Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

The main cause of problems is solutions, an American wit once declared, and the conundrums created by rephrasing self-referring sentences taken out of any context seem to be good examples of that. That’s because (3) is not the only way you can express (1) in French. Indeed, it’s just about the least plausible version you could come up with. A better match would be:

4. Cette phrase est constituée par sept mots.

But because philosophy is written by philosophers and not translators, the clash between (1) and (3) is taken to be a demonstration of a wider, general truth:

Translation between languages cannot preserve reference (what a sentence is about), self-reference (what a sentence says about itself) and truth-value (whether the sentence is right or wrong) at the same time.[159]

This would explain in a nutshell why puns and plays on words and all those kinds of jokes that exploit specific features of the language in which they are expressed cannot be translated. Because this is presented as a general assertion, it can be disproved by a single persuasive counterexample. But the reason it is wrong is not contained in any counterexample. The flaw in the axiom lies in its failure to say what it means by “translate.” So here’s my idea of a better approximation to the truth about translation:

Arduously head-scratching, intellectually agile wordsmiths may simultaneously preserve the reference, self-reference, and truth value of an utterance when fate smiles on them and allows them to come up with a multidimensional matching expression in their own language.

In chapter 52 of Georges Perec’s Life A User’s Manual, a depressed young man called Grégoire Simpson wanders around Paris and stares for hours at shop windows. He saunters into a covered arcade and gazes at the display of a printer’s wares—dummy letterheads, wedding invitations, and joke visiting cards. Here’s one of them:

Adolf Hitler

Fourreur

Fourreur is the French word for “furrier,” but it is also an approximate representation of the way the German word Führer is pronounced in French. The joke is a metalinguistic and self-referring one, provided you know who and what Hitler was, know in addition that a furrier and a dictator are different things, and are able to subvocalize the French word as if it were a German sound and vice versa. What needs matching to make a translation of this joke is not any one of these particular things in French but the relationship between them—the pattern of mismatched sounds and meanings between two tongues, one of which has to be German.

I came up with this:

Adolf Hitler

German Lieder

It took a while to find, and it took a stroke of luck. It may well be not the only or the best possible translation of Perec’s joke visiting card, but it matches well enough in the dimensions that matter. It plays a sound game between English and German, and it relies on the same general field of knowledge. It doesn’t preserve all dimensions of the original—what ever does?—but it matches enough of them, in my honest but not very humble opinion, to count as a satisfactory translation of a self-referring, metalinguistic, and interlingual joke.

Humorous remarks, shaggy-dog tales, witty anecdotes, and silly jokes are untranslatable only if you insist on understanding “translation” as a low-level matching of the signifiers themselves. Translation is obviously not that. The matches it provides relate to those dimensions of an utterance that, taken together, account for its principal force in the context in which it is uttered.

That still doesn’t tell us what we mean by “match.” But we’re getting closer.

TWENTY-SIX Style and Translation

Translations typically alter numerous features of the source in order to produce matches for those of its dimensions that count in the context it has. But there is one traditionally perceived quality of written and spoken language that is identified not with any particular dimension of an utterance but with the overall relationship between them—its style.

Style is more than genre. Kitchen recipes are typically translated not into something as vague and undifferentiated as “English” but into “kitchen recipese,” the genre constituted by the conventional features that kitchen recipes have in our tongue.

In like manner, you don’t translate French poetry into “English” but into poetry, as the American poet and translator C. K. Williams insists. Poetry is a characteristic social and cultural use of language and can therefore count as a genre in our sense, but it comes in many different forms. Beyond the genre, a poetry translator has to choose the particular style that he is going to use.