Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

The hero of James Cameron’s science-fiction fantasy is a human transformed by a laboratory technique into another being—nine feet tall, with a prehensile tail and amazing skydiving skills. His task is to penetrate the society of same-looking beasts causing trouble for a galactic mining company, and then to send back to his controllers the information they need to get the local inhabitants out of their way. He is still a human being under his impressive new shape.

But now that he has become a Pandoran in outward appearance, our hero becomes Pandoran in other ways, too. He goes native, so to speak, and becomes loyal to the community that has now accepted him as one of its own. These strange beings are fighting to remain themselves and to pursue the lives they have always had. Our hero makes their right to be different his own.

But respect for difference is clearly intended in the film to be an expression of a human value. So is our hero one of them, or still, at bottom, one of us? Is the mining company the vector of humanity—or are the awkward beasts in its way the true embodiment of our aspirations and souls?

The movie doesn’t quite answer the question at the end. It is the question that translation sets and must also leave open. How can a hugely modified transmogrification of some utterance—incorporating on occasions the verbal equivalent of a nine-foot-long tail—still remain, at some fundamental level, what it was?

Like Cameron’s fantasy, the practice of translation rests on two presuppositions. The first is that we are all different—we speak different tongues and see the world in ways that are deeply influenced by the particular features of the tongue that we speak. The second is that we are all the same—that we can share the same broad and narrow kinds of feelings, information, understandings, and so forth. Without both of these suppositions, translation could not exist.

Nor could anything we would like to call social life.

Translation is another name for the human condition.

Afterbabble: In Lieu of an Epilogue

In most intellectual disciplines, the stories of the Hebrew Bible are no longer used as sources or tools for thought. Translation studies is an exception. Scholars and essayists in this field continue to pay extravagant attention to the account of the origin of linguistic diversity given in the Bible.[179] It’s far from obvious that their time is well spent.

The Tower of Babel comes from a story told in Genesis 11. The first verse states that in the beginning “the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech.”

This is not very plausible. Nothing we know or can observe about human linguistic behavior makes it likely that there ever was a single form of speech.

The rest of this section of the Bible, Genesis 11:2–9, offers an account of how the ancestors of the Jewish people got from their hypothetical state of linguistic unity to the condition of diversity that manifestly characterized the part of the world they lived in some three to four thousand years ago.

The voluminous tradition of Babel commentary weaves religious, philosophical, historical, cultural, archaeological, and philological speculations around the story told in Genesis. Do these verses contain a trace of historical events? Or should we read them rather as a fable designed to account for the way things are, or the way they were long ago? For the purposes of this book, it does not matter whether there really was a ziggurat honoring the Assyrian god Marduk near the place now called Babil (in Iraq), or whether it was visited by Herodotus, or when it fell down. For an understanding of language and translation, it doesn’t matter if or how the Bible story is related to the Sumerian Incantation of Nudimmud. Nor does it make any difference whether we pick from the welter of Babel commentaries those which assume that linguistic diversity is a Dreadful Mess (the vast majority, in fact), those that claim it has a Silver Lining, or those few who argue that it is a Very Good Thing.[180]

What matters is whether we allow Genesis 11:1 to close our minds to other ways of imagining the origin of human speech. Cynics might say that’s what religious texts are supposed to do. But translation is not a matter of faith. It’s much more interesting than that.

The supposition of an original common form of speech has been taken to mean that intercomprehensibility is the ideal or essential nature of language itself. Such an assumption makes translation a compensatory strategy designed only to cope with a state of affairs that falls short of the ideal. It licenses, indirectly but no less strongly, all the many attempts there have been to devise languages that for some if not all purposes improve upon those that we have.[181]