Where the Stress Falls (39 page)
Read Where the Stress Falls Online
Authors: Susan Sontag
Ours, not theirs. Here, not there.
[1995]
FOR AS LONG AS
we
are
, we’re always somewhere. Feet are always somewhere, whether planted or running. Minds, notoriously, can be elsewhere. Minds, whether from lack of vitality or from the deepest strengths, can be in the past and the present, or the present and the future. Or simply here and there. For reasons not hard to understand, the making of art at the highest plane of accomplishment during the last century or so has required, more often than not, an exceptional development of the talent for being, mentally, in two places at once. Elated by the landscapes he has been painting and drawing in the south of France, van Gogh writes his brother Theo that he is “really” in Japan. The young, as yet unpublished poet from Leningrad fulfilling a sentence of compulsory labor on a collective farm in a village in the Far North, near the White Sea, receives the news—it is January 1965—that T. S. Eliot has died in London, sits at a table in his icy shack, and within the next twenty-four hours composes a long elegy to Eliot, which is also an homage to the very alive W. H. Auden (the tone and swing of whose elegy on the death of Yeats he adopts).
we
are
, we’re always somewhere. Feet are always somewhere, whether planted or running. Minds, notoriously, can be elsewhere. Minds, whether from lack of vitality or from the deepest strengths, can be in the past and the present, or the present and the future. Or simply here and there. For reasons not hard to understand, the making of art at the highest plane of accomplishment during the last century or so has required, more often than not, an exceptional development of the talent for being, mentally, in two places at once. Elated by the landscapes he has been painting and drawing in the south of France, van Gogh writes his brother Theo that he is “really” in Japan. The young, as yet unpublished poet from Leningrad fulfilling a sentence of compulsory labor on a collective farm in a village in the Far North, near the White Sea, receives the news—it is January 1965—that T. S. Eliot has died in London, sits at a table in his icy shack, and within the next twenty-four hours composes a long elegy to Eliot, which is also an homage to the very alive W. H. Auden (the tone and swing of whose elegy on the death of Yeats he adopts).
He was elegant enough always to claim that he had not really suffered during that year and a half of internal exile; that he rather liked farmwork, especially shoveling manure, which he regarded as one of the more honest and rewarding jobs he’d had so far, everyone in Russia being mired in shit, and had got quite a few poems written there.
Then, back in his native Leningrad, a few years later Joseph Brodsky, as he put it succinctly, “switched empires.” This happened suddenly, from one day to the next, and entirely against his will: among other losses, it separated this beloved only son from his elderly parents, who, in further punishment of the renegade poet, were thereafter repeatedly denied exit permits by the Soviet government to meet for a brief reunion in, say, nearby Helsinki, and died without his ever embracing them again. Intractable grief, borne with great indignation, great sobriety.
He even managed to make of his KGB-enjoined departure something self-propelled—
And as for where in space and time one’s toe end touches, well, earth is hard all over; try the States
—landing among us like a missile hurled from the other empire, a benign missile whose payload was not only his genius but his native literature’s exalted, exacting sense of the poet’s authority. (To be found as well among its prose writers: think of how Gogol and Dostoyevsky conceived of the novelist’s moral and spiritual task.) Many aptitudes eased his rapid insertion in America: immense industriousness and self-confidence, ready irony, insouciance, cunning. But for all the dash and ingenuity of his connections with his adopted country, one had only to watch Joseph Brodsky among other Russian exiles and émigrés to realize how viscerally, expressively Russian he had stayed. And how generous his adaptation to us, along with the eagerness to impose himself on us, actually was.
Such adaptability, such gallantry, may go by the name of cosmopolitanism. But true cosmopolitanism is less a matter of one’s relation to place than to time, specifically to the past (which is simply so much bigger than the present). This has nothing in common with that sentimental relation to the past called nostalgia. It is a relation, unsparing to oneself, which acknowledges the past as the source of standards, higher standards than the present affords. One should write to please not one’s contemporaries but one’s predecessors, Brodsky often declared. Surely he did please them—his compatriots agree that he was
his era’s unique successor to Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva, and Akhmatova. Raising the “plane of regard” (as he called it) was relentlessly identified with the effortfulness and ambitions and appropriate fidelities of poets.
his era’s unique successor to Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva, and Akhmatova. Raising the “plane of regard” (as he called it) was relentlessly identified with the effortfulness and ambitions and appropriate fidelities of poets.
I think of Joseph Brodsky as a world poet—partly because I cannot read him in Russian; mainly because that’s the range he commanded in his poems, with their extraordinary velocity and density of material notation, of cultural reference, of attitude. He insisted that poetry’s “job” (a much-used word) was to explore the capacity of language to travel farther, faster. Poetry, he said, is accelerated thinking. It was his best argument, and he made many, on behalf of the superiority of poetry to prose, for he considered rhyme essential to this process. An ideal of mental acceleration is the key to his great achievement (and its limits), in prose as well as in poetry, and to his indelible presence. Conversation with him, as felicitously recalled by his friend Seamus Heaney, “attained immediate vertical takeoff and no deceleration was possible.”
Much of his work could be subsumed under the early title of one of his poems, “Advice to a Traveller.” Real travel nourished the mental journeying, with its characteristic premium on speedy assimilation of what there was to know and feel, determination never to be duped, mordant avowals of vulnerability. Of course, there were favorite elsewheres, four countries (and the poetry produced within their borders) in particular: Russia, England, the United States, and Italy. Which is to say, empires never ceased to incite his powers of fast-forward association and generalization; hence, his passion for the Latin poets and the sites of ancient Rome, inscribed in several essays and the play
Marbles
as well as in poems. The first, in the end perhaps the only, tenable form of cosmopolitanism is to be a citizen of an empire. Brodsky’s temperament was imperial in many senses.
Marbles
as well as in poems. The first, in the end perhaps the only, tenable form of cosmopolitanism is to be a citizen of an empire. Brodsky’s temperament was imperial in many senses.
Home was Russian. No longer Russia. Perhaps no decision he made in the later part of his life was as startling (to many), as emblematic of who he was, as his refusal, after the dismantling of the Soviet empire and in the face of countless worshipful solicitations, to go back even for the briefest visit.
And so he lived most of his adult life elsewhere: here. And Russia, the source of everything that was most subtle and audacious and fertile and doctrinaire about his mind and gifts, became the great elsewhere
to which he could not, would not, out of pride, out of anger, out of anxiety, ever return.
to which he could not, would not, out of pride, out of anger, out of anxiety, ever return.
Now he has rushed away from us, for so it feels, to reside in the largest, most powerful empire of all, the final elsewhere: a transfer whose anticipation (while enduring a serious cardiac ailment for many years) he explored in so many defiant, poignant poems.
The work, the example, the standards—and our grief—remain.
[1998]
I’LL START WITH
a story.
a story.
It’s the summer of 1993, and I was back in Sarajevo (I’d first gone there three months earlier), this time at the invitation of a local theatre producer to stage a play in one of the besieged city’s battered theatres. We’d met at the end of my April stay, he’d asked me if I was interested in coming back to work as a director, I’d said yes, yes, gladly, and my choice of a play to do—Beckett’s
Waiting for Godot
—was agreed to with enthusiasm by him and by other theatre people I met. It ought to go without saying that the play would be performed in Serbo-Croatian: it never occurred to me that the actors I chose might or should do otherwise. True, most of them knew some English, as did a portion of the educated Sarajevans who would come to see our production. But an actor’s talent is inextricably bound up with the rhythms and sounds of the language in which he or she has developed that talent; and Serbo-Croatian is the only language one could count on everybody in the audience knowing. To those who may think it smacks of presumption to dare to direct in a language one doesn’t know, I can only say that repertory theatre now operates with almost as much international circuitry as the opera repertory has always had. Arthur Miller, when he accepted an invitation to direct a production of
Death of a Salesman
in Shanghai a few years ago, knew no more Chinese than I knew Serbo-Croatian. Anyway (trust me), it’s not as hard to
do as it sounds. You need, besides your theatre skills, a musical ear and a good interpreter.
Waiting for Godot
—was agreed to with enthusiasm by him and by other theatre people I met. It ought to go without saying that the play would be performed in Serbo-Croatian: it never occurred to me that the actors I chose might or should do otherwise. True, most of them knew some English, as did a portion of the educated Sarajevans who would come to see our production. But an actor’s talent is inextricably bound up with the rhythms and sounds of the language in which he or she has developed that talent; and Serbo-Croatian is the only language one could count on everybody in the audience knowing. To those who may think it smacks of presumption to dare to direct in a language one doesn’t know, I can only say that repertory theatre now operates with almost as much international circuitry as the opera repertory has always had. Arthur Miller, when he accepted an invitation to direct a production of
Death of a Salesman
in Shanghai a few years ago, knew no more Chinese than I knew Serbo-Croatian. Anyway (trust me), it’s not as hard to
do as it sounds. You need, besides your theatre skills, a musical ear and a good interpreter.
In besieged Sarajevo, you also needed a lot of stamina.
In July, I flew into Sarajevo on a UN troop plane, my backpack bulging with pocket flashlights and a sack of double-A batteries, and, in a pocket of my flak jacket, copies of the Beckett play in English and French. The day after my arrival I began auditioning a passel of talented, undernourished actors (most of whom I’d met during my first stay), making drawings of how I envisaged the set, and trying to understand how things worked generally in the theatre in Sarajevo—such as that was possible under the privations of siege and the terror of nonstop bombardment. Once chosen, the actors and I huddled in the theatre’s basement—no reason to start working upstairs, on the more vulnerable area of the stage, until after the first week—doing improvisations and figuring out rehearsal schedules (everyone had complex family responsibilities, not least of which was several hours’ worth of fetching water), and learning to trust each other. The noise from outside the building was incessant. War is noise. Beckett seemed even more appropriate than I’d imagined.
I didn’t have to explain Beckett to Sarajevans. And some of my actors were already familiar with the play. But we did not yet have a text in common. Before leaving Sarajevo in April, I’d checked with the producer that I could count on his having enough copies of a translation of the Beckett play on hand for the actors and everyone else involved in working on the production when I returned in July. Not to worry, he said. But when, the day of my return, I asked for copies of the play to distribute at the auditions, he announced that, in honor of the importance of my coming to work in Sarajevo, Beckett’s play was being retranslated. In fact, the translation was being worked on right now.
Uh-oh.
“The translation isn’t … finished?”
“Well, it may be finished,” he said.
Hmmm.
So I had another problem besides the Serbs’ shells, grenades, and constant gunfire from snipers on rooftops in the center of the city, the absence of electricity and running water, the shattered theatre, the
nervousness of the malnourished actors, my own anxiety and fear, the …
nervousness of the malnourished actors, my own anxiety and fear, the …
The problem, as my producer explained, was the typewriter: an old typewriter, but the only one available to the translator, one whose ribbon was very faint (having been in use steadily for a year; this was sixteen months since the beginning of the siege). But, he assured me, this translation would be a real asset to the production—if only I would be patient. I said I would try to be patient.
I knew that in the former Yugoslavia there had been many productions of Beckett’s plays—the most frequently performed being none other than
Waiting for Godot
. (Indeed, I’d chosen
Godot
over the other play I’d thought of doing,
Ubu Roi
, partly because the Beckett play was known.) There had to be a translation dating back to the 1950s. Maybe more than one. Perhaps we didn’t really need this new translation.
Waiting for Godot
. (Indeed, I’d chosen
Godot
over the other play I’d thought of doing,
Ubu Roi
, partly because the Beckett play was known.) There had to be a translation dating back to the 1950s. Maybe more than one. Perhaps we didn’t really need this new translation.
“Is the existing translation not very good?” I asked the producer, who, a director himself, had staged a production of the play in Belgrade a few years earlier.
“No, it’s not bad at all,” he said. “It’s just that this is Bosnia now. We want to translate the play into Bosnian.”
“But isn’t what you speak Serbo-Croatian?”
“Not really,” he said.
“Then why,” I said, “did you lend me your Serbo-Croatian-English dictionary the day I arrived?”
“Well, for you it would be good enough to learn Serbo-Croatian.”
“But does that mean”—I persisted—“that if I learned Serbo-Croatian there are words or phrases in use here that I wouldn’t understand?”
“No, you’d understand everything. The way educated people speak in Sarajevo is the same as educated speech in Belgrade or Zagreb.”
“Then what’s the difference?”
“I can’t explain,” he said. “It would be hard for you to understand. But there’s a difference.”
“A difference for Beckett?”
“Yes, it’s a new translation.”
“If someone did a new translation in Belgrade, would that be different, too?”
“Maybe,” he said.
“And that new translation would be different in a different way from this new translation?”
“Maybe not.”
Keep calm, I told myself. “Then what’s going to be specifically Bosnian about this translation?”
“Because it’s done here in Sarajevo, while the city is under siege.”
“But will some of the words be different?”
“That depends on the translator.”
“You haven’t read any of it?”
“No, because I can’t read her handwriting.”
“She hasn’t started to type it yet?”
“She has, but with that typewriter ribbon it’s impossible to read.”
“Then how are the actors going to study the play and learn their lines?”
“Maybe we’ll have to find someone with good handwriting to make the scripts.”
Wow, it really is the Dark Ages, I thought.
AFTER MORE HALLUCINATORY EXCHANGES
of this sort, and rising anxiety on my part about when the actors and I would be able really to begin, another typewriter was found and the translation retyped, using some ancient, scarred carbon paper to provide fifteen double-spaced scripts (for the actors, the set designer, the costume designer, my two assistants and interpreter, and me). Between the lines of my script I copied out in ink both the English and the French text, so that I could learn the Bosnian, the sound of it, by heart, and always know what the actors were saying.
of this sort, and rising anxiety on my part about when the actors and I would be able really to begin, another typewriter was found and the translation retyped, using some ancient, scarred carbon paper to provide fifteen double-spaced scripts (for the actors, the set designer, the costume designer, my two assistants and interpreter, and me). Between the lines of my script I copied out in ink both the English and the French text, so that I could learn the Bosnian, the sound of it, by heart, and always know what the actors were saying.
(An extra symmetry in this story is that, as Beckett wrote his play in
two
languages—the English
Waiting for Godot
is not merely a translation of the French—the play has two original languages, in both of which I am at home; and now it had two translations, in a language that was completely opaque to me.)
two
languages—the English
Waiting for Godot
is not merely a translation of the French—the play has two original languages, in both of which I am at home; and now it had two translations, in a language that was completely opaque to me.)
What happened then? After we had gone up on the stage and been working for about a week, and I had blocked a good part of the first
act, my assistant and two of the actors—the two who spoke the most English—took me aside.
act, my assistant and two of the actors—the two who spoke the most English—took me aside.
Problem? Yes. What they felt they had to tell me was that the new translation really wasn’t very good, and could we please, please use the translation published in Belgrade in the 1950s.
“Is there a difference?” I asked.
“Yes, the old translation is better.”
“Better in what sense?”
“It sounds better. It’s more natural. Easier to say.”
“There isn’t a linguistic difference? Something Serbian about that translation? Or something not Bosnian?”
“Not that anyone would notice.”
“So there aren’t any words you would have to change to make the translation more Bosnian?”
“Not really. But we could, if you want us to.”
“It’s not what
I
want,” I said, gritting my teeth. “I’m just here to serve. Beckett. You. Sarajevo. Whatever.”
I
want,” I said, gritting my teeth. “I’m just here to serve. Beckett. You. Sarajevo. Whatever.”
“Well,” my Vladimir said thoughtfully, “here’s what we could do. Let’s go back to the old translation, and while we’re rehearsing, if we see a word we think should be changed to something more Bosnian, we’ll change it.”
“Don’t forget to tell me,” I said.
“Nema problema,”
said my Estragon.
said my Estragon.
Which of course means … but you know perfectly well what it means. It’s a phrase that seems to translate into every language in the world.
THE END OF THE STORY
is that—as you may not be surprised to learn—the actors never changed anything. Further, when
Waiting for Godot
opened in mid-August, no member of the theatre public complained that the translation didn’t sound Bosnian, or Bosnian enough. (Perhaps they had other, more pressing things on their minds—such as waiting for Clinton.)
is that—as you may not be surprised to learn—the actors never changed anything. Further, when
Waiting for Godot
opened in mid-August, no member of the theatre public complained that the translation didn’t sound Bosnian, or Bosnian enough. (Perhaps they had other, more pressing things on their minds—such as waiting for Clinton.)
Much can be spun from this story, including some consideration of the potent fantasy that people have about language as a carrier of national
identity—which can make a translation, or the refusal to make one, the equivalent of an act of treason. What is pathetic about this instance taking place on the territory of the former Yugoslavia is that it concerns newly, lethally self-defined nations that happen to share the
same
spoken language and are therefore deprived of, if I may call it thus, “the right of translation.”
identity—which can make a translation, or the refusal to make one, the equivalent of an act of treason. What is pathetic about this instance taking place on the territory of the former Yugoslavia is that it concerns newly, lethally self-defined nations that happen to share the
same
spoken language and are therefore deprived of, if I may call it thus, “the right of translation.”
It seems appropriate that the story I’ve just told you happened in a place that—as I realize whenever I try to describe what it’s been like to spend so much time in Sarajevo in the past two and a half years (I’ve just returned, two weeks ago, from my ninth stay there)—seems to most people I talk with like the other side of the moon. It’s not just that people can’t imagine a war or a siege, or the danger or the fear or the humiliation. More: they simply can’t imagine that degree of differentness from their own lives and comforts, from their understandable sense—understandable, for it’s based on their own experience—that the world isn’t
such
a really terrible place.
such
a really terrible place.
They can’t imagine that. It must be translated for them.
TRANSLATION IS ABOUT
differentness. A way of coping with, and ameliorating, and, yes, denying difference—even if, as my story illustrates, it is also a way of asserting differentness.
differentness. A way of coping with, and ameliorating, and, yes, denying difference—even if, as my story illustrates, it is also a way of asserting differentness.
Originally (at least in English) translation was about the biggest difference of all: that between being alive and being dead. To translate is, etymologically, to transfer, to remove, to displace. To what end? In order to be rescued, from death or extinction.
Listen to Wycliffe’s Englishing of the Hebrew Bible’s Book of Enoch:
Bi feith Enok is translatid, that he shulde not see deeth, and he was not founden, for the Lord translatide him.
Eventually “to be translated” did come to mean “to die.” Death is translation—one is translated from earth to heaven—and so is resurrection, which is (again in Wycliffe’s English) to be “translatid from deeth to lyfe.”
In English, the oldest meanings of the verb have nothing to do with
language—with a mental act and its transcription. To translate is, mainly, an intransitive verb, and a physical act. It signifies a change of condition or site—usually so far as these, condition and site, imply each other. The “trans” is a physical “across” or crossing, and proposes a geography of action, action in space. The formula is, roughly: where X was, it is no longer; instead it is (or is at) Y.
language—with a mental act and its transcription. To translate is, mainly, an intransitive verb, and a physical act. It signifies a change of condition or site—usually so far as these, condition and site, imply each other. The “trans” is a physical “across” or crossing, and proposes a geography of action, action in space. The formula is, roughly: where X was, it is no longer; instead it is (or is at) Y.
Consider the following meanings, now obsolete:
In medicine, to translate once meant to transfer a disease from one
person
to another, or from one
part
of the body to another (something like the modern concept of metastasis). In law, it meant to transfer property (such as a legacy). In the words of Thomas Hobbes: “All Contract is mutual translation, or change of Right.” Perhaps the latest of these meanings which involve an idea of physical transfer dates from the late nineteenth century. In long-distance telegraphy, to translate is to retransmit a message automatically, by means of a relay.
person
to another, or from one
part
of the body to another (something like the modern concept of metastasis). In law, it meant to transfer property (such as a legacy). In the words of Thomas Hobbes: “All Contract is mutual translation, or change of Right.” Perhaps the latest of these meanings which involve an idea of physical transfer dates from the late nineteenth century. In long-distance telegraphy, to translate is to retransmit a message automatically, by means of a relay.
We retain only the sense of translation as the transfer or handing over or delivery from one language to another. Yet the older meanings expressed in the
tra-
and
trans
- words (welded to
-dere, -ducere
) remain as an underpinning. The fruitful affinities of etymology express a real, if subliminal, connection. To translate is still to lead something across a gap, to make something go where it was not. Like tradition, something which is handed “over” or “down” (originally, something material) to others, translation is the conveying or transmitting of something from one person, site, or condition to another. For all that its meaning has been “spiritualized”—what is being passed or transferred is from one language to another—the sense of physical or geographical separateness is still implicit, and potent. Languages are like separate (often antagonistic) communities, each with its own customs. The translator is the one who finds (identifies, formulates) the comparable customs in another language.
tra-
and
trans
- words (welded to
-dere, -ducere
) remain as an underpinning. The fruitful affinities of etymology express a real, if subliminal, connection. To translate is still to lead something across a gap, to make something go where it was not. Like tradition, something which is handed “over” or “down” (originally, something material) to others, translation is the conveying or transmitting of something from one person, site, or condition to another. For all that its meaning has been “spiritualized”—what is being passed or transferred is from one language to another—the sense of physical or geographical separateness is still implicit, and potent. Languages are like separate (often antagonistic) communities, each with its own customs. The translator is the one who finds (identifies, formulates) the comparable customs in another language.
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