Languages Cannot Be Assimilated or Colonized, for They Contain Multitudes

In her memoir of a life lived in and through translation, Translation as Transhumance, Mireille Gansel defines the process of bringing words from one language to another as a kind of seeking, tied to the land. Transhumance refers to the seasonal movement of a shepherd and his flock to another land, or humus. It is the opposite of settling and farming: it is a form of nomadism, a search for richer grass, and it provides an apt image for her own trajectory as a translator.

Gansel was drawn to the German spoken by her family, reduced to a “little circle of survivors” after the Holocaust. That Gansel works on German makes her particularly attuned to the movement of and within languages. Just as Adorno said there could be no poetry after Auschwitz, Gansel suggests here that the German language itself is utterly changed after the Shoah:

This is the German that has been punctuated by exiles and passed down through the generations, from country to country, like a violin whose vibratos have retained the accents and intonations, the words and the expressions, of adopted countries and ways of speaking.

Translation as Transhumance is a family history of languages and exiles: what does a language retain of the violence it has been used to commit? “How do you bridge the abyss created in the German language by the barbed-wire fences and watchtowers of history? How do you reach the shores of a language of the soul?” The 20th century is a bloody field: but how can we move away from it; what kinds of bloody footprints do we track elsewhere? Memory, and history, are the translator’s terrains.

There are physical boundaries, too. The Berlin Wall stands between Bertolt Brecht and Gansel’s rendering of his work; she is not only a shepherd with a flock but a smuggler, slipping language past the guards. Foolish are the leaders who build walls around their countries, thinking they can keep the desired in and the feared out; doomed to fail are those who try to police or purify a language. Wherever totalitarianism or censorship takes hold, it is the role of the translator to find a way up and over the wall.

The conquering of the Czech lands by the German language affects her translations of an East German poet, Reiner Kunze, whose work Gansel tells us was deeply influenced by Czech poetry. She describes the problem of rendering a phrase, sensibel wege, in French, first rendering the wege, paths, as “fragile,” then, years later, she retranslates them as “sensitive.” Just as a piece of writing can never be finished, as long as its writer is alive to revise it, or as long as scholars are interested in accounting for its drafts and revisions, so a translation can be thought of as provisional, momentary. In his own wonderful book on translating Rilke, William Gass writes that what is produced when the translator has finished his work is “a reading enriched by the process of arriving at it, and therefore, really, only the farewells to a long conversation”; this puts me in mind of Walter Benjamin’s description of the work as the “death mask of its conception.” For Gansel the farewells are temporary, and the death mask can yawn back to life.  “At that moment,” Gansel writes, “I understood translation both as risk-taking and as continual re-examination, of even a single word.”

We move from Germany to North Vietnam, where Gansel journeyed during the war, “to confront McNamara’s declaration that the US would ‘bomb ’em back to the stone age’ with the testimony of a culture that was several thousand years old.” They would publish for the first time in French an anthology of Vietnamese poetry, as an answer to McNamara’s threat. In Vietnam, she learned to play the monochord to capture the “cantillation” of Vietnamese poetry, to help her go beyond her clever French poetic devices of alliteration and onomatopoeia into “a vast and entirely different kind of poetry”—capturing in French the “wordless voice” of the Vietnamese. She describes her process of moving from a word-for-word translation to a more nuanced framework of meanings and clarifications, to a third stage, in which she would “arrang[e] all the notes, sounds, images and narratives in such a way as to recreate the words, structures and rhythms of an entire oral heritage.”

And we move, we transhume, again, from North Vietnam to the South of France, where Gansel goes to ask René Char for some of his poems to give to her Vietnamese mentor to translate. On the road away from Char’s home, the idea of translation as transhumance occurs to Gansel, who reflects on “the long, slow movement of the flocks to distant places, in search of the greenest pastures, the low plains in winter and the high valleys in summer”:

All the ancient routes that have witnessed encounters and exchanges in all the dialects of the “umbrella language” of Provençal. So it is with the transhumance routes of translation, the slow and patient crossing of countries, all borders eradicated, the movement of huge flocks of words through all the vernaculars of the umbrella language of poetry.

In stringing these encounters together here, Gansel helps us understand that translation is more than a grammar; it is a listening. When we translate, we are not rendering a block of text in its immediate equivalent; we keep an ear out for what is unspoken, carried through language, smuggled inside of it. Sometimes this means turning to people who can perceive echoes in language that we can’t, even in our own native languages.

Gansel gleaned this while translating the ethnographic writings of Eugenie Goldstern, a refugee in Vienna who was driven by pogroms from Odessa in 1905 only to perish at Sobibor in 1942. Wandering in the Alps, Goldstern produced her work in a space removed from languages and nations, “among the rockrose and the rosemary”; she “recorded the minutiae of day-to-day lives in the villages, hamlets and alpine pastures on the fringes and the shattered borders of Europe in the first quarter of the 20th century.” Her work prompts Gansel to ask how to render incredibly specific language, what “complementarity” could exist in French to capture a language “that weaves between the remotest places and is composed of all the nuances and preciseness of their idioms, sayings and names across the Alps, from Slovenia to Savoie, from Piedmont to the Tyrol, via the canton of Valais and Les Grisons?” It requires that Gansel defamiliarize her native French.

Languages themselves contain multitudes; they cannot be assimilated or colonized, because they are local, personal, and yet—for Gansel—universal, transcendent, resistant. They are composed of a million gestures, movements, exchanges, substitutions; when we speak or write in other languages, we give voice to the essential chiasma at the heart of all our encounters. I am always you; you are always I. Je est un autre. Sitting in a house in the high Swiss valley where Goldstern walked and wrote, Gansel suddenly understands this. “[A]s I sat at the ancient table beneath the blackened beams,” Gansel recalls, “it suddenly dawned on me that the stranger was not the other, it was me. I was the one who had everything to learn, everything to understand, from the other.”

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Adapted from the introduction to Translation as Transhumance by Mireille Gansel.