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correlate : both the ͛external͛ and ͛internal͛ translator/interprète have recourse

to lexica, historical grammars, glossaries of particular periods, professions, or

social millieux, dictionaries of argot, manuals of technical terminology. (͙)

Certain elements will elude complete comprehension or revival. The time-barrier

may be more interactable than that of linguistic difference. (͙) The ͚translator
within͛ has to cope with subtler treasons. Words rarely show any outward mark of

altered meaning, the body forth their history only in a fully established context.

Where a passage historically remote, (͙), the business of internal translation

tends towards being a bilingual process : eye and ear are kept alert to the

necessity of decipherment. The more seemingly standardized the language ʹ (͙) the

more covert are indices of semantic dating. We read as if time has had a stop.

History is a speech-act, a selective use of the past tense.(͙) What material

reality has history outside language, outside our interpretative belief in

essentially linguistic records (silence knows no history) ? (͙) We have no total

history, no history which could be defined as objectly real because it contained

the literal sum of past life. (͙) We remember culturally, as we do individually,

by conventions of emphasis, foreshortening, and omission.

As every generation retranslates the classics, out of a vital compulsion for

immediacy and precise echo, so every generation uses language to build its own

resonant past. At moments of historical stress, mythologies of the ͚true past͛

follow on each other at such speed that entirely different perspectives coexist

and blur at the edges.

The fracture of words, the maltreatment of grammatical norms which, as the Opies

have shown, constitute a vital part of the lore, mnemonics, and secret parlance of

childhood, have a rebellious aim : by refusing, for a time, to accept the rules of

the grown-up speech, the child seeks to keep the world open to his own, seemingly

unprecedented needs. In the event of autism, the speech-battle between child and

master can reach a grim finality. Surrounded by incomprehensible or hostile

reality, the autistic child breaks off verbal contact. He seems to choose silence

to shield his identity but even more, perhaps, to destroy his imagined enemy.

Eros and language mesh at every point. Intercourse and discourse, copula and

copulation, are sub-classes of the dominant fact of comunication. They arise from

the life-need of the ego to reach out and comprehend, in the two vital senses of

͛understanding͛ and ͛containment͛, another human being. Sex is a profoundly

semantic act. Like language, it is a subject to the shaping force of social

convention, rules of proceeding, and accumulated precedent. To speak and to make

love is to enact a distinctive twofold universality : both forms of communication

are universals of human physiology as well as of social evolution. It is likely

that human sexuality and speech developed in close-knit reciprocity. Together they

generate the history of self-consciousness, the process, presumably millenary and

marked by ennumerable regression, whereby we have hammered out the notion of self and
otherness.(͙) If coitus can be schematized as dialogue, masturbation seems to

be correlative with the pulse of monologue or of internalized address. (͙)

Ejaculation is at once a physiological and a linguistic concept. Impotence and

speech-blocks, premature emission and stuttering, involuntary ejaculation and the

word-river of dreams are phenomena whose interrelations seem to lead back to the

central knot of our humanity. Semen, excreta, and words are communicative

products. They are transmissions from the self inside the skin to reality outside.

Any model of communucation is at the same time a model of trans-lation, of

vertical or horizontal transfer of significance. No two historical epochs, no two

social classes, no two localities use words and syntax to signify exactly the same

things, to send identical signals of valuation and inference. Neither do two human
beings. Each living person draws, deliberately or in immediate habit, on two

sources of linguistic supply : the current vulgate corresponding to his level of

literacy, and a private thesaurus. The latter is inextricably a part of his

subconscious, of his memories so far as they may be verbalized, and of the

singular, irreducibly specific ensemble of his somatic and psychological identity.

Part of the answer to the notorious logical conundrum as to whether or not there

can be ͛private language͛ is that aspects of every language-act are unique and

individual. They form what linguists call an ͛idiolect͛. Each communicatory

gesture has a private residue. The ͛personal lexicon͛ in every one of us

inevitably qualifies the definitions, connotations, semantic moves current in

public discourse.

Obviously, we speak to communicate. But also to conceal, to leave unspoken. The

ability of human being to misinform modulates through every wavelength from

outright lying to silence. This ability is based on the dual structure of

discourse : our outward speech has ͚behind it͛ a concurrent flow of articulate

consciousness.

͛Translation͛, properly understood, is a special case of the arc of communication

which every successful speech-act closes within a given language. (͙) The model

͚sender to receiver͛ which represents any semiological and semantic process is

ontologically equivalent to the model ͛source-language to receptor-language͛ used

in the theory of translation. In both schemes there is ͚in the middle͛ an

operation of interpretative decipherment, an encoding-decoding function or

synapse. Where two or more languages are in articulate interconnection, the

barriers in the middle will obviously be more salient, and the entreprise of

inteligibility more conscious. (͙) In short : inside or between languages, human

communication equals translation. LANGUAGE and GNOSIS

A true translator knows that his labour belongs ͚to oblivion͛ (inevitably, each

generation retranslates), or ͚to the other one͛, his occasion, begetter, and

precedent shadow. He does not know ͚which of us two is writing this page͛. In that

͚transubstantial ignorance͛ ʹ I find no simpler, less unwidely term ʹ lies the

  
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The past is to be re-called by present discourse, Orpheus walking to the light but

with his eyes resoultely turned back.

The historian must ͚get it right͛. He must determine not only what was said (which

may prove exceedingly difficult given the state of documents and the conflicts of

testimony), but what was meant to be said and at what diverse levels of

understanding the saying was to be received.

There is a vital sense in which grammar has ͚developed man͛, in which we can be

defined as a mammal that uses the future of the verb ͚to be͛. (͙) The syntactic

development is inextricably inwowen with historical self-awareness. The ͚axiomatic

fictions͛ of forward inference and anticipation are far more than a specialized

gain of human consciousness. (͙) The provision of concepts and speech acts

emboding the future is as indispensable as is that of dreams to the economy of the

brain. Cut off from futurity, reason would wither. (͙) Through shared habits of

articulate futurity the individual forgets, literally ͚overlooks͛, the certainty

absoluteness of his own extinction. Through his constant use of a tense-logic and
time-scale beyond that personal being, private man identifies, however abstractly

with the survival of his species. (͙) Future tenses are an example, through one of

the most important, of the more general framework of non- and counter- factuality.

They are a part of the capacity of language for the fictional and illustrate the

absolute central power of the human word to go beyond and against ͚that which is

the case͛.

Language is in part, physical, in part mental. Its grammar is temporal and also

seems to create and inform our experience of time. A third polarity is that of

private and public. It is worth looking at closely because it poses the question

of translation in its purest form. In what way can language, which is by operative

definition a shared code of exchange, be regarded as private ? To what degree is

the verbal expression, the semiotic field in which an individual functions, a

unique idiom or idiolect ? How does this personal ͚privacy͛ relate to the larger

͚privacy of context͛ in the speech of a given community or national language ? The

paradoxically possibility of the existence of private language has widely

exercised modern logic and linguistic philosophy. It may be that a muddle between

͚idiolect͛ and ͚privacy͛ has frustrated the whole debate.

Meaning and public verification are reciprocal aspects of a genuine speech-act.

Wittgenstein insists that any given sign which has a use cannot simply be

associated with a personal sensation. In language utility and mutual

intelligibility are indivisible.

͚A privately referring-with-a-word person is not a referring-with-a-word person at

all. A person who is privately referring with a word is not a logical

possibility͛.

(͙) a distinction must be drawn between a language which only one person does use

and understand (the last member of a moribund community or speech-culture), and a language which
only one person can use and understand.

͚The fact that a word has a private reference does not mean that it has a private

meaning; there is no reason why a word should not refer to a private object and

yet have a meaning that is publicly ascertainable and publicy checkable͛. (D.

Locke)

G. Weiler : ͚To use a language <<in isolation>> is like playing a game of

solitaire. The names of the cards and the rules of the manipulation are publicly

given and the latter enable the player to play without the participation of other

players. So, in a very important sense, even in a game of solitaire others

participate, namely those who had made up the rules of the game.͛

No two human beings share an identical associative context. Because such a context

is made up of the totality of an individual existence, because it comprehends not

only the sum of personal memory and experience but also the reservoir of the

particular subconscious, it wiil differ from person to person. There are no

facsimiles of sensibility, no twin psyches. All speech forms and notations,

therefore, entail a latent or realized element of individual specificity. They are

in part an idiolect. Every counter of commnunication carries with it a potential

or externalized aspect of personal content. The zone of private specification can

extend to minimal phonetic units.

(͙) Because every speech form and symbolic code is open to contingencies of memory
and of new experience, semantic values are necessarily affected by individual and/or historical-cultural
factors.