Translation as Re-creation

I wrote Voice of Ice in several months, and soon after I began writing, I decided to do something I had never done before—translate my own work into English.  The most famous case of a self-translated author is Samuel Beckett, who actually re-created his books in the process of translation.  Whenever he felt that the idiom of the original could not be transposed smoothly in translation, he preferred to replace it with something entirely different rather than find an approximate equivalent, in order to keep the rhythm of the text, which was for him essential.  W. G. Sebald, who wrote in German but lived in Britain for most of his life, had a similar attitude toward the translation into English of his works, rewriting and even adding certain passages for the English version that didn’t exist in the original.

While doing my translation, I found myself more than once under the influence of the English language, going back to the original (in French) and changing words in it.  This is certainly something a regular translator cannot do, and which in my case was possible because I am the author both of the original and the translation. 

Who is I? or Writing as Self-creation

Originally from Eastern Europe, I learned French in school at an early age, and although I have probably read more books in French than in any other language, French has been for most of my life a foreign language.  After I emigrated to the United States I began writing in French; it became clear to me that in order to write I needed a distance from language that was impossible to attain in my native idiom.  Our “own” language may be the only language we can master in all its delicate nuances, but it is also, by its very nature, the language that roots us to our place of origin.  It is the language that comes to us as a linguistic reflex and, like all reflexes, becomes an opaque screen interposed between us and the world.  Writing in a language that detaches us from our origins removes that screen and forces us to re-create our very depths by renaming the world and by changing the way we relate to it, which is reflected in our grammar.  It is an uprooting in the strongest sense of the world, and it is not by accident that writers who have gone through it—for instance, Julia Kristeva, who left Bulgaria and emigrated to France when she was very young—have compared it to acquiring a different body.  It gives one an exhilarating sense of freedom grounded in an almost physically painful experience.  But what is freedom if it’s not gained with, or at the price of, our own self?   

Some might think that to translate from your second language (in this case, French) into your third language (in this case, English) is a very difficult task, but in a way, it is actually easier than writing in your “native” language (“langue maternelle” in French) because you work with pure language, as Walter Benjamin would say, and since you don’t belong to either of the two languages, you can let yourself be the instrument that creates relations between the two systems of expression.  It is almost as if you were trying to solve a puzzle by filling in the gaps, only you never know what the final form will be, because there are several possible final forms. 

Thus, French became my language almost by default.  After I finished translating Voice of Ice, I began to write directly in English and in the process I realized that the more remote I was from the origin of speech, the easier it was to attain an impersonality of the voice, which is, I believe, the essence of true literature.  Since I have been writing in English, I feel much more at home in it than in French, but the truth is that I am not really at home in either of them and that I don’t really have a language of “my own.”  It may be that the desire to write is in some way related to the desire to find a language of one’s own. 

The Other I or Becoming It

There are quite a few examples of writers who have stated unequivocally that their language is their “home” or even their “country.”  The Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa complemented his literary creation with that of several dozen personas, each with a different name and biography.  These heteronyms—as Pessoa called them—were masks of Pessoa himself, although it would probably be more accurate to say that they were no one’s masks, as Pessoa often described himself as “no one.”  In this respect he personifies poetic existence par excellence because he has transformed an esthetic idea—that of the author as a mask—into a way of being.  He was a “passerby of everything, even of my own soul, belonging to nothing, desiring nothing, being nothing—abstract center of impersonal sensations, a fallen sentient mirror, reflecting the world’s diversity” (The Book ofDisquietude).

Of the numerous explanations of the act of writing, the following one by Italo Calvino is probably the clearest and most truthful in its clarity:

It is always only a projection of himself that an author calls into play while he is writing; it may be a projection of a real part of himself or the projection of a fictitious ‘I’—a mask, in short.  […]  The author is an author insofar as he enters into a role the way an actor does and identifies himself with that projection of himself at the moment of writing.  (The Uses of Literature)

I could go on developing Calvino’s idea by invoking, as he does, the analyses of the French structuralists regarding the “I” who is writing, but one needn’t invoke French structuralists, because many of their ideas can be found in other forms in the writings of many writers who have little or nothing to do with them.  In Paul Celan, for example, we can find the idea that the poem allows the I to separate from himself, becoming a space where the I seizes himself as a stranger.  But Celan goes a step further than the structuralists: in the making of a poem, he says, the I transforms himself entirely into a sign.  Such a statement doesn’t make him a post-structuralist, as some would have it, but “merely” a Poet.  And Pessoa goes even further: in transforming himself into several dozen poets, he changes himself literally into numerous signs; it isn’t only his language that is an artifact, but the poet too—Fernando Pessoa becomes Álvaro de Campos, Ricardo Reis, Alberto Caeiro, Bernardo Soares, Antonio Mora, et al.

All and Nothing

Most great writers of modernity (and, insofar as literature is concerned, postmodernity is still modernity; outside of modernity—understood as the realm of the adventure of the Subject—the very concept of literature ceases to have meaning) have felt in one way or another that they were nothing—an idea so eloquently expressed by Borges in his story “All and Nothing”—and that this nothingness is the very thing out of which creation emerges.  A writer does not have a face.  A writer is a no one with a thousand masks.  Even if the writer doesn’t “invent” anything, he still creates a “persona,” that is, a mask covering nothing.  He is “less than one,” as Joseph Brodsky says, and it is this less that makes creation possible. 

The Photo in the Paper or the Comedy of the “Real Person”

In light of the above, there is nothing more comical—sadly comical—than today’s vision of the author as a “real person” whose photo is displayed like a flag at literary venues and on book and magazine covers, who is invited by voyeur readers to “explain” his work, and whose biography is summoned like a hidden mechanism that makes sense of the work.  The work seems to have become the pretext that allows a public avid for “reality” to peek into what it imagines to be the writer’s veiled life, and to have this “virtual reality” confirmed by the flesh-and-bones existence of the writer. 

If a writer were really true to himself, he would never put his face on display.  Not because the face were “outside,” while writing came from “inside,” as our naïve dichotomies would have it—quite the contrary: the face is always a reflection of our inner world—and not even because in today’s societies of the spectacle, a face has become nothing more than a marketable image, but because our face and our name are the non-transferable print of our I within the real, and through them we belong to the world, that is, to the very opposite of the universe of the imaginary.  Or, what is writing if not the desire to cancel the prosaic world we are a part of?  In other words, what is writing if not the desire to destroy the face and the name that we are in everyday reality?  From this point of view, the name and photograph authors attach to their work are a betrayal of the very essence of literature.  If writers were true to this essence, they wouldn’t reinforce their identity as civilians of the everyday; on the contrary, they would swear allegiance to the only world they can belong to, the world of shadows.

You can read the entire essay in the anthology Trenchart: Parapet. For more information please visite the Les Figues Press website.

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