin said.23

18
While Goux essentially writes about the credit card, the ascendancy of virtual
money is essential to its rise, and thus his arguments regarding the credit card can
be applied to the novel’s concern with virtual money and digital information.
19
Goux, “Cash, Check or Change?”, 114.
20
Ibid.
21
Ibid., 115.
22
Macauley, “Financial Markets, the Meta-Economy and the Casino”.
23
DeLillo, Cosmopolis, 23.
 “Ritually Unreadable”: Aestheticising the Economic in Cosmopolis 191

With the rise of information technologies and the associated markets

created by them, the absence of any guarantee of value has become
increasingly evident. Macaulay suggests that “the market is the result of
our collective aspirations”, the share price, therefore, becomes “a number
based on sentiment, not an independent measure of value”.24 Thus any
concept of “true” value is superseded. Kinski captures this irrelevance of
price when in reference to the amount Packer paid for his apartment
building, she says, “You paid the money for the number itself. One
hundred and four million. This is what you bought. And it’s worth it. The
number justifies itself”.25 The rise of virtual transactions, the loss of
physical exchange and the concomitant separation of value from utility
implies a fluidity of value that ultimately results in its meaninglessness.
Thus, even Packer falls victim to “information made unreadable”,
failing in his attempts to map the Yen, losing his entire fortune, and that of
his wife, and ultimately succumbing to an assassin he deems unworthy.
This concern with the loss of value and representation extends beyond the
realm of money in the novel, however, to all avenues of life, and is echoed
in the themes of authenticity and repetition. In The Seeds of Time, Fredric
Jameson argues that:

What we now begin to feel, therefore—and what begins to emerge as some

deeper and more fundamental constitution of postmodernity itself, at least
in its temporal dimension—is that henceforth, where everything now
submits to the perpetual change of fashion and media image, nothing can
change any longer.26

The thrust of this argument is captured by Packer’s self-commentary

on his choice in artwork and why he values certain pieces: “He liked
paintings that his guests did not know how to look at. The white paintings
were unknowable to many, knife-applied slabs of mucoid colour. The
work was all the more dangerous for not being new. There’s no more
danger in the new”.27 Here again, the reader encounters the notion of the
“unreadable”: the spectacle inherent in the “unknowable”. This is
interestingly coupled with Packer’s continual anxiety about authenticity
and the need to ensure his actions maintain his assertive status. Kinski,
argues that it would be inauthentic for Packer to doubt his actions, she
says, “[t]o pull back now . . . would be a quotation from other people’s

24
Macauley, “Financial Markets, the Meta-Economy and the Casino”.
25
DeLillo, Cosmopolis, 78.
26
Jameson, Seeds of Time, 17-8.
27
DeLillo, Cosmopolis, 8.
192 Chapter Thirteen

lives”.28 It is within this context that Packer’s actions in betting all his
wealth against the Yen must be read: as an attempt to maintain
authenticity in a world where everything is fast beginning to lose value
and meaning. In contrast, Levin represents the “quotation from other
people’s lives” Kinski warned of, and he harbours an anxiety around
repeating himself or “mouthing” Packer’s words. Indeed, Levin does
repeat himself often, and the placing of his “Confessions” in a future-to-
past order heightens the reader’s awareness of this repetition. This is
something Packer comments on when Levin appropriates the slogans and
protests of disenfranchised members of society: “No. Your crime has no
conscience. You haven’t been driven to do it by some oppressive social
force. How I hate to be reasonable . . . No. Your crime is in your head.
Another fool shooting up a diner because because”.29
Significantly, however, there is a sense in which everything in the
novel is derived. This is evidenced in Packer’s artwork; Levin’s
appropriated protests and his “phony name”.30 Similarly, when faced with
the damaged eye of his driver, Ibrahim Hamadou, Packer comments:

“You were beaten and tortured”, Eric said. “An army coup. Or the secret
police. Or they thought they’d execute you. Fired into your face. Left you
for dead. Or the rebels. Overrunning the capital. Seizing government
people at random. Slamming rifle butts into faces at random”.31

The prosaic nature of this running commentary ensures that the

suffering this man experienced is divorced from any meaning. It is just one
example amongst many possible experiences of pain available. Perhaps
the most significant depiction of imitation in the novel is the immolation
scene, which despite Packer’s interest, Kinski dismisses as “unoriginal”.
Ironically, Packer’s fantasy about his burial, despite striving for notability
through exaggeration and originality, in fact mimics the immolation:

Not buried but cremated, conflagrated, but buried as well. He wanted to be

solarized. He wanted the plane flown by remote control with his embalmed
body aboard, suit, tie and turban, and the bodies of his dead dogs, his tall
silky Russian wolfhounds, reaching maximum altitude and leveling at
supersonic dash speed and then sent plunging into the sand, fireballed one
and all, leaving a work of land art, scorched earth art.32

28
Ibid., 85.
29
Ibid., 196.
30
Ibid., 188.
31
Ibid., 168.
32
Ibid., 209.
 “Ritually Unreadable”: Aestheticising the Economic in Cosmopolis 193

The continual thrust into the future at an accelerated rate by this

current mode of techno-capitalism has, therefore, profound implications
for the representation and processing of information, which in turn has
repercussions for what is valued.
Levin represents an economic man of the past. He is unsuited to the
rapidly changing economic environment and retreats from society.
Furthermore, Levin is doomed to repetitive cycles and speaking with
appropriated phrases. Even the symptoms of diseases he suffers are
appropriated from the internet. Packer, in contrast, strives for authenticity
and originality. Although he appears to be acutely aware of the trappings
of imitation and repetition and is far more adept at navigating the current
economic terrain, he too, fails. All the discourses of protest become
outdated, unoriginal and recycled. Ibrahim’s scarified eye loses its
specificity and meaning and becomes a synecdoche for all forms of
brutalisation. His story is lost through Packer’s translation of it in the same
way Levin’s protest against Packer is lost in the “mouthing of words”.
Even Packer, despite his attempts to harness himself to the virtual
economy, to be its finest interpreter, succumbs to translation loss and
crashes the global financial markets. DeLillo’s representation of the nature
of translation in the financial sphere and the role of reading and
interpretation forces the reader to embody the position of translator and
unfold the possible crises of value these processes may entail. His mimicry
of financial bidding wars through verbal exchanges; the back-to-front
positioning of Levin’s journal entries; the appropriation of phrases and
names; the aestheticisation of the financial data throughout the novel; all
coalesce to submerge the reader into a world made “ritually unreadable”, a
spectacle in translation urging the reader to partake.

Works Cited
DeLillo, Don. 2003. Cosmopolis. London: Picador.
—. 1985. White Noise. New York: Viking.
Fraser, Steve. 2005. Every Man a Speculator: A History of Wall Street in
American Life. New York: Harper Collins.
Goux, Jean-Joseph. 1999. “Cash, Check or Charge?” In The New
Economic Criticism: Studies at the Intersection of Literature and
Economics, edited by Martha Woodmansee and Mark Osteen. London
and New York: Routledge.
Jameson, Fredric. 1994. Seeds of Time. New York: Columbia University
Press.
194 Chapter Thirteen

Macaulay, C.R. 2010. “Financial Markets, the Meta-Economy and the

Casino or How to Make Capitalism Ethical.” London Grip.
http://londongrip.co.uk/2010/03/economy-on-capitalism (accessed June
1, 2011).
Schiller, Robert. 2000. Irrational Exuberance. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
Stiglitz, Joseph. 2003. The Roaring Nineties: A New History of the
World’s Most Prosperous Decade. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.
 CHAPTER FOURTEEN

TRANSLATING UNINTELLIGIBILITY
IN SAMUEL BECKETT’S PLAY

JAMES GOURLEY

Of modern writers, Samuel Beckett stands out as the writer most

committed to fidelity in his creative practice. Beckett’s oeuvre is
characterised by rigorous consistency of vision and the various biographies
of the 1969 Nobel Prize winner pay testament to the torturous process his
writing required. In this chapter I will examine Play (1963) and consider
how this piece for theatre signifies the struggles the playwright goes
through in translating an aesthetic and theatrical vision to the script and
then from script to performance.
Beckett’s work is regularly cited for its difficulty. The regular
publication of reader’s guides is evidence not just of his works ongoing
popularity, but also of the disorienting experience of reading or watching
Beckett. In his discussion of Beckettian difficulty in his A Guide for the
Perplexed, Jonathan Boulter attributes this challenge to Beckett’s
“dismantl[ing of] generic expectation”.1 In my analysis of Play, I relate the
disorientation produced by Play, whether read or performed, to Beckett’s
decision to make the play, in my terms, unintelligible. This radical shift
makes clear the relevance to literary translation; just as Spiel, the German
version of Play, is unintelligibile to the non-German speaker, so too is
Play’s script theoretically unintelligible and its performance designed to
be largely unintelligible to the audience. This chapter examines the
strategies that Beckett employs to produce this garbled signification whilst
also examining the complementary discourses that nevertheless make Play
a significant work to its audience and to Beckett’s oeuvre.
Samuel Beckett’s Play is a problematic work in many ways. Although
it is not the first theatre piece Beckett wrote which experimented radically
(that is, more radically than Godot and Endgame) with the formal
1
Boulter, Beckett, 7.
196 Chapter Fourteen

constraints of theatre, Play should be considered as a work on the

borderline between modernist experimentation and Beckett’s distinctive
investigation of the possibilities of the theatre, for which he coined the
term “dramaticule”.2 This term was first used by Beckett to describe Come
and Go, written in 1965. The shorter theatrical works Beckett produced
after 1958s Krapp’s Late Tape are all reliant in part upon the elements of
the dramaticule form. Play strikes at the heart of the audience’s expectations
of what the theatre does and should do. It is Beckett’s manipulation of
these expectations that is the focus of this chapter.
Play ostensibly presents a conventionalised melodrama, husband, wife
and another woman competing for attention and for the affections of each
other. The generic basis of Play, however, is the only part of the play that
is entirely conventional. Beckett appends an exhaustive set of stage
directions to the beginning of the play text specifying the construction of
both the stage and the action, immediately privileging formal considerations,
and diminishing the importance of the action to come.
Although the conventionality of the narrative suggests a mimetic style
of theatre, conforming to Hamlet’s exhortation to the players “to hold, as
’twere, the mirror up to nature”, the restrictions Beckett places upon the
characters and the actors who play them steer Play away from any sense of
naturalism.3 Of most significance is the characters’ confinement, held in
urns, their heads the only part of their bodies visible. The characters have
no names, and never identify each other specifically. They are simply
identified as W1, W2 and M. Additionally, the characters are compelled to
speak by a spotlight, described as a “unique inquisitor”.4 Indeed, the three
characters are “victims” of the light affirming the torturousness of their
experience.5 Furthermore, the actors that play the three parts have severe
restrictions placed on their presentation of the text: their faces must be
impassive throughout, their voices toneless, with modulation only allowed
where indicated by the playwright. They speak their lines in a rapid tempo
throughout the play.6 Finally, the blending together of these restrictive
elements makes the play, and these are Beckett’s words in the stage
directions, “largely unintelligible”.7 The restrictions Beckett places upon

2
Beckett, “Come and Go”, 351; cf. Gontarski, The Theatrical Notebooks of
Samuel Beckett, xv.
3
Hamlet, III.2 21-22.
4
Beckett, “Play”, 318.
5
Ibid., 318.
6
Ibid., 307.
7
Ibid.
 Translating Unintelligibility in Samuel Beckett’s Play 197

Play transform our expectations of intelligibility, challenging some of the

most dominant theatrical conventions.

Theoretical Hypothesis
The most instructive, and the most seductive element of Beckett’s Play
is the fact that it is presented to the reading audience (distinct from the
theatre-going audience) and perhaps to the prospective director too, as a
theoretical problem, akin to a thought experiment as we have them
described to us by theoretical physicists. That is, Play sets out a series of
theoretical formal limits, and then seeks to create a play out of the ashes of
those limits.8
It appears obvious that the primary concern of Play is the manipulation
of the dramatic form, and Beckett’s desire to produce something authentic
(or perhaps “real” as he terms it in his analysis of À la recherche du temps
perdu) which encapsulates some essence of banal human existence.9 These
formal constraints discussed previously are nothing compared to the most
chilling of directorial stage directions at the supposed conclusion of the
play. Beckett simply commands: “[r]epeat play”.10
Taking this command to its absolute conclusion, the script can now
only operate in the experimental realm, in opposition to historical theatrical
practice. Play is suddenly a theoretical document, an otherworldly
performance, repeated again and again, continuing forever. Similar to
Finnegans Wake, the reading process suggests endless repetition, the
torment of the play produced simply by the fact that it never ends.
Much of the pathos of Beckett’s theatrical work is generated from the
sympathy we feel for the characters held captive in the worlds he creates
for them. Most popularly, Winnie, in Happy Days, retains her optimism
despite being incarcerated in the earth, in the first act buried to her waist,
in the second act to her chin. Indeed Beckett does not only incarcerate his
characters in his dramatic work. In his short story The Lost Ones “[o]ne
body per square metre or two hundred bodies in all” are held in an
“[a]bode where lost bodies roam each searching for its lost one. Vast
enough for search to be in vain. Narrow enough for flight to be in vain.
Inside a flattened cylinder fifty metres round and sixteen high for the sake
of harmony”.11 Admittedly it may be a stretch to see any optimism in the

8
Perhaps the most formal of Beckett’s plays in this style is Quad (first performed
in German in 1982).
9
Beckett, Proust, 16.
10
Beckett, “Play”, 317.
11
Beckett, “The Lost Ones”, 204; 202.
198 Chapter Fourteen

characters’ vain search, but the reader nevertheless sympathises with the
restraints the lost ones are subjected to.
The characters of Beckett’s dramaticules, “creatures of illusion”, and
the endless worlds that Beckett creates, whether spatially delimited as in
The Lost Ones or temporally so, as in Play, are intensely evocative of the
“Inferno” and “Purgatorio” of Beckett’s beloved Commedia.12 As Van
Hulle and Nixon have painstakingly ascertained, Beckett read Dante
repeatedly including in 1959, only three years prior to Play’s composition.13
Indeed, much productive criticism has been produced which links
Beckett’s dramaticules to the investigation of “posthumous worlds”.14
Knowlson assumes that Play takes place in Limbo.15 The possibility of M,
W1 and W2 being occupied in some purgatorial labour is convincing. M’s
lines after the change in intensity of the spotlight midway through the play
indicate this:

M: When first this change I actually thanked God. I thought, It is done, it is

said, now all is going out—
[…]
M: Down, all going down, into the dark, peace is coming, I thought, after
all, at last, I was right, after all, thank God, when first this change.
[…]
M: I thought.
[…]
M: It will come. Must come. There is no future in this.16

M is correct here: there is no future in Play. Unfortunately, however,

the liminal state that M is held in will not end as the repetition that Beckett
orders renders his punishment theoretically eternal. There is no future
because the world that he inhabits has no future, and no present, simply a
past memory and the immediate, in which Play continues forever. W2’s
line immediately after M’s observation that there is no future (both in the
torture and the performance) is far more realistic, observing that: “things
may disimprove, there is that danger”.17
Tellingly, the humour that is generated out of this line (i.e. when heard
in relation to the previous line) is not simply that the two lines suggest
congruence, but rather because W2 and M indicate no awareness of each

12
Davies, “Someone is Looking at me Still”, 77.
13
Van Hulle and Nixon, Samuel Beckett’s Library, 107-12; 109.
14
See Gatten, “The Posthumous Worlds of Not I and Play”, 96-97.
15
Knowlson and Pilling, Frescoes of the Skull, 111-21.
16
Beckett, “Play”, 312-3.
17
Ibid., 313.
 Translating Unintelligibility in Samuel Beckett’s Play 199

other throughout Play. The characters exist for each other only as
memories, despite their existence together on the stage and in the script. M
continues:

M: Of course I know now—

[…]
M: I know now, all that was just . . . play. And all this? When will all
this—
[…]
M: All this, when will all this have been . . . just play?18

Beckett’s formal exactitude means that his torture will never have been
“just play”. The utilitarian irony of Beckett’s title is amplified when
considering Play as formal experiment. Instead of any consideration for
the audience, M’s torture encapsulates a pervasive irreality that radically
diverges from the theatrical. Characters’ and audience are excised, with
the playwright assuming a position of torturous power, the final arbiter of
W1, W2 and M’s punishment.
Play opens with a “chorus”, a series of broken phrases spoken
simultaneously by W1, W2 and M. The “chorus” is related to the second
half of Play in which the three victims turn their focus from the tawdry
details of their former lives and begin to focus on the “inquisitor” that
tortures them into constantly telling their stories. The internal logic of
Beckett’s theatrical problematic is only upheld, however, if the imagined
audience is aware that they are participating in an endless cycle of the
same dialogue, repeated forever. Perhaps we can console ourselves with
the observations of Shimon Levy, who writes:

Theatre does not necessarily have to conform to the rules of formal logic,
and the answer lies on the experiential level. Beckett does not describe a
human situation on stage, he creates one in front of an audience and,
implicitly, at least, demands full and real partnership and cooperation from
the audience.19

Indeed, the desire to read Play theoretically rather than in performance

facilitates productive ideas but does not take into account the production of
intelligible meaning despite the formal unintelligibility Beckett creates.
Reading Play as a theoretical exploration of the theatrical work changes
absolutely the meaning that can be derived from the work. Play is
transformed into a work that pushes beyond the limits of theatricality rather

18
Ibid.
19
Levy, Samuel Beckett’s Self-Referential Drama, 16.
200 Chapter Fourteen

than pushing up against those limits. When we consider Play in performance

we will discover how the formal unintelligibility of the theatrical
construction calls upon the audience to participate in the production of new
meaning and produces a moment of transformation in which the unintelligible
is translated back to the intelligible.

Formal Implications
Having considered Play as a theoretical manifestation of Beckett’s
experimental dramaticules, I will now examine the epistemological and
conceptual changes necessary to translate the formally unintelligible on to
the stage.20 The playwrights’ instruction to “[r]epeat play” was altered by
Beckett after participating in rehearsals for the French premiere of Play
and whilst involved in rehearsals for the Old Vic premiere, which was to
be the first production in English.21 Beckett wrote to George Devine,
setting out changes to the play’s repeat which were eventually added into
the stage directions for publication. He wrote:

The last rehearsals with Serreau have led us to a view of the da capo which
I think you should know about. According to the text it is rigorously
identical with the first statement. We now think it would be dramatically
more effective to have it express a slight weakening, both of question and
of response, by means of less and perhaps slower light and correspondingly
less volume and speed of voice.
[…]
The impression of falling off this would give, with suggestion of
conceivable dark and silence in the end, or of an indefinite approximating
toward it, would be reinforced if we obtained also, in the repeat, a quality
of hesitancy, of both question and answer, perhaps not so much in a
slowing down of actual debit as in a less confident movement of spot from
one face to another and less immediate reaction of the voices. The whole
idea involves a spot mechanism of greater flexibility than has seemed
necessary so far. The inquirer (light) begins to emerge as no less a victim
of his inquiry than they and as needing to be free, within narrow limits,
literally to act the part, i.e. to vary if only slightly his speeds and
intensities. Perhaps some form of manual control after all.22

20
S.E. Gontarski argues that Beckett himself only considered Play complete once
he had participated in rehearsals, and the play was performed to his satisfaction.
(Gontarski, “Revising Himself”, 134-138.)
21
Knowlson and Pilling, Frescoes of the Skull 112; Knowlson, Damned to Fame,
515-518.
22
Beckett, Disjecta, 111-2. My emphases.
 Translating Unintelligibility in Samuel Beckett’s Play 201

Beckett’s suggested changes are now incorporated into the script and
are part of the collected wisdom for staging Play.23 The changes that
Beckett instituted are indicative of the alterations required when considering
Play as a working script for performance and incorporate a more human
sense than the mechanical and regular impression of the play when read as
formal experiment. In altering the parameters of the repeat, and of course
reasserting that the play does not in fact continue on forever Beckett
modifies the script to maintain the internal coherence of the play,
introducing the suggestion of a possible entropic endpoint. Crucially,
Beckett begins to make some concessions to the audience. Most obvious is
his insistence of the suggestion of a conceivable end to the torture, rather
than the metronomic repetition of the otherworldly scenario as is called for
in the theoretical original form of Play.
Simultaneously, Beckett suggests awareness for the concerns of his
audience that are completely irrelevant to the original play as thought
experiment. The importance of the audience (and the role they play in
Beckett’s dramaticules) is considered in Bernard Dukore’s review of the
Old Vic production of Play. Dukore posits Play as “anti-Aristotelian”,
“incomplete” “and of very little magnitude”.24 None of these classifications
is considered as a negative. Instead, Dukore admires the complexity that
Beckett has constructed in the script of the work. It is in the performance of
the work that Dukore becomes most concerned about Play, suggesting that
his (and all) “analysis becomes secondary”.25 Dukore estimates that 50% of
the dialogue at the Old Vic is “lost when we hear the words spoken on the
stage”.26 Dukore’s conclusion is brilliantly logical, and sometimes at odds
with the critical consensus on Play. He writes:

It should therefore be obvious that the words themselves as well as the

detail of the story conveyed by these words are less important to Beckett
than the theatrical mode employed. It is the theatrical technique, rather
than the literal meaning of the dialogue, which more fully—and certainly
more directly—is intended to convey the author’s point.27

I affirm Dukore’s observations; the precise means of creating intelligibility

and meaning in the performance of Play is via the formal constraints that
are placed upon the theatrical situation rather than any narrative that is

23
Beckett, “Play”, 320.
24
Dukore, “Beckett’s Play Play”, 19-20.
25
Ibid., 22.
26
Ibid.
27
Ibid., 22-3.
202 Chapter Fourteen

understood by the audience. The formal constraints of Play make the

unintelligible intelligible; it is precisely the performance of Play that
translates the theoretical ideas laid out in the text into a performance which
can actually claim to provide a meaning and lays out an epistemological
means to perceive meaning in the theatrical space.
Instead of narrative as the epistemological basis in this dramaticule,
Beckett becomes reliant upon, and simultaneously manipulates, theatrical
conventions and the meaning they inherently produce. The audience,
confounded by a trio of characters that speak their lines as quickly as they
can, alternating between a low mumble and something close to a shout,
who speak in garbled phrases which only rarely seem to relate specifically
to the previous line of dialogue, and who often speak simultaneously, must
search for another way to make meaning. William Worthen sees Play as
voicing “voicelessness”.28 By excising coherent meaning from the
characters’ narrative, the audience is pressed to create meaning from that
which is left—in opposition to the usual generation of meaning confirmed
by the acceptance of the illusory nature of a performance on a stage—the
audience is left with the stage setting and, crucially, the lighting that
prompts the three characters to speak.
What is produced, to use Matthew Davies classification, is a “new
transaction” between stage and audience.29 The old, naturalistic, transaction
assumed the primacy, and the importance, of the audience. Play, even when
performed with the audience in mind, diminishes the centrality of the
audience; the audience approaches redundancy.30 Despite this, the audience
for Play is not redundant. Instead, indeed, the opposite may be observed.
The audience, in performance, becomes central again, a strange reinvigoration
that translates Beckett’s destructive approach to the theatre into a new
experience.
The spotlight that compels the characters to speak, operating from the
footlights, becomes a proxy audience. In his revision to the repeat, Beckett
begins to humanise the light, allowing for manual control and even
implying an “acting” role for the light. As the performance becomes more
painful, and the characters more and more tortured by being compelled to
go on and on, the audience develops a growing uneasiness and an emerging
awareness that it is we who are responsible for this torture. The final
moments of dialogue encapsulate the trauma that is being done to the
characters. Beckett writes:

28
Worthen, “Playing Play”, 406.
29
Davies, “Someone is Looking at me Still”, 77.
30
cf. ibid., 81.
 Translating Unintelligibility in Samuel Beckett’s Play 203

W1: Hellish half-light.

[Spot from W1 to W2.]
W2: A shade gone. In the head. Just a shade. I doubt it.
[Spot from W2 to M.]
M: We were not civilized.
[Spot from M to W1.]
W1: Dying for dark—and the darker the worse. Strange.
[Spot from W1 to M.]
M: Such fantasies. Then. And now—
[Spot from M to W2.]
W2: I doubt it.
[Pause. Peal of wild low laughter from W2 cut short as spot
from her to W1.]
W1: Yes, and the whole thing there, all there, staring you in the face.
You’ll see it. Get off me. Or weary.
[Spot from W1 to M.]
M: And now, that you are . . . mere eye. Just looking. At my face. On and
off.
[Spot from M to W1.]
W1: Weary of playing with me. Get off me. Yes.
[Spot from W1 to M.]
M: Looking for something. In my face. Some truth. In my eyes. Not even.
[Spot from M to W2. Laugh as before from W2 cut short as
spot from her to M.]
M: Mere eye. No mind. Opening and shutting on me. Am I as much—
[Spot off M. Blackout. Three seconds. Spot on M.]
M: As I as much as . . . being seen?31

W1, W2 and M are transformed into despairing automata, and the

audience are transformed into actors who inflict torture on the characters.32
Of course, the audience is also tortured, just as Beckett realised when he
altered the repeat so that the work would translate more effectively into a
stage performance. You will remember that the light, according to Beckett,
“begins to emerge as no less a victim of his inquiry than they [the
characters] and as needing to be free”. The changing status of the light
suggests, as critics have previously observed, the distinction between the
audience and stage breaking down, as prefaced in Lawrence Harvey’s note
on an earlier draft of Play, stating that the intent was to have the “stage
abolished”.33 This is the claustrophobic theatrical space that Beckett
constructs, representing the unintelligible, translated just sufficiently to

31
Beckett, “Play”, 317.
32
Worthen, “Playing Play”, 406.
33
qtd. in Knowlson, Damned to Fame, 498.
204 Chapter Fourteen

elucidate the boundaries of the theatrical mode, and sufficiently torturous to

make the audience realise their complicity in the inauthenticity of
naturalistic theatre.
Beckett pursued twin transformations in his work as a playwright: his
general focus of manipulating and moulding the theatrical form into a tool
able to reflect his human and artistic concerns, and the far more specific
transformation in developing a play from theoretical artifact to performable
(and performed) work. Both these transformations rely on the metaphor of
translation to underpin their theoretical importance. Beckett laboured
intensively to produce theatrical work that appeared to him authentic, and
that combined the formal and the personal together. Play is indicative of
the theoretical style Beckett pursued, and serves as an intriguing example
of the manipulations of form and content so crucial to modern theatre.

Works Cited
Beckett, Samuel. 2006. The Complete Dramatic Works. London: Faber
and Faber.
—. 1999. The Complete Short Prose: 1929-1989, ed. S.E. Gontarski. New
York: Grove.
—. 1983. Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, ed.
Ruby Cohn. London: John Calder.
—. 1931. Proust. New York: Grove.
Boulter, Jonathan. 2008. Beckett: A Guide for the Perplexed. London:
Continuum.
Davies, Matthew. 2009. “‘Someone is looking at me still’: The Audience-
Creature Relationship in the Theater Plays of Samuel Beckett”. Texas
Studies in Literature and Language 51.1 (Spring), 76-93.
Dukore, Bernard. 1965. “Beckett’s Play Play”. Educational Theatre
Journal 17.1 (March), 19-23.
Gatten, Brian. 2009. “The Posthumous Worlds of Not I and Play”, Texas
Studies in Literature and Language 51.1 (Spring), 94-101.
Gontarski, S.E. 1998. “Revising Himself: Performance as Text in Samuel
Beckett’s Theatre”. Journal of Modern Literature 22.1 (Autumn), 131-
145.
—, ed. 1999. The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett: The Shorter
Plays. New York: Faber and Faber.
Knowlson, James and John Pilling. 1979. Frescoes of the Skull: The Later
Prose and Drama of Samuel Beckett. London: John Calder.
Levy, Shimon. 1990. Samuel Beckett’s Self-Referential Drama: The Three
I’s. Houndsmills: MacMillan Press.
 Translating Unintelligibility in Samuel Beckett’s Play 205

Shakespeare, William. 1980. Hamlet. London: Penguin.

Van Hulle, Dirk and Mark Nixon. 2013. Samuel Beckett’s Library. New
York: Cambridge University Press.
Worthen, William. 1985. “Playing Play”, Theatre Journal 37.4
(December), 405-414.
 CHAPTER FIFTEEN

TRANSLATION, MISUNDERSTANDING
AND NONSENSE

CHRIS ANDREWS

In an interview published in the Paris Review, Philip Larkin made the

following crusty remark:

I don’t see how one can ever know a foreign language well enough to
make reading poems in it worthwhile. Foreigners’ ideas of good English
poems are dreadfully crude: Byron and Poe and so on. The Russians liking
Burns. But deep down I think foreign languages irrelevant. If that glass
thing over there is a window, then it isn’t a fenster or a fenêtre or whatever.
Hautes Fenêtres, my God! A writer can have only one language, if
language is going to mean anything to him.1

Hautes fenêtres is a translation into French of Larkin’s title High

Windows, and the exclamation that follows—“my God!”—clearly
expresses disapproval, but what, exactly, does he disapprove of and why?
I will assume—how charitably it is hard to tell—that the exclamation is
not motivated by primary xenophobia, that it does not simply condense the
thought, “Foreigners are ridiculous: just listen to the funny sounds they
make!” Perhaps Larkin regards hautes fenêtres as an egregiously bad
translation not because of semantic inaccuracy (although in the discourse
of ecclesiastical architecture, windows situated in the upper part of a wall
are usually referred to as fenêtres hautes), but because of the words’
phonetic qualities. Perhaps he is appalled by the repeated ts closing the
vowels, destroying the airy openness of high and replacing the final
fricative of windows with a stop. Perhaps he feels that the words hautes
fenêtres simply do not breathe in the way high windows do, a way that
goes so well with the sense of release in the final lines of his poem:

1
Larkin, Required Writing, 69.
 Translation, Misunderstanding and Nonsense 207

“Rather than words comes the thought of high windows: / The sun-
comprehending glass, / And beyond it the deep blue air, that shows /
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless”.2
Larkin is not simply claiming that translations of literary texts are
fatally inadequate, however. He is also, in the remark quoted above,
questioning anyone’s ability accurately to judge the literary value of a text
in a language other than his or her mother tongue: “Foreigners’ ideas of
good English poems are dreadfully crude”. Because the three poets he
cites—Burns, Poe and Byron—are not reputed for the subtlety of their
sound patterning, he seems to be saying that foreigners are condemned to
have tin ears. But if that is so, how can he denounce the inadequacy of
hautes fenetres with such confidence? How can he be a reliable judge of
how hautes fenêtres would sound (and what exactly it would mean) had he
grown up on the other side of the channel? Isn’t the kind of phonetic
appreciation that I tentatively imputed to him above ruled out by his
pronouncement that “a writer can have only one language, if language is
going to mean anything to him”? He exaggerates for rhetorical effect, to
the point of courting self-contradiction.
The overall message, however, is clear: foreigners get it wrong, from
the things they do with words to the things they do with authors, works
and canons (“The Russians liking Burns”). Another way to put this would
be to say that foreigners are specially prone to what Pierre Bourdieu calls
allodoxia, or false recognition. For Bourdieu, allodoxia is an effect of the
middlebrow goodwill that leads the “petit bourgeois to take light opera for
‘serious music,’ popularization for science, an imitation for the genuine
article”.3 The Argentine critic and writer Alberto Manguel interprets the
enthusiastic reception of Roberto Bolaño’s work in English translation as
an instance of this kind of false recognition:

No doubt Bolaño was a skilful writer and wrote at least a couple of books
that are well worth reading. Distant Star and By Night in Chile are two
excellent, forceful novels; the rest are light playful experiments, not very
successful, with little intelligence and less ambition . . . It is not an author’s
fault if certain impressionable critics (as well as his agent, and his
publishers . . . ) have decided, without irony, that he must also take on the
role of a Latin American messiah in the world of letters.4

2
Larkin, Collected Poems, 165.
3
Bourdieu, Distinction, 323.
4
Alberto Manguel, review of Nazi Literature in the Americas, The Guardian
February 6, 2010, http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/feb/06/roberto-bolano-
nazi-literature-americas.
208 Chapter Fifteen

Leaving aside the very surprising dismissal of The Savage Detectives

and 2666 as “light playful experiments” without ambition, Manguel places
English-speaking readers, including the cultural elite, in the position of
Bourdieu’s anxious and gullible petits bourgeois. The implication is that
even elites are prone to allodoxia when choosing among foreign cultural
products. Or, to return to the plain formulation, foreigners get it wrong.
Certainly, many travellers, examining the shelves of foreign bookshops
—noticing, for example, the prominence of the American author Douglas
Kennedy in France—have been perplexed by how translation and the
international book trade reconfigure literary landscapes. But the traveller’s
perplexity need not lead to scorn. In an essay entitled “The
Incomprehensible”, the Argentine novelist César Aira takes Larkin’s line
of argument and gives it a radical twist:

Within a historical community, a book is necessarily over-understood

[sobreentendido] . . . We understand too well and the book teeters
dangerously on the brink of the obvious. We have the misfortune of
sharing the conditions in which it was produced . . . But with the books we
love, distances begin to open up straight away . . . Inevitably, time begins
to pass, and that temporal distance will always continue to grow. Also,
books move in space, they leave the neighbourhood, the city, the society
that produced them, and end up in other languages, other worlds, in an
endless voyage towards the incomprehensible. The ship that transports
them is misunderstanding. For an Argentine, the idea that a Cuban could
understand Borges or Arlt is as ridiculous as it must be for a Cuban to hear
an Argentine claiming to understand Lezama Lima. When books are
stripped of over-understanding, all we can do is love them. The phrase, “to
love for the wrong reasons” is what logicians call a nonsensical
proposition; anyone who has loved knows that.5

So, for Aira, foreigners get it wrong, but we are all foreigners in relation
to the works of the past, and even to the works of the present written in
other regional varieties of our mother tongue. The fall from over-
understanding into misunderstanding is both inevitable and fortunate.
If misunderstanding is the ship that transports books towards the
incomprehensible, translators are its crew. In his sanguine attitude towards
misunderstanding, Aira follows Borges, who is open to the possibility of
happy accidents in translation. In “The Translators of the Thousand and
One Nights”, Borges writes of Edward Lane: “He is careless; on the
opening page of his translation, he places the adjective ‘romantic’ in the
bearded mouth of a twelfth-century Moslem, which is a kind of futurism.

5
Aira, “Lo incomprensible”.
 Translation, Misunderstanding and Nonsense 209

At times this lack of sensitivity serves him well, for it allows him to
include very commonplace words in a noble paragraph, with involuntary
good results”.6 Elsewhere, Borges recommends a voluntary boldness that
many authors would resist, describing translation as “a variation one is
justified in attempting”.7 And his practice was consistent with this
recommendation, both when translating the work of others and when
collaborating with Norman Thomas di Giovanni on translations of his own
stories and poems.8
In “The Incomprehensible”, Aira asserts that the destiny of
misunderstanding is to “engender further misunderstandings, to multiply
them and make them more effective, to turn them into truths to be used for
living and creating”.9 How can a misunderstanding be turned into a truth?
Aira must be subscribing to a literary version of the coherence theory of
truth, according to which truth is a function of coherence among
propositions rather than of correspondence to objective features of the
world. What he seems to be suggesting is that a misunderstood textual
element can become “true” if it is coherently integrated into a new work,
strongly connected with the work’s other elements. To extrapolate:
misunderstanding is a mode of literary cannibalism; new works feed on
old ones, building their webs of connections by disrespecting or
disregarding connections established in an earlier context.
Switching now from a philosophical to a linguistic vocabulary,
connections or semantic ties may make one element of a text dependent on
another for its interpretation, thus giving the text cohesion.10 But as
Halliday and Hasan pointed out, texture, that is, what makes a passage a
text, involves something more, namely “some degree of coherence in the
actual meanings expressed”, or “consistency of register”.11 In an article on
“shifts of cohesion and coherence in translation”, Shoshana Blum-Kulka
proposed “the explicitation hypothesis”: translations tend to be slightly
more redundant and explicit than originals.12 She speculated that
explicitation may be “a universal strategy inherent in the process of
language mediation” and suggested, moreover, that translation was “a
process by which what is said might become obvious and clear, while

6
Borges, “The Translators of the One Thousand and One Nights”, 97.
7
Kristal, Invisible Work, 2.
8
Di Giovanni, The Lesson of the Master, 82.
9
Aira, “Lo incomprensible”.
10
Halliday and Hasan, Cohesion in English, 1-30.
11
Ibid., 23.
12
Blum-Kulka, “Shifts of Cohesion and Coherence in Translation”, 292.
210 Chapter Fifteen

what is meant might become vague and obscure”.13 In other words,

cohesion tends to increase while coherence suffers: the network of surface
relations is reinforced, while the conceptual relations are loosened or
damaged.
According to Anthony Pym, the explicitation hypothesis has generally
been confirmed by studies on translation between different language
pairs,14 but as Viktor Becher has forcefully argued, a higher degree of
explicitness in translated texts may be produced by explicitations that are
not specifically translation-inherent but are necessitated or motivated by
differences between the source and target languages or between the
communities that use them.15 Nevertheless, I think that most literary
translators could offer anecdotal evidence in support of the claim that
translation tends to increase cohesion, if only because it prolongs the
process of editing and proofing. Authors sometimes change the name of a
character part way through a story or novel and forget to go back and
make the change consistent. In the Spanish original of Roberto Bolaño’s
“The Insufferable Gaucho”, the protagonist is initially called Hector
Pereda, but about a third of the way through the story his first name
becomes Manuel.16 (Such an inconsistency is hardly surprising in a
manuscript prepared during the late stages of the author’s fatal illness and
delivered to his publisher just weeks before his death). In the English
version, Pereda’s first name is Manuel from the start. Inconsistencies in
naming are failures of lexical cohesion, and they are likely to be repaired
by translators, or by editors. Thanks to the work of Lawrence Venuti, the
translator’s invisibility has been a key theme in translation studies since
the 1990s, but the truly invisible participant in a book’s crossing from one
language to another is the editor, whose connection with a text on which
she has worked, sometimes very hard, generally goes unrecorded.
As for losses of coherence in translation, examples abound. Most of
the “howlers” occasioned by false friends or polysemic words, such as
those pointed out by Timothy Buck in Helen Lowe-Porter’s translations of
Thomas Mann, fall into this category. Some of Buck’s examples seriously
compromise consistency of register: Melone (bowler hat) translated as
melon, or Papierschlangen (streamers) as paper snakes.17 A similar
instance of involuntary surrealism is reported by J.M. Coetzee: “In the
Italian version of Dusklands, a man opens a crate with the help of a bird

13
Blum-Kulka, “Shifts of Cohesion and Coherence in Translation”, 394; 303.
14
Pym, “Explaining Explicitation”, 30.
15
Becher, “Abandoning the notion of ‘translation-inherent’ explicitation”, 4-5.
16
Bolaño, El gaucho insufrible, 15; 27.
17
Buck, “Mann in English”, 238.
 Translation, Misunderstanding and Nonsense 211

(what I wrote was that he used a crow, that is, a crowbar)”.18 This is
clearly a case in which a question put to the author, at the risk of seeming
silly, was in order, but it is also a reminder of how regional varieties make
a geographically dispersed language like English, Spanish or Arabic
hazardous to translate from, especially when the source text is written in a
“minor” variety, like South African or Australian English.
Although there does seem to be a tendency to increased cohesion and
decreased coherence in literary translations, no amount of statistical
evidence will transform that tendency into a causal law. Sometimes
translation increases coherence. This occurs occasionally when a conceptual
inconsistency not legitimated by the text’s genre is corrected. Norman
Thomas di Giovanni gives the example of a Borges story in which the New
Yorker’s editors pointed out that two indications of the time at which the
same event had taken place were at variance. Borges and di Giovanni
“eagerly made the change in both Spanish and English” to eliminate the
contradiction. “Inevitably”, says di Giovanni, “a professor we know
complained about Borges’ tampering with his work; he considered the
discrepancy charming and thought we should have left it alone . . . Borges
was mildly angered; first of all he found nothing charming in the slip, and,
secondly, he feels he has the right to shape and alter his work as he sees
fit”.19
Translation is especially likely to increase coherence when the original
belongs to the literary genre of nonsense or the linguistic category of non-
text, that is, a thematically ill-formed sequence of grammatically well-
formed sentences (a great deal of contemporary poetry, incidentally, falls
into this category).20 We can observe the boosting of coherence in Henri
Parisot’s translation of a limerick by Edward Lear:

There was a Young Lady of Clare

Who was madly pursued by a Bear;
When she found she was tired,
She abruptly expired,
That unfortunate Lady of Clare.

Il était une jeune Dame de Nemours,

Qui, regrettablement, fut chargée par un ours,
Désireuse sans doute d’éviter le pire,
Elle rendit tout net son ultime soupir,

18
Coetzee, “Roads to Translation”, 141.
19
Borges, Borges on Writing, 158.
20
On the concept of non-text, see Eggins, Introduction to Systemic Functional
Linguistics , 85-95.
212 Chapter Fifteen

Cette infortunée jeune dame de Nemours.21

In a literal back-translation, Parisot’s version reads as follows:

There was a young Lady of Nemours who, regrettably, was charged by a

bear; probably wanting to avoid the worst, she breathed her last, outright,
that unfortunate young lady of Nemours.

The rhyme scheme is preserved by using a different place name

(Nemours instead of Clare), which transposes the action from Ireland to
France, and the overall coherence of the text is slightly increased. In the
original, the young lady expires when she is tired, not explicitly because
she is tired. The French version spells out a reason or a motive: her desire
to avoid the worst, a fate worse than death, that is, presumably, being
raped. The probably (sans doute) legitimates the presumption by admitting
that it is not a certitude.22 The bear’s presumed intention is certainly
something to be regretted, thence the shift from madly to regrettably
(unless Parisot misread madly as sadly).
Such micro-analysis might seem otiose. Is it really worth fussing like
this over the translation of an intentionally derisory text? My fussing here,
however, is minimal compared to that of César Aira, in whose book on
Edward Lear I found this example. Aira gives scrupulous plain prose
translations of Lear’s limericks, followed by explanatory glosses. This
looks at first like the strategy recommended by Nabokov in his famous,
grumpy essay “Problems of Translation: Onegin in English”, except that
Aira’s glosses are not notes on specific points but continuous, coherent
texts, which patiently interpret the originals and unfold their interpreted
meaning, making sense of nonsense. What is surprising is the sheer
amount of space and time and ingenious energy devoted to puzzling over
what Lear’s little squibs mean. Aira repeatedly indicates that he is aware
of having strayed beyond the bounds of hermeneutic normality, qualifying
an interpretation with “I don’t know if I’m splitting hairs here”, or
remarking, “You can make sense of anything, with a little ingenuity”.23
And although he keeps his own translation and commentary separate, the
commentary exemplifies the kind of interpretation that led to the upward
shift of coherence that we observed in Parisot’s translation.

21
Aira, Edward Lear, 185.
22
On the dominant use of sans doute as an adverb of doubt, see Grévisse, Le bon
usage, 953.
23
Aira, Edward Lear, 60, 91.
 Translation, Misunderstanding and Nonsense 213

Edward Lear is a very odd book, and there are number of ways of
reacting to its oddness. One way would be to adopt Larkin’s stance and
regard Aira as a foreigner predictably getting it wrong. Taking Lear
seriously: my God! It’s drawing-room entertainment! But this is to assume
that the proper degree of seriousness with which to take a text is
determined entirely by the source culture, and to forget that when texts are
taken up elsewhere, they are put to new uses in the systems that receive
them. There is an interesting mini-tradition of serious “foreign”, and
especially French, readings of Victorian nonsense, from André Breton’s
Anthology of Black Humour, through Henri Parisot’s translations and
Gilles Deleuze’s Logic of Sense, to Jean-Jacques Lecercle’s ingenious
interpretations in The Philosophy of Nonsense (he sees the recurrent,
aggressive “They” in Lear’s limericks as an anticipation of Heidegger’s
Das Man in Being and Time).24 Perhaps if we relinquish the comfortable
authority of the native speaker with his or her putatively native ability to
get it right, we will realize that there are aspects of our “own” literatures
that we are simply not in the best position to see.
A second reaction might be to qualify Aira’s readings as paranoid.
When he says of the limerick that begins “There was an old man of the
Nile / Who sharpened his nails with a file”, that it is reminiscent of
Raymond Roussel’s punning, because nails can be fingernails or carpentry
nails, and the file can be a nail file or a document file, we might feel that
he is making something of nothing or joining too many dots.25 I would not
agree with Jonathan Culler who effectively argues, in his defence of over-
interpretation, that the most paranoid interpretations are the most
interesting.26 Paranoid readings can be perfectly dull; but Aira’s are not,
partly because of the way in which they connect with his fiction and
essays to make a labyrinthine whole, partly because of the singular
surprises they throw up, like the image of a man sharpening a carpentry
nail with a document file.
A third reaction would be to regard Aira’s glosses sternly as a kind of
domesticating translation, ironing the sheer silliness out of the originals,
reducing their strangeness. But if domestication is taking place, it is of a
very particular kind because the glosses do not make the originals
resemble anything generic. What they do make the limericks resemble,
occasionally, is Aira’s fiction, which is quite as strange and as silly, in its
own way, as Lear’s nonsense. Rather than domestication, it would be more
accurate to speak of personal appropriation. Moreover, I think it would be

24
Lecercle, The Philosophy of Nonsense, 108-9.
25
Aira, Edward Lear, 118.
26
Culler, “In Defence of Overinterpretation”, 110.
214 Chapter Fifteen

a mistake to assume that providing a more semantically coherent version

of a text is always an aesthetically retrograde option. While this kind of
paraphrasing may limit the free play of signification, it can also extend the
original’s meaning in surprising directions.
Making sense of nonsense is an imaginative process, and imagination,
as Colin McGinn has argued, is “essentially a creative combinatorial
faculty”.27 We are constantly combining isolated elements to form meaningful
wholes in a largely pre-reflexive way. We have evolved to make sense of
our environment in order to get a grip on it. As Aira says, “sense, after all,
is the basis of knowledge, and knowledge the basis of control”.28 Texts are
an important part of the environment for those of us who love to read, and
making sense of texts gives us a pragmatic purchase on them, allowing us
to put them to use.
The surrealist game called “The one in the other” (l’un dans l’autre)
neatly illustrates how making sense of nonsense is both imaginative and
natural. It was one of the few new games that the surrealists invented after
the Second World War and it worked in the following way. One person
would go out of the room and think of an object to be, call it A.
Meanwhile the other players would agree among themselves on an object
B, which they wanted the absent person to identify with. The person
would be called back into the room and told, You are a B; then he would
have to describe himself as a B in such a way, and with such
particularities, that the image of object A would superimpose itself on that
of B and come to replace it in the minds of the other players.29 This is how
Man Ray responded when he was told that he was a handbag: “I am a very
small handbag which can contain any geometric form. I am carried
around, coloured or smoky. I am of no interest to adults. I am only used in
fine weather”.30 He had initially imagined that he was a marble.
The authoritarian leader of the surrealist group, André Breton, who, in
his later years, became interested in occultism, took the success of this
game—the players guessed the other object every time, he said—as
evidence that any object is contained in any other.31 But what I think it
really shows is how prodigiously effective our mental mechanisms for
making sense by means of metaphor are (and incidentally, how in tune
with one another the surrealists were, what a coherent group they formed,
the incoherent elements having been expelled).

27
McGinn, Mindsight: Image, Dream, Meaning, 129.
28
Aira, Edward Lear, 21.
29
Les jeux surréalistes, 221.
30
Ibid., 225.
31
Ibid., 220.
 Translation, Misunderstanding and Nonsense 215

“The one in the other” might seem a mere parlour game (more
drawing-room entertainment), but it can be taken as a model for how
literary composition works in general. Very often a writer is coming up
with elements whose interrelation is initially arbitrary (or hidden, to speak
like Breton), whether they are independently arrived-at objects, or rhyme
words in a poem, or situations in a fiction. The task is then to join these
elements up in some way, to motivate a connection between them. Very
often a writer is alternately making nonsense, engaging in the kind of
irresponsible play that Caillois calls paidia—turbulent, free improvisation,
uncontrolled fantasy—and making sense, playing in accordance with a set
of rules or conventions (Caillois’ ludus).32 To put it schematically, the
writer is seizing on the inchoate promise of an A and a B, and then
working out how to get from one to the other. Whether the resulting text
looks wild or staid will depend on the set of conventions that governs the
moves by which this is accomplished as well as the relative conventionality
of each move.
I have just suggested that rule-based play makes sense of arbitrary
givens in literary composition. But rules can be used to find or determine
those givens as well. Raymond Roussel used a rule of homophonic
correspondence to produce the starting and ending points for narratives, as
he explained in How I Wrote Certain of My Books. By means of extended
punning, he constructed pairs of word-sequences whose sounds, in French,
are almost identical—for example: Les lettres du blanc sur les bandes du
vieux billard / Les lettres du blanc sur les bandes du vieux pillard—but
which can have entirely different meanings: The chalked letters on the
cushions of the old billiard table / The white man’s letters about the old
pillager’s gangs. A priori, these meanings do not cohere, but Roussel
managed to invent a story to link them more or less believably.33
Roussel’s procedure, which generates nonsensical givens by means of
a phonetic rule and then makes sense of them according to the conventions
of a minimal verisimilitude, has been translated and, in a way,
misunderstood by the contemporary English poet Matthew Welton in “I
must say that at first it was difficult work”. Welton’s poem is a set of
variations on that sentence, referring to Roussel’s procedure, which has its
origin in How I Wrote Certain of My Books. In a note, Welton explains:

this is how Roussel’s description of his method of composition is given by

Michel Foucault in his study Death and the Labyrinth—The World of
Raymond Roussel. And more specifically, it is how Foucault’s version of

32
Caillois, Les jeux et les hommes, 48.
33
Roussel, Comment j’ai écrit certains de mes livres, 11-2.
216 Chapter Fifteen

Roussel’s description of his method is conveyed in Charles Ruas’s

translation of Foucault’s book. The point, of course, is that in deriving one
sentence from another—or in arriving at an account which is a translation
of a paraphrase of a description which itself may or may not be entirely
accurate—the outcome might be less a distortion of the original than a text
with an originality of its own.34

It might be said, pedantically, that the translator Charles Ruas gets it

wrong, because the original sentence reads: “Je dois dire que ce premier
travail était difficile”,35 or “I must say that this first work (or task) was
difficult”, that is, the task of coming up with the ambiguous word
combinations. It was not exactly that the work got easier after a while;
there were two tasks and the first was hard. Perhaps Ruas was swayed by
the pleasing anapestic rhythm of “I must say that at first it was difficult
work”, and the assonance of first and work. And perhaps that sound
patterning is what gave the phrase “an attraction of its own”, as Welton
says, and made it “fruitful enough to provide the basis for the thirty-six
sentences” he “eventually derived from it”.36 Here are six of them:

Aramaic inverts the intransitive verbs

As potatoes emerge from the depths of the earth
I’m arranging excursions to disparate worlds
I’m assured there’s a version that’s technically worse
I’m a surgeon who’s working with domicile birds
I’m elated to learn I’m in step with the herd.37

Roussel’s homophonic rule is loosened almost to the point of

dissolution, yet the poem’s lines are recognizably patterned on the model
in that they are mostly anapestic tetrameters, and most have the vowel /‫ܮ‬/
in the second or fourth stressed syllable, or in both positions.
Ruas may well have felt that the slight semantic shift (from “I must say
that this first task was difficult” to “I must say that at first it was difficult
work”) was justified by the resultant euphony. Whatever we think of his
decision, it responds to the original and is responsible in that broad sense
(such minor shifts are very common in published translations and cannot
be fairly evaluated in isolation). Welton, on the other hand, in taking his
cue from “a translation of a paraphrase of a description”, showed an
indifference to getting it wrong that strikes me as healthy in an

34
Welton, “We needed coffee but ..”., 100.
35
Roussel, Comment j’ai écrit, 14.
36
Welton, “We needed coffee but ..”., 100.
37
Ibid., 52.
 Translation, Misunderstanding and Nonsense 217

imaginative writer. While loyally acknowledging his sources, he exercised

a legitimate irresponsibility, turning a “misunderstanding” of Roussel’s
sentence and of his rule (“I departed a little from the method described”,
he admits, understating the case) into a “truth” that coheres with his own
work.

Works Cited
Aira, César. 2004. Edward Lear. Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo.
—. February 26, 2000. “Lo incomprensible”. ABC Cultural: 22-23.
Becher, Viktor. 2010. “Abandoning the notion of ‘translation-inherent’
explicitation: Against a dogma of translation studies”. Across
Languages and Cultures 11, no. 1: 1-28.
Blum-Kulka, Shoshana. 2004. “Shifts of Cohesion and Coherence in
Translation”. In The Translation Studies Reader, edited by Lawrence
Venuti, 290-305. New York and London: Routledge.
Bolaño, Roberto. 2003. El gaucho insufrible. Barcelona: Anagrama.
—. 2010. The Insufferable Gaucho. Translated by Chris Andrews. New
York: New Directions.
Borges, Jorge Luis. 1973. Borges on Writing, edited by Norman Thomas
di Giovanni, Daniel Halpern and Frank MacShane. New York: Dutton.
—. 2004. “The Translators of the One Thousand and One Nights”.
Translated by Esther Allen. In The Translation Studies Reader, edited
by Lawrence Venuti, 94-108. New York and London: Routledge.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of
Taste. Translated by Richard Nice. London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul.
Buck, Timothy. 2001. “Mann in English”. In The Cambridge Companion
to Thomas Mann, edited by Ritchie Robertson, 235-252. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Caillois, Roger. 1958. Les jeux et les hommes. Paris: Gallimard.
Coetzee, J.M. 2005. “Roads to Translation”. Meanjin 64, no. 4: 141-151.
Culler, Jonathan. 1992. “In Defence of Overinterpretation”. In
Interpretation and Overinterpretation, edited by Stefan Collini, 109-
123. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Di Giovanni, Norman Thomas. 2003. The Lesson of the Master: On
Borges and His Work. London: Continuum.
Grévisse, Maurice. 1975. Le bon usage. Gembloux: J. Duculot.
Halliday, M.A.K. and Ruqaiya Hasan. 1976. Cohesion in English.
Longman: London.
218 Chapter Fifteen

Les jeux surrealistes. Archives du surréalisme 5. Présenté et annoté par

Emmanuel Garrigues. Paris: Gallimard, 1995.
Kristal, Efraín. 2002. Invisible Work: Borges and Translation. Nashville:
Vanderbilt University Press.
Larkin, Philip. 1988. Collected Poems. London: Faber.
—. 1983. Required Writing: Miscellaneous Pieces 1955-1982. London:
Faber.
Lecercle, Jean-Jacques. 1994. The Philosophy of Nonsense. London:
Routledge.
McGinn, Colin. 2004. Mindsight: Image, Dream, Meaning. Cambridge,
MA, and London: Harvard University Press.
Manguel, Alberto. 2010. Review of Nazi Literature in the Americas. The
Guardian February 6.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/feb/06/roberto-bolano-nazi-
literature-americas.
Nabokov, Vladimir. 2004. “Problems of Translation: Onegin in English”.
In The Translation Studies Reader, edited by Lawrence Venuti, 115-
127. New York and London: Routledge.
Pym, Anthony. 2005. “Explaining Explicitation”. In New Trends in
Translation Studies, edited by Krisztina Károly, 29-34. Budapest:
Akadémiai Kiadó.
Roussel, Raymond. 1963. Comment j’ai écrit certains de mes livres. Paris:
Jean-Jacques Pauvert.
Welton, Matthew. 2009. “We needed coffee but . .”. Manchester:
Carcanet.
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Chris Andrews teaches at the University of Western Sydney. He has

translated books of fiction by Latin American authors, including César
Aira's Shantytown (New Directions, 2013) and Rodrigo Rey Rosa's
Severina (Yale University Press, 2014). He is the author of Roberto
Bolaño's Fiction: An Expanding Universe (Columbia University Press,
2014).

Gillian Ania (University of Bangor; formerly Reader in Italian, University

of Salford) writes on contemporary Italian literature. Her publications
cover the works of individual authors (among whom, Leonardo Sciascia,
Paola Capriolo and Tullio Avoledo) and more widely, literary
representations of 9/11, apocalypse and dystopia, 1960s-70s narrative,
epistolary fiction and literary translation. She has published one book of
poetry to date, and translated novels by Capriolo, Avoledo and Nicoletta
Vallorani.

Alessandra Calvani, born and educated in Rome, is a literary translator

from English into Italian and a prize-winning writer of short novels and
poems. She earned an academic degree in Modern Languages, a Master’s
degree in Marketing and Web communication and a European doctoral
degree in Comparative Literature, Translation Studies. She publishes
extensively on literary translation and has worked as adjunct professor at
Rome Tor Vergata, Macerata, Urbino and Cassino Universities.

Sarah Comyn is a doctoral candidate at the University of Melbourne,

Australia. Her thesis, titled, Economics and the Empathic Imagination: A
Literary History of Homo Economicus through the Anglo-American novel,
examines the interplay between economic theory and novelistic discourse
as it converges in the portrayal of homo economicus in six Anglo-
American novels.

Chris Conti is associate lecturer in the School of Humanities and

Communication Arts and a member of the Writing and Society Research
Centre, University of Western Sydney. His current research brings
together Hans Blumenberg’s ideas on the anthropological significance of
220 Notes on Contributors

rhetoric with writers such as Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, Patrick White,
and John Barth.

James Gourley is a lecturer in the School of Humanities and

Communication Arts and a member of the Writing and Society Research
Centre, University of Western Sydney. He is the author of Terrorism and
Temporality in the Works of Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo
(Bloomsbury Academic, 2013).

Nicholas Jose is an Australian author best-known for his fiction and

cultural essays. He was general editor of the Macquarie PEN Anthology of
Australian Literature (2009) and has written widely on contemporary
Australian and Asian art and literature. He was Visiting Chair of
Australian Studies at Harvard University 2009-2010 and taught there again
in 2011. He is Adjunct Professor with the Writing and Society Research
Centre at the University of Western Sydney, Professor of Creative Writing
at Bath Spa University, and Professor of English and Creative Writing at
The University of Adelaide.

Wenjing Li is a Teaching Fellow in the Department of Chinese and

Bilingual Studies at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. She received
her PhD in translation studies from Lingnan University, Hong Kong and
taught translation at Lingnan University from 2009 to 2012. Her research
interests include translation studies, gender in translation, and the
translator’s identity.

Matthew Lorenzon is completing doctoral studies at the Australian

National University on the musical collaborations of the contemporary
philosopher Alain Badiou. His Masters research at the University of
Melbourne has led him to publish on the place of literature and philosophy
in colonial Melbourne, in particular in the life and work of G.W.L.
Marshall-Hall.

Elisabet Titik Murtisari is a lecturer at the Faculty of Language and

Literature, Satya Wacana Christian University, Central Java, Indonesia.
She obtained her master’s degree in Translation Studies (Applied
Linguistics) from the Australian National University, Canberra, in 2005,
and her PhD in the same field from Monash University, Melbourne, in
2011.
 Literature as Translation/Translation as Literature 221

Barbara Pauk is an Honorary Research Fellow in European Languages

and Studies at the University of Western Australia and at the Institute for
General and Comparative Literature at the University of Fribourg
(Switzerland). She has published on cultural exchanges between France
and Britain in the long nineteenth century.

Rachel Robertson is a Lecturer in Professional Writing and Publishing at

Curtin University, Western Australia. Her memoir, Reaching One
Thousand: a story of love, motherhood and autism (Black Inc. 2012) was
shortlisted for the 2013 National Biography Award. Her academic
interests include feminist disability theory, life writing, ethics, motherhood
studies and Australian literature.

Robert Savage teaches General Paper at the Hwa Chong Institution,

Singapore. He has published widely in the fields of critical theory, science
fiction and literature. In addition, has has translated several books from
German into English, including Hans Blumenberg's Paradigms for a
Metaphorology (Cornell, 2010) and, most recently, Jan Assmann's Religio
Duplex (Polity, 2014).

Daniel C. Strack teaches Japanese to English translation as an Associate

Professor at the University of Kitakyushu. He received his MA from the
University of Wisconsin-Madison and his PhD from Kyushu University.
His first book, Literature in the Crucible of Translation: A Cognitive
Account, was published in 2007.

Joy Wallace is Senior Lecturer in English and Associate Dean Learning

and Teaching at Charles Sturt University. She has a long-standing interest
in translation and comparative literature and has published on Sir Thomas
Mallory's use of his French sources. Her interest in the work of Hazel
Smith is also long-standing; she has published two articles and she wrote
the sleeve-notes for the CD Nurahgic Echoes. This essay brings the two
interests together.
 INDEX

Adorno, Theodor 72, 76, 78 Derrida, Jacques 12

Aira, César 208-9, 212-3 La Divina Commedia 54, 198
al-Samawy, Yahia 3 Dostoevsky 117, 126
Apter, Emily iii
autism 170-82 Eliot, T.S. 44, 55, 68, 73-5
Empson, William 50-1, 53, 57
Baudelaire, Charles 32, 67-75, 79 equivalence 104-5
Baudrillard, Jean 64
Beckett, Samuel 195, 200-1, 204 Field, Barron 6
Play 195-204 French Revolution 103-4, 106-7
Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Henri Friend, Donald 6
107-9, 112-3
Paul et Virginie 101-2 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang iii, 12,
Blumenberg, Hans 155-168 14, 39
Bolaño, Roberto 207-8, 210
Borges, J.L. 208-9, 211 Habermas, Jürgen iii
Hamlet 196
Cai, Jun 129-130, 132-137 Harris, Max 11
Capucci, Giovanna 47-65 Hegel, G.W.F. 11-2, 38
Carey, Peter 11 Herder, J.G. 14-5
Casanova, Pascale 12 Hobbes, Thomas 160
censorship 128, 131-2, 137 Hope, A.D. 33
Chaplin, Charlie 78 Horace 3
China 130-2 Hulme, T.E. 44
Cho, Tom 8
Chow, Rey 12 Kafka, Franz 43, 167-8, 180
Clarke, John 1 Kinsella, John 11
Coetzee, J.M. 10 Kirkpatrick, Peter 10
Collins, Paul 181
Not Even Wrong: A Father’s Lamb, Charles 6
Journey into the Lost Larkin, Philip 206-7
History of Autism 174-8 Lefevere, André 105
Conrad, Joseph 34 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 12
Lewis, C.S. 39
Damrosch, David iii-iv Lin, Shu 130
Deakin, Alfred 138, 149, 151-2 Lindsay, Lionel 138-141, 143-45,
DeLillo, Don 152
Cosmopolis 184-93 Lindsay, Norman 138-145, 152
White Noise 184 Lombroso 145-50
Lyle, Marshall 138, 144-7, 148
 Literature as Translation/Translation as Literature 223

Macquarie PEN Anthology of repetition 197

Australian Literature 1-15 Richardson, H.H. 3
Malkorda, Frank 1 Ricoeur, Paul 156
Malouf, David 1, 3, 12 Rimbaud, Arthur 34, 42
Marr, David 39 Rousseau, J.-J. 33, 106, 113, 160
Marshall-Hall, G.W.L. 138-9, 144-
5, 149-52 Sakai, Naoki 7
Maurice, Catharine Sand, George 96
Let Me Hear Your Voice: A Schopenhauer, Arthur 39, 138, 149-
Family’s Triumph Over 50
Autism 176 Spengler, Oswald 39
McAuley, James 10, 34, 41 Spivak, G.C. 12
Mead, Philip 11 Stazzone, Cecilia 81, 83, 94-100
memoir 170-82 Steinbeck, John 16-29
metaphor 155-6 , 158-9, 161-4, 177 Sterne, Laurence iv
metaphorology 157-8 Stewart, Harold 10
Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley 81- Stiglitz, Joseph 187
100 surrealism 214-5
Montale, Eugenio 57
Murray, Les 6-7 Taam, Sze Pui 1-2
Tan, Amy 129-134, 136-7
Nabokov, Vladimir 128, 212 Saving Fish from Drowning
Neidjie, Bill 4-5 129-137
Neilson, John Shaw 8 Theocritus 42
neurodiversity 171-3 Thomas, Dylan 1
Nietzsche, Friedrich 34, 39, 142-3, de Tocqueville, Alexis 13
152-3 Toer, Pramoedya Ananta 16-29
Nietzsche Contra Wagner 139, 141 Tǀson, Shimazaki 117-9, 122-6
Nonsense 213-4 Chikuma River Sketches 117-9,
124
Paradiž, Valarie The Broken Commandment 117-
Elijah’s Cup: A Family’s 9, 122-6
Journey into the Community transformation 105-6
and Culture of High- Tranter, John 1, 3
Functioning Autism and Turgenev, Ivan 117-22
Asperger’s Syndrome 178- A Sportman’s Sketches 117-22
81
paranoia 213 Unaipon, David 9
Paul and Virginia (Williams untranslatability 7, 35, 156
translation) 102, 104-113
Paul and Mary, an Indian Story Venuti, Lawrence 106, 108, 173-4
(Dalton translation) 105-6 Virgil 98
Petrettini, Maria 90-4 Vu, Chi 8
Pope, Alexander 97
224 Index

Wagner 139, 141-3, 153 Wordsworth, William 42, 47

Wright, Alexis 9
Watt, Ian 34
White, Patrick 30-46 Yu, Ouyang 3
Wilding, Michael 26, 35
Williams, Helen Maria 101-13 Zola, Emile 146-7
Letters from France 110-1