Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

GPDs of any language, and quite especially those using an alphabetical script, are always of potentially infinite size, because no language can have fixed boundaries in time or space, and there can be no ultimate, definitive division of a social practice into a finite set of components. To escape from this dilemma while pursuing the broad project of mapping a particular language, Peter Mark Roget devised his Thesaurus (“treasure” in Greek), which uses not the arbitrary order of the alphabet but the natural order of the world as its organizing principle. He established six general classes of “real things,” which are not material things but ideas: Abstract Relations, Space, Matter, Intellectual Faculties, Voluntary Power, and Sentient and Moral Powers. These he divided into categories, then broke down each category into lesser groups of ideas, and only at this point does he list all the words and expressions that may be used to communicate the idea. “Sentient and Moral Powers,” for example, incorporates the category of “Personal Affections,” one of whose groups is constituted by “Discriminative Affections,” among which figures the subgroup “Aggravation.” That’s where you find a raft of words and phrases including anger, ire, fury, to get up someone’s nose, to piss someone off, and to get someone’s goat—a long list of synonyms all of which express some quality or variety of aggravation. Roget’s Thesaurus is an extraordinary achievement. Its structure harks back to those Sumerian word hoards on clay tablets sorted by thematic category, but as it contains very few words like polyester, recitative, or crankset, it offers no support at all to those who would like to see a language as a list of the names of things. Rather, it displays to a spectacular degree the sheer redundancy of the vocabulary set that we have, with dozens of words giving only minutely different shades of meaning for almost exactly the same thing (anger, ire, fury …). Roget shows language to be a rich, illogical, and complicated tool for making fine and often arbitrary distinctions—for discriminating, separating out, and saying the same thing in different ways.

The thesaurus was not designed as a resource for translators, but it serves translation in two distinct and equally important ways. The first is eminently practical. Browsing Roget’s lists of quasi-synonyms and cognate words helps a writer—who may also be a translator at that point—to identify a term to express a more precise shade of meaning than the word that first came to mind. In the second place, however, a thesaurus says on every page that to know a language is to know how to say the same thing in different words. That is precisely what translators seek to do. Roget’s wonderful Thesaurus reminds them that in one language as well as between any two, all words are translations of others.

TEN The Myth of Literal Translation

With bilingual dictionaries to get them started and Roget’s Thesaurus to help them polish their work to a nice finish, translators ought not to find it too hard to tell us what the words on the page really mean. In practice, however, it’s the words on the page that hang like a dark veil over what a piece of written language means. Words taken one by one obscure the force and meaning of a text, which is why a word-for-word translation is almost never a good job. This isn’t a new insight: arguments against literal translation go back almost as far as written translation itself.[51]

After immersing himself for several years in the history of translation, George Steiner discovered that it consisted very largely of repeated arguments over this same point. “Over some two thousand years of argument and precept,” he wrote with perceptible frustration, “the beliefs and disagreements voiced about the nature of translation have been almost the same.”[52]

When Don Quixote’s favorite bedtime book, Amadis de Gaula, appeared in French, for example, the translator gave his patron two reasons for not having stuck to the literal meanings of the Spanish words: