The Knife in the Stone: Essays in Literary Theory 9783111342412, 9783110991123

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DE PROPRIETATIBUS LITTERARUM edenda curat C. H. VAN S C H O O N E V E L D Indiana University

Series Minor, 9

THE KNIFE IN THE STONE Essays in Literary Theory

by Frederic Will

1973

MOUTON THE H A G U E - P A R I S

© Copyright 1973 in The Netherlands Mouton & Co. Ν. V., Publishers, The Hague No part of this book may be translated or reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publishers

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER: 72-94513

Printed in Hungary

For Theodor Adorno who opened up many paths in the woods

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Some of these essays were originally published, in different form, in the following journals, to which I am grateful for permission to reprint here: "Consciousness and the Self", Giornale di Metafisica (1960), pp. 413-420. "The Motive of Literary Criticism", The Dickinson Review (1967), pp. 5-10. "Translation and the Limits of Inter-Cultural Understanding", Tamkang Review (1972), pp.. 141-158. "The Evaluation and Use of Translations", Wisconsin Conference on the Teaching of World Literature (1959), pp. 23-30. "Translation and Criticism", Iowa Review (1971), pp. 97-108.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments 3 I. Consciousness and the Self 7 II. The Motive of Literary Criticism 16 III. What are Literary Genres? 24 IV. Physical Symbols in Poetry 33 V. The Oneness of Literature 41 VI. Translation and the Limits of Inter-Cultural Understanding 59 VII. The Evaluation and Use of Translations 78 VIII. Notes on Translations of Three Stories 87 IX. Translation and Criticism 99 X. Faithful Traitors 110 Bibliography 160 Index 161

I CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE SELF The mirror, above / all - the mirror is our teacher. Leonardo

Consciousness is an awareness of being aware. From the outset, then, it involves reflectivity. It is not single but differentiated. To be sure, we all carry in us the impression, or intuition, of a state of pure, undifferentiated consciousness, but there is no conclusive evidence for the existence of that state. Even the vast, oceanic subconscious seems to be permeated with reflectivity. The censor labors there to prevent unacceptable awareness from rising to the surface of conscious life. The censor is the unconscious' awareness of its own contents. In fact, the distinction between the unconscious and the conscious life seems, as we grow more subtle in our understanding of the former, to be a very relative distinction. As the ground for the growth of the individual psyche, consciousness precedes selfhood. The awareness of being aware appears, to the degree that we can isolate it, to be neutral in character, that is prior to qualification. Such priority is temporal, for one thing. One's consciousness precedes one's being a self. Yet consciousness is also psycho-genetically prior to self. Selfhood is generated as a mode of being from consciousness. Awareness of being aware, then, is the source of selfhood. The word 'source' has a distinctive meaning here. Simply to say that self emerges from consciousness is very little. Self, as a matter of fact, is the way in which one is aware of being aware, the way in which one is conscious. Each consciousness is, in a distinctive way, awareness of being aware. Each person is conscious in his own way. This way is his self. It is only in this sense, then, that selfhood emerges from consciousness, as a character-differentiation in consciousness.

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Such a position introduces the question of the substantiality of the self. Is the self, as it is defined here, a substance? My own argument can be pinned down by being distinguished, at this point, from the corresponding positions of certain social psychologists, on the one hand, and of certain 'structure' philosophers, on the other. G. H. Mead, as an example of the former, elaborated a theory of the social self. That is the self which we construct by our interactions with our society. The learning of a socially transmitted language is a first stage in this construction. From this language we acquire our ideas of selfhood through words like T , 'me', and 'myself'. We proceed to form notions of ourselves which conform to this - misleading - initial linguistic assumption of a substantial self. Other people's attitudes toward us play a large part in creating these notions. So does our awareness of ourselves carrying on dialogue with those other people. We hear ourselves talk - how else could we understand what we say? - and at the same time form opinions of ourselves. Then in accordance with our conception of ourselves we adopt roles, enacting ourselves in a variety of formulaic ways. In all of these negotiations with society we simply create social selves which have only pragmatic significance. They are useful. We have no substantial self. J. P. Sartre has also tried to deny the substantiality of the self. His theory is more complex than Mead's. In part it consists in eliminating the conscious self, and leaving, under the rubric 'self', only an inert substance. For Sartre substance, the en-soi, is being which achieves complete identification with itself, and in which, if it had consciousness, there would be no fissure between consciousness and the object of that consciousness. The en-soi is inert, has no past or future, and is the peaceful quietude toward which human being moves, indeed strives, inexorably. Human being, however, is pour-soi, that is, it exists 'for itself, as presence to itself; it is, in other terms, awareness of being aware. Sartre's analysis of consciousness, in fact, is a good statement of that division in consciousness, which I have called 'awareness of being aware'. Yet Sartre accords no substantial status to this uneasy consciousness. Rather he is preoccupied with the nothingness of

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consciousness. For that consciousness plays over the cleft between being aware and the awareness of being aware, the cleft which we are forever unsuccessfully trying to close, and can only close with death. Our effort is unsuccessful, while we live, because we can never achieve identity with ourselves, a state of being en-soi. What we customarily consider the conscious self becomes, to Sartre, an abyss played over by the insubstantial, groundless dialectic of consciousness. All he will call 'self' is the inert en-soi which is our past - though it can never have a past - and which we vainly try to rejoin in the effort to be identical with 'ourselves'. In very different ways, then, Mead and Sartre try to deny the substantiality of the conscious self, while retaining the basic concept of self in a different form. In Mead the notion of substantial self has been replaced by the notion of a function of social existence and social activity. In Sartre the traditional self has been replaced by a mobile, groundless structure within consciousness. This structure is deprived of its selfhood, which Sartre locates elsewhere. Both Mead and Sartre have revolted against the idea of the inertness and changelessness of the self, against the traditional conception of self as substance. They have substituted radically dynamic concepts, and implicitly raised the question : is it possible to preserve the insight of the dynamism of self without revolting so exclusively against the idea of a substantial self? I think it is possible; I have just such a preservation in mind, in considering self as emergent in the structure of consciousness. I take issue with either of these two different kinds of modern theory. The way in which one is conscious, to return to my definition of the self, is not a substance. Naturally a way cannot be a substance. But it can, in certain senses, be substantial. For one thing, in the case before us, the self has the permanence of the dynamic structure of consciousness. That structure lasts as long, at least, as the individual in whom it inheres. But as a structure, it is not only permanent in the sense of being relatively durable. The identity of consciousness with itself through time is further proof of its relative permanence. This is not the permanence of substance in, say, a mediaeval sense of substance as imperishable. But it is

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permanence of sufficient strength that existence of increasing complexity and richness can be built on consciousness. Yet the self does not simply share such important kinds of permanence with the structure of consciousness. The self is substantial in the sense of being the source of growth. The multifarious values of self-consciousness spring from the self, of course. The awareness of the awareness of being aware is an indispensable condition for the depth on which good art (and good criticism) depends. The artist's awareness of the structure of his self becomes an out-working ingredient in his imaginative vision of a coherent world of selves. In fact creative activity in general, whether active or passive, depends heavily on such inward dimensions of reflectivity. This is only further evidence that the self as the dynamic structure of consciousness has substantial traits. The self is evidently no mere attribute of consciousness. The insubstantiality of this self, relative to the self of many mediaeval thinkers, is equally clear. There is no going back to the mediaeval brand of confidence in substance. The relation of self to soul, as it is variously expressed in, say, many scholastic thinkers, is close. Mind, body, and soul are viewed as the three ingredients of human being. Self often serves, along with soul, or in place of it, as symbol of man's ineffable character. In itself, this close relating of self to soul led to associating with the self the attributes commonly reserved for the soul : imperishability, immateriality, separability, separability from the organism in which it appeared, or found itself. In terms of this theologically tinted description of selfhood the present notion of self must inevitably seem insubstantial. Yet there is another, and for our time more consequential, sense in which the insubstantiality of self needs to be remembered. I am referring to the dependence of self, for its existence, on being enacted. It is not a question, simply, of the fact that self is not the ground of its own being, as has been indicated already by the rooting of self in consciousness. I mean that self must continually earn its own being through existing it, thus through bringing it into being. Of course viewed in one way, in the terms of the present

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argument, the mere fact of being conscious is enough to guarantee the existence of one's self. The self is just the way in which one is conscious. But earning one's existence cannot mean simply being conscious. Nor can we accept the idea that the more conscious one is, the more he is himself, that is, that there is a quantitative correspondence between consciousness and selfhood. We feel that, though self emerges in the structure of consciousness, the two inner realms are of different nature. One can be highly conscious without being himself, and, oddly enough, the reverse can be true. Or perhaps this is not so odd. Self is not, after all, consciousness, but rather it is the way in which one is conscious. We find, accordingly, that though one must be conscious to be himself, it is not by being more conscious but by being conscious in a unique way which is his own that one becomes himself, enacts his self in such a way as to give it fuller existence. It is thus that self, being never fully realized, always striving, is in an additional sense insubstantial. Yet we need to remark, immediately, on the difference of this point from Sartre's. For him the self, that is, in this case, the en-soi is always an unrealized yet transcendently significant component of the structure of consciousness. It is unrealized because the fissure between the reflecting and the reflected elements of consciousness provides (and incidentally measures) the distance dividing us from ourselves - from self-identity, that is, in which we are finally what we are, instead, as in the case of normal consciousness, of being what we are not. As it is, nothingness (le néant) haunts all the efforts of our pour-soi forward into the future. The position I have taken is in some ways similar to Sartre's. I held that consciousness is fissured by reflectivity, and that the self is an inner, as distinct from an externally elicited, or social, entity. I disagree, though, with Sartre's idea that the true self exists, as it were, inertly and at an inaccessible distance from consciousness. He confusingly introduces the notion of the nothingness of the present of human being to characterize the ambience in which consciousness progresses. Thus he relegates substance to the past (le passé). In fact, however, that ambience in which our consciousness progresses is precisely the 'form' of self toward which the dynamism of consciousness more or less

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nearly approximates. The presence of self as a positive possibility is a dominant invitation to the partially fulfilled self, which enacts itself in its own consciousness' distinct rhythm. Self, consequently, is eminently presence, even though it is not fully realized, and thus remains, in that sense, insubstantial. I think we can claim a modified and relative substantiality for the self as the way in which one is conscious. Yet the characterization of self as a relatively substantial way of being conscious may seem to lack life. Granted that that way varies with the individual consciousness, so that each self is unique, can we make any general statement about the nature of that way? Can we say of it anything such as : 'the way in which one is conscious is love?' or 'the way in which one is conscious is distinction-making'? The answer is 'yes'. By closely regarding the semi-substantial nature of self, as I have tried to depict it here, we can discern the basically appetitive nature of the self, of the way we are aware of being aware. Awareness of being aware involves contemplation, in a broad sense, of the experienced surrounding world (the Umwelt). That world confronts us through experience: it may confront actively, as, say, it confronts a poet; it may confront passively, as that same landscape for which a planning engineer projects radical disturbances, such as a plowing-up with bulldozers; it may confront us, as when we are physically active, simply as a concomitant of our own forward-striving inner existence. In all of these cases the world which meets us in experience is first a 'being aware' in our consciousnesses, then is a 'being aware of being aware'. This transformation of the raw materials of consciousness, then, is what I mean by the contemplation involved in consciousness. Reflective awareness proposes some fragment of the encountered Umwelt to its own attention. It will be clear, I believe, in what sense this contemplative tendency of the structure of consciousness is appetitive. That structure is literally a hunger to draw the experienced closely and deeply in, thus lending a distinctive impetus to all the self's negotiations with what-is. This is so true that it is unimaginable that self should be anything but a way of drawing encountered reality into a focus of

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apprehension, removing it thereby from the condition of being merely encountered. Being human, as we know it, is closely connected with being such an appetitive self. The extent to which this is true may be illustrated by returning, briefly, to one of the examples only mentioned above in order to prove the universality of the appetitive motion of consciousness. I am thinking of our action, our forward-striving inner experience, in which, it might appear, the self's appetitive-contemplative effort was negligible. If we can point out that there is such effort even here, it will support the overall present argument. In one sense, human existence is action, just as it is consciousness. The moi, as Bergson said, acquires an always-changing character from the interpénétration of memory with the vanishing present of consciousness. One is different every instant because his past, out of which his present is created, has changed by the amount of the instant which has just been relegated to it. When I speak of action in the present argument, however, I mean to distinguish it from that more general sense of the word, in which we are all active as long as we exist. I chose above the example of the engineer who plans to reform the land, and claimed that this man's self is thereby confronting the land appetitively, and in that sense contemplatively, despite his intention to act on the land. Yet this example was relatively easy. Let us consider, to be fairer, the peculiar case of what we call charity, that highly conscious effort to do good for other people, to help others. Charity is surely action : that is, a directed outward motion of the self. Its object is ostensibly the outer, the other, quite as conspicuously as the engineer's object is an outer plot of ground. Yet charity is far more intimately and probingly related to its outer object than the engineer's plans are to the land. How are we to say that the consciousness of the charitable man operates appetitively in the act of being charitable? An answer to this question may provide us with incidental benefit, that is, benefit additional to supporting the present argument about the nature of self. It may be possible to claim that the apparent ego-centricity of self, its mere appetitiveness, is not incompatible with generosity, that is, with a tendency to give from one's self.

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In an act of real charity - to be distinguished, of course, from ostentatious giving - the object of charity is made of great importance, becomes 'the experienced' under one of its keenest forms. Few of our usual transactions with nature or man, whether they are moral, rational, or aesthetic transactions, propose to themselves objects on which they bestow such intrinsic worth as one bestows on those who awaken his sense of charity. Consequently being charitable is being deeply aware. Yet it appears to be more than that. It is awareness which is drawn into the full circuit of one's consciousness, and itself deepened by being reflected on. In no situation, in fact, is our being-aware more fully made the concern of the reflectivity which waits in the core of consciousness. In other words, in charity we draw the experienced other person into contact with our whole self, which, in the process of realizing itself through the motion of consciousness, has confronted, indeed almost fused with, the other person. The action which charity is, that vital forth-going of our being, shows itself to be, surprisingly enough, a particularly clear example of that appetitive structure of consciousness on which our selves are built. And here - to point to that incidental benefit of the discussion of charity is the ground for a theory of how the growth of the self and the moral imperative, so called, may be simultaneously satisfied. That problem, of such concern to a romantic mind like Wordsworth, has often been made to seem unnecessarily difficult by a sentimental confusion between generosity and so-called 'loss of self', a confusion for which undiscriminating pantheisms deserve some responsibility. In fact the problem is less difficult. The apparent - but only apparent - ego-centricity of self is found to be a creative element in the deepest encounter which we are capable of having with the self of another person. There remains much to be said of this appetitive nature of self : of particular value would be a sketch of the various relationships contracted by self, and of the nature we must assume being to have, in order for it to support such relationships. Problems of such complexity must, unfortunately, be totally omitted here. Having expressed first a view of the nature of consciousness, then of self's

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relation to consciousness, and having finally remarked on the character of self, I have nearly completed the present argument. It is left to restate, in the light of what has been argued, a familiar and fundamental truth concerning the self. I mean the truth that each self is unique, and bears an ineffable character. Only as a fact of intuition does this truth give or permanently re-establish itself : yet its very intuitive basis is enough to make it partially suspect, or in need of a more discursive, gradual demonstration. The origin of self from consciousness, self's dynamic way, and the appetitive character of self can become stages in such a possible demonstration. They are stages from which one might, by an imaginative logic, conclude to precisely that uniqueness and ineffability which we associate with self. The origin of self from consciousness confronts us with the fact that man is essentially, if not spirit, at least subjectivity and viewpoint. That origin traces self back to Ur-awareness, the condition of sense-existence. Already in this pure reflective awareness, it seems, one exists as a point-ofview, an angle-of-vision, if 'vision' be taken as a metaphor for présense awareness. Yet self, it is claimed, is distinguishable from the consciousness which sponsors it: it is the way one is conscious. Self is action, then, a way of envisaging, as distinct from being merely an angle-of-virion. At the same time it is a continual appetitive transaction with what-is, and thus always has content. To the putative subjectivity of self as rooted in one subject's consciousness, may be added the dynamic way-ness, and the ever-changing, distinctive content of self as further indication of the privacy of each individual's self. Admittedly, privacy is not equivalent to uniqueness, or ineffability. But those states of self, as already said, can never be convincingly affirmed except in intuition. The demonstration of the dimensions of that privacy is as close as we can come to drawing the unnameability of self up into words.

II THE MOTIVE OF LITERARY CRITICISM

Our century has devoted to literary criticism, the most voluminous and refined thought ever devoted to that activity in a similar period of time. The critic has become a prominent, almost a typical, figure in the intellectual life of universities and on the pages of little magazines. Both his practical and his theoretical claims have multiplied. Practical criticism, the analysis and evaluation of particular books, has been given systematic attention: explication de textes, familiar throughout western culture as a theological discipline or a schoolboy exercise, has reappeared as a refined literary tool, and has newly revealed the qualities of old masterpieces. In America, especially through the New Criticism, the theoretical aspects of literary criticism have received attention along with the practical ones. For instance, the area of critical judgment has been surveyed, and divided conceptually into affective, cognitive, and intentional regions. It has been pointed out that the critic's undertaking may have one of several directions: he may consider his - or other peoples' - response to a work of literature; or he may consider the intelligible content of that work; or he may consider the motive, the intention, of the author in creating that work. The critic is left free to choose his path. But he is told, above all, that he should be aware of what he is doing, of what direction he is taking. Confusions among these three directions of criticism have been loudly pointed out, and the attitude from which the average critic starts to work, as far as this matter is concerned, is more alert than it would have been thirty years ago. This is only one of the accomplishments of modern critical theory. It is by now very old-hat. It serves as well as any to illustrate a weakness which is the reverse of those accomplishments.

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Noticeably lacking to the whole American critical movement, even in its theoretical phase, is a philosophical underpinning. The fundamental nature and value of criticism itself have been little considered. Yet an understanding of those matters is of importance to a critic, and to the deeper success of his work. Whether he likes it or not his critical activity is pervaded with philosophical implications, of which he had better be conscious than unconscious. Suppose, for example, that a critic is concerned mainly with the cognitive dimension of literature, with the intelligible structure of literary works. He is anxious, as critic, to convey clearly to his readers just what is in this or that novel. Whether he knows it or not he must proceed, from the start, as though he had answered at least two philosophical questions : in what sense is a literary work intelligible; in what way is it possible to convey that kind of intelligibility to another person? His critical effort will presume, in the first place, that he has adopted some attitude toward the degree of 'publicity' or of 'accessibility' of the meaning of a work of literature. To what degree does he think the meaning of literature is unambiguous, like that of mathematics, and thus directly communicable? To what degree does he think the meaning of literature is hidden, paradoxical, hard to grasp? In short, how does he think literature is intelligible? His cognitive criticism will presume a personal answer to this question. This critic must also have decided - the second presupposition behind his work - how it is possible to tell other people about the meaning of literature. This decision* however it has been made, is intimately related to the first. The sense in which literature is intelligible will determine the way in which its meaning can be discussed. The attention, in this second assumption, is on the form of communication between critic and reader. Must it be oblique, poetic? Can it be direct, prosaic? By his implicit answer to both these questions, the critic's criticism will acquire a relatively public or private stamp. It may be objected that the critic deals subconsciously, and properly so, with such kinds of assumption. Perhaps his own nature simply determines and articulates his answers. There is some truth here. But the objection makes an unnecessary concession to human

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frailty. An understanding, a conscious awareness, of his philosophical assumptions is indispensible to a good critic. Literary criticism, after all, springs from a potent urge to self-consciousness. The critic is by definition a man who is not satisfied simply to experience literature, or any other art, but who also demands to know or understand that aesthetic experience. In this sense he is an incomplete man, and ultimately an inadequate critic, if he remains unaware of the presuppositions of his aesthetic and critical experience. One way for a critic to orient himself philosophically is to understand the motive underlying his critical efforts. The value of this recourse, I suppose, is basically psychological: knowing contact with the generative sources of activities helps such activities to become articulate and effectual. In the critic's particular case the advantage is especially evident; he is stimulated to draw philosophical premises up into useable realizations. The motive force behind the literary critical act is the self's reflective structure, self's existence as a kind of awareness of being aware. This structure derives from the self's origin in consciousness, and takes the form of self's intention toward apprehension of itself-as-the-contents-of-its-experience. By 'intention' I mean a 'tendency toward', an effortful, but never complete, ever renewed, activity. Such intention, as far as we know it, is never toward pure self-awareness, toward awareness of one's-self-evacuated-of-content. The self seems never to be empty. In any case no such purity of self-experience is necessary for the literary critic or in question here. He becomes aware, quite simply, of his experiencing of a work of literature. He feels an especially strong impulse to grasp the nature and significance of his literary experience, to draw that experience into the circuit of his awareness. (To what degree he is also aware of himself having that experience is another matter. He is certainly aware of himself as some kind of ingredient in the literary experience. Does the self preserve a distance from its aesthetic encounters?) This event of 'becoming aware' of himselfhaving-a-literary-experience is the critic's way of rehearsing the fundamental rhythm of self, its intention toward reflective awareness. It is important, in understanding the enacting of this rhythmic

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motive behind criticism, to see that it is identical with the critical act itself, with the business of creating literary criticism. The enactment of the self's intention is, among other things, criticism. Yet in another sense that intention exists wholly apart from any specific enacting of it. It is part of the structure of existence of the self and has being apart from the self as do any of its activities. Literary criticism touches on being, as one expression of being. The motive of criticism, the intention of the self toward reflective awareness, can naturally be found throughout human existence. The intentionality of self develops with the person's whole growth. A baby is relative immediacy, with undeveloped reflective powers. He is little more than what he perceives. It is not long, though, before he finds himself through the attention of other selves to him. They praise, scold, fondle him. He becomes aware of himself as a person - if only as a person toward whom other persons have attitudes. As self, he is not made by his 'society', but is elicited by it. It is the beginning of that growth into deliberate self-consciousness which will characterize his mature existence. The presence of such intention of the self as a motive is common to all stages of human accomplishment; criticism, as I said, simply harnesses this infinite human force. It is no less important, however, to emphasize the closeness of criticism to this deep source. If the uniqueness of the critical act seems compromised in this way, it is compromised in the service of understanding the whole person. Nor can it be objected that understanding the generality of the motive for criticism is of no practical importance. Understanding the sources of one's acts can never be practically indifferent. The practical relevance of this understanding has an aspect which should be taken into account by the critic, almost as a warning. The critical rhythm of the self, its effort to become aware of its own existence, at least of that existence as mediated by the events of its awareness, is also a dangerous rhythm. This danger is part of the definition of criticism. Criticism has a suicidal component. The reflection of self on its own activities can become refined to a crippling extent, as much in matters of literary criticism as in any. Imagine a hypothetical literary critic. He may become

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aware of his experience in reading a book, and so on. Usually such progressive subjectivizing is not a real encounter with the initial awareness on which the critical self feeds, but simply a series of encounters with what a literary work 'means to' or 'means in' self. The extension of such degrees of self-consciousness is theoretically infinite. It is unimaginable that this refinement in degrees of reflective awareness should come to an end. The self is constructed like an infinite series of mirrors, each of which reflects from a point farther from the initially mirrored awareness. Considered in itself, the exploration of these inner dimensions is a vital, 'healthy' effort. It becomes crippling, though, at the point where the critical self begins to dissolve its literary experience in subjectivity, and therefore to deprive itself of any external relations. Unfortunately this 'point' is often hard to detect. Such a voluntary deprivation is suicidal. It can rob being of the power to act, or even to experience, with any natural fluency. It can leave us with a Hamlet, a M.Teste, or a literary critic whose experience of literature has been converted into a mediocre experience of himself through literature and who is left, consequently, detached from the activity with which he began. Strictures against the critics of our day too often apply to men of this sort. Considered from another angle, though still with concern for the critic, the refinement of self-awareness appears suicidal in another way. It is a progressively irrelevant solution to a problem; it tends to denature its problem. A criticism of Paradise Lost which becomes simply the critic's oblique commentary on himself has changed objects, ends in the Aristotelian sense, and has become untrue to its own nature. It would be hard to specify, in any particular case, just what the nature of a single job of criticism is. Nor does that kind of specification seem needed. It is only important for the critic, through an insistent use of good sense, not to abuse the object of his attention for the sake of his own inwardliness. Such an abuse causes him to be no critic at all. It is exactly at this point, in fact, that the boundary between even the most inwardly motivated critic and the philosopher is evident. The metaphysician has an end for his thought, namely Being. But in an important sense that end is

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within him. The critic, however, has an end - a work of literature or a literary problem - which is in some degree 'external' to him. This should be evident. It is not surprising, though, that the work of criticism should continually risk too great subjectivity. It is in the nature of criticism, as an activity, to be drawn back deeply into the reflective structure of self. The critic must be aware of this large rhythm in order to guard against being carried too far by it, as well as in order to enact it successfully. In general the critic's self knows how to safeguard its health, as selves usually do. On this intuitive wisdom, in fact, we base our entire notion of 'health' and 'normalcy'. The critic's activity tends to be self-generating and not self-mutilating. One factor in this stabilization, quite as significant as the self's refusal to dissolve literary experience in subjectivity, is precisely the insistence of the critical self on realizing the general intention of self toward reflective awareness. To ignore this inner tendency would be to court suicide from the other side, from the world of experience, and therefore of nature. This danger is the Charybdis to the Scylla of excess subjectivity. A product of such negligence might be a critic who offered little more than a resume of the literary work, or at most of the phenomena of his experience of the work. I am not referring to the explicateur de textes. His job requires invasion of the surface of the work. I am thinking of the reader who is engaged in deciphering the shallowest phenomena of his reading. Such ignorance of the character of criticism is more deplorable than the tendency to dissolve the critical object in subjectivity. For the critic's surrender to experience is not even of use to himself, much less to anyone else. Such surrender makes the critic a third-rate aesthete, just as surrender to the extreme of subjectivity makes him a third-rate metaphysician. The critic's adventures through his self may profit him, at least, even when they throw no light on the critical question at hand. The validation of literary criticism lies precisely in its fulfilling of a natural rhythm of self, though there is no formula for how it fulfills that rhythm, with exactly what degree of 'subjectivity' or 'objectivity' and so on. I have said that this critical rhythm of the self has its own excesses, its unnaturalnesses. The finer discrimina-

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tions of the critical self, though, must be left to the particular situation and particular human nature involved. Each critic will deal with his literary experience according to the demands of his particular way of encountering the world. There can no more be a regimentation of critics than there is of creators. The literary critical act is unimpeachable. It is a vital, selfgenerating event which can never, simply through realizing its nature, grow malignant, though it can easily be distorted. This assertion, clear in a philosophical perspective, is in its turn the ground for approaching a subtler type of argument which is often directed at criticism, and which may serve to prompt, here, a final observation on the character of literary criticism. I am thinking of the argument concerning the function of criticism. It is asked, sometimes, whether that function is primarily to assist creators of literature, or whether it has its end in itself, and is a self-validating activity. It may appear, at first, that this question should not be put so exclusively, should not be put as though the two ends of criticism were incompatible. But the present argument requires a decisive answer. The idea that literary criticism is essentially an effort to aid writers is really another way of saying that criticism is self-liquidating, that if, by a pure chance, critics had aided writers to write as best they could and should, then criticism would no longer be necessary. That this is improbable is here irrelevant. We are dealing with theories. It is not even relevant that criticism is seldom of any use at all in assisting writers to write better. For many critics look on their efforts as a co-operation with authors in the overall improvement of literature. What matters is that this argument disregards the inner nature of criticism itself. If I have been right, criticism rehearses a deep and natural rhythm of self; becoming thus a self-validating activity. It is every man's way of dealing with his own experience of literature, and as long as literature is read there will be literary criticism. The guarantee lies in the constitution of psyche: the rhythm of critical reflectiveness is essential in man. This solution may sound academic, releasing criticism from

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responsibilities toward the writer, and sanctioning a private, introverted critical effort. Isn't it true, it might be asked, that literature could well exist without literary critics while criticism would be nothing without literature? Certainly this protest has been voiced. But how strong is this protest? Once its overtones have been heard, it turns out to conceal a romantic stridency. It assumes the primacy of the creative - a primacy both in value and time. It assumes, falsely, that creative effort has more intrinsic worth than critical effort, and that creative effort preceeded critical effort. The former assumption is part of a certain spirit of our age, a conventional complaint against the rationalization of modern man and the freezing of his imagination. It is the kind of assumption which, in its 'intellectual' form, owes much to thinkers as varied as Nietzsche, Bergson, D. H. Lawrence, and Heidegger. In its anti-rational direction, though, this protest simply proposes the subordination of one more precious and needed human faculty, critical reason. Side by side with this kind of assumption, and in support of it, stands the poeta vates theory. The poet is still considered, perhaps rightly, to be the seer. Yet the critic, too, has his dignity and his inspiration. (Poets have often been excellent critics.) The critic also drinks from the pure springs of Being. As for the second assumption, that creative activity precedes criticism in time; who can doubt that when our common ancestor cut his first cave-relief, his wife by his side made an immediate grunt of approval, disapproval, or amazement? She was a critic. While it is indisputable that literary criticism could not exist without literature, it is equally true that literature could not exist without literary criticism. This doesn't mean that literature depends on criticism for its existence, though the reverse might, admittedly, be true. It means that the existence of literature implies the existence of criticism. These two expressions of man rise from different directions of his being, criticism from the rhythm in, creation from the rhythm out, and thus they are coordinate and equally worthy. The critic can do no more, in convincing himself of the truth of this point, than to understand the philosophical dimensions of his effort, gaining, at the same time, a sense of the danger and dignity of his work.

III WHAT ARE LITERARY GENRES?

Let us imagine a literary critic, interested in Greek literature, who is tempted to make the following generalizations about its categories. He will say that the epic, dramatic, and lyrical genres - or literary kinds - had been fully and satisfactorily realized in Greek literature. He will point to Homer, Sophocles, and Sappho, and say that each of these writers was born to his or her specific genre : that Homer, for instance, wrote epics rather than dramas because he had to write epics rather than dramas. He will conclude that the epic, for example, was recognized by the Greeks as having a generic substantiality. This same person will also point to later literature, where conceptions of epic, dramatic, and lyric poetry are largely based on Greek examples, and will repeat, even after reflection: "In Greek literature the forms or ideals - or something like that of the main literary genres are discovered and realized." This person is, rather unclearly, raising important issues. By his apparently simple assumption that there are such things as literary genres he makes himself responsible for a difficult position. Most people who discuss literature seriously do exactly this. But they rarely know what they are doing. They adopt so difficult a position that when faced with their assumptions they are likely to back up a little, then to begin modifying implications. Did they mean to imply that genres have a nature and existence independent of their examples? Did they think that the epic, as a genre, is something other than all the epics ever written, and so has an independent existence? No, not at all : they were using these genre words as convenient labels for types of literature. Such words are just a way of making discussion of literature possible. In short, they are anxious to be let out of defending the independent existence of genres.

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In this these men are like most judges of literature, even many of the keenest. They have an instinct for safety. But do they give up their ground too fast? It may be worth talking with them longer; their haste in retracting a first position, which at least implied that the genres themselves have autonomous existence, may conceal mere habit, and show no recantation. It is true enough, as far as it goes, that genre-terms are convenient categories with to capture literature which. The use of these categories satisfies our need to find order in the outer, in this case to make the world of literary experience intelligible. This need has its roots in the self. Something has been said here, earlier, about the self's dynamism. We live by defining our environments, by making them accessible. We are eager to ward off the chaos which always threatens from a mindless world. Yet by arguing indefinitely, even from the clear usefulness of genre-terms, from their contribution to order, we cannot explain away the existence of genres, declaring that they are merely useful. God - to take an analogy - is the must useful possible concept, or term, an aid to reason in all its forms, a supreme principle of order. With the help of Him as concept, we can explain much, perhaps all, in our universe. And yet His existence is not for that reason called into question, made dubious. His degree of usefulness, as a concept, is irrelevant to His existence. Or consider this related analogy. Freud implied that because he knew why we believe in God - because He serves us usefully as a father image - we should therefore consider our belief an illusion. Such a belief is made no less real by a demonstration of its usefulness. Being, even the being of belief, cannot be explained away that easily. Why shouldn't He exist, in fact generally coincide with the real? We can press this point by asking why, if genre-terms have referred so usefully and embracingly to literary works throughout the history of literature, it is reasonable to consider them only convenient labels. I want to look at the bare fact of usefulness in a new way. Labels need to be changed as the things they label change. Why should mere labels be applicable to the literary products of many different ages, of fifth-century Greece, Elizabethan England,

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or 17th century France? Why should it be - as it is - relevant to refer to the works of Sophocles, Shakespeare, and Racine as 'dramas'? Is it reasonable to suppose that the genre 'drama' is, in this case, nothing more substantial than a rather loosely applicable word? The question of genres is frequently approached through a too easy nominalism. Let us say that genre labels have been applicable to works of literature - to the extent that they have been - because literature has tended to fall into categories, actually to categorize itself. Thus, it could be argued, the actual corpus of produced literature generates a consistent relevance for words like 'epic', 'dramatic', and 'lyric'. This is a revision of our interpretation of the existence of genrelabels. We do not say that the labels are just labels, extrinsically related to what they label, but that genre-terms are consistently applicablei/m/?/y because literature falls consistently into categories : there is an organic relation between genre-terms and the works which generate their relevance. We can go farther into this point, though, and ask why literature falls consistently into categories; epic, dramatic, lyric. On the face of it, considering the varieties of literary creator and of possibilities in language, it seems unlikely that literature would do this. What, after all, is literature? It is a deeply unified, verbal event occurring in the self. It has no concrete substance of its own. It is a process in self, or, viewed in its communal aspect, it is a spiritual dialogue undertaken between author and reader. Simply because it is this we must turn - in answering the question why literature falls into genre-categories - to consider the self as agent of literature. The author's self, which initiates the work, is of initial importance. Perhaps we will find in it the ground for an organic relation between works of literature and the categories of literature. In looking for this ground, as it happens, we shall be approaching a definition of genres which attributes autonomous existence to them. How can we relate the categories of literature to the self as their agent? The self has a variety of ways of expressing itself - the phrase seems inevitable - aesthetic-creatively in language. This variety is identical with the variety in literary genres. One man has

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fAwpower, another that. This limitation is impressive and important, coinciding as it does with the limitations on the kinds of verbalaesthetic creation possible in literature. Mankind, through the structure of its collective self, is determined to express itself literarily in forms which coincide adequately with the genre-terms to be applied to them. This is the single reason, I think, why literature falls consistently into categories, generating and being generated by those categories. This answer enables us to express firmly the conclusions reached so far. If the self is the origin of the different, category-seeking forms which works of literature are, the self is also the source of the genres. If self dispenses literary creations to categories, it has to know or contain those categories, in some sense, before it fills them. The self works out from categorical forms. Its containing, or enacted knowing, of those categories is the way in which it is the source of them. Just as self is the source of literature, then, it is the source of the modes of literature, the genres. At this pausing point of the argument two questions impose. Can we distinguish the source of literature from the source of the genres ; how can we bridge from the present acquired position to a definition of genres in their independent existence? The source of literature cannot be distinguished from the source of its genres : the source of each is the self. But self's welling forth in literature must pursue certain channels, which are literature's generic forms. Even the organic creator, on this view, expresses not only his artistic vision in his making, but also a consciousness of the generic mode he is working in. His actual product will be the better for his having made it in conjunction with half-conceptual awareness of the genre he is working in. (Just as the critic profits from an awareness of what he does in criticism.) An ingredient in a novelist's creativity is his sense of the 'novelness' in him. To back up this position, and at the same time to answer the second question, involves passing to a definition of genres: to something different from the present effort to locate and characterize their source. The bridge does not need to be long, though, and part of it has already been built. The intrinsic nature of genres

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is clear at just the point where they are produced in the self. They are modes of self's expression in its function as creative of literature. They are not simply works of literature visible from a distinctive angle. Nor are they labels applied externally to those works. They are modes of self's expression on which literature is realized. The projection of these modes into the stream of literary history results in the categories which that history so easily, and after all not so amazingly, channels itself into. As these modes, these genres, are few in number and definite in character, it is no wonder that the genericplaysa thoroughly intelligible part in the history of literature. It is well to state, more precisely, what forms genres take in the self. There are three possible forms : lyric, dramatic, epic. Each form, each 'genre' in usual parlance, represents the self in a different degree of objectification. Those degrees, which reduce essentially to modes of literary being of self, are essentially substantial, rather than 'formal'. That is, those degrees of objectification cannot be adequately distinguished in terms of form of expression: metrics; types of imagery; stanzaic organization. I don't suggest that there is no relation between this 'outer' literary form and the generation of literature out of experience. There is a relation. The substantive core movement of self, creating outward into language, is quickly engaged in outer form. But it is primally, and more deeply, engaged with inner form, that is with thematic energy and intention, the 'essence' of the work. This essence can hardly be described as 'content', in opposition to form; the notion of already-formed content may come closest to describing this essence. Outer form, by opposition, may be accidental, and in any case is last, not first, in the creative process. The movement of the self is the kinetic principle of all three degrees of objectification. In lyric expression self objectifies itself least, in dramatic more, and in epic most. This scheme needs explanation. The lyric, on this view, is a literary outpouring of self. The word 'literary', I think, qualifies the romantic tone of this definition. Of course the outpouring must be artistically disciplined. It must be inwardly and outwardly formed, from its first spring out of the creative matrix. The main point, though, is that in lyricism the self

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expresses the verbally apprehended world in such a way that the exteriorizing does as little as possible to qualify or diffuse the encountered world in the self. The created externality may be rich, an important thing in itself, but it is there chiefly to foster and relieve self's direct experience of the world. Sappho, Marvell, and Tate all find in lyricism immediate resolution of world-encounters. Dramatic experience, in its turn, involves a greater diffusion of self into its exteriorization, a more qualified, oblique externalizing of self. The dramatist spreads his own creative vision out over several impersonations, bathing them, as Joyce once wrote, 'in a vital sea'. In this sense the self is literarily objectified in drama. The spectator of a drama meets its creator in all his characters. But he meets him fragmentarily, and obliquely, as one meeting the disjecta membra of an Orpheus who was essentially indivisible. Epic expression is the ultimate degree of literary objectification of self. In it the self moves out like a god into its entire creation, or at least into metaphors of its being, everywhere throughout its pantheistic universe. Nature, man, divine myth, and all the realia of each of these realms : so much is dispersed by the creator through the wide frame of epic verse. That verse is the most externalized literary symbol the self can find, without sacrificing its character and letting it pass off quietly into 'the other'. For the great epic poet, despite the impersonality necessary to his art, marks his own character subtly on his work, as an intangible signature over the whole. It is claimed that these are the three generic forms of self-expression in literature. Literary creation falls into, or realizes itself in, one of these degrees of objectification. And yet there is inevitably much disagreement about how to place particular works in such a scheme. A chief objection may be that in practice this theory ruthlessly subordinates outward 'formal' considerations to 'substantial' ones, to considerations of the character of the constructing spirit behind the genre. It will be said that works which qualify formally as 'lyric' poems should be considered lyrics. I am trying to look below such formal considerations here. The division of genres by their origins in the self is, as I take it, both substantive and funda-

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mentally evaluative. That is a topic to follow farther: the conception of 'genre' as a value-term. But the present argument at least plots an approach to the question. Another form of objection to this argument will be that some - not many - works of literature will need to be placed in categories which they do not belong to in terms of 'outer form', that is, in metrical, stanzaic, or other terms. Thus what is, from the formal standpoint, a long narrative poem, may show its substantive affinities chiefly with the epic or even the drama. Its outer form may appear almost an accident of its inner creative motion. Are we, in this case, to 'place' the work solely by the criterion of degree and kind of objectification of its author's self? Such a radical decision may force us even to deal indiscriminately with poetry and prose, looking to their substantial similarities first, and only later to their outwardly formal differences. Yet this substantive viewpoint, I think, is the only principle of division which reaches sufficiently far into the creative transaction. As a matter of fact, we know, substantial creative tendencies conform to formal ones. There is a so general correspondence between them that the distinction even between form and content is ultimately untenable. We seldom find an epic literary self expressing itself for long, or successfully, in drama. But this conformity is accidental, in the last analysis. 'Outer' form is the phenomenal part of the mode of discipline which the maker's mind adopts. 'Inner' form is another question. It returns us to the most inwardly mode of creation, the working out through a medium with regard only to the self's vision. This theory invites infinite elaboration. Yet it should be possible, by now, to press some practical advantages. Three fairly brief hints will suffice. In the first place, as might be expected in the argument at hand, this theory of genres does explain why we use genre-words and why they are persistently applicable. (It is that kind of theory.) We have traced genres to their lairs, and discovered that genres are real. They have the same kind of substantiality as the self that creates them. If that is so, then it follows both that we use genrewords because they refer persistently to reality and that we find such words applicable to works of literature because genres are

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co-created with literature. They are, metaphorically speaking, determining channels along which literature flows into being. A t least two other points can be accounted for by this genretheory. First, there is the fact that most writers can only realize themselves in one or at most two types of generic expression : a lyric poet is seldom a good dramatist, and vice versa; and neither of these creators is often an epic writer. In other words preference for a certain genre would seem, even on the face of it, to reflect a distinctive inclination of self. Why else would it be so difficult for a writer to shift genres ? Such a theory also explains why there are no more literary genres than there are. By this I mean something different from the inclination of literature to fall into a limited number of categories. I mean the positive limitation of man's creative originality as far as genres go. Epic, dramatic, and lyric expression exhaust our collective creative possibilities. Suppose someone should ask, for example: where does the novel fit into the picture? We could answer that the novel is a modern form of the epic, the last example of which was Paradise Lost. The novel displays the same high objectification of self and universality of content which the epic has. It shows the mind working out into a panorama of forms of existence, and in its general 'familiarity' of tone recommends itself more than the epic to the modern ear. Such answers are made especially plausible by the adoption of a substantial, rather than a formal, definition of genres. This is only a hint at the kind of questions which might be raised here, and the kind of substance-seeking answers which might be used to counter them. My main purpose has been to suggest a definition of genres, and only incidentally to draw practical conclusions from the definition and to defend them. It is only on the solid ground of that definition that the reality and comprehensiveness of genres are intelligible. Yet even as far as that definition goes these remarks remain fragmentary. I mean this in a special sense. The context in the mind, of the genre-creating powers, has been left unmentioned. The exteriorizing rhythms of the self appear in other arts. Have the self's movements into literary genres

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analogues in music and painting? Or, tracing all such questions toward the interior; what is the ground, in Being, for the goingforth of self as spirit? In terms of that question we could see how little need there is for genre-theory to degenerate, as it so often has, into a wrangling discussion of the kinds of literature.

IV PHYSICAL SYMBOLS IN POETRY

In writing what has been called his 'drama of the mind', Dante established an elaborate, multi-dimensional imaginative system, full of all kinds of symbols drawn from the experience of physical reality; he wanted to externalize and incarnate a sustained inner vision. He freed the pure productivity of his mind. It should not be supposed that to Dante - or to any other great poet - the inner vision simply came 'first'; that it was suddenly there, prior to the effort at externalizing and holding it in language. (Just as the genres, too, did not pre-exist in that sense). Dante's vision surely existed, in great part, precisely as its externalization in what was to be the Divine Comedy. Yet at some stage in his poetic apprenticeship, or perhaps we should say in his apprenticeship as a person, he must have found himself predisposed to choose certain available 'physical' symbols rather than others as appropriate expressions of his inner experience. To such a choice, based on gradual personal predispositions, we would have to look for the origin of Dante's use of particular physical symbols in his poetry. The kind of poetic symbolization in question here rises from early in, near the core of, individual being. (Just as, we suppose, must have been the case in choices of genre.) I want to consider three specific aspects of the choice of physical symbols, as it reveals itself in the Divine Comedy. The relation of punishment to sin, in the Inferno, provides rich material and the first point. Dante attempts to 'relate' his punishments to their corresponding sins. Each punishment is thought to be appropriate to, and intrinsically called for by, the sin which it counters; and thus the punishment invites description in terms of physical symbolism of inner states. This process of symbolic 'relating' begins

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with the immediate physical situation of the sinner: with his clothing or physical ambience. The hypocrites and simonists, respectively, are good examples. The former are clothed in long capes which glisten with gold on the outside, but are lined with lead. These garments are symbols of the spiritual state of the sinners whom they enclose : the external brilliance of the cape can be taken as analogous to the false excellence which the hypocrite, in a particular situation, acquires through dissimulating his true feelings ; while the lead in the cape is analogous to the true heaviness, the denseness of the hypocrite's inner life. The 'physical' symbols here chosen bear a clear relation to the spiritual condition for which symbols are being sought, and which is an intimate part of the poet's vicarious inner awareness. But attention should be drawn right at this point to the arbitrariness of this symbolization. Gold and lead, as objects of physics, are spiritually neutral: to be sure, one is physically brilliant, and the other physically heavy, but neither acquires, for that reason, any spiritual quality. For brilliance and heaviness are in themselves, that is in essence, qualities which do not exist in spirit, and which can only metaphorically be transferred to the inner life. The same kind of symbolic arbitrariness is obvious in Dante's treatment of the simonists. Those men have used church offices for private gain. Their punishment is to be inverted in a pit, with only their feet and ankles exposed. Down over their feet and ankles a continual fire burns and plays. The sin in question, then, is punished in two appropriate ways. The perversion of it is rewarded by an inverted stance. While the hatefulness of the sin in God's eyes is suggested by the flame which forever comes down from above. Here again punishment acquires its meaning from a symbolical treatment of the physical conditions of the body. But what could be more obvious than the arbitrariness, from the standpoint of physics, of the specific spiritual qualities attributed here to matter? An inverted body has no ontological, no essential, connection with perversion. Flame has no ontological connection with punishment. This point can be developed by examining two kinds of significant

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motion in which certain of Dante's sinners are engaged. Here, as before, we find the physical world used symbolically as a way of articulating inner vision. Excellent examples are furnished by the condition of the lustful and the spendthrifts. Although Paolo and Francesca are able to pause during their conversation with Dante, the lustful are otherwise continually buffetted by winds which never allow them to rest. These sinners are in a perpetually distraught, restless motion which, Dante implies, is like the spiritual condition of lust. The punishment of the spendthrifts and the avaricious - together in the same circle - is somewhat less obviously related to their sins. These two groups of people are aligned opposite one another, like sides of opposing football teams. Each side is madly pushing a boulder, which clashes against the other side's. Then the two groups separate, each throng pushing its boulder in a semicircle, until the two sides come face to face again, in another place, clashing their rocks together. This movement goes on forever. What does it symbolize? The raging futility of avarice or prodigality, of attempting to collect or spend an endlessly great sum of money. Here as in the punishment of the lustful, motion of a particular kind has been chosen to symbolize an inner state. It hardly needs to be repeated that here, again, we are dealing with an attribution, to motion, of qualities with which the physical world would never be credited by a physicist. For a third example I turn to a wider aspect of Dante's physical symbolism : the physical-geographical setting of his poem. We can concentrate on the most obvious features of the Inferno: that it is set in an inverted cone with its tip downward; that the whole drama therefore develops in a progressively narrow space; that the air in that cone is dark, the ground rough, that there are muddy waters to cross. Any reader of the poem knows how appropriate this physical setting is to the sins and punishments encountered along the way. The setting of progressive, spatial descent seems a fitting background to the increasing baseness of the sins encountered; the darkness of the air fits the spiritual darkness of the sinners, the roughness and muddiness along the route suit the gross states of the sinners' souls. In all these feelings the reader of the Inferno is perfectly

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justified; but his feelings are in this case distinctively poetic. Nature has undergone a highly formalizing transformation in the poet's pen. Dante's entire geographical setting is effective because we accept his conventional poetic insistence that descent, darkness, roughness, the subterranean, etc., have a connection with evil, are related, in being, to evil. To the extent that we remain scientists, however, and not poets, we all know that a subterranean, descending geography has no moral charge whatever, one way or another. Or that a gently rising hill, even touched lightly with dawn, as at the beginning of the Purgatory, has no more spiritual elevation than a pit dug far down into the earth. That mud is no more crass than air, or roughness than smoothness. The use of named outer reality, the named physical world, as a symbol or correspondent of spiritual vision is only one aspect of the entire undertaking of poetic language, and in fact of language as a whole. Language is simply an elaborate metaphorical system, in which analogies are established between words and what they signify. If there is any general peculiarity of poetic language, it seems to lie in the poem's emphasis on the word in the creating mind, as distinct from the referent of the word. As we know, of course, words enter poetry furnished with their referents, and cannot be used, however anarchically, without that overlay of referential meaning attaching to them. Yet the word, in poetry, acquires an incantatory power over its meaning, charming its meaning to the point where it becomes a valuable ingredient in aesthetic effect. This relatively great power of language, as a thing in itself, is marked in poetry. We see it with special clarity in the case of the examples considered here. For these examples all involve a consideration of what we confidently call the 'physical world', a neutral unqualitative world recognizable chiefly through the portrayals of natural and physical science. When poetry uses language which signifies 'things', events, or constructions of that neutral world, and yet loads that language with distinctive, feeling-arousing qualitativeness, we appreciate the radically linguistic, anti-physical, musical tendency inherent in verse.

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It is partly for this reason that the present inquiry is of interest. It puts into relief the audacity of poetic language, which so confidently re-uses, re-makes the physical world of scientific experience as it is described in language. For this to be a valuable point we must be clear, of course, about the kind of audacity involved. It is not that the neutral world of science is more real than the qualitative world of poetry, or that poetry, as one might say, is imprudent in reinterpreting the world of science. Poetry does not put on airs of being a substitute science, and we should not quickly assume that poetry is trying to do what science does. Our problem is more distinctively linguistic. It is more nearly a question, that is, of poetry following its inevitable destiny, employing in new ways words which are by nature far more directly referential than they can remain in verse: words which, like 'mud', 'stone', 'ascent', or 'descent', are in origin purely descriptive, neutral. By following this destiny, of course, poetry indirectly proposes the things of the physical world to a kind of non- or un-scientific experience. Poetry is non-scientific, not anti-scientific. Simply by being of this kind, the poem becomes a repository of pleasant distortions of language, distortions of the more usually referential function of language. In this sense, then, we speak of the audacity of poetic language, which is a primarily linguistic audacity. The status of poetry, as far as its use of physical symbols is concerned, is insecure: the poem forever pushes forward from unambiguously referential language, which directly indicates the outer world, in the direction of language which makes little or no reference. Poetry moves into the open, the uncharted. What, in the case of such symbolic adventures, is the support of the poem? What standards of meaning can it clutch in its effort to remake the physical world metaphorically? For certainly the poem must discover some new source of meaning or replace its partially lost external reference. The standard is the usage of the poet's culture. Literate Italian culture of the thirteenth century was generally agreed on the metaphorical significance of such nouns as 'gold', 'lead', 'flame', 'mud', 'rock', 'ascent', 'descent', to choose concepts discussed above, all of which were common symbols drawn from

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daily experience of physical reality. Agreement on these arbitrary metaphorical meanings was the foundation on which Dante proceeded to create. Without such agreement, in fact, his work would often have been ambiguous, or would simply not have communicated, where communication was of most importance to him. Dante depended that closely on his own culture. We can feel this dependence even more clearly when we understand that the verbal agreements of Dante's culture were themselves arbitrary, not necessary. For other cultures had not, and would not, make the same agreements. The complex and delicate flavor which Mediaeval Italian gave to the concepts I have been considering is distinctive of a particular epoch, and was created by that epoch. In other cultures than Dante's, for instance, such verbal experiences as those of the subterranean, in general, have had more or less different overtones. We could say, for the most general illustration, and without taking a step outside the limits of western culture, that to the Greeks of the fifth century B.C. a Dantesque conception of the subterranean would have been only partially imaginable. In Greek antiquity there was a current image of the harshness of the underearth: 'Hades' was the name both of a cruel ruler, and of a dark subterranean cave where even such life-giving forces as Persephone could be temporarily swallowed up. The Homeric image of Hades as a realm of flaccid, wretched ghosts remained standard, it is thought, into the fifth century. Yet there is something in the Hellenic picture of the underwold which is, we instinctively feel, of a quite different character from the mediaeval Christian picture. That something derives, I believe, from a plain fact : that the Greeks had a very non-Florentine inner vision to convey through the physical symbolism of the underworld. The Greeks too made a kind of equation which by no means all people have made. Yet the Greeks had at the most a vague sense of wrongness, of 'balefulness', to convey through the image of the underworld. The notion of sin, of an innate and classifiable predisposition to evil, seems to have been foreign to the classical Greek mind. As a result, with a few interesting exceptions like Sisyphus and Tantalus, the punishment of sin in the Greek underworld is simply being in the underworld.

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Whereas most departed souls are not in the sad underworld for their sins, but simply because that was where ordinary mortals had to go after death. In mediaeval Italy, however, the notions of sin, and of the place and details of its punishment, were fully developed. Dante is only one of several poets, many his predecessors, to write an Inferno of essentially the Dantesque kind. In the thirteenth century the classification of sins had become a fine art, as had the organization of sins according to their degree of baseness. The mediaeval Hell, as a consequence, was a more precisely, intelligibly organized geography than the Greek Hades. The mediaeval mind had more to express through the physical symbol of the underworld. Many of the verbal agreements, on which Dante relies for his verse, sprang from just this trait of the thirteenth century mind. This particular point could be given additional force by the consideration of cultures outside or on the edge of the ClassicalChristian tradition. Anthropology informs us of more than one culture in which the subterranean realm is never metaphored into a place of misery or punishment. To many Siberian tribes the upper and under worlds are, though regions where spirits live, neither blessed or cursed. While in Irish mythology we find that the subterranean has become the home of immortal spirits, destined to eternal feasting, and other delight. This blissful Celtic underworld, the Tirnanog, is a kind of subterranean Elysian Field. It is unnecessary to stress this cultural point any farther, with any of that abundance of proof which is available. For even the Hellenic example proves enough here : that major physical symbols are not sanctioned by the voice of universal humanity, but are the property of a single culture. It may be well to re-emphasize, though, the way in which this point fits a broader argument. I have implied that the poetic creator humanizes the unhuman outer, physical world, through turning it into emotionally significant symbols. But this act involves, metaphysically speaking, a leap into the blue, a creation of new being, through language. In order for that new being to be intelligible, experienceable by others, it must have been gradually infused with meaning by the culture which provides

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the poet with his language. For despite all talk about the individuality of the poet he must rely, for the tradition which makes even his originality possible, on the language which awaits him at his birth. Considering the extreme bravado of the poetic act, it cannot surprise us that the poet requires at least this support for his effort.

ν THE ONENESS OF LITERATURE

1 The existence of the oneness of literature is not substantial; it can only be a continually asserted hypothesis. Saying this is both saying only a little and saying what is necessary. It is necessary for this reason : the whole body of literature, like its matter language, exists only as and when it is asserted. We pick up traces of that body, talk about them, say them, make our ways through them; we talk about literature and it is. Or we forget it, don't read, don't write ; or read and write without any sense of the whole body we're consuming; and that body is not. The body becomes inert, thus not a body. The habit of substantializing the body lures us back to metaphors of weight : the work of literature becomes an object, it swells with organs - plots, densities, structures - it takes its place in a tradition, in a burden of weights which we heft on from one to another. It becomes a lifeless mass. Finally, the last heresy, literature exists apart from us. It is a field of objects rather than an existing body. This habit of thought which alienates literature from us is tough and resistant. That's why we have to keep remembering that literature, the oneness of literature, is, at any moment, because we make it be, because actually we read and write and listen to it. Literature as a single body, and the unity making that concept intelligible, is an asserted hypothesis. Saying this is little enough. But it's an essential background to the experiment of the following diary.

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2 The following short diary is drawn from selected events, in a two month project in Budapest, in the summer of 1969. The purpose of the visit was through translation to make a small anthology of recent Hungarian lyrics, for a Hungarian issue of my poetry magazine, Micromegas. In a certain perspective, which I intend to stress, the purpose of the visit was also to test an idea : that the whole body of literature exists as a continual assertion. That testing was carried out by an intensely experimental method which was by nature infinite, and which did not lead anywhere. I had a problem but I never solved it. I just kept defining the kind of problem it was. And then setting it up all over again. If my virtual ignorance of Hungarian were to be overcome in this effort, if my work together with Hungarian writers were to make over some Hungarian poetry into English, I would need the help of an ideal, pre-existing body of literature, a body to nourish and support my work. That body and the notion of it - which would come close to being it - would be my hypothesis. Conversely, to the degree my work was working I would be giving evidence of the existence of that ideal body, that body I am here calling literature. That evidence, though, would never prove the body's existence. It would at most prove the necessity of assuming that body's existence. The inter-translatibility of languages is the firmest testing ground, and demonstration ground, for the existence of a single ideal body of literature. If there is any meaning, to the idea of such a body, it will show itself through an effort to equate literature in one language with literature in another. The assertion, in the hypothesis of the existence of an ideal body, will never make itself clearer than in the personal coming-together of yourself with anotherlanguage-in-another-person. The tertium quid required for intelligibility will have to be invoked in such a coming-together. Literature's ideal body will appear as a form of the Logos. You and another person will be intelligible to each other by virtue of a form of the Logos.

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July 24. Offices of the Hungarian P.E.N. Club. Bare green chairs, blond wood arms, a low coffee table with Hungarian orange pop and small glasses of coffee. Outside heavy traffic. Eleven A.M. Across the table sits Kodolanyi Gyula; 30, intense; a reader for Corvina Publishing House, the State House for publishing Hungarian literature and works about Hungary in foreign translation. Kodolanyi is the son-in-law of Illyes Gyula, a mountainous modern poet of whom he will provide me rough translations. After some survey and exchange of literary tastes we turn to poems. The text is A Tribute to Gyula Illyes; recently published English translations of a selection from that poet. We seem both to know, from opposite directions, that most of these are poor translations. I know they're not much as English ; with the exception of one startling prose poem about a drunk woman in the rain, a woman simultaneously in Budapest and in the Brazilian pampas, there is little that feels like English poetry. But there is a great deal, something in every poem, that feels as though it could have been made into English poetry. Kodolanyi confirms this. We center on a specific poem, about a ride on an old-fashioned steamship. The poet is resting lazily in his deck chair, sleepy with sun. But inwardly he grows conscious of the presence, in the boiler room, of a sweating coal-stoker, a man working as the poet had himself once worked. This consciousness pains the writer, and the poem is an intricate discussion of his pain. In terms of what do Kodolanyi and I both feel that the translation misses many of the nuances he values ? I feel my way from the flatness of the translation toward some fullness which seems to be implied by it. We both feel let down from a definite level of expectancy. Don't we both, though, feel 'behind' the translation and behind the original, some ideal form of the poem, some presence of that poem as part of the 'body of literature' ? I leave the question alone for a moment. It's the central question of this diary. July 24: 5 P.M. The Rozsadomb Espresso in the most fashionable section of Buda. Small wooden tables. I see Gergely Agnes coming across the street, peppy, pretty, a little tired. We sit down to soda pop and coffee. Our talk will do something to amplify the

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point reached and felt talking with Kodolanyi . . . It wasn't clear with Kodolanyi, why, like me, he was experiencing the translated poem in terms of an ideal poem. Why wasn't he simply returning in thought to the Hungarian original? Had I any right, after all, to analyze his situation inside his own language? Gergely Agnes offers a translation from "A Message Abroad", by Garai Gabor, the best Hungarian Communist poet of the day. The poet explains to an emigre Hungarian the reasons why 'there is no escape', why Hungarian roots will die if uprooted. There are certain obvious problems in the translation at this stage: . . . tell him : we shall come to him by nights we shall be a choky stiffness in his throat, a bulging glass-ball in his flurried eyes, an icy shower on his neck... Part of the discomfort can be reduced by use of a thesaurus and by reuse of an Hungarian-English dictionary. "Bulging glass-ball" can easily be replaced. "Choky stiffness" can be homogenized; or left, if more texture is wanted. Much of the poem, however, is an appeal to one's awareness of the unforgettable sense-qualities of the homeland. For a while we talked as strictly as we could about the 'literal' meanings of the Hungarian words for these sense-qualities. Inevitably, though, our search for equivalents drifted. Partly we were forced away from the literal effort by its impossibility. The emigre experience offered man through English has in this century been so much less rich than that offered him in Hungarian. But our resignation of the literal effort taught us something else : it reminded us of the poem's location in experience. We were dealing here with the 'eternal question' of exile, emigration, and the tension toward return. As we looked for literal equivalents our minds - Agnes' as well as mine - transcended toward the basic situations implied by the words of the original. "A bulging glass-ball in his flurried eyes" began to worry us for a new reason. We didn't want simply to make a colloquial, comedy-free, tone in the English. We wanted to know and feel the reason for this detail, and to do that meant finding, even behind the original line, the ideal - a word to be meated out

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later - factor of vision-rigidity, almost of perception-paralysis, which sets in with the loneliness of exile. This perception we drew from the human experience which constitutes a small fragment of the body of literature. 3 It means a little, already, to say that the Budapest experiment was relying on a necessary ideal hypothesis. There was an unseen body in the picture. Translation summons glimpses of that body. I've said that body is indefinable, though later I'll try to define what I mean by indefinable. Before finishing the diary, though, a few negative distinctions. I don't want to open the curtains onto a fresh theory of archetypes. Those figments seem to me far too substantial. Even in discussing the Garai poem I only went so far as 'basic situations implied by the words of the original'. In the Illyes poem I wrote only of 'presences behind the original'. What I'm working toward is describing a ground for the intelligibility of original, or original and its translation versions, which is brought into existence during the experience of a literary work. But this ground is even so not in-existent, for it confers on the work its intelligibility. Thus there is some value in considering this ground a hypothetical body whose existence is necessary to the maintenance of oneself-in-literature. 4 July 25. Far western suburb of Budapest, working man's suburb, out beyond 'The Field of Angels', a one story stucco house with a tiny spectacular garden, four giant spruce, a kitten, hundreds of small cacti that seem to be coming up out of the soil like corkscrews. Enter me, Kada Julia my guide and friend, and Bartosz Tibor, a brilliant thirty year old freelance writer, alive with sexuality and eccentric opinions. Coffee, two aspirin, some wine. Bartosz is preoccupied with the work of Fiist Milan, a Jewish writer dead at an advanced age two years ago, author of a wailing

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but bitter "Self-Portrait". We are both unsatisfied with Bartosz' translation of this poem, and begin at once to negotiate certain lines between us - trying to keep the 'thrust' of the whole poem in mind. For the opening I, too, would like to be a haggard ancient with a wrenching mind... I suggest Haggard and ancient, yes, I, a hook for a mind... This is a representative change, involving more than at first it seems to. The two main changes are in rhythm - which has a semantic dimension, and in metaphorical emphasis, with a rhythmic underbasis. We did what we could, here, to make the rhythm stertorous - as in "ancient, yes, I" followed and jammed by articlenoun rather than by a soft preposition. We also tried to sharpen metaphorical angles; the substitution of "hook" for "wrenching" symbolized that effort. Afterwards we asked ourselves what the general direction of our changes had been. They had been offerings to a perception : of the bitter, selfwilled, passionate, Scroogish character of the poem's author; had been efforts to reach with that author toward a recreation of himself. That effort predominated over verbal matters ; though with those we did our best to be accurate and deliberate. What mattered was finding consistently the tone of character delineation which (I think) we reached in the first two lines. Doing this involved, again, reaching for some form of the original which was not locked into it, and was not wholly confined by it. What we were doing with Fiist's poem brings up clearly, for the first time here, the question of thepoem-lying-between-the-poems, in the case of translation; or the allied question, in the direct reading of originals, of the poem-notwholly-confined-within-the-original. In discussion of Illyes Gyula's poem I mentioned an ideal form of the poem lying behind both the poem and the translation of it. In the Garai poem we came to

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an ideal factor, connected with the loneliness of exile, which lay 'even behind the original line'. In both these cases, too, I was in some way discussing the poem-lying-between-the-poems or notwholly-confined-within-the-original. I was not pointing toward archetypal situations or material embedded in the poem; but toward a certain dynamism, in the two poems, through which they transcended themselves into the essence of what they implied. I was pointing toward something more literary, less psychological, than archetypes. 5 July 26. 11 A.M. Once again in the P.E.N. Club office, where I'd met Kodolanyi. Across from me now a cultured, British-tuned accent, Geher Istvan, an editor at Europa publishing house, the house which annually puts out more than 250 books translated from foreign languages into Hungarian. Geher fingers his pipe tobacco, then withdraws papers from a large black portfolio. He has brought rough translations of poems by Agnes Nemes Nagy, the most distinguished woman poet in Hungary. These are bare, tough poems, leading up to a sense of the dry mystery of experience. One of the best, "Sleeping Bedouins", grows from a perception of cobblestones, on a hillside, which are lying face down so as to seem "turned inside to the hill". With sinister precision the poet converts these forms into sleeping Bedouins, lying far down in their camp. Dark shadow spreads over the scene, especially into the hill, which mere existence is penetrating. A paraphrase of this poem rapes out all its delicacy, and is worthless for any purpose but the present one : to raise again the question of where the poem is located. Geher assures me of the ways the poem is located in the detail of the Hungarian : in the semantic-cultural resonances of words, in the sound patterns elaborate polysyllabic rhymes, and in the arbitrary, enriching semantic accidents of the prosody. Yet when we begin to translate, to talk about the conversion of those details, we are mastered by reference to the paraphraseable

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content described above. We know that such a 'being mastered' is not proper. We try to correct the form in which it presents itself. We try to find an English that will sensually embody the content of the original. Whether we succeeded in that effort determines whether we translated well; what we did well in that effort will probably be the sharpest indication of where the poem itself, the unbound poem, lay. We are back to the question of the poem-between-the-poems ; but this time in a way somewhat more complex and more conducive toward the inside of the metaphor of the 'body of literature'.

6 The body described so far is a necessary hypothesis. It exists when 'existed', when brought into existence, and in that form there is nothing ontologically tentative, nothing unreal, about it. It is an unusual kind of hypothesis. So far I have only shown this hypothesis operating as a hole-plugger, as an account of what seemed to have to exist, for the existence of poems to fulfill itself in explanation. A more embracing argument can take its place shortly. Now to be more precise for a moment. Another poem by Agnes Nemes Nagy, "The Horses and the Angels", opens this way in a word-for-word translation : Because lastly nothing is left, only the angels and the horses. Only they [the horses] are standing down in the yard the angels are in my room. They are strolling sometimes almost a hundred one being in itself, what does it mean? Syntax is not a great problem for translation here. The syntactical features of this poem are about the same in Hungarian as in English. But there are several points at which we begin to struggle with the crucial small differences between the two languages. Three of those small differences are worth noticing here. "Only the angels and the horses" is, in Hungarian, csak az angyalok s a lovak.

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Az is 'the', plural nominative, in the form required by its position in the line, preceding a vowel. The ζ is (obligatorily) there for felicitous transition between two a's. The s, by itself, is a standard phonetic shortening of es, the word and; and is followed by a, the form of the definite article (semantically equivalent to az) which is used before a consonant. A phonetic cross-stitching is built up, among these three words - az, s, and a - which reinforces their slightly asymmetrical semantic functions, as definite article (az) and as conjunction (s) plus definite article (a). The richness provided by this design is balanced by the juicy a's in the bracketed angyalok (nominative plural of the word for angel). The entire line is enclosed by csak (only) and lovak (horses), more round a's. Fluid a's, hard k's, and the sliding sounds of the mentioned cross-stitch all enclose and emphasize the lonely isolation of the "horses and angels", which are all that is left. Of this kind of situation in language it is customary to say that it defies translation, being too deeply rooted in unique traits, or that it requires of a translator supreme ingenuity, to find indirect compensations. I want to say something different, and more relevant. The supposed uniqueness, of the language situation in this line, takes place as a 'desire' or 'intention' to go out across itself into an adequate restatement of itself. This kind of 'desire' in language is at its most intense when the language is most idiosyncratic to itself, has most fully realized what makes it only itself. (As though, being turned in on its own peculiarities, an inverse law drove it even harder out into the open, into the intelligible). It is only when the language of poetry is commonplace that it seems to exert no pressure outward from itself. The same - and a little more - can be said of another Hungarian 'peculiarity' in these first lines ofAgnes Nemes Nagy's poem. I mean the word szobamban, 'in my room', in line four. Szoba means 'room' ; the suffix m, in this instance, adds the meaning 'my' ; the suffix ban adds the meaning 'in'. This famous agglutinative concision, one mark of the Finno-Ugric languages, defies any 'ingenuity' in English. But this defiance is precisely a challenge. It is not necessarily a challenge toward the answer 'room-my-in', though some-

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times we should push English harder in such directions, as Louis Zukofsky had done in his translations from Plautus and Catullus. (English can take a lot). But above all it is simply a challenge. It asks to be translated, to be smuggled across the borders from one language into another. (Shifty and indefinible borders, hard to patrol). Thus it asks to be made what we call intelligible. Intelligibility, here, means a kind of'transcendence' and a kind of becomingsalient. The third example is smaller than the other two. I include it as a simple reminder of the kinds of minutiae which separate one language off from another, and collectively issue that challenge which is a specific work's cry to be transcended. In the second stanza of the poem : Only they stand [the horses and the angels] and there is nothing more, only the spectacle (latvany) and the vision (latomas)... ^Vision', here, goes back in Hungarian to a strong, 'visionary' word ; while 'spectacle' goes back to a more limited and répertoriai word. So far the distinction in the English words is simple and clear enough at least to parallel that in the Hungarian. But both Hungarian words rest on the root lat, 'to see' - andare thus both semantically and 'playfully' joined at their base; this couldn't be done with the equivalent English words, a limitation which is again, in the ^ original', the goad to self-transcendence. This last instance is so trivial that it shows all, lets the whole point ride out around it. The pressure toward being translated is greatest when a translation is strictly impossible, when - as in the present case - a brutally inimitable formula opposes itself to the need for a translation. The need for intelligibility operates most strongly into the vacuum of the meaningless. Such discussions of Hungarian poetry, and translations of it which I made with friends in Budapest, led toward creating a small anthology of contemporary Hungarian poems. There are now (October, 1969) some fifty pages of English poems, each made by the tandem method, and each rising from the same kind of striving,

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to find a poem lying behind or between poems, which we saw in action above. In the larger collection of poems we can see more clearly some of the implications of the detailed examples. Of course that larger collection is simply many single poems; as a group they are not qualitatively different from their existence as individuals. We are here, though, getting ready for a full-scale assault on the metaphor of the body of literature; and where bodies, even of this kind, are involved we cannot ignore quantity. So what is this larger collection ? It is ad hoc and revisible relief for the yearning in fifty Hungarian lyrics. Each o f those lyrics has overcome itself here. But the ground for this yearning is not simply the ground these Hungarian poems stand on : the Hungarian language, cultural situation, literary tradition. As soon as the translation has been 'completed' the poems take up their existence on a new ground, on the English in which the translations exist, and on the linguistic, literary, and cultural background of that English. These 'grounds' are really 'centers of energy', coded symbolic systems which as in the discreteness of individual poems spring back toward what we call, only by convention, their originals. Discovering this is getting closer to the large notion of 'the body of the world's literature'. It also brings us, for the first time, within coining distance of a new notion: 'the body of the world as literature'.

7 The Micromegas translation experiment has served as a basis for a view of the kind of presence poems, literary works in general, have. That presence has little specific gravity. By nature it leans into the versions of itself which translation of it can be, or which even readings of it are. Literature is that volatile. The body of literature is the invocable totality of possibilities, which all works potentially mean. Seen that way, the body of literature is that oneness of literature about which I am questioning

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myself in the present essay. The anatomy of that large body will more than occupy the rest of the essay. Translation is a wedge consciously driven into the seeming integrity of works of literature, and for this reason has been an appropriate activity to build on in the present argument. It seems to me time, now, to break out an important corollary to the positions reached here so far in discussing translation. (A corollary which is strictly a ground and condition for the state of affairs in question throughout this analysis of the ontology of literature). The original work of literature is always taken as 'the starting point for translation'. But what is an 'original work'? For a work to be able to be original, it seems to follow that some other kind of work could be unoriginal. But what kind of work of literature would that be? Works of literature can be bad or good. But aren't all of them equally original, in the important sense that they are all beginnings again from the ground of language? Wasn't I, earlier in this essay, taking the shallow end of the argument when I discussed originals and translations of them? This problem in terminology covers this problem in actuality: that works of literature seem to be but are not solid objects. In order for them to be either original or unoriginal they would have to be such solid objects. Instead they are inimitable courses of action in words. A poem exists when it is being read, decoded. A play exists when it is being acted, even silently, gesturally. A novel comes to exist in the infinitely complex interdramatic propositions, and aural stimuli, of the reader's mind. The notion of an original, as when we speak of that from which a translator translates, is that of a solid object, with fixed implications, from which one takes rubbings, more or less literally accurate but in every case servile to the master form. In this deeper context there is no such thing as an original. To translate works of literature, therefore, can never be to adopt a répertoriai or duplicative attitude toward them. It can never be to copy them to be literally faithful to them, for the simple reason that a work of literature is not static, not imitable, is only something along beside which one can run in one of an infinite number of

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parallel courses of verbal action. One can enter the apertures in the original and build here, build there. One can let the original fill the holes in one's own making : let the prosody, word-play, or philosophy of the original take over one's making. But the other work - original of course - will never offer itself as an icon. We are thus one glimpse farther into our anatomy of the body of literature. We find that that body, like the human body, is in no cell untouched by the totality of its own life; that its parts are active by nature; that it is restless. Finally we begin to find the next fact: that those parts, literary works, are by nature and definition self-transcending. They cannot exist as rest in themselves.

8 This self-transcendence has been more or less emphasized here already. In one sense it is only a way of talking about the fundamental energy of literary works, that activity - along prosodie or thematic or philosophical curves - which in fact defines such works. But that energy is basically entropy, the way works turn in on themselves, that in them which requires the 'translator' of them to run parallel, to live his own verbal life beside them. There is in literary works a decisive counter-motion which fights entropy : the motion toward intelligibility. This is what I mean by self-transcendence. There is a trivial sense in which every element, of the created world in which man finds himself, is open to man as its knower. Being, without man, would in just that sense be closed, would either turn in on itself or lie on itself in neutral and indifferent accretions. Man as knower changes the world. He cuts into it with consciousness until it cries out. He opens it up, wounds it. He ploughs it. And so on. At last the whole world is open as a lover. Man strides masterfully through it, wielding names, singing songs. The new world which is human grows particularly human as it grows more verbal. Those Romantic critics - A. W. Schlegel, Victor Cousin - were right who thought that words were man's true emblem, the vehicles of his full humanity. (They were dealing with

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a time-bound esthetic assumption: that in language the sensuous and spiritual were perfectly fused while in architecture, say, the sensuous overweighed, and in music the spiritual. But in their insistence on incarnation, as an explanatory metaphor, they were here struggling away from their time. While their entire intuition, about the power of words to move and remake human destiny, was raw common sense.) Being fully human has much to do with being totally inside, and working out through one's language, oneself as language. This is true for the reason that language has the general property of overcoming itself into the meanings it can be for its knowers : those who listen, who read, or who attend to their own interior monologues. Of literary language, which is the most concentrated, self-reflexive, and enriched development possible to words, this self-transcending characteristic is particularly true. The words of the poem or novel have no existence apart from the address they make - even though they make it through the entropy which is their style of being. We are back to the paradox met in discussing the difficult Hungarian of "The Horses and the Angels". That address, surprisingly, is not simply a call for attention, for being noticed. In fact, as I said in the previous section, written words at least are extremely reticent in this respect. We must release them into their demands. Their demand is to be made part of new Uves, others' lives; a living chain of effect binds the work to its knowers. Literary works do not ask to enter lives in the way that lives ask to enter lives. Literary works ask to enter, narrowed and formed, thus in their way widened. They ask to enter small and grow big inside. There is no better way to get pregnant than on a small poem. 9

The body of literature is composed of the demands of all existing literary works. There is no 'reasonable' way to respond to, or exist in the presence of, that body. Like the specific works that compose it, it is as a whole inimitable. It must be paralleled, taken up in

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the curve of experience. But unlike the works that compose it, the body of literature does not precisely allow that kind of parallel response. It is an organic unity ; and not in the simpler way in which the individual work of literature is such a unity.The individual work is a unity superimposed on the inner tension between entropy and self-transcendence. That superimposed unity is organic; it rises from the inside of the poem or play or novel, and in turn sheds its significance and control back over the elements of the work, embracing them. The organic unity of the body of literature also grows from the center of the entire system. It must be the unity of two levels or degrees of lesser unity, the degree existing in the tension o f the specific work, and that existing as the organic force in the specific work. Thus the organic unity of the whole body of literature is both particularly rich and particularly coercive. It is a complex spiritual substance, real because it has to exist, unreal because it can never be experienced. We understand the ideality of the body of literature more sharply when we think again over the implications of the preceding section, which touched on the self-transcendence of the literary work, and of the section before that, which touched on the infinity of 'legitimate' responses to such a work. The cellular literary work is insolid, and exists as a constantly self-revising, self-reiterating demand on its knower, who then reproduces it (in his experience, or his writing, or his translation)', and in whose reproduction the work is made new, is new. The body of literature must include, include by organically being, the incredibly ramified and delicate operational interaction which goes to constituting the life of particular literary works. Thus the body of literature is a unity the composition and energies of which are continually, say with every reading of every poem, shifting, glittering and fading, fading and glittering. The constancy of the body will come from some power in it always to reform itself, to close again over the fissures made in it by every literary experience. But that matter brings in another question : of the structure of this unusual body. Or rather it brings us around headlong to that issue of the oneness of literature which has all the time, here, been under more or less direct consideration.

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10 If literature is one, in the special sense argued, it will add greatly to our knowledge of it to be able to say something about the main elements of that oneness. Are we leading ourselves toward a notion of archetypes; of tropes; of genres? Or are we heading toward a sublime nominalism, for which there will be nothing that can be said in general about literature except that the body of it exists ? We're much closer now to the second position. Yet we still need to sketch in more fully the details of that negotiation by which the individual person forever freshly shifts the energy and weight of the body of literature. We still need to be more bluntly human. In man alone exist the tensions of the individual work, its longing to transcend itself, its reception and shouldering, and the body of literature, which I just characterized. Each man brings the details and the totality of these possibilities into being, simply by bringing them into being. If he decides individually to bring some part of Hungarian lyric poetry into being, to make it - in his achievement - a part of the whole body of literature, he does so on his own, and does something radically new. Seeing it this way we see freshly the sense in which the body of literature is ideal, is a possibility, is shifting. For each knower and maker of it that body will exist as an infinite set of possibilities, realized at every moment, yet constantly revised and broken up and reformed by each additional giving-birth, through experience, to new forms of that body. The whole body of literature will be the simultaneous, organically unified, existing aggregate of these individual bodies ; it will be a vast ideal body. What will be the place, in that body, of the usual principles of order, the categories - like archetypes or genres - by which we are accustomed to making that body thinkable? In one sense they exist, in the body of literature. But for a very simple reason their existence is purely or merely ideal, as distinct from the actual, existing ideality of the total body of literature. Tropes, archetypes, or genres are ordering categories which obliterate time, which find

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unities, among different works, in terms of an ideal time in which the relevant works could be juxtaposed and studied together. In that kind of ideal time, of course, the Iliad and Paradise Lost do exist together; so do a poem of Sappho and a poem of Richard Wilbur; so do The Spanish Tragedy and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf ? But the body of literature is not ideal in that sense. It is not a set of non-temporal specimens. It is perfectly real, in the everyday sense, in what concerns its temporal situation. With all the complexities imposed on it, by the variety of works and workers composing it at any instant, it is as bluntly and severely real as anything could be. It is at any instant, under its instant's inimitable mode, thrillers, lyrics, Broadway plays, and metaphysical novels. It is all that instant's readings or hearings or experiencings of those literary works. The ideality of the body of literature is simply that it is a necessary and continually asserted hypothesis. The phrase, 'the body of the world as literature', has been mentioned. This is no place to earn as ambitious an account as that; but it is right, at just this point in arguing, to stress the incarnated aspect of literature. The elements which compose the body of literature, at any instant, are embodiments - realizations, fillings out - of that body which is itself ideal. The order in those elements is not the order of categories, but that of ontology; the elements co-exist in time, and share the same dependency. They are incarnations. But they are incarnations to return finally back into the whole argument made incarnate by man, under the sign of their ideal body. The body of the world as literature is nothing apart from man. It is this closely bound to man in terms, precisely, of his moment to moment negotiation out through literary works. We should step back finally into the depth of man's shoes, for these last remarks. They are remarks out from the intersection established by the moment. At that intersection, inside literature, man exists as possibility - a possibility affirming an incarnation of that possibility which the body of literature is. We are now in a position to understand deeply what it means to ask into the knowability of the body of literature.

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There is no possible advance answer with which to meet that question. The common sense answer, that we can only know so much, that time and ability are limited, is not relevant. It would be relevant if - as such an answer assumes - the knowable body of literature were a static intelligible mass, an object of knowledge of the kind prayed for by experimental scientists. Then our problem would be to make our way through the mass, to appropriate it. But the knowable body of literature is a simultaneous, co-present, ideal hypothesis. It can be in part experienced; the whole training of an intuition can be thrown against it. But since it is not static it cannot be exhausted; and since it cannot be exhausted it makes no sense to say, of the failure of individual attempts to know the entire body of literature, that they prove the impossibility of knowing that body. The opposite of the common sense answer, to the question about the possibility of knowing the body of literature, would be the ecstatic answer : that we can, after wide reading, much of it in translation, intuit the total form, or the archetypal body of forms, of literature. As usual, ecstasy teaches us more than common sense; but ecstasy rarely does its homework, and that is the case here. For the total body of literature does not continuously surround the individual intuiter. To mention only this: the body of literature exists in the minds of all the receptors who give it life, not statically, out there, in such a way that an individual could know it all, if he knew 'all there was to know'. If we reject the answers of common sense and ecstasy, what then can we say about the knowability of the body of literature? Very little, but what there is is a bar of iron ; we can hold on to it. As a knower of, or into, or toward the total body of literature, man cannot know himself as limitation. The knowing of literature through individual works is an opening of the person which is in itself a transcendence of limit. Nothing but the most banal post facto empiricism could lead us to think that literature is information to be learned. It is nothing to be learned.

VI TRANSLATION A N D THE LIMITS O F INTER-CULTURAL UNDERSTANDING

1 I resolved . . . that I would know the dynamic content from the shell, that I would know what was accounted poetry everywhere, what part of poetry was 'indestructible', what part could not be lost by translation, and - scarcely less important - what effects were obtainable in one language only and were utterly incapable of being translated. (Ezra Pound, "How I began", 1913) And a little later in the same essay : . . .certain things are translatable from one language to another, a tale or an image will 'translate', music will, practically never, translate... This second passage suggests that "dynamic content" - as distinct from shell - may associate itself with "a tale or an image". That is some help toward defining Pound's point. But it is not enough, and it is all he offers in theory ; he offers much more in practice. The complexity and confusion of his argument becomes more obvious when we add to the argument he makes above his distinction among melopoeia, phanopoeia, and logopoeia. Melopoeia is the "musical property" in poetry; phanopoeia is a "casting of images upon the visual imagination"; and logopoeia is the "dance of the intellect among words" (from How to Read, 1928). What in this list corresponds to "dynamic content"? Throughout his criticism Pound emphasizes the importance of energy in poetry. For instance : Poetry is a centaur. The thinking, word-arranging, clarifying faculty must move and leap with the energizing, sentient, musical faculties. {Literary Essays, 1912)

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This emphasis is helpful. We may be tempted to think that "dynamic content" is very close to logopoeia, "the dance of the intellect among words". Certainly there is some closeness. But as logopoeia approaches abstract intelligibility it gets farther from whatever core Pound believes translatable. Logopoeia, phanopoeia, and energy behind and in them both, are essential ingredients of the core. Music is not.

2 There is a difficulty involved in getting to this core; though Pound is confident we can get there, can translate the real thing into our own language, whatever that language is. This particular difficulty is interesting and profound, in that it differs from the difficulty, really the impossibility, of translating the superficial parts of the original - its prosody and rhyme scheme. Those we neither can nor should try to translate. They are local bric-a-brac, the "clutteration of dead technicalities, fustian à la Louis XV". The core, the "dynamic content", is living; and it is closed off from us by its interiority to itself, to its author, and to the culture in which it finds itself. Let us imagine that words are like great hollow cones of steel of different dullness and acuteness; . . . let us imagine them charged with a force like electricity... This particular energy which fills the cones is the power of tradition, of centuries of race consciousness, of agreement, of association. .. (The Technique of Content, 1912). The difficulty of reaching this core is interesting; we learn from touching it. And it is profound. It takes us all the way down to the threshold of difference between cultures.

3 One instance of his achievement will give us some sense of what practice underlies Pound's theory. We will see clearly, here, that

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what the "dynamic content" reaches toward is a determinable, and so meaningful, thrust in the original poem. The original, this time, is Li Po's Ku Feng No. 14, which Pound translated from the word-by-word provided by Ernest Fenellosa. It is one of those remarkable efforts in which Pound intuits his ways deeply into the original. Ku Feng No. 14 1 The barbarian pass is filled with windblown sand 2 Squalling from ancient times till now. 3 Trees stripped of leaves, autumn grass go yellow. 4 We climb up to look over the barbarous land : 5 Desolate castle, vast empty desert, 6 No wall left to this frontier village, 7 White bones lying across a thousand frosts, 8 Huge mounds, covered by thorns and brushwoods. 9 Who is the aggressor? Let me ask. 10 The barbarians' malicious martial move 11 Has brought the emperor's flaming anger. 12 He ordered the army to beat the war-drums. 13 Calm sun turned into murderous air. 14 He called for soldiers, causing a turmoil over the Middle Kingdom. 15 Three hundred and sixty thousand men. 16 Sorrow, sorrow, tears like rain. 17 Grief-drenched, yet we had to go. 18 How are we to farm our fields? 19 Without seeing the frontier men 20 Who would know the dreary sorrow at the pass? 21 General Li Mu is no longer here. 22 We guardsmen fed to tigers and wolves. By Li Po (Literal translation by Wai-lim Yip) Lament of the Frontier Guard 1 By the North Gate, the wind blows full of sand, 2 Lonely from the beginning of time until now! 3 Trees fall, the grass goes yellow with autumn. 4a I climb the towers and towers 4b to watch out the barbarous land:

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5 6 7 8 9 11 12

Desolate castle, the sky, the wide desert. There is no wall left to this village. Bones white with a thousand frosts, High heaps, covered with trees and grass; Who brought this to pass? Who has brought the flaming imperial anger? Who has brought the army with drums and with kettle-drums? 10 Barbarous kings. 13 A gracious spring, turned to blood-ravenous autumn, 14 A turmoil of wars-men, spread over the middle kingdom, 15 Three hundred and sixty thousand, 16 And sorrow sorrow like rain. 17 Sorrow to go, and sorrow, sorrow returning. 18 Desolate, desolate fields, 19 And no children of warfare upon them, 19a No longer the men for offence and defence. 20 Ah, how shall you know the dreary sorrow at the North Gate, 21 With Rihoku's name forgotten, 22 And we guardsmen fed to the tigers. By Li Po (trans. Pound) The points at which Pound penetrates remarkably, beyond any hints Fenellosa seems to have given him, are: 11. 1-2; 1. 10; 1. 13; 1. 16; and in the sense of a northern, windy desolation which fills the poem. (Wai-lim Yip's book, Ezra Pound's Cathay, furnishes a fine analysis of these details.) But it is better, here, to skip details and so stress the large point: Pound has gone for the energy of the original. He has ignored its music, about which he seems not even to have been curious. He has gone for the logopoeia and the phanopoeia. And he has found "dynamic content". 4 We can now attach some firm meaning to Pound's conception of dynamic form, especially when we go back to the notions of logopoeia, phanopoeia, and the energy impelling them both. His transía-

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tions reach for the feeling-sense of the original. In the present case he found the connotations of "barbarian", and "squalling", and found they meant desolation of time in Li Po's poem. Pound has reached out to a poem from a culture far from his in time and place,, and has brought back strong echoes of 'the way things were'. But has what he brought back also been what he took with him? Partly. We know from Pound's early and later poetry that his own inner tone is everywhere in the present translation. Has he then simply been translating himself? Has he been a victim of the paradox of selfhood, that it is closest to us when we have reached farthest? Not simply; he has been finding his own analogues, and learning his own tone from hearing it on other people's lips.

5 We are trying to find out whether Pound broke the cultural barrier, in translating from Chinese, and we see that even the terms in which we might want to answer are not easy to produce. We have been touching on a paradox - that we are perhaps most ourselves when we most leave ourselves - which itself touches on the classical problem of epistemology : how is it possible to know (or do, or grasp) anything we don't already know? how is it possible to be anything we are not already ? It is time to turn the paradox around and to examine it, paradoxically, from the opposite direction. We should consider one of the ways in which China has returned, with interest, the attention given to her literature by poets like Pound. Here the question of poetic cognition and translation has been partially replaced by equivalent political considerations. The All-China Conference on Literary Translation Work, held in Peking (Aug. 18-25, 1954), was the beginning of a period of intense and highly directed national attention to the problems of translation. Since that time a great many works have been translated from Western languages into Chinese. (Though translations from Russian are still greatly in the majority). 33 works by Balzac, 32 by Hans Christian Andersen, 19 by

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Shakespeare, 18 by Mark Twain, 15 by Howard Fast, 12 by Jack London . . . have been published. 1,173,500 copies of Andersen's works were published and sold in translation in China between October 1949 and August 1960; 443,000 copies of Shakespeare; 394,000 of Twain ; 280,000 of Jack London. In each case this marks a great increase over the number of books - by the author in question - translated and sold in China between 1910-1935. Twain, Fast, Jack London are high on the list today. Goethe and Oscar Wilde were high on the earlier list. Only Hans Christian Andersen has survived the tough political changes of the New China. This vast movement represents both a highly centralized operation and a taste which we don't expect - given the ideology of the whole movement - behind the governmental decision to support translation actively, to organize innumerable translation cadres, and to bring the products of this effort to as many people as possible. The translations undertaken, under these unprecedented conditions, surprise us by the consistency with which they favor originals with three main traits : 1. an old-fashioned flavor, preferably 19 th century - the very popular flavor of Dickens and Thackeray; 2. a 'proto-Communist quality' - such as we find in Jack London; 3. a connection with fairy-tale or science fiction. As Bauer says, it is "understandable that Hans Christian Andersen ranks first among all Western authors; he simply fills all three requirements", (p. 24). Those requirements are rooted in the 'taste' of contemporary Mainland readers ; where taste refers to a) traditional expectations, b) accepted political cliches and c) a primeval love of tales. For all the machinery of attention, which is being given to Western literature, the determinant criteria, for the choice of which literature to translate, are entirely homemade. The selfhood paradox repeats itself on this massive scale. 6 The organized Chinese effort to translate vast areas of the Western literary achievement has something in common with Pound's very individualistic effort to penetrate, and plunder, certain limited

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sectors of the Chinese literary past. Both efforts illustrate the limits, and the reasons for the limits, that define such efforts. Pound made some strong intuitive hits, and brought home to English something like poetry which he found outside English. But, paradoxically, the more clearly he cut out that definite area of his own achievement, the more clearly he was revealing the individuality of his own work and style. This point applies, magnified, to what the Chinese seem to be doing as they move forward with their massive translation effort. The more extensive it becomes the more transparently it displays the taste-prejudices behind the effort itself. That effort is too massive for us to say, of it, that the more it succeeds the more it defines its limitations. But if 'success', here, means 'reaching out ambitiously in all directions, toward its goal', then something like the present paradox applies to the Chinese experiment. Is the selfhood paradox lodged in the naked truth ofepistemology? Would the truth it conveys be applicable to all human acts of knowing? Has it nothing interestingly specific to do with problems of language, or, much less, of translation ? The paradox works itself out in a specific relation to language and the translation of language. The language of the other pushes back the translator of it; it does not draw him in. That is because language is what it is, and not because there is any a priori inevitability to the situation. Another language - especially aesthetic language - is not perspicuous to the translator. He can not enter it and lose his subjectivity. I don't mean that any language is imaginable by entering which we would lose our selfhood, magically. I mean that selfhood is relatively, and temporarily, surmountable. "Temporarily" because that surmounting has to take place over and over again. To this point I'll return at the end, when it will be in place to say more about selfhood. 7 Is language in some sense objectively intelligible, in such a way that it could help us out of our paradox? To some extent the machines think so. Thinking about machine translation forces us

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to think in terms of translation techniques from which the human element has as far as possible been excluded. This makes us consider translation which will really go to meet, and return with, the verbal products of another language - with the minimum of that paradox, of self-discovery through other-discovery, of self's imprisonment by self, which we found marking, and in some degree 'disturbing', the translation relations between Pound and the Chinese and between Chinese and Western literature ; and which, it seems reasonable to assume, would go on disturbing all such relationships. We are forced to think now of the possibilities of translators without taste or tastes. The sophistication of automatic translation machines is growing. The Mark I or Automatic sequence calculator (1944) was the first efficient machine for word by word translation, but it was slow: the inertia of its electro-magnetic relays limited both its speed of calculation and its memory capacity. (Machine Translation, Delavenay, p. 19)

but this situation changed rapidly : The use of electronic tubes, particularly of the double triode or flip-flop, in the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator of the University of Pennsylvania, made it possible in 1946 to perform in 2.8 thousandths of a second a multiplication of 10 figures by 10 figures, as opposed to •6 seconds with Mark I.

Subsequent similar improvements made a vast difference in the neutral usefulness of such machines, for language translation. Electronic dictionaries were developed which provide almost immediate recall, and which increasingly, now, provide new tools for choosing among possible, plausible, and impossible syntactic combinations; and now there are effective logical-discrimination facilities, which distinguish the logical relationships among the elements put in, and find their general equivalence in the target language. The first thing we have to say, about the selfhood paradox as it applies to machine translation, is that the paradox enters through the subjectivity of the men who feed the machine. The machine

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has to be set-up, by men who have determined what particular range of translation equivalents is to be available ; and ultimately it is set up by men who have constructed the entire machine after the model of a human brain. This point is important but not of full interest when left at this level of crudity. The reason for the pressure of subjectivity, in the programming operation, cannot be reduced entirely to the inevitable entrance of the programmer and machinemaker, but is at some point related to the nature of language which is to be translated. It seems that language, and especially the language of art, cannot be entirely smoothed out, homogenized, reduced to its principles, made available to mechanical access; opened up as an object; consequently it forces the aspiring translator of it - man or machine or both - back into subjectivity. It is as though an indissoluble node formed along the wire in the machine rushing information from one language to another; as though this node blocked the mechanical fluency of the machine; and as though that blockage required the translator to reemerge as subjectivity, in order to replace the neutrality of a situation in which functioning had ceased. The view and hope which this image counteracts is perhaps nowhere found in pure form, but has from time to time been expressed by structural linguists or mathematical logicians interested in the possibility that language may be totally reducible to intelligible, or orderly, principles of organization. Proponents of machine translation are likely to be attracted to the theoretical aspects of this position. The vision entertained by such people is one in which translation, even literary translation, would be accomplishable by relatively neutral machines, and in which there would be virtually no nodes - of the kind described above - formed to block the flow of information. My impression is that most such people finally bow to a compromise of the sort expressed by Professor Panov, of the Russian Academy of Sciences : Should it [the reduction of the structure of language to mathematical formulae] be achieved, the problem of automatic translation would join as equal those profound problems united under the name of theory of information. Unfortunately, so it seems to me, we must refrain from this

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tempting road. The very nature of the problem of translation is such that individual features of the translated text cannot quite be ignored. (Machine Translation, p. 42) The quite is crucial. Such individual features can almost be ignored but not quite. For a great deal, even in literary art, can be reduced to formulae and repetitive structural patterns which can be directly translated into at least many other related languages. The quite is required here, however, not simply in order to accommodate the special problems of the aesthetic, but also in order to accommodate the nature of ordinary communication in language. The question of cultural difference is of course involved here. The blockage, the noding I attribute to the nature of language, has much to do with the nature of culture. But I don't think we need to go that far, this soon, to explain the kind of block, against total translatibility, which is in question here. That is precisely the block which requires the entry of the translator as subjectivity, and which lands us in the selfhood paradox we saw rising toward us from the WesternChinese and Chinese-Western relationships.

8

In Cartesian Linguistics, Noam Chomsky turns back to the Grammar and Logic of Port Royal, in order to discover antecedents of contemporary transformational grammar, and in doing this he confirms his own belief in the uniformity of the grammatical relations involved [in different languages], a belief that deep structures are fundamentally the same across languages, although the means for their expression may be quite diverse. This claim is not obviously true . . . so far as I know, however, modem linguistics offers no data that challenge it in any serious way. (p. 45) The uniformity he speaks of provides one more state-of-affairs which would promise the possibility of the objective mutual interpenetrability of all languages; would at the same time render the

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limits of linguistic translatability transcendable and in fact help us to see beyond the paradox of selfhood, as it applies to the present matter. If language were as essentially intelligible as this, the translator's mind would be able to go beyond itself and penetrate the objective actuality of that language. Chomsky refines his notion of deep structure by reference to Descartes and his age; to thinkers who held that language is the distinguishing feature of humanity, its main difference from the animals, and that it is in fact our only entrance into the inner life of another person. That insistence on language as the door into the other is the axis on which Chomsky turns his distinction between deep structure and surface structure. The deep structure of language is the true and actual working of the mind, through symbol, which lies below linguistic utterance; that utterance itself is a formalized reworking of the deeper material, a reworking which follows rules of the particular language in question; which in one case translates depth meaning into Video canem currentem and in another into je vois un chien qui court·, but which in every case translates. It marks human language - according to Descartes and Chomsky - that as a system it is capable of innovation, of aiding us to create new thoughts and new responses to thoughts Those innovations are built across the base of deep structures which are the undergirding of every speaker's mind. These structures are a 'simple reflection of the forms of thought' (p. 35). The mind builds its language out of propositions, linked together as and through the parts of speech, builds its language in all places according to similar rules and out of the same raw materials. But it remains hard to know just what are the contents, of the deep-structure part of the mind; it is hard to know of how much interest it is to know that all minds share these. Above all it seems that Chomsky is best at pointing out the simple differences between deep and surface structure, the deformation of depth by surface; as in showing that when we say Dieu invisible a créé le monde visible we are in fact reflecting three elementary propositions: God is invisible, God has created the world, the world is visible ; despite the appearance,

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given on the surface, that only two propositions are involved. The discrepancy of deep from surface structure, the fissure running through the whole body of language, takes us flatly back into the limits of translatability. Precisely the depth-intelligibility of language makes for the surface, the apparent and actual, deceptiveness of language. Yet depth-intelligibility is present and important in language. From a different angle Norbert Wiener too helps us to see, inside the fallen, partly intelligible world of language, certain active principles of meaning of which we might ourselves want to say: that if they can be found by the translator, the language in which they are embedded will raise only minimal opposition to the subjectivity which raids it for translation, will do its best to help that subjectivity transcend itself. For Wiener language is man's most distinctive activity, the one he shares with no other animal, even with his nearest relations : The chimpanzee has simply no built-in mechanism which leads it to translate the sounds that it hears into the basis around which to unite its own ideas or into a complex mode of behavior. (The Human Use of Human Beings,

p . 114)

Man is an animal, and a machine, which has unique powers of storage and retrieval; but which, in addition, is capable of unprecedented deepening of the conception of meaning. With man's use of language, the semantic region of being grows vastly in quality. In discussing man as a meaning-making machine, Wiener makes it clear that he speaks of man in general. There is a strong emphasis on the common traits of human intelligence, and it is only when Wiener discusses entropy that he becomes quite explicit about certain views, on the difficulty of linguistic communication, which bear closely on our argument. In Chomsky's account we run sooner or later into a special problem for translation: that deep structure is only obliquely related to surface structure, and that we can therefore only with considerable chance for error reach through surface structure to the 'real argument', the 'mental argument'. Wiener's application

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of the physics-term, entropy, directs another kind of critique at the possibility of inter-cultural translation. Gibbs helped us to speculate that the tendency of the physical world is to run down, unless its natural course is counteracted; to run down, lose energy, become disorganized : As entropy increases, the universe, and all closed systems in the universe, tend naturally to deteriorate and lose their distinctness, to move from the least to the most probable state, from a state of organization and differentiation in which distinctions and forms exist, to a state of chaos and sameness. In Gibbs' universe order is least probable, chaos most probable. (The Human Use of Human Beings, p. 20) Language, as well as 'life' in general, is for both Gibbs and Wiener one of the forces counteracting entropy; building up organization, introducing change, introducing probabilities as distinct from inevitabilities, and combatting chaos. The meanings embodied in a particular language are only very delicately distinguishable from its nonsense; they shade into each other: One may get a remarkable semblance of a language like English by taking a sequence of words, or pairs of words, or triads of words, according to the statistical frequency with which they occur in the language, and the gibberish thus obtained will have a remarkably persuasive similarity to good English. (The Human Use of Human Beings, p. 108) (Rudolf Carnap, in Pseudoproblems in Philosophy, gives a neat list of such shading: 1. 'Jupiter sits in this cloud'. 2. 'This rock is sad'. 3. 'This triangle is virtuous'. 4. 'Berlin horse blue'. 5. 'And or of which'. 6. 'bu ba bi' 7. (*-*")'. (p. 326).) The result of this general situation, the account of which rests on a vast metaphor transferred from physics to linguistics - is that in language there will at all times be a strong thrust toward generalization, toward lack of organization (which is about the same thing) and toward a nearly fatal equilibrium - the kind of randomness and absence of inner perspective which we have seen in nonsense; though it will be the special glory of strong language to oppose that threat, to become great poetry instead of cliches.

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The threat posed to and fought by language will in its special form be also a threat to the possibility of translation, for it will not only block the translator's self-transcendence, but it will contribute to many related difficulties which especially plague the translator. (Jiri Levy, in his essay 'Will Translation Theory be of use to Translators,' makes this point with details ; to him it seems that the translator's greatest danger is in losing the specificity of the original.) Though there is a sense in which the activity of translation postulates an ideal language, a meta-language which contains all other languages, there is no sense in which that activity is advanced by substituting general for particular language, especially when it is operating on literature. Wiener helps us to see how precariously translation of language must hold to the particular rather than the general, to the possibility of organization rather than chaotic equilibrium ; and thus he echoes, in his terms, Chomsky's sense of the narrow tightrope that any language walks, over the deep chasm of the mind's intelligible principles or structure.

9 It seemed at first of only paradoxical interest, that translation from foreign languages is to a large extent a way we rediscover and reconfirm ourselves; and that in translation the human factor, with its accompanying epistemological limitations, seemed ineradicable. However as we went ahead to glance at the linguistic views of Chomsky and Wiener, it seemed as if perhaps that paradox is itself insuperable, or is so at least in practice; to the postulate of omnipresent subjectivity we added an apparent fact: that language embodies a recalcitrance against the kind of incarnate intelligibility which would help the translator's self to overcome its isolation, to meet the other as real objectivity. In fact aesthetic forms of language are just what is required to bring out the individual subjectivity of the translator. The very character of such language is both universal - stipulated by physical and psychic traits common to all men - and in its linguistic instances related, with impenetrable

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fineness, to the specific mind and moment that made it. This last limitation suggests why the aesthetic text to be translated may at least partly drive the translator back into the epistemological paradox with which we began. We all know that something like translation takes place, that it is not identical with self-expression, that - like Pound's work - it reaches some significant aspects of the original, and that it is partly able to preserve these. Yet the foregoing suggests that the activity of translation is hedged in by serious limits - imposed by the structure of selfhood and the nature of language. We reach the almost comical position of holding that while translation is actual it is not possible. We reach an impasse here. We can only get out of the impasse that is, see distance opening on the far side of stalemate - by going simultaneously backward and forward, carrying the argument along on our backs. We opened with the Chinese-Western relation. The argument might well have turned, from that point, straight into the social-cultural problems met by the translator. But it isn't too late; for we have now, in the argument, come precisely to the place where those problems are of maximum interest. The recalcitrance of language, to providing the intelligibility needed for being translated objectively, has been suggested by Wiener and Chomsky - while they suggested much else too. They were discussing language as it is, and as far as they went we have no reason to suppose they are not accurate. They support, from a different angle, the supposition included in the paradox of subjectivity - that although translation is actual and real it is hardly possible. What we want to understand now is a situation in which we could justifiably account for the possibility of translation while remaining true to the philosophical and linguistic points that led us to think of translation as impossible. That is how we can go ahead. The kind of situation I mean is one which would come into being if language-users, especially users of different languages, were to express themselves with great care, but were in the same carefulness to go much farther than simply to exclude unclarities. They would need to alter their existence maps and to orient themselves differently toward other language users.

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In a tidy essay, "Communication and Meaning - A Functional Approach", Donald MacKay makes the following major points: 1. Each individual is a goal-directed system, and "information as to the current state of his environment (including results of his own activity) contributes to the outgoing selective process by which his behavior is organized". Each man has an inner map of his own goals. 2. "That when the environment includes other members of the same... species, a new kind of possibility emerges"; namely that changing the goal-complex of the other person becomes a way of influencing one's own environment. This changing is called 'communication'. It changes part of the other person's goalcomplex map. 3. Communication acquires meaning for another when he sees how through changing you are trying to orient him freshly within his goal-complex. 4. Failure in communication results from the inability or refusal of one individual to locate, on his goalmap, information provided by another. 5. Satisfactory communication occurs when each individual in a set "is open to goal-adjustment, though each evaluates externally imposed adjustment negatively for feedback purposes. Here a genuinely 'social' situation can develop. Each can pursue its goals only by taking into account the goals of the other, not only as facts about the world, but as potential members of its own goal-hierarchy . . . The social unit formed of A + B-interaction becomes a goal-seeking system in its own right" (in: Cross-Cultural Understanding, ed. Northrop, p. 176). This argument is applied by MacKay to communication in the broadest sense; in a sense which clearly includes language at its center. We deduce at once, from this perspective, that the source of linguistic misunderstandings is more than our indifference to clear reference; that it lies in the misadjustment of our deeply inward personal goal-maps. We see that linguistic understandings result from the at least local and partial mutual adjustments of those maps. We see further that those adjustments are realized in a comingtogether, and intertwining, of some part of the goal-complexes of the individuals involved in the communication. How does this help us to view a situation in which translation would be possible?

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This metaphorical language enables us to talk freshly about the paradox of selfhood in translation, and about the inherent disinclination of language to help that paradox transcend itself. The selfhood paradox in the present argument is simple: in going out to a foreign text, to translate it into our language, we carry our personal tastes, language-style, perceptions with us, and what we bring back is essentially our own self-expression in words partially prompted by someone else's expression. Crudely put, the formula for this state of affairs is that in translation we find or confirm ourselves through others - as Pound had through Li Po, and the Chinese translation cadres had through Hans Christian Andersen. But this formula felt too easy, even at the beginning. 'What one is' is a notoriously loose phrase. What one is seems partly to be determined by what one becomes through being in a world with other people. Realizing this, we wondered whether the paradox of selfhood was correctly formulated. Even at this point, there seems no reason to doubt the paradox, but much reason to reexpress it. MacKay's argument helps us see that the paradox was correctly but incompletely formulated. (We could support this view with many modern texts; from Sartre's Being and Nothing, Buber's I and Thou, or, from the realm of empirical sociology, from Erving Goffman's The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.) We see this when we look on Li Po's poem as one activity taking place within the activities constituting part of his entire goal-complex; or as an activity by which he oriented himself on his own interior world-map, at the same time slightly revising the map itself. Granted this account we can slightly reinterpret Pound's effort to translate from Li Po. Pound is there standing or trying to stand inside Li Po's worldmap, is trying to establish a similar map of his own. We have here at least the beginning of a 'social situation', in MacKay's sense though placing literary relations in this sociological frame itself needs more translation. In this situation Pound is, to some degree, having to take into account the goals of Li Po, and is joining with him temporarily in a new social unit. To that extent, in this case, it is not simply true that Pound is meeting the other but remaining

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himself. (We never quite simply said that anyway.) The notions of 'oneself and 'other' are not that unitary or solid. They are intermeshing notions, concerning intermeshing entities (or abstractionentities). The paradox remains, but itself translated; self, meaning among other things what one becomes through others, returns from the other which it partly is, and which is partly it, to establish new artifacts which are to a surprising degree social achievements. At the same time MacKay's frame enables us to look freshly at the language-analyses of Chomsky and Wiener. I stressed that, in those analyses, which made language out to be a blockage in the flow of information. If the imprisonment of subjectivity were to be overcome, I said earlier, it would be through going out to translate the objectively intelligible in the language of others. At that point, however, Chomsky and Wiener - speaking of the hiatus between deep and surface structure, or of entropie deterioration seemed to stress the non-translucency of languages. With a new way of talking about the self, however, we change our whole picture - not the points made by Chomsky and Wiener, for instance, but the intelligible framework into which to place those points. Now we are able to see that the struggle of language against entropy, and its struggle to find a consistent way of transforming meanings into surface structure, are both ways in which language makers press toward making works which will be as intelligible as possible, which will - in Wiener's terms - fight disorganization and probability. This is to see that while what we call blocking is just that, it does in fact function, in a wider perspective, as a stage in the preparation of consciousness, a preparation for verbal forms which will be objectively intelligible and so translatable, even in the strictest sense of 'translatable', the sense a machine might give. These are senses in which an account of translation based on structural dynamics - and on an ontology which not only supports it, but is held directly in position for use - can place both classical philosophical dilemmas and empirical accounts of language in a more living perspective. It is after all only a question, here, of pointing out how translation is possible, as well as actual. We never

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doubted it was real, but had difficulty believing, or understanding how, it involved any genuine negotiation, meeting and deepening of poles, and penetration of an objective structure of language. At this point in the argument, I think, we have no reason to express that kind of doubt, at least in the same way. It is piquant and worth attention, however, to see that while we were able to doubt before, on the basis of accurate accounts of the situation, a more suitable framework, for our account of the nature of self and other, was all we needed to put the same data to full use.

VII THE EVALUATION AND USE OF TRANSLATIONS

A translation is a verbal approximation, in one language, of a verbal creation in another language. We can see the importance of translations in many ways. For example, they assist us in the effort to understand people of other nationalities who speak languages other than ours. This kind of understanding is important, for on it depend any significant strides toward a world political community. Yet this understanding of other people depends on ability to break through the barrier of language established between people, a break-through best accomplished by translation. If translations are important, it is important that they be good. Whether at a meeting of the United Nations or in the classroom, a bad translation is harmful, worse than none. Yet if good translations are to be found, the criteria for their evaluation must be carefully established, and poor translations must be abandoned. What standards are there for judging translations? Even if we restrict this question to translations of imaginative literature, as we shall do here, it is as difficult a question as any that offers itself to the aesthetic judgment. The criterion for evaluating a translation is accuracy. A translation is good if it is accurate, bad if it is inaccurate. The translator must voluntarily subordinate himself to another person's verbal stance, or verbal attitude. He must try to feel his way into that attitude, accurately, in good faith. And yet the assessment of accuracy, in such a case, is unusually difficult. What does accuracy really mean here? The model to be translated is complex, existing in different ways, to each of which the translator must be faithful. It will be well to discuss those forms of existence here, in order to clarify the problem of evaluating the accuracy of a translation.

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There are both 'prosaic' and 'poetic' aspects to every work of literature. I use the word 'prosaic' in no derogatory sense. By the prosaic aspect I mean those words, elements of syntax, and larger units of organization by which the work points outward toward its meanings, by which the work is, as we say, denotative. One might describe this as the transparent level of literature, for the words which construct it can be seen straight through to that which they 'mean'. Literary fiction is seldom unambiguously prosaic, in this sense. It must be said, in fact, that in no literary work is language as systematically transparent as it is in scientific writing. Suppose a scientist writes : When we formulate the laws of ordinary optics, we usually think of light as travelling in three dimensions. Gravity dominates our everyday lives so much that we almost instinctively think of ordinary space as consisting of two horizontal dimensions and one vertical. (James Jeans, The Growth of Physical Science, pp. 295-96.)

This language is not intended to be of intrinsic interest, for itself. It is supposed to fall away in the reading, revealing beyond itself the concepts which it dramatizes. The prosaic aspect of literature is not so self-effacing. Imagine that the preceding passage had been found embedded in Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus, or in another modern novel which draws much scientific information into its scope. Even in such an 'informative' work the foregoing words would be of more intrinsic interest, as words, than they are in the writing of James Jeans, their author. In a novel, these words would be established in a context - of plot, and characterization which lent them a multiplicity of affective, connotative traits. They might be the words of a character, or the author's comment on reality as it is enacted and embodied within the work. It is not that these words would be less 'meaningful' in a novel than in a scientific work, though they would hardly satisfy a positivistic criterion of meaning. Such words would have a less unambiguously extraverted meaning than if they had been established in a treatise on optics. And yet, as contrasted with 'poetic' language, these words, even when embodied in fiction, would seem to-be transparent. On an

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absolute scale of kinds of meaning, such prosaic language in fiction would lie between the prosaic language of science and poetic language, wherever found. The 'poetic' aspect of language is composed of those words, syntactical units, and larger forms of organization which not only point outward, but, to a greater degree, are reflexive, self-referential. We might say that this is a relatively opaque, rather than a transparent, aspect of language. Such poetic use of language is especially evident in the kind of writing which, from a purely formal viewpoint, we call 'poetry'. Yet there is, obviously, no necessity that poetic language should be organized in any particular way on a page, rhymed, or regularly metered. It is only required that the elements of poetic language be intrinsically rich, and include, in their own texture, a substantial part of their meaning. When we read: The swift red flesh, a winter king Who squired the glacier woman down the sky ? She ran the neighing canyons all the spring; She sprouted arms; she rose with maize - to die. (Hart Crane, "The Bridge")

we are in contact with language which draws attention to itself, which proposes its own sensuousness as an essential part of its communication, and makes no suggestion that what it denotes is the only point. It is not that this poetic language is unintelligible, or meaningless. Far more than the language of prose in fiction, though, poetic language has non-conceptual meaning. The 'meaning' of poetic language is, for just that reason, difficult to explain. It must be explained in poetic language, too, and yet that poetic language must be kept analytical: a hard balance to maintain. Hence, the great difficulty of writing criticism of works which rely heavily on poetic language. The poetic and prosaic aspects of every work of literature are interwoven. One kind of level invariably predominates. In a lyric poem, poetic language is generally salient; in a discursive novel, prosaic language. Yet even single words - in any kind of literary work - are torn between their centrifugal and their centripetal

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tendencies. The chief difficulty for the translator, and for his judge, enters with the attempt to translate accurately the poetic aspect of his model. Prosaic language, as has been seen, points outwardly to what it 'means'. That which is denoted by prosaic language generally has a public character, such as, for example, the character of what we call the 'things' in the world : those objects, from tanks to toothbrushes, which we know through our senses and confidently assume to be 'out there'. Those 'things', of course, may be as abstract as the "gravity" and "space" mentioned above by Jeans. But even in such cases the things are public : universal and open to conceptual generalization. Prosaic language strives, furthermore, to make clear just exactly what it is indicating, to remove fuzzy outlines and mysterious overtones. For both of these reasons, the accurate translation of prosaic language is not insuperably difficult. A mere dictionary is of great use in such translation. Poetic language is far more difficult to translate. It denotes and connotes simultaneously, with its connotation being the stronger element. The dictionary meanings of words which are used in poetic language are very partial accountings for those words, as they appear in a literary context. Dictionary definitions can only give the general conceptual equivalent of words, not their unique sensuous overtones. The un-definability of poetic language, in its larger forms of organization, as well as in its use of single words, makes the translation of even a lyric poem vastly more difficult than the translation of a unit of prosaic language, even as it appears in highly organized fiction. The translator of poetic language must first use, then throw away, his dictionary. The evaluator of the translation must do the same. For in assessing the success of a translation of and into poetic language, he must feel himself into the texture of the original language, until he has experienced the full complexity of its meaning. Only then, and only if he is sensitive to his own language, can he determine how well the translator has defined the indefinable, done the impossible, for the translation of poetic language is literally impossible. How can we best assess translation, which presents - as every translation of literature does - at least some elements of irreducibly

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poetic language? We are looking for accuracy. We can determine, fairly well, whether the translator was acquainted with the prosaic meanings - which are themselves sufficiently varied - of the language from which he translates. After that, we are forced to rely on taste, like migrating birds relying on an intangible sense of orientation. This is not a cause for despair. Taste is no more subjective than reason, and in fact involves its own compelling demand for universality. Taste is a disciplined feeling, through which the anti-conceptual aspect of art - in this case its sensuousness - is transmitted. With taste, we can approach the connotations of literary works in other languages, and evaluate attempts to transfer those connotations to our own language. It follows, then, that both considerable linguistic knowledge grammatical, lexicographical - and taste are required for a determination of the accuracy of translations, an evaluation of translations. The same requirements hold, of course, for the translator's own work. (The efforts of the translator and his evaluator naturally overlap a great deal, probably more than those of the critic and the novelist whom he criticizes, between which latter two there is a wider spiritual gap.) Yet the accuracy which we require of the translator is still more complex. So, consequently, is the job of evaluating a translation. Up to now, I have only mentioned the 'static' elements in the work to be translated, that is, the two aspects of language present in works of literature. I have briefly discussed larger units of language, syntactical and even more comprehensive organizations. But the stress has been on the kind of reference which words, or organizations of them, make to their distinctive meanings. For the purpose of analysis, I have ignored language as action, the interworking of words together. I have ignored such inner dynamism as it appears on the largest level of organization, the whole form (or Gestalt) of a work of literature. The translator, as we all know, may have the requisite knowledge of the language from which he translates, may even be sensitive to its 'poetic' dimension, and may yet not render the dynamic wholeness of his model. The evaluation of this aspect of translation also demands taste, an intuitive appreciation of the quality of the original. Yet to grasp

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the whole Gestalt of a literary work requires a more significant kind of taste than was mentioned above, in connection with the poetic dimension of the original. Now we are concerned with taste for the thematic organization of a work, that which justifies - or does not - the work's specific linguistic elements. Ultimately, I think, there is no beauty in literature apart from the whole. Of course we may speak of 'beautiful lines' in a lyric, or of 'sharp perceptions' in a short story. Matthew Arnold referred, in this way, to touchstones of beauty in poetry. But this is the aesthete's way into literature, and in the long run it distorts good works. We must oppose it as an approach to literature. Not only must we demand of the translator, however, that he seize the original in its integrity, but we must be careful to see that he seizes it in its integrity, not in his own. The perfect balance between manliness and submission which we require of a translator is likely to be disturbed at this point. The translator is eager to find his own creative vision in that of his model, and has doubtless been drawn to that model by its supposed kinship to him. We must be sure that his judgment has been scrupulous. As evaluators, then, we must require of translations a complex accuracy to their original. It is clear that we will expect a translator of literature to be far more than a good linguist, though capable linguist he must be. He will have to be an initiate in the poetic use of language, and, incidentally, be able to distinguish between the prosaic and poetic elements of the work he translates. Neither of these two abilities, I believe, presumes in the translator a strong creative faculty. Yet the third requisite for accuracy, a fidelity to the whole conception of what he translates, does suppose a creative faculty in the translator. It supposes in him a disciplined sympathy for the final purpose of his original, and the power to transfer that sympathy into an organic conception in his own language. Yet it requires that he keep the precarious balance, here, between his own creative power and the persistent, dominant 'other', to which he must remain faithful. The elements of a rich and difficult marital situation are at hand. Such criteria for the evaluation of translations are clues to the

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use of translations. One must first establish standards, then attempt to decide, in any particular case, which translation is 'best'. It is only too well known, of course, that there is often no satisfactory translation, that none is available, or that what is available is too expensive, particularly for student use. These are serious practical problems. But it would be inappropriate to do more than mention them here. Rather it will be well to make two further general indications, emerging from the criteria established, of ways in which one might select translations, whether for academic or other uses. Translation of literature involves a serious transaction with poetic language, with words used poetically. It is enough to say that any work of literature which might be translated exists, in one of its aspects, through partially self-referential language, through meanings which it itself partly is. These meanings, as I have said, are the most difficult to translate, the despair of geometers. Only a tasteful ear can discern the fullness of such meanings and we must require such ears. The translation of poetic language often presents this 'poetic' difficulty in a specific form. It is that the overtones of such language - what it implies, as distinct from what it states - may be bound up with the idiosyncracies of a particular language at a particular time. Modern poetry often distinguishes itself by a successful use of slang, local references, technical terms. Hart Crane and W. H. Auden, for instance, provide abundant examples of this. Such a trait of poetic language makes it especially hard to translate. The translation of such language must be into comparably local forms of the language of the translation. However, those local forms, as we know, become rapidly out-dated, for all their temporary vitality. It is not that they are inherently defective forms of expression : often extreme linguistic localism, as we find it, say, in Giono or Faulkner, is vital and profound. It is that such language, and thus translations of it, never become part of the canonized tradition. So it happens that many translations of important literature grow outdated, like the very originals they translate, and need to be replaced by translations in a contemporarily more intelligible idiom. For this reason, and not this reason alone, new translations

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of the same work are soon needed. However one wishes to explain this matter, it is true that, as we are often informed, each generation needs its own translations. We may well look for up-to-date translations, then, when we try to use our evaluative criteria for the purpose of selecting translations. We will also want to be sure, in the light of the foregoing arguments, that our chosen translator has not only verbal taste, as described here, but also a significant creative gift. I have tried briefly to suggest the ambiguity of the creative position of the translator, who is called on for both subservience and originality. Yet surely we would rather read a good creative poet's translations of poetry, even if he be frequently inexact - like Pope or Pound than those of a scholar without creative gifts. Of course, we will not be misled into calling 'translations', in the proper sense, recreations which reveal more of the translator than of the original author. Fortunately, though, we are not entirely thrown back on such distinguished pseudo-translations, even for our supply of creative translations. We have a number of scholarly, creatively-gifted translators - Richmond Lattimore, Kimon Friar, Arthur Waley, Vladimir Nabokov, Stuart Gilbert, among others - and may expect that this number will increase. Universities can do something to maintain the supply of exact and creatively-gifted translators. In fact the responsibility of universities is great, here. They are, for example, seed-beds and shelters for linguists, specialists in language per se. Who could be more appropriate judges of the character of various languages? Not all of those men need to succumb to the barbarism of their own professional language. Many of them could write significant literary translations. So, of course, could the less specialized students of the language-and-literature of a foreign country: those in Romance Languages, German, Slavic studies. Finally, the writers - novelists and poets - in our universities are in a peculiarly good position to contribute translations which are both creative and exact : these tamed Bohemians are likely to be better educated than many of their creative predecessors, while, contrary to frequent expectation, a university contract does not sever their connections with the Muses. From the especially complex and open

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matrix of the American university, we can expect a multitude of good translations. Once a literary man appreciates the challenge, difficulty, and end-product of a good translation, he is in danger of being seduced.

Vili NOTES ON TRANSLATIONS OF THREE STORIES

Contemporary short stories, in English translation, make as good a setting as one could want for testing arguments about translation. They are likely to raise almost any of the significant problems, touching that activity, that the most fertile theorist could dream up, and are likely in the process to call their own story existences a hundred times into question. By taking part, in that somewhat theoretical calling into question, we necessarily come into close critical acquaintance with the texts themselves. Reading such stories prompts general questions which gather around the mere fact that those stories are presented in translation ; though the interest of these general questions is far from limited to that of the business of translation. My first question, in reading such stories as the three involved here, is whether they are in fact all public material; whether they are what Horace in the Ars Poetica, thinking of the Greek tragedians whose greatest stories were about public events, admiringly called publica materies. In a good sense, it strikes me, these stories are close to the public world they were made in, are public tales, and are in that sense more possibly translatable than might otherwise be the case. But that is only the start of an answer. A second introductory question is this : does the publicness, in such stories as these, in any sense guarantee that there is a public language into which they can be translated? Does it both presuppose and look forward to the existence of such a language? Into what kind of language are, and can, these stories be translated? Questions like these, raised by story-reading, relate in turn to a broader one, which keeps us close to the texture of the translations themselves; I mean the question of whether the translator

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should himself serve chiefly as an intermediary .This question bristles with complications. It stirs every nerve of the fidelity vs. freedom controversy, as it touches translations; but it raises that controversy to the level where we can see some meaning in it : can see it hiding the entire matter of what we understand literature to be, and how we feel it can be carried along from one culture or language world to another. The last raised question interests the general reader of translations most directly. Do we get the original in the translation of it, or is the original lost? Is the translator, perhaps no matter how he tries to efface himself, or to hide himself inside the spirit of the original, inevitably a traitor to the original? Is there any way, or are there many different ways, for him to be a faithful traitor? Even starting to answer this question, which is practical, requires some theoretical fussing. I applied these questions to three stories, in English translation. These questions seemed to preside over whatever was worth asking, about these stories in translation. I want, now, to ask the questions back to the literature, so completing a kind of circle of concerns, drawing the ideal and the embodied into the same field. My attention will be microscopic. From the beginning it seemed wise, in the present experiment, to scatter what linguistic knowledge I have over three languages : in this case French (Sartre's The Room), Spanish (Borges' The Shape of the Sword), and German (Boll's Pale Anna). I believe the tales are well known. They are good. And all of them are hard to translate, in a way that engages the introductory questions in a substantial wrangle. To answer toward the first question first, these three stories are all instances of publica materies, material which is in a very significant way drawn from common experience, through literature, and which is thus, in an equally significant way, translatable; that is theoretically translatable. (Theoretically possible translations may be the most difficult). That is, this material is at least in principle susceptible to refinding itself in another language drawn from another culture. For this to be true is for it to be at least possible

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that the reader, of these stories in translation, is getting through to the original he is after. Stories which resisted becoming public matter might have been far harder to translate. Joyce's The Dead, Gide's La Porte Étroite, or Mann's Tonio Kroger resist efforts to place them in terms of material or cultural realia. They bring forth very little interest in the public realities of the world, restricting themselves rather to the infinite finesse of the psychic, which, as they present it, resists becoming public literary material. (The kind of concern being essentially the other way around, say, in the stories by Boll, Sartre, and Borges). The stories by Joyce, Gide, and Mann are for this reason, I think, less susceptible of translation than are the 'harder' stories I have chosen. (Harder and, I might add, significantly later in date, part perhaps of a literature which wants its psychism embodied). How - the second question - does this translatability let itself be expressed in terms of the available languages? Do these stories actually find their public voice, in the public translating languages which come to meet them? I think they do, and that we can see the proof in a few details. Boll's story is a good place to start. It is a story, of considerable perception, which works itself out around a very simple plot: of an ex-soldier who finds his way, via his talkative landlady showing him photos, back to a girl he had loved before the war; a girl who happens to be living in his boarding house, in the room adjoining his. The action, decor, and responses are all tangibly presented, hard and clear. Matters move very directly : Erst im Frühjahr 1950 kehrte ich aus dem Krieg heim, und ich fand niemanden mehr in der Stadt, den ich kannte. Zum Glück hatten meine Eltern mir Geld hinterlassen... To which the English responds, supply and suitably, though true to detail, almost in fact to the syntactical order: It wasn't until spring 1950 that I came back from the war, and I found there was nobody I knew left in the town. Luckily my parents had left me some money.

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The translation problem is thus easily and adequately solved through most of the story. ('Adequacy' being tested, here, by our sense that we simply wouldn't consider tampering with the translation as it stands, though we are not quite arrested by it.) Most of the time the dialogue works just this publicly, and unmysteriously, over into English : 'Nein', sagte ich leise, 'aber das Mädchen'. 'Das Mädchen', sagte sie, 'das war seine Braut, aber vielleicht ist es gut, dass er sie nicht mehr sah - ' 'Warum?' fragte ich. 'No', I said quietly, 'but I do know the girl'. 'The girl?' she said. 'She was his fiancée, but perhaps it's a good thing he never saw her again - ' 'Why?' I asked. It is not all this easy. As I look back over my copy of the translation, placed beside the original, I see that I have pencilled several passages for questioning, and that often those are passages in which the original has, so to speak, turned back into itself, established something like mood or atmosphere over itself, and become inaccessible. I want to suggest two examples of such movement in. The first is tiny, but revealing. The English sentence, in which the problem phrase is set, is this : .. .there he stood, in a tram-conductor's uniform, beside a number 9 tram at the terminus, where the tracks curve round the circle, and I recognized the refreshment stand at which I'd so often bought cigarettes, when there had still been no war. (Italics mine)

It is a passage crucial to the story, for the kind of retrospection it establishes; a passage so delicate, suddenly, that even the "terminus", in American English a slightly false locution at this point, betrays the difficulty. (Endstation ringing naturally, conversationally, in the German.) The great problem is "when there had still been no war", which sounds and reads strange in English. (I mean ineffectively strange. There is room for some kinds of strangeness and strainedness in translation.) I suppose we would say 'before the war had begun'. (Though sayability is not the only test.) I feel this would be a preferable expression, in the present translation.

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For a complicated reason, though, even this expression would miss. "Als noch kein Krieg war" ('When still no war was') includes, as part even of its way of meaning 'before the war', the idea (or feeling) that the war was coming. Even my, I think preferable, alternative, 'before the war had begun', fails to reach a certain moody contamination of times with which this little German phrase is pregnant. One more example, from Pale Anna, of a text's withdrawal, its escape from translatibility. Here again I don't want to arbitrate; only to point at something in the text. The narrator is telling about a letter which he received, when he was at the front, from an old girlfriend. Her patriotism had clashed with his growing disillusion : a disequilibrium of which her letter made him finally aware, in the sentence : Ihr werdet schon siegen, und ich bin stolz, dass du dabei bist... which gets translated into You lads will win, and I'm so proud that you're out there... One feels, at first, that the only problem may be "lads". Such words date rapidly, and this one has been dead for several years. But the problem is more radical. As put, the sentence is far more selfconscious in the English - almost as if it were a slogan - than it is in the German. The "out there" contributes to this. ("Dabei" having rather the meaning of 'being alongside' or 'pitching in with the others'.) But there is something about the whole English sentence which is not quite possible, I won't say to say, but even to hear inwardly, as part of the internal rhetoric of an attitude. It is not a question, here, of German idiom which is hard to translate. It is a question of tone, a question which becomes a problem because the tone here is a resonance of cultural atmosphere. The public quality of Boll's story is broken here. These are all narrow and specific soundings, drilled at precise points into Pale Anna. I am trying to test the translatability of a work which seems basically 'public'. What we find in the few details

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will have to do a lot of work. To this point, as far as it goes, the detail supports the idea that Pale Anna is centrally public, but that it fades away from 'the public' at various points, fades away from the translator. What about Borges' small tale, The Form of the Sword? Borges' work is always whimsical and mysterious, and to that extent public only in its own way; though public, and directed toward us all, it does somehow contrive to remain itself. Like Boll's work, this story is on the whole reachable; and the translation of it very successful. It works at its best, I suppose, when it deals in Borges' precise and scary descriptive detail : when it puts up A spiteful scar crossed his face : an ash-colored and nearly perfect arc that creased his temple at one tip and his cheek at the other... to account for Le cruzaba la cara una cicatriz rencorosa: un arco ceniciento y casi perfecto que de un lado ajaba la sien y del otro el pómulo. There is a loss in rhythm, but a nice sharpness of retained detail. That is enough. Again a couple of difficult passages will prove more. The first is a classical mood-problem. As the narrator begins to recount his earliest experiences, he wants to explain the later histories of some of his comrades in the Irish Revolution. Some went on to fight for peace, others fought under the British flag, and another, the most worthy, died in the courtyard of a barracks, at dawn, shot by men filled with sleep... or, in Spanish : otro, el que mas valía, murió en el patio de un cuartel, en el alba, fusilado por hombres llenos de sueño... I have trouble putting my feelings about the English : that it is flat and implicationless just where - in llenos de sueño or el que mas valia - the Spanish is fullest. All the Romance of the Irish Revolutionaries - 'Republicans, Catholics . . . Romantics' - is conjured

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up in the heroic overtones of this line about the 'one who was most worthy'. The English doesn't reach far enough. Would it have been better to take more chances, to speak of 'the one who mattered most, who died in a barracks yard at dawn, shot down by sleepladen men...'? My second example raises equally the question of mood. (I am not trying to pick out mistakes in translation, simply inadequacies, and I pick those out without implying they could have been made adequate.) Again the instance is small. The narrator and Moon have passed nine days together in the general's enormous house, working out their plans of action. The narrator sums up the period in this way : De las agonías y luces de la guerra no diré nada: mi proposito es referir la historia de esta cicatriz que me afrente. The tone, I think, is both Latinate - formal, drawn from a rhetorical tradition which is quite at home in ordinary discourse; and part of the strangely classical-intimate-grotesque communication which the narrator offers Borges, inside the story's frame. No wonder the sentence defies English: Of the agonies and the successes of the war I shall not speak. I propose to relate the history of the scar that insults me. What was accessible, in the Spanish, is simply too nuanced for us to meet it with what is accessible, outward-turned, in our language. The stories by Boll and Borges are on the whole translatable. They are studded with the world's realia, as well as with the realia of ordinary discourse, and though points present themselves occasionally, in both pieces, at which the text recedes from touch, these are local occasions, on which the publicity of the matter concerned is only temporarily lost from view. They are not the moments, of total self-sufficiency, which we are likely to meet in a James novel or a Mallarmé poem, against which the translator has no recourse. Sartre's fiction, as one would assume from Sartre's philosophy, is peculiarly outward turned, devoted to movement, to action,

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whether psychic or physical, and to self-transcendence through the verbal into the world of action. The story here, The Room, is no exception to this Sartrean bias ; though in theme it deals with the neurotic forces of the inward world, it is at the same time a strongly conceptual piece, at every point intelligible. One seems to understand as well as experience it. This is its special way of making itself available. The story is too long to retell or sample representatively. But the weight of what it can tell us should be applied here. The point I want to make is rather a rough, perhaps a perverse, one. There are various nodes at which Sartre's text becomes tough to translate, and yet, because of his work's special character, one feels that even getting most of his text over is adequate. One example may make this clear. Here is M. Darbedat, complaining about his insane son-in-law: When I say hello to him he gives me a flabby handshake and doesn't say a word. As soon as they're alone, I think they [he and his wife] go back to his obsessions : she tells me sometimes he screams as though his throat were being cut, because of his hallucinations. He sees statues. They frighten him because they buzz. He says they fly around and make fishy eyes at him. (Tr. by Lloyd Alexander.) I think this sounds false in English - though after reading a passage several times one is never sure. Inside the French the sources of this falsity are visible. "Go back to his obsessions" is probably all one could do with the much richer, more idiomatically lodged "il revient sur ses idées fixes", in which the "idées fixes" themselves trail a flock of connotations - Montaigne to Valéry - and the 'revenir' clothes a very supple physical metaphor, which adds an indefinable dash to the sentence. In French "des statues", grammatically feminine plural, picks up "hallucinations", also feminine plural, and thus automatically puts itself in apposition to "hallucinations". The "he sees", which is necessarily added for clarity in the English, obscures the concision and shockforce of the French. Finally - and here the English certainly does less than it might - the "fishy eyes" is at best a distant effort toward

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the "yeux blancs" of the French. 'White eyes' would not have done, of course. Neither, given the tone of this English passage, would 'blank eyes', a bilingual pun which I should myself have tried to use. Wasn't it a mistake, though, to risk an animal metaphor, especially one, like "fishy", which has not yet been completely freed from its physical basis? And yet - this is my point - because Sartre is not a finicky writer, because he deals less than Boll, and much less than Borges, in local detail - we get the drive and point of this passage, even into its detail. In that way, I think, Sartre is the most public and most translatable of these three authors. Two of the general questions have been opened. The second, concerning the kind of language which inherently public materia} can find to translate it, has been answered with some qualifications, but with one constant affirmation : that such material has indeed, in the present case, found a language, English, to absorb and communicate it. It is only fair to make clear, though, that the expression publica materies has been loosely used. As it came from Horace and classical culture it implied mythical tales, or at least - as in Plautus and Terence - inherited themes to which the author could address himself, making his own point by reshaping the given. The counterpoint achieved in this way was dear to Greek and Roman literature, and the source of its greatest accomplishments. How could Euripides have managed his kind of originality without Sophocles to work off against? Or Sophocles without Aeschylus? The expression publica materies was coined, I think, to cover that kind of situation; but the situation came to involve, as it developed into mediaeval literature, a wider range of verbal, as distinct from larger mythical, effects : the public in literature did, it is true, continue to embrace the thematic - tales of the Grail, stories of Diktys and Dares, Roland - but came to include the inherited tropes, analogies, and prosodie techniques on which, more even than in antiquity, the writer in the Middle Ages depended. It is this widened sense of the public, to cut short a long historical account, which I am implying here.

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From defining terms we can pass, I think, quite naturally into the question of the translator's role. The answer to this question depends on almost everything. We are here concerned with prose, which is generally less inviting than poetry to 'freedom' of translation ; with stories which are designed to be read in no sense as icons but as tales for the interested; and with, as I have tried to show in three instances, stories which are essentially public. Inside this framework we can say our words about the role of the translator. Where the public part of the original is in the foreground one seems, as translator, neither to need nor want any more strategy than this: to draw the original as directly as possible through bimself-as-keen-representative-of-his-own-language, into a balance, in the new language, which stands pretty accurately for the original work. There seems to me no need in such a case for, say, 'continuing out the curve of the original', for making it new in the new language. So far so simple, if academic. The harder problem for the translator sets in where he deals with the private in the original: with that receding element which we saw in Sartre, Boll, and Borges - in a few phrases only, but with what amounts, in those three stories, to a great body of phrases, paragraphs, and larger elements, inextricably woven with the public, and with the whole fabrics of the stories under consideration. To account critically for the way that private element enters these stories would be not only to explain the whole problem of the translator, in addressing such stories, but in effect to account for the peculiar, as distinct from the general, pleasure all literature gives us. It will have to do here to say that the translator's role, in the present cases, must be to carry over the public, while deftly, and with always unplannable skill, weaving the private into it. However this schematic breakdown of the original, into its public and private parts, is an irresistible temptation to avoid general criticism, and to bring this chapter to rest on its final question ; which is at this point perfectly in place. It is the most urgent question of all : do we find the originals, in these and other translations, or do we miss them?

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Any even partially convincing reply, in the present setting, will limit itself to the three stories given attention: I chose to discuss them partly for what I took to be their quality of representing the kinds of possibility and difficulty provided by a whole range of modern tales, and I hope this guess will prove accurate. There is no point simply in saying, of these three or of all these stories, that one part of them, the public, was translatable, and another, the 'private', was untranslatable, or nearly so. "When there had still been no war" is not no translation of "als noch kein Krieg war". "El que mas valía" is not entirely lost in "the most worthy". "Go back to his obsessions" is not no translation of "revenir sur ses idées fixes". It is obviously a question here of degree; in referring to the private I mean only to be pointing to what is relatively hard to put over. Within the language of degrees it was simply a great deal easier to manage the translation of what I call realia-based language. Even so the point is probably too obvious, and threatens to leave us, in answer to the final question, with the uncomfortable feeling that what we get, in these translations, is only about fifty percent authentic. And that despite my insistence, earlier, that these stories belong on the whole, and to a remarkable degree, to the public realm. Without going far beyond the common sense perspective of translation, I think, we can turn this final impression surprisingly, and give it at least a fresher feel. Translation is, more than anything I've said here implies, process, an activity, of constant approximation to some other text, which is constantly growing with the understanding of that other text. Understood in that way the realia become, in fact, not so 'hard'; the intangibles, not so 'soft'. The whole problem begins to look different. But the issue is deeper than that - and the academic classifications are more unsteady even than they seemed. For the original, that famous icon of discussions like these, is itself not a static object, not 'hard' as at least in ordinary language we take it to be. The original is a structure of intentions, living argument. It is made out of language, not out of the things language is about. And so on. It is in fact made by a creature, man, in whom the desire to find the substantive around

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him is a constant temptation to discover and identify the substantial. In this perspective, I think, the transaction of the translation looks even further restatable than before. To see the exact nature of such a restatement would have required more and deeper redefinition than would have been to the point here. Not to have mentioned the difference, though, would have been to assert too much for the accuracy of the present translations, without at least suggesting the complexity of the entire matter of accuracy in translation. The complexity includes the prospect that the public factor in literature may be far less a block, a hard unit, than we usually experience it; while the hidden may be a little firmer than extraordinarily prepared provocation to risk.

IX TRANSLATION AND CRITICISM

At a conference in Paris, in March, 1967,1 heard Polish and French poets and translators discuss the problems of translation. Their immediate theme was three anthologies of recent Polish poetry translated into English, French, and German respectively. But they went, of course, quickly and far out beyond the topic at hand. To their efforts at discussing the problems of translation was added a striking piquancy: that much of the conference's discussion of translation was carried on by means of translation. That situation made the whole event more meaningful than I could analyze. The discussers were thereby put into an unusual position. Some of their analyses were communicated to one another in a medium or form which was an example of the thing they were discussing. The conditions of their act of communication were the most eloquent comment to be made on the contents of their communication. Not only the difficulty of translation was illustrated by that situation; but also the fact that even in talking about translation we go out beyond our analyses, and forget how difficult it is for us even to discuss the difficulty of understanding one another across language barriers. It is in various ways worth thinking about what kinds of alleviation translation can be, to the burden of language barriers. We often think that it can provide equivalents, in a new language, for what was written in another language. This concept of equivalents or equivalence needs a close look, for it opens the door to a flock of confusions. I have fought with the idea already, but it is well worth returning to here. 'Equivalence' usually means, in the kind of case I am thinking of, 'value in a new language which is like and worth the value of 99

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that from which the translation was made, the original'. I have already examined some of the roots - ontological and political - of this conviction: here I simply state it. Sometimes this conviction joins with the belief that translations can deal very freely with their originals, and sometimes with the opposite belief, that translations must be very, as it is called, 'literal'. Either of these views, and a spectrum of possibilities lying between them, can be supported by the kind of equivalence-conviction I describe. These opposed views have in common, in the present case, the conviction that they represent ways of establishing equivalence. There is an alternative to this definition, or at least another way of looking at it; a view of translation which if not original is at least unorthodox, which is backed up by many contexts, and which has the merit of describing translation's relation to the main landmass of meaningful uses of language. Translation deserves, under certain conditions, to be considered an extension of an original work, quite as literally as we sometimes consider literary criticism or literary scholarship an extension of literature itself. I mean by extension something entirely different from translation as variation or imitation (in Robert Lowell's sense), in which great latitude is provided for interpretation. 'Interpretation' is a frightening word. The notion of it returns us to the duller aspects of equivalence, the non-ontological aspects. I mean at this point to consider translation as a continuation of the impulse latent in an original. From the shelf I pick a book by René Char and read : Le poète ne s'irrite pas de l'extinction hideuse de la mort, mais confiant en son toucher particulier transforme toute chose en laines prolongées, and then, translated by Jackson Mathews on the opposite page : The poet is not angry at the hideous extinction of death, but confident of his own particular touch, he transforms everything into long wools. The ineptitude of this translation results from giving in to the most pedestrian sense of equivalence. But what use would even a more

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creative sense of equivalence have been here? Of what interest could it have been in this case even to imitate (in Lowell's sense) imaginatively? One could hardly have done more than, say, make daringly explicit the maggoty, spindly aspects of physical death. This would have helped, but could perhaps best have been achieved by creative translation out from the center of the French. Like this, for a start: The shaper of poems (1) is not rawed by (2) the tangible strangle-grasp (3) of death, but turns it (4), trusting his touch, into fingers (5), endurable skeins. One may head, first, for the dominant sense-experience of the original, which here is tactile. (Not amorphous and indifferent, as the equivalent-version suggests.) Then the hints from the original begin to accumulate. One realizes what to do with the "laines prolongées", that they can be related to "toucher". Hence "fingers" (5) and "skeins". One goes for etymological or cultural resonances (as in 1,2,3) which convey the original's sense of effort and texture. One specifies (4) where the original could afford to be general in its reference : with its "toute chose" which the equivalent translation simply waters down. In short, even in my rough version of an extension-translation, one may follow up a variety of promptings in the original, in an attempt to continue its work, and not in order to find an equivalent of it. Such a program of ad hoc strategies may wander off into anarchy. One can go wild picking up all the hints, and be left in the end with a picnic of linguistic oddities. This would be following a too private course. What I said, concerning the dominant sense-pressure of this passage, may serve as a clue to kinds of shaping available here to the translator. In the present passage the problem is relatively simple, as it is in all poetry or poetic prose which springs from a strongly internalized sense-experience. The texture of the chief component sense will in the reader make itself promptly clear. Usually, though, no so obviously organizational thread is laid down, as is clear in considering, say, La Divina Commedia, Andromaque, or Les Fleurs du Mal.

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In those cases one must listen. Felt senses of motion - upward, downward, inward, outward - will in Dante join the moral issues so as to suggest strategies, or recurrent tropes, of linguistic behavior. A lyric poet, like Baudelaire, might need to be approached through puns or sound-patterns, whose suggestibility seemed at first quite random, but on second reading turned out to be crucial clues. (Think of the sense-and-sound play between "soeur" and "douceur", LIII, or between end-rhymes like "tige" and "vertige", XLVII.) That this sketch of a program is worth considering grows convincing only when one considers, in its light, what it is that work with another language, through translation, can accomplish. As translator, one has first to penetrate another language with his own. This sounds odd, but is true. "Poète" and "hideuse" and "mort" are necessarily addressed, by us, through the English words which have introduced us to those three specific meaning-giving signs. "Poète" first means, to us, in terms of "poet". Secondly, it means, to us, through what we may happen subsequently to know of its roots (poietes, 'the maker', in Greek), its cultural resonances, or its tonal qualities. Third, of course, it means all this through what it gathers and bestows significance from, in its context in its own work. One job of the translator, especially of the translator of the poetic, is to nourish and foster any or all of these meanings, letting them grow from their original soil out through his words into their natural deployment, or at least into one of their possible unfoldings. Similarly with the whole meaning of the original poem, story, or play, we need to let it flower into our words. "Our"? It would be too little to say that this view treats translation as a means to extending our own language. I am convinced of at least that. I see many cases in which the language of translation should clash with the norms of the speech and writing system from which it emerges. (Zukofsky's translations of Catullus are a brilliant example of total clash.) This kind of clash can be extremely fruitful to any language, as we know in English from the effects of our greatest translations - Chapman's and Pope's of Homer, the King James Bible, Fitzgerald's Rubaiyat - all of which have moved the

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boundaries of our language farther out around us, so that we breathe more freely inside it. I am on the whole, though, thinking of nothing so grand when I speak of letting the words of the original flower into our words ; yet I am thinking of something intimately, densely, and experimentally concerned with language extension. I think of the way one can enter the foreign language, and work out with it into a number of its intentions, especially into its guiding intention. Finally I think of the possibilities of occupying, in this way, some of the no man's land which lies between languages, or some of that tertium quid territory which constitutes the ideal language between the particular languages. It involves extending one's own language, but doing that through building a bridge back into one's own language from a foreign language one has gone out into. The notion of equivalence offers us the false idea of balance in values in different languages. Although such translations as I've discussed here may never give the sense of completeness, they are incomplete only because they are permanently in a state of creative emergence from what is being translated. What they emerge toward is that single, universal language which each of us bears deep in him, as the theoretical horizon which makes linguistic actuality possible. From a translation of a realistic novelist which would in any sense be adequate, to a similar kind of translation of René Char, would be a great distance. I am conscious of having allowed for translation in both these senses. I'm also aware that earlier in this chapter, where I was trying to establish a context - philosophical and historical - for the free and liberal employment of translation, I was also creating a context which would support a far more conventional view of the activity. A world of public literary matter, to which attention was called there, is no more invitation to Christopher Logue than it would be to a translator of Zola. Each of them could find, in publica materies, justification for his own procedure as translator. This chapter has hinted, so far, at a remarkable kind of possibility for translation, and I should like to let my conclusion circle about that possibility, rather than come to rest on a balanced and equable

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relativism, of the kind justified by the last two sentences of the preceding paragraph. (Though the point made through that relativism seems to me made to stand.) There is certainly nothing wrong in certain cases with equivalencetranslation of prose, nor is there anything sacrosanct in developing the intentions of the original, whether poetry or prose, a business which in most hands - sometimes, say, in Pound's - leads to fatuously ungrounded results. The latter activity is, however, certainly the more daring and fertile of the two, and if we can at the same time find, in it, plausible hints of methods, we may be learning something valuable about all kinds of translation. It deserves a final try. The plausible hints lie hidden in the direction of the translator's work; back into the original, then out again in the direction proposed by it. Certainly, because I haven't been that careful at definition, this verbal movement is likely to sound like a very daring 'following the curve of the original', and in a sense I suppose it is. But in the example from Char, which I consciously kept small and unambitious, less than what was shown going on, and what was shown seems to me to have been the necessary minimum, for translation which makes any claims on us. (Particularly claims of accuracy). What was going on was, on one level, a kind of etymological busywork; as in the movement back into "poète", "s'irriter", or "extinction". But that busywork was part of finding out what was in the original, and letting it assume its basic meanings again. In "laines prolongées", already, more was done, as, also, in the turning of "transforme" into "turns it". From etymologizing on up, at that point, translation means bringing back, into a version of the original, some of its toughness, density, or texture. This much, I believe, was being done even in the "flattest" or "straightest" instances of prose translation, to be considered later in this book. I know that was one of the motives behind the making of successive versions of the short story Fama. To say a lot in nuce, that is what I was after when in translating that particular Polish story I changed

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Mr. Posag, coming downstairs to the men's room, was the nearest to the monument, which behaved so unusually, and he saw most clearly how Fama moved her hand, raised the horn to her lips, and gave a sharp sound

into Mr. Posag, who was coming downstairs to the men's room, was the nearest to the monument when it behaved so unusually, and it was he who saw most clearly how Fama moved her hand, raised the horn to her lips, and blew sharply.

It was not all I was after - because I was also concerned with a kind of inner sayability in English-but it was part. I was after a moderate restoration of the original's vital qualities. Basic restoration, then, may be a suitable formula for the moment, and may help, once more, to remove any sense that translation is inadequate unless it achieves a radical freedom. A quite different sense, I think, should ride in the wake of this formula; the sense of the function of translation as a kind of criticism, or at least as an activity significantly related to criticism. On the busywork level again, translation of the 'basic' kind is a process of constant choice, and is thus, from the outset, 'critical', 'judgmental', in recognized senses of those terms. The decision whether to write "gave a sharp sound" or "blew sharply" is a complicated, if not very interesting, case of such basic criticism. The decision involves our notions of the whole context of the phrase - thus of thework involved, and ideally, by extension, of the author's whole oeuvre; all this involves, of course, our ears' sharpness, our linguistic preparation, and our sense of ambience and mood in lived life. On this busywork level, translation involves deciding what effect a work is aiming at; and defending one's decision by showing proof. A lot of what we usually consider practical criticism certainly does no more, and not much differently, than that. Is translation ever more than that kind of busywork? Translation of any critical worth is not only phrase-by-phrase work modified by an active knowing of the whole text; but it is both of those

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activities working together. What is hard to analyze is this: that the joining of those two activities, if carried out by the process of restoration of the original's vitality, seems to constitute something like the creative process that went into making the original. Not only is this seeming hard to analyze, but it needs analysis. Surely we don't want to admit that good translations, works of good criticism in that sense, are as creative as the original creations to which they are applied. We don't, just as we naturally reject the idea that good discursive criticism - from Aristotle to Lukacs to Frye - somehow 'makes itself equal' to a body of literature by accounting for it. What marks the original literary work, in all cases, is a density and texture which are unique to it. The translation at best is criticism which renders a kind of account of these factors. But it is not a becoming them, in accounting for them. As that, translation in its critical function remains a kind of guardian of our concern for significant literature. It gives an account of such literature, and is thus, at its most ambitious, as aspiring as the most aspiring of the discursive works which we usually agree to call criticism. And that is not, at this point, to speak of translation as creation. If the meaning of translation as 'account' is still not yet fully worked out, it is nevertheless clearly distinct from 'creation'. Where one act in words, translation, begins to transform itself into another, criticism, it is likely that we will be especially able to see what the first, the departing, was. It is a privileged moment. That moment was invited, in the last paragraphs, by an attempt to probe the difference between translation and criticism, as different kinds of accounts of original texts. I suppose we need once more, in order to take this distinction farther, to invoke the insubstantiality of original texts. We need to think again, before discussing accounts fully, about what in such cases we are giving an account of. Original texts are not icons. They are symbolically coded patterns of movement; intention, argument, and the expression of both, theme. They are neither hard nor soft, but are basically process. I

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like to think of them as participial, rather than nounlike or verblike. Works of literature, there to translate, have a character, a nature each by each, which is like their substance, their mark of personality; but they can make this substance clear, indeed actual, only by enacting it. That action is their verblike side, needed to reveal the nouns in them. In this sense they, literary originals, are participles. They enact the nouns they are, by becoming verbs. They become verbs by enacting the nouns they are. I touched these factors in hinting at the problem of translating, in general and at all. I mention them now for a new purpose : to assure us of continuing directly into this last question of how or whether translation differs from criticism. Into this question of the kinds of account provided by the two activities, there are three main differences between the two activities. First: the worthwhile translation accounts for its original by being physically plaqué, almost plastered, against it. Talk of this kind is needed, to raid the phenomenon in question. I think this plaquing occurs on either of two planes of encounter; either parallel to the original text, against the motion of which it seems to lie, absorbing and adequating that text's motion at every point; or out beyond that text, taking on the text's course of movement, receiving, as I said initially and repeated in the Char example, the thrust of the text's movement. Neither of these positionings - which are spiritual facts, not metaphors - is completely what happens. In no case does a significant parallel translation not also recoil, with the original's thrust, back into the ambience of its own language; nor does the thrust-continuing translation ever not in many ways draw continuous nourishment from the process we call its original. But in every worthwhile translation there is the factor of one of these kinds of physical relationship to the original. Criticism is different. Whether descriptive (Frye), prescriptive (Leavis), or metaphysical (Barthes, Staiger), criticism has either a much less sensuous relationship to its original, or a much less continuously sensuous one. I think here even of Leavis, a hard example; his criticism, though not without great texture and density of its own, is far less densely related to its object, say to a Lawrence novel,

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than a good translation ofthat novel would be. As far as accounting goes, criticism is an abstraction. It is for instance much less able than translation to account for the process which the original not only is, but on which the original depends for everything that deploys and elucidates its own character. Second: follows from the first difference. Critical choices are indeed operative at every level of translating; on the phrase-level, on the level of the whole work. This applies equally to parallel and to arc-continuing kinds of translation. These choices, however, operate strictly within the limits set by the original text; by that process, in language, which is being converted. This is the constriction which the gain in sensuousness costs. It is a great expense. There is of course a sense in which the prerequisites for adequate translation are unlimited, thus in which we can claim that even the translator's most local choices require whatever experience he has had in his own language, and in other languages; it following that the translation incarnates the whole its maker is, as fully as any original work does. In a sense, as I say, this is true; the reason why it is also true, that translation is a restricting field of choice, is that translating provides only a very small aperture through which the translator can draw his generally very large linguistic sensibilities. On occasion - perhaps in Chapman, Pope, and Fitzgerald - this very smallness acts as incentive, in the way a prosodie limitation might. And in general, I suppose, it does not act as a deterrent, merely as a sieve. But that is enough. Translation is quite especially a choosingagainst-the-background-of-prearranged-syntax,and thus a choosing in terms of rather presuggested possibilities, within the translator's own language. Criticism, of any of the varieties I have mentioned, is more distant than translation from the process which is its object. (What kinds of account, in fact, could be as close-fitting as translation?) A t the same time criticism is much freer in its references and implications, freer than translation to deflect these out away from the text it is considering, or to draw them in from other texts. It is also free, of course, to select as radically as it can, in finding the details it

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wants to examine, and remaining only with them. It is no requirement of criticism, in any of its forms, that it should account for the wholeness of works, or even for the whole of them. By contrast with this, the account given by the translator seems free chiefly in the freedom of his original decision of which work to treat. Third : the good translation tends toward fusion, its own process, with the process the original is. If criticism is chiefly a way of trying to say what an original is, translation is chiefly a way of saying an original. The active marrow of even the most liberal good translation is on loan. The work of conventional criticism is its own substance and its own motor force. Translation, for this reason, tends to be a meaningless notion apart from its original; while criticism, by the very least defense, has a half-life of its own ; or as someone like Frye might imaginably argue, has a kind of ontological priority even to literature, of which it names the Ur-forms. This is precisely where the difficulty arises, in determining whether translation is a form of criticism, and it is too important a point to see trapped in questions of terminology. Translation is in at least two senses a genuine, informative, enriching account of texts. It can be, as we saw in the case of the Char, restoration of the forces and values of the original. It can be a way of getting inside those values and pushing them out, so to speak, so that they can be seen with fresh words attached to them. And it can be a way of making new sensuous-thematic textures which 'account' for, 'give an account o f , the original's textures. As an 'account', however, it lacks distancing, freedom of reference, and the power to reify, which are crucial to what we generally consider the acts of presenting the knowable. About these acts there is everything still to say. But as we see them beginning to assume definite boundaries, at the end of the spectrum of species of translation, we have a renewed sense of their usefulness, as definers of what translation both is and cannot be. This is an oblique, but useful, way to talk about what criticism is.

χ FAITHFUL TRAITORS 1. A STUDY OF TRANSLATION

At the start I went into the business of teaching Greek and Latin, a job at which I kept busy from 1953-1963. By daily routine I translated, from Latin into English, then back, then repeated the process with Greek. I had a good enough education in Classics, before that time, though about it there had been nothing Old School, much that was auto-didact, and an eccentric overbalance of Greek to Latin. 'Teaching' those languages required, from the teacher himself, a discipline he'd lacked. It rarely occurred to me, during the first seven years of teaching, that I was inadequately interested in the business of translation, which in practice was exercising me and my students every day. We would daily discuss a great many translation problems - how to render, in English, the differences between anima and animus·, how to translate culturally rooted Greek concepts, like time or sophrosyne·, how to worry a poem by Catullus into some sort of prosodie equivalent, in English, without squeezing the life out of it. However, these concerns of ours never came together, thus never quite made sense, for us; because we never grew aware of them as part of the general activity of translation. We never managed to pay attention to what translation itself was. My own enlargement of perspective, in the matter, began at the University of Texas, the last place at which I taught Classics. There I continued to do the same old things professionally, but in new company, and, before long, into a new mouthpiece of expression. William Arrowsmith was the first of the personal stimuli. He and I founded the magazine Arion: A Journal of Classical Culture, on which we were soon joined by two Englishmen, John Sullivan and Donald Carne-Ross. This entire experience helped give me a sense

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that translation was a special activity, a specially worthwhile though limited craft. What I learned could be summarized this way: to appreciate the very lively, and occasionally inspired, translations of the Classics, which we printed in Arion. Much of the work we were doing, in publishing that magazine, was high-powered and urgent; opening a conduit out for a strong force in human culture. I hadn't, still haven't, any doubt that the Classics require such outlets. When I remember my resistances to translation and translating, as I felt them, they seem to come down to this: that I had invested a great deal of time in a flat conception of translation, had done it in a daily way for so long, that a broader and profounder view of the act seemed to threaten me personally. I largely overcame that flat view in Texas, where I put on some sense of what translation is and can be, and began to tailor, accordingly, my judgment of the activity. It also started to occur to me, there, that the theory of translation was as important as, and more interesting than, its practice. By that time I had begun the practice, was soon nearly through putting Kostes Palamas' epic, The Twelve Words of the Gypsy, into English. I was aware how much daily tedium had to go into an effort like that. When I wrote my introduction to the translation of the epic, I knew how engaged I had become with the implications of what my tedium had made. It rather pleased me to think, that in no other way could I have gotten through to those implications. A little bit every day, until I seemed to be getting a point. In relation to the Classics, particularly, I formed at Texas the idea that how we translate matters enormously. I was teaching Humanities courses which used classical literature in very poor English translations, and I was becoming terribly aware that the survival of Greek and Latin literature, as any kind of living force in our schools, might well depend on translation which met its originals at some point of heightened creative force. The question of cultural survival seemed most important, but it was a concern that intersected linguistic and philosophical issues at many points.

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At the same time I started to sense - as it worked itself out in my own writing, and in what I saw of the writing of Fitzgerald (in his Odyssey translation) or Macneice (in his Faust) - I began to sense that translation bore a unique, and very helpful, relation to what we call 'creative work'. Several people I knew, or knew of, were better writers as translators than they were on their own hook. Others were manifestly better writers because they were translators. And so on. I hadn't gotten far into this idea, when it occurred to me that one of these points was true of myself : that my translations of Palamas enjoyed a freedom, a kind of characterful going-beyond my own obvious limits, which at the time I couldn't seem to manage in my poetry. There was nothing implausible in this state of affairs. Translation rubbed my nose in important matters out beyond me. But I couldn't, and still can't, be sure what was going on in my work at that time. My self got in the way. The ideas starting to open were nursed and unfolded at the University of Iowa, whose Writer's Workshop gave me help of every kind, and within the cadre ofwhich I directed, from 1964-1967, the Translation Workshop. In one sense the Translation Workshop is simply a class. Graduate students enroll for it, get credit for it, do assignments. There is a beginning and an end, and the span of the work is by University Semesters. It can grow into thesis-work. In a wider sense, and more truly than with any group I have 'taught', that Workshop is a creative coming-together of verbal people under the general auspices of a University. From the beginning the range of students was wide : from Japan, Taiwan, Korea, Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Iraq, Poland, France, Sweden, England, Canada, America. Many of the participants had already become distinguished writers in their own countries. Virtually everyone had been published. Our way of working together was simple. Every week one of the students would present his version, of a text which he had translated into English, for mimeographing : this version would be distributed to the other members, in advance of the class, if possible with the original stapled to it. The following week's class, then, would be led

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by the translator, who would read aloud both the original and his translation, would try to explain the problems he had faced, and would invite - generally endure - questions and criticisms. At the semester's end everyone would gather his work and present it to me. That was the semester's assignment. The value of the work accomplished there depended greatly on its being criticized in common, as I saw from the quality of improvements which tended to follow class discussion. I want to stress this aspect of communality, in the word-business, very soon. The source of creative change, however, was always private, largely a question of homework. The public and private worked together in this way, toward new creations. Any defence of my claims, for the success of the Translation Workshop kind of experiment, will have to wait for the second section of this essay. I want to amplify this section by indicating rather skeletally the kinds of learning which the Workshop experience provided us. The two main issues of this book are involved here. Whatever else I was able to learn about literature, during the Iowa years, was somehow wrapped up in the lessons of that class. What I saw, of the work being done by my students privately on the basis of our criticisms in class, convinced me that for them translation was becoming, inwardly, a job of working with words, which not only had the closest relation to their own creative lives, but was improving their 'creative' work. With such students, as the apostrophes around 'creative' imply, it grew increasingly difficult to distinguish the work of translation from that of creation. Since that time I have been confused about the limits of the expression 'creative writing', and will in the following, I hope, be able to clarify some of my reservations about the essentially romantic idea of creativity, as we find it customarily held. A second confusion was the second lesson. Obviously, the literatures we were dealing with were various, widely scattered, and embodied in widely varying cultural contexts. It was against this web of differences that we required ourselves to weave a new, single, homogeneous fabric, each new poem or story we translated. Finding this out, in daily experience, was a way of finding out

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how we could transcend our differences, in word-work. This was the international part of the lesson. It was a more complicated discovery than I would have expected. Put that way it sounds banal. But it was not, for throughout the workshop experience we translators were finding out a great deal about how different we really were from one another, and about how meaningfully those differences expressed themselves in language. That all men are essentially one, though in some sense true, is not a lesson which we learned interestingly in this situation. What we learned was that literature is public property. That literary works in one language could be turned into literary works in another came to mean, for all of us, that there is an important sense in which works of literature do not belong to themselves, or to their authors, but to us all. This point might seem to emerge equally clearly from our experience of reading original works in different languages. What is especially meaningful about the case of translation ? Translation is, in fact, especially clear proof of the point, for it shows us ourselves in the precise act of appropriating literary material, which thereby reveals itself as public property, reveals itself as material, existing in common, out beyond us, to which we can go out.

2. PIECES OF EVIDENCE

The examples I choose in this chapter will illustrate or confirm the present point. These examples occurred first, in every way as examples prior to the points they help to substantiate. No one is born with views on translation. They develop out of the practice. They do, however, tend to return us to the question of literature as public property. First, the case of the short story which Leszek Elektorowicz, the Polish poet and critic, and I translated from Polish. We hammered our ways through several versions of this piece. His English was quite good, his Polish native; my Polish was nonexistent, my English native. We worked at the story sentence by sentence. Leszek would

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provide a literal translation, which I would type out, modifying as we went. Then I would rework it overnight, and the next day we would look over the material freshly, before tackling more. About ten days went into that stage of the work. When we were through, of course, we found how many problems there were which derived from our restricted grasps of the text at any given stage through it. The diction greatly needed to be straightened out. In the process of straightening it we worked away from the original. How far? Fama {by Jaroslaw Iwaskiewicz) On the twenty-first of May, 1952, at 10:23 A.M., the monument of Fama, originally brought from the Castle of Warsaw, and standing now in the large hall of the National Museum, blew three times.

This obviously faulty line was next modified to : On the twenty-first of May, 1952, at 10:23 A.M., the statue of Fama, previously located in the Castle of Warsaw, and standing now on the main landing of the National Museum, blew her horn three times.

Certain detailed changes were as usual involved, some of them, also as usual, necessitated by original ignorance. Among changes involving more than mere knowledge would be the modification from "large hall" to "main landing", which grew from a «visualization, in terms of another, slightly different, architectural tradition. The greatest change, I think, involved a certain new copiousness and, in a very modest way, a new imaginative realization in the second version. "Statue", "landing", and "blew her horn" all contribute, I think, to this kind of strengthening of the translation. Only a very modest breakaway, or getting loose, from the literal is shown here, but it is a clear case, and something representative can be seen in it. "Monument", "large hall", and "blew" (by itself) all fought against the life of the passage. They were literal locutions which - as it turned out in getting closer through English to the intention of the Polish - simply fought against the character and movement of the passage. This fact was not quite clear, of course,

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until the whole story had been translated, and its pace and diction had made themselves apparent. Some of the rest of the first paragraph should be quoted, as it will build out the point. I will cite the second and third sentences, and comment on them. The first version of the second sentence went: At that time there were four people near the monument : Francis Posag, janitor, 54; Professor Stanislaw Wolski, distinguished art-historian, 76; Tony Tralka, called 'Hercules', a student of the school of drama, 19; and Miss Hollander, the composer, 42. The dry tone of the first sentence, especially as we had written it down in our own first version, appeared to be maintained here. But we'd already a feeling, in our first sentence, that it had been too drily put, and it was no wonder, therefore, that the second sentence came also to feel that way. (One translated sentence revising another, prospectively and retrospectively. This being the rhythm of the feelings in question.) Not much could be done, of course, at this point in the story. In the second version of the second sentence we wrote "a janitor", instead of "janitor", after Posag's name: it seemed to give him more personal identity. We also added "age" before the number of the age of each of the four persons, and had a distinct, but complicated, feeling of gaining some specificity in this way. In our third version we made only one change, from "Tony Tralka, called 'Hercules'", to "Tony ('Hercules') Tralka", which for several reasons, chiefly the later developments of that character, seemed more appropriately piquant. The first sentence, in its first version, ran this way : Mr. Posag, coming downstairs to the men's room, was the nearest to the monument, which behaved so unusually, and he saw most clearly how Fama moved her hand, raised the horn to her lips, and gave a sharp sound. By putting it this way we had pretty simply, and directly, followed the course of the described action. (In each of these cases the first version felt right, and sprang from some natural inner sources of

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conversation. This made revision particularly hard.) We then worked over to this : Mr. Posag, who was coming downstairs to the men's room, was the nearest to the monument when it behaved so unusually, and it was he who saw most clearly how Fama moved her hand, raised the horn to her lips, and gave a sharp sound. After this revision we saw that all we had done, again, was to contribute a little more life, through being more specific, at least as regarded the persons in the story. "Who" was now used to dramatize Mr. Posag in the first line; "which", of the earlier "monument, which" now yielded to a time-defining term, "when", and "it was he who" was now used to give more emphatic identity to Posag - a device which can easily be abused, and only accidentally accomplishes its purpose here. The second version of the sentence, therefore, came down to a manipulation of pronouns - in this case an important means to bringing out the life which is always latent in accurate reference. The third version of the sentence, and the one at which we stopped, involved only one change; substituting "blew sharply", with its appreciable action, for "gave a sharp sound", which finally sounded uninterestingly anti-idiomatic. The result of these local changes was that we had turned from this: On the twenty-first of May, 1952, at 10 : 23 A.M., the statue of Fama, originally brought from the Castle of Warsaw, and standing now in the large hall of the National Museum, blew three times. At that time there were four people near the monument: Francis Posag, janitor, 54; Professor Stanislaw Wolski, distinguished art-historian, 76; Tony Tralka, called 'Hercules', a student oftheschoolof drama,19: and Miss Hollander, the composer, 42. Mr. Posag, coming downstairs to the men's room, was the nearest to the monument, which behaved so unusually, and he saw most clearly how Fama moved her hand, raised the horn to her lips, and gave a sharp sound... to: On the twenty-first of May, 1952, at 10:23 A.M., the statue of Fama, that was previously in the Castle of Warsaw, and now stands on the main landing of the National Museum, blew her horn three times. At that

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time there were four people near the monument : Francis Posag, a janitor, age 54; Professor Stanislaw Wolski, distinguished art-historian, age 76; Tony ('Hercules') Tralka, a student of the School of Drama, age 19; and Miss Hollander, the composer, age 42. Mr. Posag, who was coming downstairs to the men's room, was the nearest to the monument when it behaved so unusually, and it was he who saw most clearly how Fama moved her hand, raised the horn to her lips, and blew sharply. The remainder of the first paragraph, in the first version, runs like this : She repeated the movement three times, and Francis, bewildered, saw it with his own eyes. The Professor was in the Gothic Room, leaning over the altar with the Visitation. He was engaged in writing a study of the influence of Polish Lower Pomeranian and Stettin sculpture upon Leonardo da Vinci's art, and it was just this altar, showing the influence of Master Jan, a court sculptor of Kasimir of Stettin, the grandson of Kasimir the Great - although it came from the Holy Cross Mountains which was one of the basic supports of his argument. The Professor, who was completely lost in a brown study of the lower fold of Saint Elizabeth's garment, the fold which was the basis of all his argumentation, managed to hear the strange, sharp, yet sonorous voice of the horn, and with all the speed he could achieve at his age he made for the landing to check the cause of this strange music. He just managed to see the moment when Fama for the third time raised the horn to her lips; the sound of this instrument, heard 'from nearby', shocked him to the depths. My copy of this first version is blotchy with revisions, as is that of the second version. The general pressure of revision, as before, is toward greater life and freedom of movement. (A phrase which is loose and evasive, but has to do at this point. And has to do with moving out, out toward the original.) Much of the shuffling about was syntactical, as in the long aside about Master Jan and Kasimir. Comparison of the first and third versions will make this evident. The characteristic revision-strategy is the introduction of a specifying relative pronoun, like the "which" in "it was just this altar made in the Holy Cross M o u n t a i n s . . . " But there are more colorful means of unfolding the original's life, and they raise more strikingly the question of fidelity. "He got there just when", in the last line, paces the text. To "muster at his age" seemed spryer

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than "to achieve at his age", as a way of describing the Professor's speed. (It took the whole story to make that character's nimble readiness quite evident.) A more quickly reached wordplay, much less solidly lodged in the whole story, might also be pointed out: 'the fold which was the foundation of his entire thesis', in which 'foundation' turned out to endure an injection of double entendre. The third version of the section looked like this: She repeated the movement three times and Francis, bewildered, saw it with his own eyes. The Professor had been in the Gothic Room, leaning over the Visitation Altar. He was engaged in writing a study of the influence of Lower Pomeranian Polish and Stettin sculpture on Leonardo da Vinci's art, and it was just this altar - showing the influence of Master Jan, a court sculptor of Count Kasimir of Stettin, the grandson of Kasimir the Great - it was just this altar, made in the Holy Cross Mountains, that furnished one of the basic supports of his argument. The Professor, who was completely lost in meditation on the lower fold of Saint Elizabeth's garment, the fold which was the foundation of his entire thesis, managed to hear the strange, sharp, yet sonorous note of the horn, and with all the speed he could muster at his age he made for the landing to check the cause of the strange music. He got there just when Fama for the third time raised the horn to her lips. The sound of this instrument, heard from nearby, shocked him to the depths. What was done to the first version of the entire story can be quite well surmised from the changes, and strategies, embedded in the analysis above. They are not profound revisions. Locally, they aim at life, an increasing suppleness in the English, and, in places, at a strain, within the English, which will add to the texture of the translated texts. (So the aim is multiple and shifty.) The completion of the entire story, as it turns out, adds relatively little to the understanding of its details. (It adds something, as we saw in the case of the Professor's nimbleness.) Therefore, the details we have seen are fairly representative. (Not only, as we discover, in the case of the present narrative, but in that of most prose fiction, which is less giving than poetry, to its translators.) A glance at a couple of barriers, in the translation of the remainder of the story, will amplify the present point. It can be simply said, for context, that the Professor was just one of a number of

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character stereotypes who found themselves, on that day in May, in front of the obstreperous statue. The story concerns their effort, in collaboration with the Museum Director, to keep the event quiet; the event in which matter, in violation of the 'third dialectic law', moved on its own accord. At the end of the story the statue stops blowing, again of its own accord, proving by this new decision both that it could be stationary, which was a relief, and that it could choose to be stationary, which brought back all the confusion. One of the characters involved in this conspiracy of silence, is a hyper-devout party member, the musicologist Miss Hollander. Of the whole group she is the most deeply shocked by Fama's misbehavior. In the introductory description of her the author uses language, straight from the Polish scene of that day, which like all scene-language is peculiarly resistant to translation. A first version, of the trickiest kind of sentence involved, goes this way: Miss Hollander, in her compositions, was to recreate those folk dances, and at the same time to give the idea of mediaeval Polish art. It was no great task for our realistic composer, the creator of songs, for the masses, as popular as Obligations', 'Super Quota Worker and Super Quota Workette', 'Sikorsky's Heart', etc. I transcribe this ingenuously, as we first put it to paper, just to show how falsely even the syntax can flow, under preliminary conditions. A glance at the third version, which I will include in a moment, will make this clear. In that version of the first sentence "render" finally replaced "give", and "basic spirit" replaced "idea" ; changes which to us seemed more in the tone of mock-academic lingo, and thus, as we came to know the story better, more in the mood of the story. Knowing that larger mood helped us at another point to tone down; to break down the rather patronizing "our realistic composer" into "such a realistic composer", which finally seemed to fit better. About the song-titles, though, we were made healthily aware of our limits; those titles simply wouldn't yield, out of their own stubbornly Socialist context, to any western lingo.

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The third version of the passage went : Miss Hollander was to recreate those folk dances in her compositions, and at the same time to render the basic spirit of mediaeval Polish art. It was no great task for such a realistic composer, the creator, for the masses, of songs as popular as Obligations', 'Super Quota Worker and Super Quota Workette', 'Sikorsky's Heart', etc. The problem of the song titles became, as could be imagined, the most obvious kind of problem for the entire text. It was a problem of terminology which cropped up later, and became quite tangible in the case of a certain 'technical term'. It happened that a bunch of school-children were trapped in the Museum, at the moment of Fama's act, and that it was necessary, therefore, both to cut them in on the secret and to incarcerate them for the time being. One of these children, Gabriel Ponova, had the idea which saved the day, and concluded the story : to post, over the statue of Fama, a banner reading "Even the Statues Thunder for the Glory of Socialist Realist Art". Ponova's ingenuity had been recognized before, as it happened; for having initiated his village's fight against maybugs he had already been honored by the state. He had been given a title which, in English, we first called "industrial expert", then "national whiz kid", and finally, in desperation at these pale and dated terms, "Annual Idea Boy for Industry". The notion was right, the words seemingly accurate one by one, yet the term "Industry", for us, entirely lacked the kind of socialist bravoura the original intended comically to convey. The humor, in the limitations of translation, was wrapped up here. It was invincible. Translating Fama was not tremendously difficult, as translations go; the problems it raised were relatively minor. The translation work was remarkable, in fact, chiefly as a tandem operation, the three quarters sighted leading the half sighted, an effort which in itself was exciting, and with certain advantages not found in saner methods of translation. I wanted to open with Fama here, however, because it presented limited and obvious problems. I have referred to a number of strategies by which we shaped the second and third versions of our translation: earlier I spoke of

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'liveliness' and 'suppleness' as qualities in the English, toward which we were working. In another place I spoke of 'specificity', and once, even, of 'strain', a word which seems to me an important alien to have lodged in the company of sunnier terms. There is no bringing all these terms under one roof, and there is nothing, about any of them, which is worth more than its value as a signpost and function-indicator. There is, in fact, a problem even in the use of such terms here. Using them seems to imply that we had some notion, before translating Fama, of where we wanted to go with it, or of where we wanted it to go. Such terms as 'suppleness', 'liveliness', are, after all, more than likely to be recollections of attitudes we had half-consciously imported into our work. Yet shouldn't one, in translating, want farmore than this for the original to prompt the character of the translation ? For the public quality of the original to be the source of demand? Shouldn't one want whatever 'liveliness' the translation enjoys to be there only because the original stimulated it? The answer is on the whole 'yes', if the question is put that way, and it may be that we simply have to live, in this case, with an especially apparent limitation of our power to reach across to other cultures' languages. We may have to admit that we can't get across. I want to leave this possibility open but raised, for the moment, and within its terms to make a further preliminary remark on the kinds of presuppositions we are dealing with. The word 'strain' was the only one which strained the harmony of the terms chosen above. In the use of this word, I think, I am myself particularly likely to be importing, into translating specific texts, convictions developed independently of them. As a teacher I dealt so long, hardly realizing it, with pallidly textureless versions of originals, especially of original Greek and Latin Classics, that I came to overvalue the dramatic or attention-attracting translation. In part this is simply my own problem. In part, though, it is not idiosyncracy, but is grounded in a reasonable sense of what the language of translation can and even should be. At this point, I think that the dilemma of the last paragraph can be eluded: that there is something legitimate to be said in general about the lan-

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guage of translation. This is not legislation about the specific traits of the language of translation. While the translator can allow himself no specific formula for the direction he takes, in moving away from an original, he can allow himself a certain legitimate luxury : of dealing with the language of translation as an artifact apart, as a made thing which attracts attention. I am not sure I have created any examples of this doing, in the discussion of Fama, except the wordplay on "foundation", which occasioned the mention of 'strain'. But even that little joke is an instance of the kind of 'language of translation' I am referring to. Translating is, after all, a self-conscious activity, perhaps the supremely self-conscious act in words, since it uses language as raw-material, as well as vehicle, of operation. The joke I am offering is a play within language, an addition to the original - that is a matter of fact - which somehow dresses up the original. I want to return to this point several times, even going so far as to suggest that the language of translation can on occasion properly ritualize ordinary language. But I don't want to imply, by using these big words, that I think they will in any concrete way save translators from the dilemma announced above: the dilemma of whether they can legitimately import their own views of language into the translation of a foreign author's text. That dilemma may be well lodged, or is at least left well-lodged by anything said here yet, and is one of the points at which the problems of the translator's business must seem very close to those of the critic when he reads any text at all except his own. More later on the relation of translator to critic. The thoughts scored up here can be better pursued through an example drawn from the translation of poetry, especially from that of poetry which arrogates, to itself, the power to forge new forms of language. In dealing with such poetry we exempt ourselves, further than in the translation of any but the most experimental prose, from the dilemma of 'what we import into our translation'. It is not easy to explain why this is true, though it seems obvious enough; but it is possible to come close to an answer. Languagechanging poetry works out from the embodied assumption that all

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language is kept in life only by being created out beyond itself, into new forms of life. Meeting such language by a translating language which goes beyond itself is therefore consonant enough to the matter being translated. It fits. My first examples will be taken from just such a poem. The King's Flute is a modern epic by Kostes Palamas, an audaciously modern and at the same time audaciously conservative visionary poet, who was one of the establishes of the modern Greek literary idiom. Palamas thought of his work as epic, and so was ready enough to consider it part of the public domain. It is there that we find it, for all its difficult neologisms and archaisms. It is an open poem. The King's Flute recounts, precisely through the mouth of a flute, the tale of Basil the Bulgarkiller, the Byzantine Emperor who in the thirteenth century slaughtered various Bulgarian armies on his way to worship the Virgin Mary in the Parthenon, which had been converted into an Orthodox Cathedral. The flute, which had been found in the mouth of Basil, retells all this in language sown with archaisms, locutions taken from the riches of mediaeval Greek religious, political, and military vocabulary. These words, as Palamas reused them, were themselves spearheads of originality. They were often multisyllabic and smithied into the compound forms in which they extended the naturally great sonority of modern Greek. This effort continued into the irregularity, sumptuous polysyllabism, and elaborate fancy of the entire epic's prosody. I want to concentrate on three fairly representative, quite distinct, and consistently hard to translate, passages: the first, a series of epithets of the Virgin Mary, addressed to her by Basil the Bulgarkiller; the second, an elaborate and high-rhetorical peroration, by Mt. Parnassos, to Basil's passing troops; the third, an interchange between the philosopher Proklos and the goddess Athena, whom the Virgin Mary had just displaced from the Parthenon, and who was homeless. For the first passage, and only for it, I offer the Greek, though it is merely transliterated; thus providing readers without Greek at

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least some impression of the sounds to be coped with. It goes this way: Pantanassa, Eleousa, Glykophilousa, Akathiste, Yiatrissa, Ponolytra, Paramythia, Periblephte, Panachrante, Hodogetra, Antiphonetra, Tricherousa, Vangelistra, Lavra, Gorgoepikoe, Athenaia, Romaia, Phaneromene, Purge chrysoplokotate, liostalasmene Throne! Two features appear at once: the similarity of endings - all in either a or e - and the general prominence of vowels, particularly the iotacism. I suppose that there is also, more generally, a powerful placative, explosive force to this passage of invocation. The reader can judge what I have been able to do with these elements of sound. The elements of meaning were in their way much harder, and I have had to compromise, even with my limited etymological knowledge, to the point where this version would probably seem, say to the scholar of Byzantine Greece, careless and adventurous. In the present catalogue Basil offers back to Mary some of the countless names of her which she had provided for her worshippers throughout the Empire. They are the names I have translated into : All Queen, Who Pities. Lover in Sweetness, Ubiquitous, Healer, Freer, There, Seer, Fulfiller, Leader, Who Answers, Noonsun, Swift in Response, Romaic, Athenian, Seen, Tower goldwoven, throne suntarred. But they are not easily translatable. For one thing, the Greek tradition, being on this matter a genuine tradition, can support a long list, can rely on a high level of aural tolerance for names. In translating the present list, I have simply omitted two of the Greek epithets. Much more has been shorn from the tropically rich meanings of the Greek words. Their roots are in many cases sunk into a past which to us is at most a booklearned abstraction. My

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"Ubiquitous" translates akathiste, a word meaning literally 'unseated', 'without defined location', and applied, originally, to the unseated singers of a hymn. By Palamas, however, metaphysical implication is acquired from a word meaning literally 'unseated', yet taught through centuries of usage into a finer meaning, and into a transplanted reference. Here, the Virgin is "placeless", "ubiquitous". The Greek word behind my "Swift in Response" is equally inaccessible. Gorgoepekoos does mean 'swift in hearing and responding', but it means it embodiedly. (Much more than I realize, many of these other epithets may contain their meanings embodiedly.) Gorgoepekoos means itself in terms of a particular church, a Byzantine jewel of Athens, still called The Church of the Virgin who is Gorgoepekoos. Thus it takes on its meaning in terms of habitual, deeply seeped experiences of which some, at least, would be commemorated in each Athenian's reading of this epithet in Palamas. "Swift in Response" goes, as we say, only so far. All the problems in translating the sounds of the original are of this same order. The sounds are, of course, welded to their meanings. More important, though, they are grounded in a whole sensuous-perceptual stratum of life-awarenesses. No one can help to recover this stratum. Perhaps the best response to its presence is that of Christopher Logue, in the Homer translations to which I want to call attention shortly. Palamas' rhetoric includes what to our ears may often seem a shameless inclination to pathetic fallacy. Almost the entire King's Flute is the speech of a flute. Throughout that speech, voices of weapons, rivers, and mountains are heard. What can we do in today's English with a mountain's peroration to passing troops? Part of what I have done with it, the speech to Mt. Parnassos in Word Five, is this : And you who pass so grandly from here before whose treading the earth is shaken, trembles; immeasurable, sudden people, led by a pitiless Hero, a king, cavalier apart, worth you all the sweat of a thousand journeys drops from your bodies,

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in your eyes burn fires of a thousand wars; it is as though you went - not as before to ruins and bleeding, suddenly, fatally but somewhere else, joyful, and festal, to religious worship, the festal; advance, and hear me, people, and break your course come here and bend, bend genuflect, bend worthy before your god, whatever god, from my twin peaks. The tact of the moment, as I have said, is my only program here. Principles fall before any effort in English to match such highstyle language as this Greek. Here as usual the Greek lines are long (fifteen stresses), complete, and orotund; my longest and fullest lines - the second and sixth in this passage - are shorter, lack the vowelled openness of the Greek, and threaten to break down from inner anemia. Whereas my shortest lines, like the fifth, are often only admissions of defeat. What was I to do, in that case, with the Greek line : (who separates off from all of you and is worth) pou xechoridzee ap olous sas ki axidsei (that one all of you) o enas olous. I can imagine the objection that I should have written 'who stands apart from you all, and is worth you all'. This would not be a bad alternative, but I avoid it to escape that piling of monosyllables which tire in extended English poetry, and for the sake of variation in line length - a small strategy I find invaluable in the shaping of each section of the poem. At another point this Greek line offers no room for compensation. In its syntactical excitement, peculiar to an inflected, and thus syntactically flexible, language, o enas is the subject of axidsei, which it follows - already a difficult relation for English - yet o enas has been prepared by the preceding pou, to which it is in apposition, though their kinship is tensely withheld by the intervening verb. Finally, o enas and olous are syntactically jammed together, though they are opposed both in

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meaning, here, and in case - the accusative of olous being truly 'accused' - in such a way that the punch of the line is greatly reinforced by its syntax. Before all this, I repeat, no specific compensation seems possible, only some larger redesigning. This kind of redesigning, as well as the various local compensations, is what I mean here by introducing a kind of compensatory pressure, into the language of the new work, which amounts to 'strain', or at the very least to a working out against the literal transference of the original into translated form. My third example, of the point where Palamas' rhetoric grows luring but unreachable, is simpler, but it calls on more ingenuity in the translator than the two preceding passages. At the beginning of Word Eight the Parthenon, as the home of Mary, the new Athena, is panegyrized. Suddenly we are at the foot of the Acropolis, in the house of Proklos, the Neo-Platonic philosopher; it is 500 A.D., and the realm of legend. A knock at the door; there stands Athena, just driven out by Mary, seeking a night's lodging, a brief sleep during which a change of cultures can descend onto the world. The tone of the meeting gets away from my best effort, thus: Proklos, at home. All night awake. Wakelessness choked him, the fall came whipping, thinking consumed him. The middle of night. A knock. All ears! - Who knocks? He listens. The trembling of voice. 'Make ready the house. Receive her. The Lady is coming. Will stay with you now.' Ί have no way to go, no shelter from night. Let me sleep here, and leave, at dawn, swiftly in flight with swallows and cranes. Driven from my creation. Stranger and outcast on my own throne in my own possessions. Madness the way she came, inclined, and humble, that evil magicianness, ach!'

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I take the passage to be rhetorical, through being so public, speaking out so into the common body of Greek sensibilities. In this case the sensibilities are particular to a certain Greek historical experience: here, in the Greek, the awesome and the arch are bafflingly fused. What remains in English, I think, stresses the archness - in the "she" and the "ach!" - but fails to translate the awe. It is hard for us to mix these ingredients. What I have consistently tried to do in translating Palamas, is indicated by what I have tried in this Proklos passage. The "ach!" and the "she" run the risk of suggesting a jealous house-wife, arms akimbo or wrists flapping. To encourage at least a partially grave historical awareness I have forced the word "fall", (1. 2), the expression "make ready the house" (1. 7), and the word "creation" (1. 13). The first two expressions, in the Greek, mean more nearly 'driving-out' and 'receive her!', but by a theologically auraed translation I hoped to import an otherwise lost gravity into the passage. Piase, the Greek word behind my "creation", here probably refers only to the Parthenon. I have allowed that single sense to remain, but to remain crowded, as I think English usage guarantees, with awareness of the vastness of the loss of Athena. I rarely imported new meanings into translating Palamas, even to the degree shown in the Proklos passage. I made no effort to reinterpret Palamas' poem, and very little even to make it sound like a poem in English. At most daring, words like my "fall" and "creation" met Greek halfway, and brought out a sense latent in the Greek words, at the same time making them English. I took pleasure, here, in a controlled stiffness and strangeness of meaning. Yet Palamas' meanings, as the remarks on his rhetoric probably showed, are not isolatable from the way he means them ; and the way he means them, his rhetorical way, has virtues in Greek which are nonexistent in English. His way would be easier in French, and in fact wants describing in the terms of classical French criticism ; it is the way oí grandeur, souffle, nobilitò. We lack in English even a tradition of that kind, though Whitman, Eliot, and Crane have all proven the modern powers of extended English verse. Above all we - by which I mean our ears - are

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suspicious readers of grand verse. I have not only had to shear much of the rhetorical sound of Palamas in translating him, but I have tried to give it back in a tone we could accept - though we could not accept it, I hope, without some effort. A look at typography indicates the basic shift of emphasis. Palamas seldom deviates in this poetry from the fifteen-stress political line. Nor, almost incredibly in an epic of over four thousand lines, does he ever lose his sense of the dignity and autonomy of the line (in this resembling Homer, and drawing, perhaps, on the unique adequacy of the clause in Greek). The sense of the line, of course, I have tried to preserve. But the marble-block lines of Palamas have been far too heavy and completed for me. The lines of my translation are jagged as old teeth. This way, I thought, might lead in English to greater excitement. An example may show what I mean. Word Five culminates with the speech, quoted above, addressed by Mount Parnassos to Basil's troops. In these brief lines, Parnassos prepares to sing : And Parnassos has heard the passing, and watches the people, and opens itself a song - for it is entirely song, a song to remain unsilenced, a song from root to peak, like the Flute myself. And mouths and lyres sang out that song the mouths of all that bloom and fly and stir and stay on the mountain's slopes and passes and caves and peaks... The Greek passage is foursquare, consisting of only six lines, all of nearly the same length. It is a chunk of language. I have tried to aerate it and break it up, providing more variety and excitement. I think our ears require that. This is part of what I understand as the translator's effort at compensation. But it is only part. The present passage in English happens to contain one line, the second, which illustrates a second kind of compensation. The bulk of my passage is roughly iambic, or iambic-stretched-towardanapaestic (such parlance being, of course, only a gross approxima-

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tion to the actual pattern of stresses). The Greek here is much more sinuous and irregular than even my English : it is more closely built on conversation. The Greek is inaccessible, the best English equivalent is generally iamb-based; but to avoid the dullness of repeated iambs, compensatory prosodie techniques are urgently needed, and I have used them freely. The most common illustrate themselves in the second line here, where jamming of stressed syllables is suggested in the fór it Is entirely song, a passage readable either iambically or, as marked here, jammed, and actually serving simply to thicken the kind of line which in outflowing English verse of this sort can become colorless and textureless. Some such thickening is also intended in the "all that bloom", five Unes farther down. The following six lines, addressed by Basil to the Virgin, offer an unusually dense collection of stresses : And from áll the námes you took from áll thóse pláces, your wonders, yóur particular grâces, námes ráying like yóur brów's glóry, bálsam like yóur ówn countenance déep like the springs of pity and mérey which áre your two eyes... My stress marks, in these cases, are intended simply as nudgings. They seemed useful as warnings against the old iambic mood into which most of us can imperceptibly fall, losing all sense of the character of our reading. They keep us on guard against a mere conversational reading. I have commented, now, on two examples of translations, which I have made from relatively long and complex works ; concentrating on my (or our) own process of work, in each case, simply because I knew it best, knew the motives, strategies, and deceits involved. Those factors were, evidently, very different in the two cases, in the Polish and the Palamas translations. The goal, of going forth to another text, was in common. Working with Leszek Elektorowicz I was naturally held back by the steadying which another mind's presence exercises in verbal

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collaboration. Of more importance in this direction, was the character of the text itself. I hesitate to say that prose resists freeing translation more than poetry, yet in this case I think that is what happened. Iwaskiewicz's implications are in Fama necessarily onelayered, except when they involve heavy double-entendre, a play with the political background of the story. Translation, therefore, had to operate within fairly precisely controlled limits. Cutting loose would only have meant freeing oneself, as translator, into an unsupported vacuum. With The Kings Flute cutting loose was an entirely different matter in itself, and in addition, perhaps, illegitimately different; in the sense that there I let the original carry me far; this letting seemed in a sense 'justified'. Palamas was himself working against and beyond the limits of his own contemporary language. One feels at every point in his work a pressure out from regularized syntax. In trying to set up against that work the response which a translation must be, I had to try to go out beyond both usual English and my own English. The extraordinary had temporarily to become the normal. My last examples of this section will also be of poetry in translation, and will range from the relatively direct to the most imaginatively freed kind of version. I want again to begin with translation of my own, first with a very modest version of a lyric, "Medea", from the German of Andreas Okopenko : Vielleicht muss man biegsamer sein um glücklich zu sein in Europa. Ich habe alles versucht; ich weiss nicht, woran es liegt. Die Knaben sehnen sich dort wie unsere Knaben und träumen schwer vor sich hin, wenn der Löwenzahn fliegt. Die Mädchen haben grosse Augen und ernsthafte Züge, mehr vielleicht als wir, denn sie ahnen die kommende Lüge. Ihre Schönheit besteht in der Angst, das die Schönheit verfliegt. Das alles verflüchtigt sich später; ich weiss nicht, woran es liegt.

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Vielleicht muss man biegsamer sein um glücklich zu sein in Europa. Man müsste die Freude suchen und nicht lange fragen wohin. Die Segel verstellen, treiben mit jedem beliebigen Wind. Keiner hält sich lange, doch gibt es viele. Von kindlichen Spielen und Hoffnungen bleiben später die Spiele Und grosse Augen mit Atropin.

Perhaps in Europe the clue is bending : for happiness. I tried all; God knows why. Their boys (like ours) long there. Moodfully dreaming futures in dandelion time. The girls have giant eyes, earnest features, Deeper than ours perhaps - they sense what's coming. Their beauty is partly dread, that beauty goes; will later evaporate; God knows why. Perhaps in Europe the clue is bending: for happiness. Is looking for pleasure and asking it seldom why. Is turning the sails from side to side, driving with every wind. (For none blows long, but many blow). From juvenile games and hopes stay only the games. And the eyes immense with Atropin. Very little complicated strategy has gone into this version. Yet there are a number of details to point out, and there is a general question concerning maintenance of tone. A trimming of the original's rhetorical fullness sets the translation's tone. (Translation of lyrics, it seems to me, often has to resort to clipping in order to acquire some compensatory tenseness and force of language.) Where the German, characteristically, resorts to commas, I have interested myself in the colon or semi-colon (as in 1. 1 or 1. 7).

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Where, as in the last couplet, the German runs the two lines together, I insert a period between them. I have, furthermore, dropped out approximately one word in three. The final effect, I hope, is a kind of intense dry rhetoric of its own. It is no sensational revision of the tone of the original. Local tompensations for the inevitable translation loss can be spotted at several points. (I refer here not to 'tone', rather to details of syntax and vocabulary.) I think of words like "clue" and "juvenile games" or phrases like "God knows why", which seem to me three similar instances : efforts to put into the English a kind of strange, even slightly strained, usage, which will throw the rest of the translation into sharper relief. I dare think, though, that the translation's finest moment is reached at the end, with the technical Atropin, which is no translation at all. Compensatory tricks are less effective than gifts. My next illustration involves part of a long poem, "Amorgos", by the contemporary Greek poet Nikos Gatsos. We are here, again, with a multilevelled and rhetorically demanding piece, which gave more scope than the Polish or Okopenko, to free translation. The emotional force of this poem has surprisingly much in common with that of the Palamas ; both flowing out from an essentially postclassical Greek longing, a Sehnsucht Hellenism. In neither case did the original really stipulate. (In neither, though, did it cut the translator loose, as we shall find Homer doing for Christopher Logue, in the final example.) I want to emphasize this especially through drawing in a second translation, by Sherrard and Keeley, of the same part of the poem. My version runs like this : .. .How much I loved you only I know it I who touched you sometimes with wildbird eyes and embraced you with the moon's wrapped mane while we danced on the fields of summer over the harvested stubble and grazed together in the cutdown trefoil Great black ocean of pebbles, your necklace, multicolored rocks in your hair

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A rusted wheel-well ship comes creakingly into the shore a tuft of cerulean smoke in the horizon's rose like the crane's wing that scatters armies of swallows we wait while they out their welcome to the men waving their naked arms with anchors engraved on their armpits While the children's cries get lost in the west wind's singing and bees go in and out of the cattle's nostrils kerchiefs from Kalamata flutter and a distant bell is tinting the skies with indigo like the semantron's voice, that travels among the stars, now gone for such infinite ages... Sherrard and Keeley's version looks like this : How very much I loved you only I know I who once touched you with the eyes of the Pleiades, Embraced you with the moon's mane, and we danced on the meadows of summer On the harvest's stubble and together ate cut clover, Great dark sea with so many pebbles round your neck, so many coloured jewels in your hair. A ship nears shore, a rusted water-wheel groans. A tuft of blue smoke in the rose of the horizon Is like a crane's wing palpitating. Armies of swallows are waiting to offer the brave their welcome. Arms rise naked, anchors engraved on the armpits Children's cries mingle with the song of the West Wind. Bees come and go in the cows' nostrils. Kalamata kerchiefs flutter And a distant bell painting the sky with bluing Is like the sound of a gong travelling among the stars A gong that escaped so many ages a g o . . . (Four Greek Poets, p. 99.) I include the two, as I've said, chiefly as a reminder of the interpretive freedom stimulated by even a fairly straightforward text. The main differences are apparent at one. I have romanticized where Sherrard and Keeley have with a conscious stiffness worked much more closely toward the original.

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A second reason for including both versions is to indicate, against a background, a few of the decisions I have myself made here. The "moon's wrapped mane" sounded, and still sounds, like a fresh thing to do with the Greek's direct "with the mane of the moon". (Is there any room here for a pun?) The issue, in such decisions, is whether and how the metaphor of the original can be re-used in the new language. I feel less sure of "cutdown trefoil", wh'ch is quite literal to the Greek, but not as safe as "cut clover", though my own move certainly wins for density and demand. The question is whether "trefoil's" unfamiliarity to the modern English ear is a liability; I took a chance. I might mention, as a third example, one that is much simpler yet telling; the "bees go in and out of the cattle's nostrils". I feel that the sense of the original - held in a single verb, 'to enter and go out' - is more rhinally captured in my phrasing. I refer here to one of the small strategies by which one can hardly be said to be moving farther away from the original, but simply to be growing more sensuously interesting, in terms of it. The examples from Gatsos and Okopenko, then, amplify some of the points made earlier. Analysis and discussion of particular translations is likely to continue fairly indefinitely in this vein, turning up similar points ; we are not, after all, able to break through on this front to questions of the primary imagination, but remain limited to what we can do, by getting into the thrusts of other writers' primary imaginations. Yet if there is any recent example I know, of translation which does somehow make something more than this out of itself, it is Christopher Logue's version of Homer's "Patrokleia", which I would like at this point to make my last example. The original is Book X V I of the Iliad. A t that point in the epic, it will be remembered, Homer has brought the narrative to an impasse. Achilles refuses to fight, the Trojans are getting ready to burn the Greek ships, the Myrmidons are sulking and on the verge of mutiny. We can perhaps expect, from ourview-point, that Homer will have to make something like the move he makes, that he will make Patroklos persuade Achilles. N o other character in the epic could have accomplished this, and some character, some personal

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force, was required for it. But we could hardly have anticipated, Homer being so much more modern than we, the profound relationship between Patroklos and Achilles which would be turned into the vehicle of Achilles' decision. The eros between them is brought sharply into the center of our concern. It is embodied in the assuming by Patroklos, of Achilles' armor, a love trade; then by the sadistic demand from Achilles, that Patroklos is not to go too far in his attack, is to stop - which he in fact refuses to do - short of the walls of Troy. A cruel gift rather cruelly given is the love bond. It seems sure to end in death, and in the maggots which Achilles will fancy up as he sees his lover's corpse. I retell this simply to remind that Logue has bitten into Homer where he is most akin to us, and to pre-establish as much sympathy as possible for Logue's evident feeling that he has been freed, into his own world, by this text. I imagine the three examples I choose will from most people require that sympathy. The first example (Iliad XVI, 11. 168 ff.) involves enumeration and descriptions of the five main forces accompanying Achilles. So far so good, for modern English. But for us, the troublesome genius of Homer adds itself here: his gift for intercalating personal detail into enumeration. To make my point and Logue's solution clear I want first to cite the whole Homeric passage, in the most literal possible version (mine), then to pursue it directly with Logue's passage. The Homer runs this way : There were fifty swift ships which Achilles the charioteer had led to Troy. In each there were fifty men on the benches. He had set up five leaders to rule under him, he himself being chief commander. Of one contingent the leader was Menesthios the swift armored son of the two winged river Spercheios, whom Polydore the lovely daughter of Peleios bore to noble Spercheios, a lady mating with a god, but by repute with Boros the son of Peñeres, who ostensibly married her, bringing priceless dowry gifts. Eudoros the warlike led another contingent, a virgin man, whom Polymele bore, she who was lovely in the dance,

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daughter of Phylas; the strong killer of Argos had fallen for her, seeing her with his eyes, among the dances in the dance of golden spindled Artemis. Straightaway noble Hermes took her upstairs and lay beside her, and gave her the splendid son Eudoros, swift runner and good fighter. But when the birth-laboring goddess Eilythuia led the child forth into the light and the rays of the sun, the strong son of Echekles the son of Aktor led her (Polymele) home, when the dowry had been given, and the old man Phylas nourished and cared for the son, loving him like his own. Peisander the manly was in charge of the third contingent, the son of Maimales, Peisander who excelled among all the Myrmidons at spear throwing, after the comrade of Peleus. The old horseman Phoinix was in charge of the fourth, and of the fifth Alkimedon, splendid son of Laerkes. This of course makes very dull and uncomfortable English. The genius of Homeric prosody has been completely subtracted. Yet that part of Homer is lost anyway, in any modern translation. Logue cannot recapture it, and in fact wisely makes no effort to. His answer is radical excision and selection, combined with local developments at odd angles out from the original. He puts it this way: Achilles led fifty ships to Troy. Fifty swift ships, each holding fifty men, And the force divided into five, under five Commanders. First was Menesthios, Achilles' nephew. Far and away of all the Greeks (excepting Nestor) He was the best tactician, and could judge The enemy's numbers by the accompanying cloud Of dust. Once he had courted Helen; now He fought to get her back, aiming a thousand men As easily as others aimed their bows. Next was Eudorus, Polymele's bastard. When young this woman was so beautiful She joined Artemis' dancing nuns Who lived together in the House of Spindles. One day while she was dancing Hermes caught her eye, and beckoned.

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And looking neither right nor left She left the dance and went upstairs And had the God in her own bedroom. Later, when the boy was born, her father Sold her to a local man for a small fortune. About the other Commanders we know little. Peisander led the third contingent, Phoenix Once Achilles' guardian - the fourth, and Alkimedon, nicknamed 'Smiler', led the fifth. (Patrocleia of Homer, p. 18-19.) Lines 174-78 of the Greek, which provide a creative genealogy of Menesthios, have been left out entirely. So have the biographical details about Peisander (11. 193-95). So has much of the amplification (11. 168-72) concerning the numerical distribution of men and ships, and Achilles' superintendence over them. So have such epic periphrases as (11.187-88) the description of Eilythuia, the midwife goddess. What has been kept and developed? The pace, first of all. In any verse acceptable to our fallen ears the freight of Homeric detail would be unbearably heavy. Logue has dumped a lot of that freight, quite simply as the price necessary for pace in our terms. He has then done some beautiful blowing up of detail, by what is in effect a photographic enlargement process. One could sense, even without Greek, that something like this must have happened in: When young this woman was so beautiful She joined Artemis' dancing nuns Who lived together in the House of Spindles. And indeed it has. There is nothing in the Greek about the woman's beauty - though it is fully implied by the events she became part of. The "dancing nuns" are an intelligible and appropriate gloss on the text, but not closer than that to it. The capitalized "House of Spindles" is a rather exciting, if perhaps unfairly ambiguous, development out from the epithets for Artemis (1. 183). The three lines just quoted, from Logue, are thus in one way eccentric and unjustifiable. They are certainly arbitrary. But I think the arbitrariness works at this point, and carries over to us, in our idiom, some

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of the beauty and strangeness of the original. The following five lines seem to me even more daringly successful: quick, a little excessive - "had the God in her own bedroom" - but in neither regard far from the point in Homer. It is noticeable, here, that where Logue feels he has struck a rich vein - as in 11. 184-85 of the Greek - he exploits it shamelessly, expanding it into his own five lines of bedroom scene. Most remarkable of all is Logue's passage on Menesthios, almost none of which appears in the Greek (11. 173-4), while what does appear in the Greek is entirely missing in Logue. I wonder, in this case, whether Logue mightn't have helped himself by engaging with the terse autobiography held in the Greek : Menesthios being after all, and rather 'poetically', Son of the Two Winged River Spercheios. Yet it was worth something to be forced onto .. .aiming a thousand men As easily as others aimed their bows. The second passage I have in mind is particularly difficult, for it provides little opportunity to excise, and makes demands on one's power of aural-tactile imagery. In the Greek (11. 211-215) we have a powerful description of the effect on the Myrmidons of Achilles' exhortation, which had itself followed directly on the enumeration which I examined in the previous passage. The Greek, again put very literally and flatly by me, runs this way: Then the contingents arose, when they heard the King. As when a man with thick laid stones strengthens the roof of a lofty dwelling, warding away the strength of the wind, thus the helmets and rounded shields were packed together. Shield close to shield, plume to plume, man to man. The effect, though expressed entirely in physical imagery, gives the strongest possible sense of the tightening and strengthening of military lines. The feeling of interchinking masonry works persuasively as image of interwoven shields. Logue has picked up these unusually obscure lines like this :

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The columns tightened. The rim of each man's shield Overlapped the face of his neighbor's shield Like ashlar work - as masons call it when they lay Bonded walls, proof against wind. As they moved off The columns tightened more, till, from far off, It seemed five wide black straps studded with bolts Were being drawn across the sand.

The modifications will be obvious enough; all the way from reversal of the tenor and vehicle, within the image, to the sharp variations in line length. We are made perhaps especially aware, by the second kind of difference, that we are with Logue dealing in lyric - rather than narrative - units, though within those units he maintains his pace. Only a sensationally effective use of those units can electrify us into accepting the lyric transformation. An example of this success is :

It seemed five wide black straps studded with bolts Were being drawn across the sand where we are made suddenly to see, if not precisely what Homer wanted to see, at least something powerful and cruel in the bunched men. The last instance will need less comment than the first two, for the point of Logue's strategy is not to be shown by indefinite analysis; it needs to be felt, and it gets itself felt quickly. We reach here, in this passage, the crucial image by which Homer drives home the death of Sarpedon, whom Patroklos has for many lines, and through the hottest interplay, been wooing with murder. The Greek is once again extremely simple : He fell as when an oak or poplar or some tall pine falls, that will become a mast...

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The English is not less simple, except for one extraordinary word planted in its third line: He fell as a tree falls - oak, say, or pine Slowly at first and then, with the bright Commercial axes at its heart, The tall hurt trunk lies down, Among its leaves, resentfully. 'Commercial' is just justified enough, by the harshness of the metal slaughter, to stay in place. By so doing it behaves conspicuously and even blatantly, in a way we never find individual words behaving in Homer. But it does not overrule its passage, and it does make certain that we can't miss the passage. It is part, though far from all, of Logue's accomplishment that he makes sure we can't miss the Homer he brings us.

3. PUBLIC MATERIAL

We have seeii a number of ways in which translation can effectively indulge itself in freedom, at times even in a freedom which takes its original text as pretext. I suppose that 'freedom', as we are using it here, is so much a part of one kind of translation, that even at his most liberal the translator fulfills his function, or plays out the rules of his game. For it to be so clear that such freedom is permissible, something else must be assumed : that our usual sense of the original's inviolability, the sense we can probably all find somewhere in ourselves, has its weaknesses, or at best expresses itself inadequately to us. We have gotten used to being trapped in our own manner of speaking. I refer to our idea that original works are the private property of their creators, an idea deeply lodged in us. It is, I suspect, the deepest root of our conviction that such works are inviolable. I think we should try to extirpate, or perhaps just to loosen, this root. There are important senses in which original literary works are private property. They are made by individuals. They express

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something that is unique in those individuals. And they form part of the oeuvres which are distinctive to those individuals. But these are not decisive senses: Or rather they need to be put in proper perspective. Our culture has a way of making it hard for us to do even this. It seems to be essential, at the start, to distinguish individuals from the works they produce. With the New Criticism in America, we have been through one phase of this insistence, and have noticed a consequent sharpening of critical interest in literary texts. But that movement was rather narrowly literary critical. It is more pertinent now, even to literary study, to address ourselves from broader contexts to the whole question of literary fatherhood, to this facet of the relation between maker and made. The analogy between human parenthood and literary parenthood is the most useful starting point. A child seems to its immediate creators to be substantial, say a substantial 'addition to the family', or 'heir to the line'. In each male's condition as real or imagined pater familias there comes a moment when to himself he quantifies the members of his family, when to himself he tots them up as numerable substances. I speak from limited experience - a small family of children and writings - but I suspect, and have myself felt, that the author will at times want to quantify, thus want to reify, his own literary productions, and in this sense he will want to possess them, as, I believe, the father of children will at such times also long to do. In neither relationship, however, will Possession finally be possible. This is in a way our tragedy. Grasped and used properly, though, it may be our secret power. I mean that both the father and the artist create from the inside, not by rules but by organic production, and that what they make by its nature puts on the nature of the process that made. The process flows from the maker to the thing made. (Here( the notion of process, movement, is crucial.) Children and poems become lives of their own, even though the life of poems, like something dehydrated, has to be resuscitated or revived by us at each readines I think we touch, here, on the most significant reason why workg. of art can only superficially - say in a nakedly le gal sense - be

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considered private property. Being property is not a significant element of what they are. What is made, in the way I described, can by definition not be substantial, thus can hardly be possessed. Possessing it would be like possessing movement. What about the 'something new' that is unique in those authors, and what about the way it finds itself into their works? I want to rush at that dilemma with a term, 'style', which I think characterizes the unique aspect of an author, the aspect which he can transfer to his work. If style is the man, indeed, it is that part of him in which he stamps his personality on his action. 'Style' is an insubstantial quality, never a something to be possessed; always a done, under the sign of which one can enact himself. Style is participial, not substantival. Here, too, we return to the question of movement, which the participial is. In this regard, though only in it, it is a matter of great importance to a work of literature who has created it. The relationship is not one which gives the creator proprietary rights; for marking something with one's style is not a way of possessing it. I have made a homespun and amateurish analogy between two kinds of fatherhood. There are, of course, many more serious ways of thinking into the impossessibility of literary works, into the fact that they cannot be anyone's property. One could take either a linguistic or a culture-historical course of argument. I begin with the former. Metaphysical thought has been from the outset preoccupied with the nature of substance, and has only after the most selfbinding, self-constricting arguments started on a large scale to free itself from the notion of substance as static, weighty, 'substantial'. I take it that the shapeless term 'Existentialism', which has significant origins that pre-date the Romantic movement, covers a variety of self-identifying efforts, which have it in common chiefly that they are all trying to loosen up the tighter, more traditionally constricted, notions of substance. Of course this effort is as a whole not new. But in the last hundred years it has taken on new force, and for new reasons. What we call the Romantic Movement has provided, in this instance, much of the motive force for the change.

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To this day there has been little sensitivity to the implications inside 'Existentialism' for the aesthetics of literature. (Works like Qu'est-ce que la Littérature seeming perhaps to have closed the matter.) One of many unexplored roads leading toward this issue would lead into linguistics. It would look to see how the sentence, our seemingly unavoidable weapon of communication in language, is locked into the gears of precise, and precisely separately functioning, parts of speech. It would find, at the center of that locked system, the substantive, the representative par excellence of the metaphysically substantive. (The substantive would seem to function like a stable sun, in the midst of whirling parts of speech, planets.) In that enthronement of the substantial, I imagine, the argument would be able to find the center of the problem of understanding what literature is. From there the argument would expand directly to considering how substantial the substantive in literature actually is, at any time; to considering, say, what ontological status accrues to character, plot, prosody, etc. At that close look through the lens, works of literature would begin at onc&to dissolve. It would be found necessary, in order to seize them at all, to begin thinking of them as perpetually recreated, as happenings, to language, by which we constantly experience out, negotiate out into the world with which through language we define and confine ourselves. We would turn out to be losing old substantialities, but gaining a place for literature in the work of living, or perhaps, to avoid the Arnoldian phrase, in the business of negotiating a life. The road that led through Existentialism into a kind of linguistics, would appear to have come out at the point I was touching earlier; at the fact that the literary work is participial, and in that sense unpossessible. This is an outline of what I called a linguistic argument for the insubstantiality, and unpossessible essence, of works of literature. The culture-historical argument borders on the linguistic. It is a simple fact that culture is a system of paralyzed substantives - substantial values, economic standards, national identities plaqued against the anomic background of mere life, as it is lived, say, by pre-cultural folk. It is even more distinctively true, within

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this general picture, that what we call bourgeois culture accentuates, remarkably and remorselessly, the importance of substantive possessions within society. There is no need, here in the argument, to take a stand in this matter, only to say that it fosters in each of us from early in life a readiness to embrace the substantivecentered vocabulary, and set of assumptions about literature and language, toward which I have just directed an attack. I suggest this opinion here : that the bourgeois culture's habit of substantive fostering, repeats itself early enough in each of our lives that we should at least attempt to expose it as the habit it is ; and that we should do so most energetically where it touches the question of the substantial, and possessible, in language. Language being, after all, the point from which what we most importantly are moves out. Literature is what Horace, in the Ars Poetica, called publica materies, a body of formal accomplishment in language to which all people share natural and equal access, regardless of their temporal or spatial distance from the making. Horace's conviction was, of course, a lieu commun of ancient literary criticism. Behind him were, for instance, the Greeks, on whose practise he relied for every sort of precedent. Among them it had been taken for granted that whatever good is done in words should be used and reused as fully as possible. We hardly need to be reminded that this conviction, theologically backed up, makes what power and consistency we find in mediaeval literature. To the ancient Greeks, as we know, literature was precisely publica materies. Aristotle explained in the Poetics that the familiar and profound stories, of the great mythic families, made the only proper subject of tragedy. The tragedians worked from the same conviction. The House of Thebes or Argos, the wanderings of Medea or Heracles, provoked innumerable reshapings and reinterpretations, while maintaining their integrity as stories. It was just this change within stability which provided the conditions for meaning, and opened the field for innuendo, implication, and - say in Aristophanes - raucously hilarious counterpoint against earlier authors.

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It is unnecessary to expand this point to a broader survey of literary history, in this anyway well known feature. The preoccupation of Roman and mediaeval literature, with inherited patterns of diction, with tropes, apostrophes, rhetorical questions, and organized strata of meaning through which they constantly stressed their reliance on the verbal accomplishment of the past: all these are only more obvious forms of the traditional verbal alliances by which the works of post-mediaeval literature bind themselves together in a fabric of repeated tales, turns of phrase, and perspectives, a fabric in essence neither individual nor personal. We can hardly write a poem, essay, or novel, today, without knowing, in our expectation, to what extent we are working off against other experimenters. To take a limited instance familiar to me, the experimenter with form, in contemporary American poetry, will discover first how much he owes to Olson, then behind him to William Carlos Williams, then behind him, but far from finally, to Whitman. This is a characteristic regression, the importance of which we characteristically mask by describing the influences at work in it. Actually it is far more important to see that the stages, in such a regression, are all elements of public literary material, are all, in just that sense, precisely not possessible, not possessed. (Becoming thus, more than we realize, inapprehensible by the passion for categorizing, which lies behind the constant search for influences.) Not possessed. The stages of this material are. We go out to them, and leave things beside them, for others to go out to. Being, rather than being there to be had, or owned, confers on these elements of public literary material a particular inner quality, and relation to us. They must be continually appropriated and reappropriated by us, if they are to continue to live in our literary history. This would be less true if such works could be possessed and, so to speak, carried home and owned by each of us, or by each of us as nations or cultures. Since we cannot own them, we must affirm them by going out to them. One way in which this can happen to them is for us to translate them. Fairly clear notions, of the nature of literary works, of the nature of literary tradition, and of the way literature is 'appropriated',

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are all involved in the understanding of what translation is and can be. Translation, in any meaningfully liberal sense, even in senses liberal enough to permit my versions ofPalamas andGatsos, requires being understood as an encounter between the living and the living, the participial and the participial, above all between the insubstantial and the insubstantial. As an act, translation is an affirming in words. This last point is surely clear by now, but is so crucial that it deserves reemphasis.To the very large extent that works of literature are thought solid and substantial, are considered the hard building blocks of literary tradition, the elements in chains of influence, we must inevitably consider 'translations' of them as counterbalances or faulty equivalences to them. We will at most think that the translator has a bag of verbal tricks tucked away, by use of which he can compensate locally for what the translation loses. But we will not acquire any imaginative - that is, consequently, accurate sense of the way the translator carries on the work of the original. A translation will still be an assault on an impregnable fort. As soon as we loosen up our sense of what a work of literature is, and of what literary tradition is, as soon as we aerate it, we loosen up our sense of what translating works of literature can mean. The whole set of metaphors, which are usually clues to our understanding of such matters, gradually shifts. From the notion of 'carrying over', embedded in the etymology of the term 'translation', we will slip into notions of 'version', 'continuation', 'development', notions which more or less mutedly contain the notion of working out from the original into something new. This process of relanguaging, which can be the avant-garde of deeper change, has made itself slightly felt in the present book; though, as I have said, I have tried to make 'translation' do as much work as possible; such relanguaging is a reaching out, at its most dramatic and possibly most significant, to the possibility of the translation as a carrying forth of the thrust of the original, from which it works out. A translation like Logue's may well be considered an instance of this. And some of the work that went into the Mary-catalogue, in my English of Palamas, seems to me part of that kind of movement.

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Something far more important follows, for translation theory, from placing the job of translation in the context of the nature of literature. It is that original works of literature reveal themselves as in no sense coercive, as making no demands, above all no specific demands, on the way people address and use them. Those works make no demands on those who make translations or versions or imitations of them. This point should be obvious, without any discussion of the nature of literature, but it is not. The belief in some kind of coercion, as an aspect of works of literature, is deeply planted in our language of substantives. It is part of the notion of literary property, which is in turn part of our wider notion of private property. Why our conviction of this coercion should be part of that larger system, and be supported by it, I am not sure. It may simply be that our (deluding) principles about possession lead us to fear plunder, and to suspect plunder on all sides, in the most unusual forms. The author wants above all to protect his work, not to give it, and everything around him in his society fosters his desire. Once our notion of the supposed coerciveness, and monodirectional demand, has been exploded, once we grasp that there is no correct way to translate, imitate, or represent a given work, that what works is what matters, we are of course all the way to realizing that translation can be as free as it can get by with being. (Or as unfree as it can get by with being.) I hope the examples which were given in Section 2 indicate - which is true - that I am not myself likely to import any very subversive tactics under the banner of these ideas. I doubt that I could. My version of Palamas is as far as I could go in taking his drive out into my own languageworld; and even there, I think, I have gone farther than I thought I could with Okopenko. But it seemed apparent to me, in the process, that there were at every point bolder and more imaginative things to be done, which for various reasons I didn't accomplish. I especially wanted to include in my analyses a little of the best of Logue, as a sign of good faith in this regard. I could quite easily have included some of the best of Robert Fitzgerald, W. S. Merwin, or Robert Bly. The point would have been the same. It would

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have been seen that there were in those texts, often, no holds barred, but also that there was nothing to bar them. Before wrapping up this section, which is really a long footnote to the examples of the previous section, I want at least to mention a cluster of questions which open out from the present issues into what we are in the habit of calling 'the world'. In this case the world is very large, and the act of translation seemingly very small. I shall try to close that gap further in the final section of this chapter, and will here simply delineate the opening. A friend of mine who is a writer remarks, over coffee and discussion of the ideas in this short book, that the most precious right an author has is to his copyright. It is the only way he can control what he creates. It is what in fact he hopes to enjoy as a guarantee of his livelihood. I reply, as I have always rather automatically done, that copyright law is extremely modern, a mid-sixteenth century innovation in the English and European worlds, and not part of the grand literary tradition. (References to Greek andRoman practice inevitably creep in here.) And at this point our argument seems to bog down, seems that way even to me. We seem to have reached an impasse. The difficult fact is that we are both right. An author's copyright is indispensible to him now, and has been so, I suppose, since the Renaissance, because of various conditions dominant in society since the Renaissance. I wrote earlier of the Romantic period as a turning point, at which our present assumption of the author's uniqueness, and of that of his work, was firmly stamped on us. But in going back to the Renaissance, in the present context, I mean to be considering an even wider circle of causes and effects. I am thinking of the change, which began to assert itself in the sixteenth century, toward a world in which the writer - the artist in general - no longer works in terms of the whole purpose of his society, multiple as that has of course always been, but in terms of himself, his patron, his ideal for art, or, perhaps, simply in terms of the market. The development of this complex, of new stances for the artist, was the development of a situation in which the artist simply had to look on his work as a private possession, a potential commodity.

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My friend was right, then, but how could I also have been, at the same time? The deplorable situation I describe has necessitated, and made to seem perfectly natural, a very deleterious relationship between writers and their works. (I have earlier made a sally against the philosophy of the substantial, and would work out from there in defending the use of 'deleterious'.) The post-Renaissance aesthetic situation could easily be seen to revolve around marmoreal, frozen, commodity-like conceptions of the literary work. The preferred artist-work relation is viewed as one of possessor to possession, rather, actually, than one of creator to created. The made work is thought to belong to the person who made it, or to the others, who acquire and 'buy' it. That having been made into the case, into the modern situation, I think I was correct to say that the major tradition of literature, which flourished in older Western, and still flourishes in some contemporary Eastern, societies, runs firmly counter to the present Western situation. That it runs firmly counter I took, in our conversation, to be 'bad' for us, though I know it isn't so absolutely, or per se. I hope that the various arguments introduced in these chapters, en route toward a theory of translation, will have given some notion of why I think our own present situation can be considered bad. It is at the very least inimical to the proper sense of what translation, in the widest sense, is and can be. Being inimical to the widest sense ofwhat translation is surely has some connection in the present case with the leading to certain misunderstandings both of literature and of life.

4. TRANSLATION AND SOCIETY

A great many questions, both large and small, have surfaced in the previous sections, and though I see it as self-indulgence, I want in this section to try deepening a few of the suggested connections without constant reference to the topic of translation. Doing it in this way will at several points take the argument farther out away

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from translation, from the details of language, than it was taken even at the end of the last chapter. However, this extension of the argument seems to me part of the point; another way of indicating the continuity between translation and standing-in-the-worldthrough-language. Translating raises our attention forcefully to its relationships because it is peculiarly self-conscious - not peculiarly great - work in words. That being, from the theoretical point of view, perhaps its chief attraction. In the second section I gave a variety of examples of the work of translation, hoping to open up that activity somewhat, from the inside, and to show some of the intentions and pressures that occur in the course of it. Of the examples chosen, only that of Logue took me far outside my own experience; serving, at the same time, as the sharpest instance of free translation. My discussion of The King's Flute was intended to indicate, as honestly as I could, how far I felt I personally could be forced out into new language by the work of translation. The exigencies were less confining, there, than in the work on Fama, "Medea", or the section of Gatsos. Though in none of them was there anything like coercion operating out onto the translator. In the third section I tried in several ways to spread a net in which to catch the examples and points of section two. I opened with a hasty attempt to define the 'work of literature', then went on to consider what, in light of that definition, 'translating' such a work could mean. An assault on the substantive, and a defence of the participial, constituted, in the broadest sense, the strategy of argument, in terms of which order was called down on the always disturbing chaos of examples. I made a sally against post-Renaissance deviations in literary tradition, and against that in our bourgeois society which most nourishes the idolatry of the substantial. This historical argument was to some extent intended as a metaphor, though only partially; to that extent it was an effort to extract a vocabulary, from the language about our own past, which might help to explain our contemporary situation to us. Even as metaphor, then, the historical argument circled closely around the main point. It was en route, at every stage.

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What wants still to be done, now, is to tighten up some of the ambitious indications concerning our society, our language, and the history of our culture; and the way these 'forces', or 'situations', in the midst of which we all live, bear on the act of translating, and are in turn borne on by it. By 'tighten up' I mean 'grasp closer to the roots', toward that point which, if it is well secured, secures the whole bundle of the argument. Man, society, the culture man lives in, and the language man uses in his society, are all one; not in some eroded sense, in which all that exists is held in some ultimate unity, but in a much more practical, tangible, and immediate sense. The words man uses construct and are constructed by his society and culture. The values he lives by, and which are central to his society, are maintained by being named, virtually by being changed. The view of language which I sketched in the previous chapter requires, and is required by, a certain view of what man is. (Which is no proof that the particular view of man is valid, accurate, but is the beginning, through consistency, of the way toward proof.) Language is itself insubstantial. We re-enact it, make it act every time we, say, read it off the page. This is quite as true of the substantives as of the verbs, and the other parts of speech in the sentences we meet. Strawson, in his book Individuals, has shown in some detail the ways in which the introduction of substantives into sentences is simply a kind of introduction of assertion. He makes us see the psychic pressures which different kinds of parts of speech constitute. The point may sound banal, stripped of its complexities, yet the truth is that even stripped the point is so pregnant we can hardly control its growth. It threatens our presuppositions. They are anyway dangerously overprotected. That is because language is so close to us and in us, that we have trouble knowing what we are doing inside of that medium or operation. We normally assume that there are some substantial realities in some world assumed to exist outside our language; and we go on to imagine that, when we have heard the names of those 'substantial realities', we have met the substantive in language, or the linguistically substantive. I think this delusion is part of an effort to compensate

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for the unexpected insolidity of our situation in existence. There is an air of surprised desperation to most of our interpretations of what language is to us. One thing the examination of our language teaches us about man is that he has a hunger for the substantial, and willingly gratifies that hunger through the creation of language. The parts of speech, as we call them, represent different qualities of the experienced world as they can be synthesized for our better understanding. Such qualities, including those introduced as blocks of assertion for comprehension, the substantives, are all forms of the act of dealing with areas of perception, or more generally, of experience. This kind of negotiation can, as in the present sentence, be quite abstract, desensualized; or, as in sentences about apples or tables, or in imagist poems, can simply be an effort to deal with the simplest visual experience. 'Dealing with experience' can have that variously different significances. This is something to understand about man, something which his language is good at teaching us, especially once we have cut free from our usual preoccupations about substance. We also happen, here, upon a route toward understanding man's way into society through language. (The last loop of a circuit, as society will then, again, be the matrix of language, as well as its beneficiary.) From the beginning men spoke to other men in order to do something to them, for them, or with them. We need to force ourselves to remember this, somewhere inside; as we need to force ourselves, in the case of the Lascaux or Les Eyzies paintings, to understand that they are part not of art as its own end, but of religious rhetoric. Once again we need to force ourselves, because the realization runs against the grain of substantial interpretation, of what we might, today, call our passion for reification. Once we have the point clear we flow naturally into other realizations; the natural perspective takes over gain. We see that the value words, by which - in its chauvinism, aspiration, disapprobation, etc. - each culture shapes itself, are simply culture's attempts to define its own destiny. Its substantives and verbs, I suppose, are its attempts to locate itself, or to teach itself the business of

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holding on to positions in space and time. I mean only to stress, in running through these ideas, that man puts back into society, in the form of readiness for action and negotiation, the context-laden words which he grows up absorbing from society and learning how to use. Works of literature, plainly, are only complicated examples of factors in this circuit of intentional give and take which embraces man, his language, and his society. What I think translation is, in all this, I have already said : and I want to restate it here simply so the point can lie embedded in as fundamental as possible a context. Translation is par excellence the process by which the thrust behind the verbal works of man, the best of those works at that, can be directly transferred, carried on, allowed to continue the arc of which their coming-into-being was already part. (Such a word-arc being itself, though normally not through translation, the continuation of similar, preceding, arcs of thrust.) Language is intentional, negotiatory, and a thrust at all stages. Works of literature are highly organized instances of such thrust, diverting it carefully into the blocks of pressure which we associate with, say, prosody, characterization, or thematic drive. These blocks force themselves on, through time, from culture to culture. When we think of the life of the Odyssey, the Agamemnon, the Bible, even The Divine Comedy, we are thinking about, and really in continuity with, those translations, from the most to the least literal, which have preserved the arc. The point along which this life maintains itself is part of what we call 'society', that invisible community, of energies and concerns, of which I said earlier that it feeds and is fed by the language men make. I suppose it is of decisive importance, to society, to be coursed through by the kinds of energy I am describing. No doubt this point also is obvious : I have, for instance, included the Bible among the works whose life has been maintained through translation. But the point does not need to be taken so obviously, and I think the inclusion of a work like The Divine Comedy, among society-maintaining forces, might at once seem more problematic. Works of that sort, which are happenings of the highest complexity

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and greatest profundity to man's language, help crucially to maintain that language, and the energies in it, at a stage from which it can strike out at any point along the trajectory of other great things which man finds himself able to say. In this argument there is an underlying critique and an obscurity. I suppose there is also an underlying but faintly visible horizon. The critique has been maintained in earlier pages, and represents a not original dissatisfaction with the culture in which we now find ourselves, in mid-twentieth century Western Europe or America. In particular, I think of a dissatisfaction with our dwindling sense of commonwealth, common good, or res publica: with our growing sense of the isolation of the individual, particularly the individual artist; and with our, if not growing at least strongly consolidated, habit of experiencing in material, rather than in what I should call 'creative' terms, terms marrowed with thrust and energy. This critique is to some extent inevitable in any age, is an assault against the darkness in all of us, an outcry against the burden of trying to make it though fallen. But much more is involved. The implicit conviction that a society lives, if not by what it believes at least by what of belief it enacts, has surely been on the whole, though only very gradually, eroded in the West. It is a convenience of some value to date that decline from the Renaissance, at which time the idea of the free, economically competitive, spiritually atomic state is beginning to assert itself. Community, in the classical Roman or mediaeval senses, is abandoned, cut down almost to microscopic units of affiliation. Atomization into states which are in many instances little more than economic propaganda units, has tended to fracture the earlier senses of men-as-continuous-withone-another. This tendency, which is inimical to the spirit behind the creative use and production of translations, as of much else, has been accelerated by the increasing passion for private property and ownership, a passion which had, until recent decades at least, militated in favor of a similar view of literary productions. That this condition is still in force, to an impressive degree, can be confirmed by anyone who tries to 'gather permissions', from large commercial publishers, for the publication of an anthology. The example is

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tiny but representative. Literary property is private property with a price tag tightly attached. Is this a world in which we can return, to some extent, to the notion of literature, even currently created literature, as a contribution to the common good? In which the serious author can feel himself in solidarity, as maker, with a receiving community? In which the recognition, for which the author now quite properly demands financial evidence, will take some other form : of amore spontaneous contribution of conviction and approbation? Somewhere, in the attempt even to begin to foresee answers to these questions, lies whatever horizon, and even possibility for horizon-forming, the question of translation contains. Once we grasp the importance of the kind of work translation is, we find it significant that translation would best operate in a particular kind of social-cultural situation ; a global one, a world situation in which efforts - economic, verbal, philosophical - would as a matter of course be pooled, in which achievements of value would not be moves in the strategy of competition but contributions to the general good; in which cultural convergence rather than cultural competition would be the norm. The conditions for a profounder sense, of the character of possession, would be latent in this kind of organization ; and the awareness of societies as bearers of thrusts, uncompleted arcs of spiritual intention which want carrying farther, would be inherent in such a global situation. Can translation affect culture, can it play, by design, any shaping role in culture? In one sense the idea is absurd. Translation is as usually practiced an act of secondary imagination, and is even at its most liberated - as in Logue's piece - a derived expression of primary imagination. At its most effectual, in purely literary terms, it can only stimulate from, present evidences of, and keep alive, the argument of the past. In literary terms which are at the same time extra-literary, it can do more. The example of translations of the Bible is far too obvious, for the present argument; it is God's Word at work, and so is an unfairly strong precedent. In fact evidence from the past should probably be avoided, in light at least of the present effort - to get

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through to the operative conditions timelessly present in the activity of translation. In this light, humbler present experience, like my own in the Translation Workshop at the University of Iowa, is more appropriate for me to discuss. Half of us in those class sessions were working out from English, the other half, some fifteen to twenty, from various directions Pashtun, Japanese, Chinese, Indonesian, Swedish, Spanish, French, Ibo, and others. In every way our work together was a growingaware-that-literature-is-common-property, that anyone can properly take hold of it and carry it wherever he wants to go with it. In many ways, also, our experience was a convergence in, of each of us, toward the others. This was not at all simply the result of doing the job in common. It was, as we felt at that time, a communal working toward the single language which lies between, or among - spatial metaphors collapse here - all the national languages. It was in that sense an especially potent coming together, and one centering on a pure and artificial horizon. Of course we were not, literally, considering a middle or pure or perfect language, but always languages χ and y, from one of which we were trying to translate into the other. However the theoretical horizon, which made possible this notion of crossing linguistic areas, was the conviction of a single repository of meaning, a tertium quid, from which both χ and y drew, from which they were both equally nourished, which somehow guaranteed them both in their relationship to each other. This invisible language of the center was, of course, never attainable. It was present, in our translations, as the rules of logic are present in ordinary discourse. Crossing, though, was vivifying and unifying. The Translation Workshop was a gathering of word-oriented people, in a University cadre, for the purpose of working out, in as much detail as possible, instances of the use of an invisible language. It was, of course, very great fun to be involved in this effort. It was extending and amplifying work, that rose on the easiness of a naturally human convergence. More could certainly be made of precisely this kind of experiment; and even on the prac-

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tical level of University work, such an experiment could I think be the spring-board to a considerably widened sense of the extraordinary unity, as well as the quite inspiring disunity, of all languages and their spokesmen or spokeswomen. By the movement out of such cells, there would be a slow pregnant increase of the essential understanding, that finally where acts continue one another, in a fundamentally organic succession, they build a lasting commonwealth of concerns and acquired values.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

(of a few works most useful in the preparation of this book) Adorno, Theodor, Dialektik der Aufklärung (Frankfurt, 1969). Arrowsmith and Shattuck, The Craft and Context of Translation (New York, 1964). Bauer, W., Western Literature and Translation Work in Communist China (Frankfurt, 1964). Buber, Martin, I and Thou (New York, 1958). Carnap, R., Scheinprobleme in der Philosophie (Frankfurt, 1966). Chomsky, Noam, Cartesian Linguistics (New York, 1966). Delavenay, E., Bibliographie de la traduction automatique (Mouton, 1960). Frye, Ν., The Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, 1957). Goffman, Erving, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York, 1959). Marcuse, Η., One Dimensional Man (Boston, 1964). Mead, G. H., Mind, Self, and Society, (Chicago, 1959). Northrop, F. S. C., Cross-cultural Understanding (New York, 1964). Palamas, Kostes, The King's Flute (Lincoln, 1967). —, The Twelve Words of the Gypsy (Lincoln, 1964). Pound, Ezra, ABC of Reading (New York, 1960). —, Literary Essays (Norfolk, Conn., 1954). Sartre, J. P., Being and Nothingness (New York, 1956). Strawson, P., Individuals (London, 1959). Wiener, Norbert, The Human Use of Human Beings (New York, 1967). Yip, Wai-lim, Ezra Pound's Cathay (Princeton, 1969).

INDEX

Aeschylus, 95 Andersen, H. C , 63-64 Andromaque, 101 Arion, 110-111 Aristotle, 106, 146 Arnold, M., 83, 145 Arrowsmith, W., 110 Atropin, 134 Auden, W. H„ 84 Balzac, H. de, 63 Barthes, R., 107 Bartosz, T., 45-47 Baudelaire, C., 102 Bauer, W., 64 Bergson, H., 13 Bly, R„ 149 Boll, H., 88-92, 95-97 Borges, J. L., 88,92-93,95-97 Buber, M., 75 Carnap, R., 71 Carne-Ross, D., 110 Catullus, 50, 102 Chapman, G., 102, 108 Char, R„ 100-104, 107, 109 Chomsky, N., 68ff. Corvina Publishers, 43 Cousin, V., 53 Crane, H., 80, 84 Dante, 33ff., 102 Descartes, R., 69 Diktys and Dares, 95 Divine Comedy, 33, 101, 155 Elektorowicz, L., 114, 131 Entropy, 71

Equivalence, 99ff. Euripides, 95 Fama, 104-105, 115ff., 132, 152 Fast, H., 64 Faulkner, W., 84 Fenellosa, E., 61 Finno-Ugric languages, 49 Fitzgerald, E., 102, 108 Fitzgerald, R., 112 Fleurs du Mal, Les, 101-102 Freud, S., 25 Friar, K., 85 Frye, N„ 106-107, 109 Füst, M., 45-46 Garai, G., 44ff. Gatsos, N., 134-136, 148, 152 Geher, I., 47-48 Gergely, Α., 43-45 Gibbs, W., 71 Gide, Α., 89 Gilbert, S., 85 Giono, J., 84 Goethe, J., 64 Goffman, E., 75 Hamlet, 20 Homer, 24, 102, 130, passim Horace, 87, 95, 146 Hungarian language, 42ff. Hungarian P.E.N. Club, 43ff. Iliad, 57, 136ff. Illyes, G., 43, 45-46 Iowa University of, 112, 158 Irish mythology, 39 Iwaskiewicz, J., 115, 132

162

INDEX

James, H., 93 Jeans, J., 79 Joyce, J., 29, 89 Kada, J., 45 Keeley, E„ 134-135 King's Flute, The, 124ff., passim King James Bible, 102 Kodolanyi, G., 43-44 Lattimore, R., 85 Leavis, F. R., 107 Levy, J., 72 Li Po, 61fir.,75 Liveliness in translation, 122 Logopoeia, 59ff. Logue, C , 103, 136ff„ 148-149, 152, 157 London, J., 64 Lowell, R., 100 Lukacs, G., 106 Mackay, D., 74ff. Macneice, L., 112 Mallarmé, S., 93 Mann, T., 79, 89 Mark, I., 66 Marvell, Α., 29 Mead, G. H., 8ff Melopoeia, 59ff. Merwin, W. S., 149 Micromegas, 42, 51

Racine, J., 26 Roland, 95 Rubaiyat, 102 Sappho, 24, 29, 57 Sartre, J. P., 8ff„ 75, 88, 93-95,96-97, 145 Schlegel, A. W„ 53 Shakespeare, W., 26, 64 Sherrard, P., 134-135 Siberian tribes, 39 Sophocles, 24, 26, 95 Staiger, E., 107 Strain in translation, 122 Strawson, P., 153 Sullivan, J., 110 Tate, Α., 29 Terence, 95 Teste, M., 20 Texas, University of, 110-111 Tirnanog, 39 Translation Workshop, 112-113, 158 Twain, Mark, 20, 64 Twelve Words of the Gypsy, The, 11 Iff.

Nabokov, V., 85 Nagy, A. N., 47ff.

Waley, Α., 85 Wiener, N„ 70ff. Wilbur, R„ 57 Wilde, O., 64 Wordsworth, W., 14

Okopenko, Α., 132ÊF., 149 Palamas, K„ 111, 124, passim Panov, Professor, 67 Paradise Lost, 20, 31, 57 Phanopoeia, 59ff. Plautus, 50, 95

Poeta vates, 23 Pope, Α., 102, 108 Port Royal, 68 Pound, E., 59ff., 104 Publica materies, 87-88, 95, 146

148-149, Yip, Wai-lim, 61-62 Zola, E., 103 Zukofsky, L., 50, 102