One of my “professional hobbies”/nerdloves is literary translation. The more practical work I do elsewhere on the planet, the more helpful I find literary translation's inherently close and ruthless look at language, its transpositional powers, it functions and peccadillos. I also can't distinguish between cognition and narrative, and since narrative takes place in abstraction, I can't separate cognition from metaphor either, since every abstraction of language could be called one.
Watching that clip of Jon Stewart returning to host the Daily Show for the first time after 9/11/01 reminded me of Susan Bassnett on literary translation, when she describes Walter Benjamin using the metaphor of "translation as afterlife" in a 1923 essay, one that Derrida used to "play with ideas of original and translation, with the problem of where the meaning is located" (Bassnett 151). Jon Stewart consoles himself on camera with the idea that what's worth moving forward for is the "un-assailable" America he saw in the aftermath, the reconstruction, on display in the wake of the tragedy. He argues, in other words, for a focus on meaning located in the "afterlife" of a traumatic event.
My inability, along with George Oppen, to “distinguish meaning from narrative” (as he so perfectly puts it in his daybooks) consistently draws my attention to suggestions of violence in the metaphors I encounter in theoretical texts. Diana Taylor got under my skin, so to speak, with her “phantom limb” metaphor for the Twin Towers going missing from the New York skyline. I think the reason why takes the form of a couple of lists I've been keeping. Here are some other strong metaphors I've encountered in theoretical texts lately:
Schizophrenia. Unfaithful wives. Slave. Mounting an offensive. Appropriation. Invasion. Interprenetra[tion]. Capture. Aggression. Manipulation. Cannibalism. Vampirism.
Think I'm recounting metaphors from our performance study readings? Nope! These are translation theorists describing translation studies (most notably Lori Chamberlain, Perrot d'Ablancourt, and Susan Bassnett in the opening gambit of Bassnett's 1993 book Comparative Literature: An Introduction). I'm concerned by this common thread of visceral and often disturbing embodiment metaphors between performance studies and translation studies. This preoccupation, of which Taylor's diagnosis of a somehow society-wide “phantom limb” constitutes a part, has recently been renewed by my work with victims of violence, violence that is “real” by virtue of being embodied--being physically “undergone,” to borrow a verb from Artaud.
Back to performance studies: to borrow more from Artaud, here's a list of metaphors he uses in the few shorts pages of “The Theater of Cruelty”:
Ambush. Prostituting. Seduction. Enslavement. Bloody and inhuman. Crossfire. Cruelty. Idolatry. We are not free.
What is going on here? What do performance studies and translation studies have in common that they both elicit such intense and evocative metaphors of violence, such passion, conviction, and vitriol in their practitioners?
My best guess? They both render.
And therein lies what I believe to be the central tension and “raw nerve” at work in both disciplines: the act of rendering is essentialized over and over again in both discourses as sinful and inhumane. This is why any theater in response to 9/11 was so taboo that even a pundit like Jon Stewart laid low for a while after the towers fell, and when he reappeared, appeared to have surrendered a layer of detached artifice. What is it about a "bad translation" that so often offends people, and what is it about local-disaster-as-spectacle that suddenly instills a thick, discursive fog with moral underpinnings in the public sphere? What is is about rendering that has everybody's panties in such a bunch? Why is rendering such a sin, such a taboo, that in its embodied sense we try to call its practice off altogether when we're frightened and/or hurt? Could it have something to do with Debord's image-as-negation-of-life? With the evil Brecht seems to see in the "apparatus"'s industrial mode of production and reproduction? With the sacral quality Artaud sees in the theatrical gesture through its inability to be reproduced?
Perhaps the theorists we've read are onto something when they critique the theological commitments they see as a weakness in Western philosophy...to the extent that it seems to short-circuit something in us as viewers when we see a rendering of something we hold sacred, such as the communal pain around 9/11. Reproducing something is a sin because it “renders” idolatry possible. Without images and likenesses, we would not have the worship of false idols. We also wouldn't have translation studies or performance studies. Both discourses trade heavily in purity metaphors, establishing at the center of each discipline a (perhaps false, but that's another post or five) central dichotomy of sacred vs. profane. As early as Jackson's “Professing Performance,” we encountered the “origin story” of the not-so-subtle analogy of two men giving birth to a discipline, which places such a beginning smack in the middle of “miracle” narrative. Meanwhile, over in translation studies' genesis, St Jerome, the guy responsible for translating the Vulgate version of the bible from Greek into Latin, wrote his oft-anthologized "Letter to Pammachius" in the 4th century CE denouncing some dude who stole and circulated a hastily done private translation of his--denouncing the thief by comparing him to none other than Judas.
Performance studies, with its roots in rhetoric, communication, anthropology, and critical theory as well as literary studies, and translation studies, which, to use my own strong metaphor, is something of a bastard child of comparative literature that comparative literature doesn't particularly want to acknowledge, are both “multi-historied” disciplines that came of age during the latter half of the 20th century. Both are often characterized in terms of violent metaphors that suggest not just a power differential but an abuse of power. This endows the concept of the “original” with an innocence: a done-to, less-powerful figure suffering the abuse of that which might render its likeness.
The similarities don't end there. Translation studies is conceptualized by Paul Venuti in much the same way performance studies is conceptualized by Jackson in her efforts to grapple with the field's inter- and intra- disciplinarity: as an extraordinarily context-dependent genealogy of transference and transposition that perhaps demands an awareness of such shifting ideological and cultural landscape from any practitioner hoping to participate “ethically” in its discourse. It is here we might find a nugget or two of cultural wisdom to offer up in the face of an event like 9/11: it is a much higher-stakes version of the moment Sandy the real dog gets near-strangled by little kid Annie trying to keep him onstage. It is a moment to ethically locate ourselves in a popular discourse that still deals cheifly in notions of the sacred when the going gets tough. It harkens back to Jaskson's project as she maps out a genealogy of performance studies as a “mode of knowing,” from “epistemological consensus” to “epistemological conundrums” to “epistemological anxiety” and back again. And speaking of phantom limbs caused by gaps in landscape, there's one other place I encounter the concept Jackson puts forward of “epistemological gaps”: translation theory. And I need to hunt down the source of this because I can't remember when I first heard it, but many of the “gaps” addressed in translation studies? They're also called “traumatic.” Something is always lost, in translation and in tragedy. But perhaps one is an apt (if inherently violent) metaphor for the other; if so, would dichotomies long held central and epistemologically dear by both fields reinforce one another--or would they collapse also?
Non-Class Texts Referred To Above:
Susan Bassnett, Comparative Literature: An Introduction (1993)
Jerome, "Letter to Pammachius", tr. Kathleen Davis, from Translation Studies Reader, ed. Lawrence Venuti (2004)
Lawrence Venuti, "Genealogies of Translation Theory: Jerome”, from Translation Studies Reader, ed. Lawrence Venuti (2004)
George Oppen, "Meaning Is To Be Here: A Selection from the Daybook", Conjunctions: 10, Spring 1987: p. 186-207.
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