Touching the untouched: Sundar Sarukkai on translation and language

I

The modern discipline of translation studies is often traced back to the preoccupations of biblical studies, specifically the problem of translating the book of god into human languages. This particular formulation of translation has had an unfortunate and unforgiving influence on the way we continue to understand the activity of translation. It is based on the fundamental presupposition that there is a given original, and the translation of that original is never adequate. The definition of the original is itself defined in such a way that the translation can never achieve unity with it. By definition, there is an unbridgeable gap between the original text and the translated one, which mimics the unbridgeable gap between the divine and the human. The original is always unreachable, untouchable.

Such a view continues its hold over centuries only because of certain assumptions about the nature of language. As much as they were based on the belief of an unerasable difference between two kinds of beings, they were also the reason for this continued distance between the original and the translation. This act of producing an artificial gap/chasm between the language of the gods and that of humans naturally leads to a chasm between human languages, thereby creating a hierarchy in the way different languages are understood.

The belief that the languages of the gods are languages that can best express truth went beyond the problem of translation. It was not just religious texts but also languages of knowledge, like mathematics, that got sucked into this belief. The common element in mathematics and religious texts was the belief that all these languages were the best languages to express truth and knowledge. Curiously, claims that certain languages have unique expressive capacities have long been around. For example, Urdu as the language of poetry, German as the language of philosophy, Telugu as the best language for Carnatic Music, and so on. By calling them the “best” and the most suited language for something or the other, an unbridgeable gap is introduced between languages. Translating from one language to another is still deeply mired in this troubling metaphysics of language.

The strong belief that truth has its own language which cannot be translated into any human language has influenced the formation of disciplines like science. While the study of translation is centuries old, the almost complete absence of the problem of translation in the sciences is a pointer to this belief. While the translation of a single poem causes much heartache, there is almost no such worry within the sciences. Much of the seminal work in the natural sciences was produced in languages such as German, French and Russian, especially at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. But the global language of science today is English.

It is puzzling that the problems of translation which have haunted literary translations do not even find a mention in translating scientific texts into English. My entry into translation studies was catalysed by surprise at this omission. Interestingly, what I discovered is that translation is not seen as a problem in science because of the belief that the essential language of the sciences was mathematics and mathematics is not translatable. The claim of the untranslatability of mathematics into natural languages like English produced an unbridgeable difference between mathematics and other languages. In other words, mathematics becomes an essential language necessary for the expression of truth and no spoken language has the capacity to express truth like mathematics could. Ironically, while mathematics and natural languages have a natural connection between them, this belief about mathematics made mathematics a highly valued untouchable. Linguistics and the scientific study of language did not help resolve this problem even though they produced the possibility of seeing languages in terms of families rather than as completely individualised entities.

To understand translation, we have to first understand this constant attempt to find differences between languages. How exactly is one language different from another? Is the difference to be found in their vocabulary, in the spread of concepts that they possess, in their formal capacities such as embedded in grammar, in their uniqueness to produce imagination in the reader/listener? The differences-in-languages hypothesis has become so well established that even today much of the discussion on translation revolves around the difficulty in capturing the world that is expressed in the source language in the translated language. Translation is haunted by this presumed perpetual gap and loss.

The possibility and the impossibility of translation both rest on the assumption about the differences between languages as well as the difficulty in bridging them. One of the most common responses to translation comes from the incompatibility and sometimes incommensurability of concepts in different languages. Much has been made of the fact that certain concepts are not present in some languages which are present in other languages. This forces the former to consciously produce new concepts while translating between these two languages. However, there is a lack of understanding of the meaning of concepts when such positions are taken. Any word in principle is translatable. The problem as to whether they can be exactly translated is a problem that is related to the assumption of the gaps between languages. The problem of translation is the problem of these gaps.

Ironically, the notion of the gap is perhaps the most fundamental philosophical theme about language itself. Not just in the gap between languages but in the very idea of what a language is. In other words, the problem of the gap in translation is first manifested in the necessary presence of gaps in the definition of language itself. This is yet another argument that suggests the priority of translation over language, meaning that translation is not something that comes after language. Translation is prior to language and it is the idea of translation that defines what a language really is.

The presence of the gap between the original and copy that is emblematic of translation is firstly a quality present in language. The original for language is the world. The beginning of language is based on the premise that the word follows the world. The word attempts to match the world. An expression produces a description of the world (thing, quality, event etc.) with the hope that it truly matches the reality of that world. But there is always a gap between the nature of a particular reality and its linguistic description. The first chasm is this irreducible chasm between language and the world. The suspicion about language that is historically present in the formation of disciplines like philosophy and the sciences is a suspicion about the capacity of language to tell it as it really is.

This perpetual gap is once again manifested at the next level: the gap between a word and its meaning. A word is not the same as its meaning. A word can only point to a meaning but that meaning can never be attained by that word. It needs other words to articulate that meaning. This is a never ending process. In other words, the fundamental problem of translation which is often discussed in terms of equivalence, right translation etc, is one that is already present in the original language itself. The question of equivalence is not the problem of translation but of language. Once we start with this position, it is possible to look at translation quite differently.

Almost all functions of language exhibit this problem. Whether language is viewed in terms of meaning, representation, expression or communication, all these views have the problem of the gap. I want to suggest here that the source of this problem is not merely the nature of language or translation but a particular way of approaching these terms. Whether in the traditional philosophical questions or in linguistics, the approach is cognitively oriented. This is a particular framework to study phenomena in terms of notions like knowledge. In general, this process is analytical and understands phenomena by breaking them into parts, similar to the way language is broken into words, then sentences, then larger groupings and so on. Such a methodological approach to the study of language contributes to this problem of original and copy.

II

But there is another way to understand the commonality of languages, one that does not begin with the assumption that languages must be viewed in terms of hierarchies. An approach that does not begin with an original and the attempts to re-capture it. One that has to invoke another methodology of studying language and translation. This approach is not new and has been part of the methodological changes in the study of disciplines today. Disciplines have undergone many “turns” in their evolution such as a linguistic turn, a turn towards the centrality of body and matter, and more recently the emphasis on sensations and the affective.

I want to look at the ideas of language and translation through this sensory turn. That is, begin with the experience one has of language. This would require that we talk about language not in terms of its analytic units but in terms of our experience with it. What we can say about language will then have to be recovered from that experience. There are very few approaches to language and translation through this approach, with one exception being Rita Kothari’s book Uneasy Translations. What can this approach tell us about the nature and practice of translation?

All languages have a binding commonality: they are all nothing but sounds. Every language is a series of sounds. (For this discussion, I am not going to use a broader definition of languages as purely semiotic systems, which would then include sign languages, gestural language, and so on.) Words are sounds, sentences are sounds. Kannada shares sounds with English. Words in Kannada can potentially be English words. The analytical approach to language in terms of structure and meaning misses this point about the sameness of languages, including animal language. To understand language through a philosophy of sound leads to a different understanding of language, as well as translation. This approach needs a deep metaphysics of sound to make sense of both language and translation. So the question that we need to ask is this: What is translation when looked at from the perspective of sameness and not from that of difference? What really becomes ungraspable, unrepresentable in the act of translation when we begin exploring the sameness of two languages? What happens to the anxiety of the gap in translation when language becomes an experiential mode and not a cognitive one?

In the description of this conference, there is this sentence: “Bhashavaad is an attempt to listen to what’s left over, as opposed to what’s lost, in translation.” What I was referring to as the gap is this idea of loss in translation. What is the practice of translation that can let us listen to what is left over? Not surprisingly, the act of listening to the leftovers is an act of sensibility, a particular way of experiencing language. One can actually begin to understand translation itself as a particular way of learning how to listen to languages.

My entry into the world of translation studies began with my attempts to understand how scientific texts, which are a complex mix of different semiotic systems, produce coherent meaning. That led to my first book titled Translating the World, which tried to make sense of the gap between languages, in particular between mathematics and spoken languages. My gradual shift from this cognitive approach to language and translation to a more experiential understanding of it led to my latest work, a novel titled Following a Prayer. In the latter, rather than assuming languages are different from each other, my starting point was to ask why one language is different from another. I began by exploring how Kannada could be expressed in English. Equivalently, how is it possible to imagine the intertwining of English and Kannada in a primordial sense of language?

In the analytical approach, language functions primarily as a carrier - of stories, of words, ideas etc. The emotion that is so desired of fiction is often produced in the narrative structure. A story has to enthuse us, make us feel sad, make us happy. But in my novel, the question that mattered to me was to find ways to make language itself an agent of feeling, as the subject of experience. How does language feel? How can reading the words affect emotions independent of what the words are saying? Through this, I was trying to express how language itself is the carrier of emotions and not words and stories. In other words, what I wanted was a pre-translated text, one that would not have to undergo the anxiety of confronting and crossing the gap, because in the writing of the novel in English, I was always aware of the commonness with other languages. So I was not really surprised that among the first comments I got was from a Bengali who said she felt that she was reading the book in Bengali. The Tamil translator’s first comment was that he felt that he was reading a Tamil book. When the original text is already sensitive to the commonness of other languages, the act of translation becomes different.

I found an excellent empirical example of this in the work of the Tamil author and translator, Srinivasan Ramanujam. He is one of the most effortless translators that I know, having translated a large number of books ranging from fiction to academic works. Since he has translated many of my books, I have had the opportunity to discuss his craft of translating English to Tamil in great detail. There are a couple of points that are relevant to this particular discussion. Ramanujam described his process of translating in a phenomenological manner as follows.

After he reads the book (which is to be translated) multiple times, he says that the “content” of the book echoes in his mind, and the “content” of the echo is largely filled with his own words. For him, the act of translation “attempts to give the words/sentences a tone or sound so that they become the ‘language’ of the echo” in his mind. So, the question that becomes relevant to him is whether he should translate the words/sentences or the sound of the words/sentences. He says that when he translates, a very important element of his translation arises through “translating the sound.” This makes him attentive to the text not only in terms of words and meanings but also the way a text “produces different kinds of sounds, gestures, and ‘facial’ expressions that the text performs before us. The translator, like an actor, performs that text. Performing a text gives a ‘language’ for the echo we carry inside us.” The act of translating is “an attempt to transmit the echo the translator experienced through words/sentences.” There are many examples of how he has done this in the translation of both fiction and non-fiction into Tamil. It is possible that such a sensory reading of a text is what catalyses his prolific translation.

Translation seen through the performative mode relates it to the sensory modes of experiencing reading and language. There is another interesting example that Ramanujam gives in this context. “In 1994, I was asked to direct a German play, Time of the Innocent written by Siegfried Lenz. This play was already translated into Tamil and published. This play was also performed by Koottu-P-Pattarai.” But before he directed the play, he first rewrote the play in Tamil since the earlier translation was linguistically faithful. He points out that when “I rewrote it again in Tamil, I focused on the actor's breathing. When we translate taking into account the breathing, the translation becomes performative. Certain words (sounds) were repeated taking into consideration the way the audience would have heard the words. Literal language translation does not bring out the performative element of the words. Performative translation is not translation of language, but translation of sound.”

III

These are examples that suggest why it is important to have a sensory turn to translation. There are different ways one could operationalise this, and here I want to suggest one particular image that can help us understand translation differently from the preoccupation of gap and loss.

I mentioned earlier that sound is common to all languages. So sound is one obvious sensory modality of language. But we can also experience language in reading where the sense of vision plays a role. Here, I want to draw your attention to one of the most interesting sensory modalities in our body, the sense of touch, and its essential relation to language and translation.

So much of literature, particularly fiction, is about the affective world. The affective is deeply immersed in the world of the sensory. Words and stories move us, make us feel the writing sensually, as if words are objects of sensation. Words when heard in audiobooks or in performance poetry can capture this sensuality of language directly. The commonly used phrase “those words touched me” has too often been seen metaphorically – I want to suggest that they should be taken literally. Language has the capacity to touch us, but what does touch mean in this context? (Interestingly, both sound and vision are associated with touch. We hear sounds when our eardrums are touched, by sound waves, for example.) While much can be said about the relation between sound and language, I want to restrict my comments to translation. Translation should be understood first and foremost within the matrix of touch since translation illustrates the possibility of languages touching each other.

Translation is a constant search and attempt by one language to touch another. Its lack can be understood in terms of the presumed incapability of the translated language to touch the original language, to enfold it, to absorb it into its own being. This is the origin of the perpetual gap between language and translation, a process related to the metaphysics of untouchability. As I had discussed in my work on the phenomenology of untouchability, touching is more than contact. Using this framework, we can see that the first step in the translation of a text is the establishment of contact between two languages, just like two objects which are in contact with each other.

Contact is location-specific, or locus-specific. A monkey in contact with a tree is in contact only at certain points of both the tree and its body. A monkey’s paws are in contact with a branch of a tree. In this case, the monkey is not touching the tree; only its paws are in contact with the branch or some parts of the branch. In translation, one language comes into contact with another language. Like the monkey and the tree, the contact is defined by those specific points in which both languages overlap. Translation when viewed in terms of units of language is only a process of contact between two languages - the points of contact may be words, sentences, phrases, cadence, prosody etc. So when translation is viewed through these contact-points, there is really no translation between languages at all.

On the other hand, viewing translation within the ambit of touch changes the relation between the two languages. It is useful to remember an influential formulation of the philosopher Merleau-Ponty here. He uses the example of one hand touching the other to illustrate what he calls Reversibility. When one hand of the body touches the other hand, there is a simultaneous sense of touching as well as being touched. When I touch, I am being touched. The unity of the body makes possible this simultaneous experience of touching and being-touched. In translation, one language comes in contact with another language but this action becomes an action of touch only when the other language has the experience of being-touched. The two languages involved in a translation are like the two hands of the body. Language as sound is the common body on which different languages are the different limbs. Translation is the simultaneous experience of one language touching another and the other language producing the experience of being-touched.

The problem with translation, in its long history where translation is always seen to be after language, and always incomplete with respect to the original language/text, is that it is still caught up in the contact paradigm and not the touch paradigm. Two languages being in contact with each other – at certain loci – do not produce translation. Translation is an act that corresponds to the metaphysics of touch, something that is symmetric, that envelops, that is undefinably irreducible to language alone. In other words, in any formulation of translation that begins with the idea of difference and gap, language presents itself as an untouchable to translation. A good translation is a product of transgression – that is perhaps the essential meaning of trans in translation. A great translation touches the language, the body of the language, that it is not supposed to touch. It is the overcoming of the untouchability between languages (that space in each language which makes it different from others) that defines the meaning of trans in translation.

This is Sundar Sarukkai’s keynote at Bhashavaad: National Conference on Translation held on August 23 and 24, 2024 at the India International Centre, New Delhi.