Octavio Paz on Translation: Literature and Literality, translated by Lynn Tuttle

Abstract

Learning to speak is learning to translate; when the child asks his mother for the meaning of some word, what he is really asking is that she translate the new word into his vocabulary. Translation within a language is not, in this sense, essentially different from translation between two languages. The history of every nation repeats the child’s experience: even the most isolated tribe must, at some time, confront the language of an alien people. The astonishment, rage, horror, or amused perplexity we feel in response to the sounds of a language we do not know soon becomes doubt over the one we speak. Language loses its universality and is revealed as a plurality of languages, all foreign and unintelligible to each other. In the past, translation dispelled that doubt: though there is no universal language, languages form a universal society. Once certain difficulties are overcome, all can know and understand each other. And they understand each other because in different languages men always say the same things. The universality of the spirit was the answer to the confusion of Babel: there are many languages, but meaning is one. Pascal found in the plurality of religions a proof of Christianity’s truth; translation responded to the diversity of languages with the ideal of a universal intelligibility. Thus, translation was not only an extra proof but a guarantee of the unity of the human spirit. The modern age destroyed that security. When he rediscovered the infinite variety of temperaments and passions and beheld the spectacle of a multitude of customs and beliefs, man began to stop recognizing himself in other men. Until then, the savage had been an exception. It was necessary to suppress him by conversion or extermination, by baptism or the sword. But the savage who appeared in eighteenth-century salons was a new creature. Although he could speak his hosts’ language perfectly, he embodied an undeniable foreignness. He was no longer the subject of conversion but rather of argument and criticism; the originality of his judgments, the simplicity of his customs, and even the violence of his passions were proof of the madness and vanity, if not the infamy, of those baptisms and conversions. Change of direction: the religious search for a universal identity was followed by an intellectual curiosity bent upon discovering differences which were no less universal. Foreignness ceased to be an aberration and became exemplary. This exemplary quality is paradoxical and revealing: the savage was the civilized man’s nostalgia, his other self, his lost half. Translation reflected these changes: no longer did it tend to seek out the ultimate identity of man, but instead became the vehicle of his uniqueness. Its function had consisted of revealing similarities over differences; from now on, it would show that those differences were irreducible, whether describing the strangeness of the savage or of our neighbor. Doctor Johnson expressed the new attitude very well. During a trip, he wrote: “A blade of grass is always a blade of grass, whether in one country or another . . . Men and women are my subjects of inquiry; let us see how these differ from those we have left behind.” Doctor Johnson’s sentence may be interpreted two ways, and both foreshadow the double path which the modern age was to take. The first alludes to the separation between man and nature, a separation which would become opposition and combat; mankind’s new missiȯn is not salvation but rather domination over nature. The second refers to the separation between men. The world is no longer one world, an indivisible whole; it is split into Nature and Culture, and Culture is divided into cultures. There are a great