Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

To put it in a slacker style, “I translate word for word only where the original—even its word order—is completely impenetrable to me.” That is, of course, what translators have always done. For the most part, they transmit the sense; where the sense is obscure, the best they can do—because unlike ordinary readers they are not allowed to skip—is to offer a representation of the separate words of the original. This may even explain the style of the translation of the extract quoted here. Maybe Derrida’s translator, far from trying to sound foreign, was simply baffled.

What, then, is a literal translation? Not a substitution of letters, since we call that transliteration. A one-for-one substitution of the separated written words? Maybe. When confronted with a decidedly loose French translation of “The Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” Mark Twain decided to back-translate his story into English using a single-word substitution device intended as the opposite of his French translator’s overuse of rephrasing.

THE FROG JUMPING OF THE COUNTY OF CALAVERAS

It there was one time here an individual known under the name of Jim Smiley; it was in the winter of ’49, possibly well at the spring of ’50, I no me recollect not exactly. This which me makes to believe that it was the one or the other, it is that I shall remember that the grand flume is not achieved when he arrives at the camp for the first time, but of all sides he was the man the most fond of to bet which one have seen, betting upon all that which is presented, when he could find an adversary; and when he not of it could not, he passed to the side opposed.[56]

This schoolboy prank mocks French, French grammar, the school teaching of French, and so forth. But the main thing it demonstrates is Octavio Paz’s point: “literal translation” is not impossible, but it is not a translation. You can only understand the target text if you can do a reverse substitution of the words of the source and read the French through its representation in English. In other words, to make any sense of “The Frog Jumping” you have to know French, whereas the whole purpose of translation of any kind is to make the source available to those readers of the target who do not know the source language. A translation that makes no sense without recourse to the original is not a translation. This axiom incidentally explains why the meaning of cherub will forever remain a speculation.

The term literal also hides other mysteries. It is used to refer not only to a translation style that barely exists but to say something about the way an expression is supposed to be understood.

The distinction between the literal and figurative meanings of words has been at the heart of Western education for more than two millennia. The literal meaning of an expression is supposed to be its meaning prior to any act of interpretation, its natural, given, standard, shared, neutral, plain meaning.

However, when we say, “It was literally raining cats and dogs last night,” we mean the adverb literally in a figurative sense. Studies of large corpora of recorded speech have shown that the majority of the uses of literal and literally in English are figurative; similar results would no doubt be extracted from written texts in all European languages.[57] This is a curious irony, because expressions that mean one thing and its opposite were a thorn in the flesh of precisely those Greek thinkers who invented the distinction between literal and figurative in the first place. But language is like putty. The figurative use of literal is one among a thousand cases of expressions meaning this and its opposite, depending on what you use them to mean.

Literal is an adjective formed from the noun littera, meaning “letter” in Latin. A letter in this sense is a written sign that belongs to a set of signs, some subsets of which can be used to communicate meanings. Speech communicates meaning, writing communicates meaning—but letters on their own do not have any meaning. That’s what a letter is—a sign that is meaningless except when used as part of a string. The expression “literal meaning,” taken literally, is a contradiction in terms, an oxymoron, and a nonsense.