Peter Caws, University Professor of Philosophy, The George Washington University

It is a great pleasure for me to participate in this colloquium at the invitation of Young-Key Kim-Renaud, who has been a valued colleague ever since I came to George Washington eighteen years ago. I came down from Delaware this morning but it was only when Bruce Fulton mentioned the tour "Made in Korea" that I remembered I had been driving my faithful Kia, made in Korea - and very well made, I may say.

It is a pleasure also and an honor to meet such distinguished representatives of Korean letters and of the community of translators from the Korean. I will make just a few remarks about translation and its connection to interpretation.

My interest in translation is of long standing, and has been both practical and theoretical. On the practical side I have done some translating, and learned at first hand the pitfalls and the rewards of the trade. The rewards I must say are more cerebral than financial, which is one of the standing difficulties in the production of good translations in my own field of philosophy - they may be undertaken from love or duty but hardly from a desire for fame or fortune. (But perhaps that is true of academic work generally.)

On the theoretical side no philosopher can afford to ignore issues of translation, from Greek and German at any rate, to speak only of Western philosophy. And in a field like the Human Sciences, in which we offer the Ph.D. here at George Washington, the dependence on translation is even more striking. In my introductory course in that field, besides Greek and German, we read texts whose originals are in Latin, Italian, and French. It would be wonderful if our students knew all these languages. They don’t - but even if they did that would be only the beginning.

The great Slavic linguist Prince Nicholas Trubetzkoy, when he set out to write his Grundzüge der Phonologie, thought that he should work with an empirical base of not fewer than 100 languages; he seemed to think it a weakness on his part that, since he knew only thirty-three languages, he had to rely on informants for the other sixty-seven. And I don’t think even Trubetzkoy knew Korean; the greatest Western linguists are often ignorant of Asian languages, and have to resort to translations if they want to read Lao-Tse or the Lady Murasaki or Yi Kwang-su.

In these cases, unlike cases of translation between languages of one’s own group, the reader is completely at the mercy of the translator, and what I call the "Rabassa test" does not apply. Still the Rabassa test is worth a moment’s reflection. I invented this term after a vivid experience twenty years or so ago. Spanish is (or was) one of my languages, and when I travel in a foreign country whose language I know I like to take along a novel in that language for reading in the train or at bedtime or at solitary meals. On one occasion, on a trip to Venezuela, my companion novel was Cien años de soledad of Gabriel García Márquez. I read about half of it in my week away, but my Spanish is slower than my English and when I got home I decided to finish it in the translation of Gregory Rabassa.

The point of the story is this: that when I looked back at the novel as a whole I found it quite impossible to tell where I had stopped reading in Spanish and started reading in English. I have never had a comparable experience in any of the other languages I know. I take it that it reflected a successful effort at rendering the cultural subtext of which Bruce Fulton speaks. At all events I offer the Rabassa test as incorporating an ideal: I have no hesitation in recommending Rabassa’s translations to anyone, and I would like people who are in a comparable situation to mine with respect to other pairs of languages - say English and Korean - to recommend to me translators who in their view meet a comparable standard.

Why did I want to read García Márquez in the first place? Why should I wish to read, for example, Hahn Moo-Sook? The answers to questions like this are various but sometimes straightforward: in the first case because I wanted to be exposed to the magic realism of which I had heard such tantalizing things, in the second case because I was privileged to know the author’s daughter. Whatever reasons may be given - and there are hundreds of others - the fact is that literatures in other languages enrich our experience of our world and render us more fully part of the human family - in short, more fully human.

Yet that end might be served by other activities as well. What is striking is how much text is available and how little of it we can read in a lifetime. All of us here have read a lot of books - but how many have we not read? Only marginally fewer - proportionately speaking - than an illiterate peasant. So I want now to follow a slightly different tack, as it were from the other side of the picture.

I sometimes try to provoke my students by telling them that there is no such thing as the English language - only my English language, and yours, and his, and hers; that no two people have ever read the same English text in the same way; and that most of what is written in English is not read by most English-speakers, even the best-read among them - indeed that much of it will never be read by anyone. Looked at in this light, the existence of translations appears even scandalous - why add to the store of ignorance, as it were, by accumulating even more texts to remain unread?

In an academic discipline like philosophy the answer is obvious: some of the root ideas of the field were first expressed in other languages, and we would never know them if they had not been translated. But in a more general sense the justification must surely be that there are other ways of being than "being in English," that there are "pleasures of the text," as Roland Barthes called them, that we will never encounter if we remain within the domain of texts written in English.

Here things begin to get complicated. For it may be that in a translated text there are pleasures in the translation that were not even in the original. And this raises the question of the "fidelity" of translation. I take it that we would all agree that a strictly equivalent translation is an unattainable ideal, that there is always an element of that betrayal captured in the Italian proverb "traduttore, traditore." Of course in one way this cannot matter as much as might be thought, since no two readers in either language will have read either text, the original or the translation, in the same way. A translation can obviously be wrong, or culpably misleading, but that is not the issue here: the best translation, by the most competent translator, is going to fall short of - or exceed! - the ideal. Just how does the discrepancy in question come about, play itself out? Two distinct cases present themselves: one in which the discrepancy is systematic, as between the source language and the target language, and one in which it is a function of the translator’s idiosyncrasy.

Except in the case of genuinely bilingual or multilingual readers the systematic discrepancy seems to me ineliminable. It follows from what I have sometimes called the "principle of contamination in first-language learning," according to which a first language is never learned clean, as it were, but always comes with cultural, moral, historical, and political accretions. It is a question of the mother’s milk and the mother’s knee, but also of the Word of the Father and of the Other, or others, whether peers or teachers or public figures, etc. It is impossible for a child growing into a first-language community not to internalize along with the language many of the values and prejudices of the community; and, as both Yu Young-nan and Bruce Fulton have pointed out, these implicit accompaniments of the text cannot always be spelled out in translation. It is the other discrepancy that interests me more, a discrepancy that arises, as I see it, when translation becomes interpretation - as it inevitably must at any level above the most elementary.

In the chapter on the Winter Solstice Mission to Peking in Hahn Moo-Sook’s Encounter there are several passages dealing with the "translators" who accompany the mission. For example, "Ha-sang’s master, Son ... had been a translator since his youth, but judging from the fact that he had not yet reached the civil service third rank, his language proficiency was probably of dubious distinction, both in Chinese and Korean."² I will not dwell for the moment on one curious feature of this passage - the idea that a translator might be deficient not only in the source language but in the target language as well - but I wish to note another curious feature, this time of the English language, that is highlighted in the account of the translators. Encounter was translated - or so I judge from the name - by a native Korean speaker. What, I wonder, is the Korean term for "translator"? For what one would normally expect in an English text about this kind of practical, mission-specific translation would be not "translator" but "interpreter."

Here then is the curious feature of English: that just the translators who are not supposed to "interpret," as that term is used in literary studies, are called "interpreters," while those who translate literary texts, an activity that inevitably involves interpretation, are called "translators." Interpreters, at the United Nations for example, do give "price for price" (the basic root meaning of interpretation) - give them Russian, they’ll give you French, and so on - and translators do "carry over" (the basic root meaning of translation) something from one text to another, from one culture to another. But the carrying-over, and the laying-down (for "translate" is related to "transfer" as Latin fero to its supine form latus, in parallel with many other cases, "refer" and "relate," "offer" and "oblate," etc.), are not mechanical but creative activities. What is carried over and laid down, as it were on the other side of the linguistic divide, is not just the same thing in another guise but to some inevitable extent a new thing.

Here again, however, translation from one language to another is not the only literary activity in which something of the sort happens. I was struck by Pak Wan-so’s description of her first attempts at writing: she wanted, we might say, to translate on to paper the life of Pak Su-gun, but she found herself unable to keep to the original text, as it were - in the process of translation the "lies" kept creeping in. Of course we don’t want to call them lies - we recognize precisely the creative force of literature at work. In her case there was a relatively simple remedy - move from biography to fiction, where the constraints of fidelity no longer apply. The translator is not free to do this, at least not in quite as simple a way. But consider: Pak Wan-so’s fictional account of Pak Su-gun fitted him in her own words "more closely" and "more vividly" than her biographical account. And there have been cases - Ezra Pound and Robert Lowell come to mind - in which poetic "imitations" of Chinese or French poetry in English are similarly more vivid and closer in spirit to the original than more exact translations. This is interpretation on a higher level, a holistic exchange of price for price in vastly richer market than that of the interpreter engaged in simultaneous translation.

It is sometimes maintained - and these observations would seem to bear it out - that the ultimate criterion of a good translation is that it should be an acceptably good text in the target language. One final word though: it need not necessarily be judged by the previously current standards of the target language, and this is where a non-native translator may have a special contribution to make.. A non-standard style may have a character and a pleasure of its own. For example, the translation (already quoted) of Hahn Moo-Sook’s Encounter, which is formal and occasionally quaint, comes to lend a specific flavor to the novel. Of course my tolerance of it may just be a function of my awareness of the cultural distance involved - I might not be as happy with such a translation of a text in a language I know well. But it has often been said, for example, that the exactitude of Joseph Conrad’s style, an acquired taste but a highly satisfying one for his readers, derives from the fact that his native language was not English but Polish.

To borrow Yu Young-nan’s words, it won’t do for a text to be too confusing or for the language to flow too awkwardly - but enough confusion to be challenging, and enough awkwardness to be endearing, can be stimulating and rewarding. So there can be no hard and fast rule about who may do what translation - its possibilities are as wide as those of criticism or interpretation themselves, along with which activities it makes an indispensable contribution to the practice of literature. Including philosophical literature - but that is a topic that will have to be pursued on another occasion.

 ² Hahn Moo-Sook, tr. Ok Young Kim Chang, Encounter: A Novel of Nineteenth-Century Korea (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992), p. 231.