Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

For me, no English translation can have the same weight or familiarity or perfection or mystery—nor can any paraphrase in German. I cherish these sounds and words of a language I wanted to master and which I learned in part through the unscrambling and memorization of just these lines. The emotion that for me and me alone is wrapped up in the opening of Rilke’s Duino Elegies derives from my past, and although I can tell you about it in this roundabout way, you can’t share it directly with me. What can’t be shared can’t be translated—obviously enough. But that doesn’t make the poem untranslatable for anyone else:

Who, if I cried, would hear me among the angels’ hierarchies? and even if one would take me suddenly to his heart: I would die of his stronger existence.

I might have translated the lines that way when I was learning German by learning Rilke. The English says pretty much what the German says. Is it poetry? That’s a judgment everyone makes independently, by criteria that have absolutely nothing to do with the quality of the translation. This one, in fact, wasn’t done by a poet or by a translator. It was done (with a little help from a friend) by a machine translation service available for free on the Internet.

Personal, quasi-biographical reasons for valuing poems are probably very common. We may say that we treasure a line or a rhyme or a lyric “in and for itself,” but it’s easier to demonstrate that poems often get attached to us, or we get attached to poems, in contexts that endow the attachment with personal emotion. It does not matter whether the focus of such affective investment and aesthetic appreciation was first written in another language and then translated, or written in the language in which we read it. In any case, you can’t tell. A Russian reader may know that Pasternak’s быть или не быть—вот вопрос is a translation, but if she hasn’t been told, she has no way of assessing—and no reason to ask—whether it is more or less poetical than Shakespeare’s “To be or not to be, that is the question.”

We can grant that emotional relationships to things, including poems and forms of language, may be ultimately incommunicable. However, beliefs about the uniqueness and ineffability of emotional attachments have no relevance to the question of whether poetry is translatable. That is a much less abstruse matter.

Some people doubt that there are any affects or experiences that cannot be expressed, on the commonsensical grounds that we could say nothing about them and would therefore have no way of knowing if they existed for other people. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein presumably meant to adopt an agnostic position on this issue in the famous last line of his Tractatus when he wrote, “What one cannot talk about must be left in silence.”[86] The infinite flexibility of language and our experience of shared emotion in reading novels and poems and at the movies must also cast doubt on whether there are any human experiences that cannot in principle be shared. On the other side of this thorny tangle is the intuitive knowledge that what we feel is unique to us and can never be fully identified with anything felt by anyone else. That inexpressible residue of the individual is ineffable—and the ineffable is precisely what cannot be translated.

Should translation studies pay any attention to the ineffable, or to notions, intuitions, feelings, and relations that are held to be unspeakable? Oddly enough, anguished engagement with the problem of ineffable essences is not at all characteristic of Bible translation, where you might expect to find mystical and religious issues taken seriously. Instead, it has preoccupied secular scholars of the twentieth century, from Walter Benjamin to George Steiner and Antoine Berman. I would rather approach this boundary of translation from the opposite direction, for it seems to me more important to realize not that the ineffable is a problem for translation, but that translation is one big problem for the ineffable.

Let’s imagine a crew returning from a space flight at some future point in time. They’ve visited a faraway Earth-like planet and are holding a press conference at NASA headquarters. They have something spectacular to announce. Yes, KRX29¹ is inhabited, they say, and, what’s more, the little green men that live on it have a language.

“How do you know that?” a journalist asks.

“Well, we learned to communicate with them,” the captain responds.

“And what did they say?”

“We can’t tell you that,” the captain answers coolly. “Their language is entirely untranslatable.”