Corps de l’article

Translation from Italian by SusanPetrilli

1. Premise

The question of translation may either concern “simple” texts or “complex”texts. In our view this distinction corresponds to that proposed by MikhailBakhtin (1952-53) between “primary genres” and “secondary genres”: “simpletexts” belong to primary genres, that is, to those discourse genres that are notpart of literature; on the contrary, “complex texts” are those of literarygenres. For that which concerns problems of text semiotics, including theproblem of translation, texts from secondary and “complex” genres, as Bakhtinalso calls them, shed light on primary or “simple” genres and not vice versa,just as the anatomy of human beings helps to understand that of monkeys, and notvice versa.

A one-sided orientation toward primary genres inevitably leads to avulgarization of the entire problem (behaviorist linguistics is an extremeexample). The very interrelations between primary and secondary genres andthe process of the historical formation of the latter shed light on thenature of the utterance (and above all on the complex problem of theinterrelations among language, ideology, and world view).

Bakhtin, 1986 [1952-53], p. 62

This study is focussed on literary translation, on the question of thetranslation of “complex” or “secondary” texts, but with a view to making acontribution to the problem of translating non-literary, “simple,” “primary”texts as well. In other words, we shall examine the problem of text translationfrom a semiotic perspective.

A literary text is an hypertext. In the language of informatics the“hypertext” is writing with computers, writing which is organized in non-linearfashion. The hypertext offers a systemor methodics for empoweringa non-linear writing-reading processthrough computers. This implies the possibility of “pasting” pieces of a textinto a “network” and shifting freely, “surfing” through the net, choosing atrajectory from the multiple alternatives a hypertext offers. A hypertext can beunderstood metonymically as a text that responds to this type of methodics orsystem. In what follows we shall consider the advantages of using the hypertextas a paradigm for a theory of interlinguistic translation.

2. Hypertext and Translation

The hypertext is a reading-text in a strong sense, in other words, itprivileges the reader insofar as it allows him to choose from different readingtrajectories. In this context reading does not develop in a linear sense, in asingle sense, the “right sense.” In the case of linear reading, the authorforces the reader to move according to the order of exposition and as a functionof authorial intention. Consequently, the reader is stopped from cultivating hisown space and moving freely as a function of what reading provokes in him interms of an uninterrupted flow of ideas, stimuli and associations. Inhypertexts, dialogue between interpretant signs and interpreted signs—the placewhere meaning and sense are formed—concerns the text directly. The author is ofsecondary importance. But the issue at stake is to understand what the text saysand not what the author intended it to say.

The author is not always aware of the interpretants he puts into his owndiscourse. He also provides interpretants unintentionally: interpretants which the reader identifies andwhich belong to interpreter discourse. However, their traces are present in theauthor’s discourse. There are no fixed lines of demarcation between theintentional and the unintentional, between the fortuitous and what waspreestablished by interpretants present in author discourse. Nor is there adefinite line of demarcation between interpretants offered by the author andthose offered by the interpreter.

While in the process of studying “anagrams,” Saussure was seized by the fearthat what he traced in the texts he was analyzing was nothing more than what hehad read into them himself. Anagrams: something fortuitous or a rule effectivelyfollowed by the author? According to Starobinski, Saussure made the mistake ofseparating the “effect of chance” from “conscious procedure.” Starobinskibelieved that both chance and consciousness should be put aside and that theanagram should be viewed as an aspect of the word process—which is neitherpurely fortuitous nor fully conscious (cf. Starobinski, 1971, p. 154).

Texts that break through the boundaries of their own time and flourishbeyond contemporaneity, in the “great time,” as understood by Bakhtin (see 1986and 2003) develop new meanings and senses.

We can say that neither Shakespeare himself nor his contemporaries knewthat “great Shakespeare” whom we know now. (…) But do we then attribute toShakespeare’s works something that was not there, do we modernize anddistort them? Modernization and distortion, of course, have existed and willcontinue to exist. But that is not the reason why Shakespeare has grown. Hehas grown because of that which actually has been and continues to be foundin his works, but which neither he himself nor his contemporaries couldconsciously perceive and evaluate in the context of the culture of theirepoch.

Semantic phenomena can exist in concealed form, potentially, and berevealed only in semantic cultural contexts of subsequent epochs that arefavorable for such disclosure.

Bakhtin, 1986, p. 4

Text materiality is not onlyachieved with respect to the interpreter. Similarly to all communicativeprocesses, the text emerges as semiotic materiality not only in the sense thatit resists the interpreter, is autonomous from the latter, has its ownsignification that does not depend on the interpreter and may even escape him:the text has its own materiality, objectivity, independence, a capacity forresistance and self-signification with respect tothe author as well. The language (including the language ofliterary genres) used by the author resists the author himself, leads him by thehand and even says things that the author had not established he wouldsay.

The text has its own irreducible autonomy with respect to the meaningattributed to it by the interpreter. And this is true both in the case of theinterpreter who “reads” the text, the “reader,” or the interpreter who“produces” it, the “author.” The text tells of a sense that is other with respect to the sense conferredupon it by the interpreter-self. Therefore, the text is endowed with its ownobjectivity, materiality, capacity to resist with respect to interpreting,signifying consciousness. This is the alterity of the sign that determines anddecides the limits of interpretation, whether “author” or “reader”interpretation. Contrary to Umberto Eco, the problem of the “limits ofinterpretation” (1990), in light of which he reconsiders the problem of the“open work” (1962) and the role of the reader, “lector in fabula” (1979), cannot be solved in terms of “habit”or social convention. The limits of interpretation are given by objectivity,materiality, autonomy of the text, in other words, by its alterity with respectto the interpretant-self, whether this be the “reader” or the “utterer,” theperson who produces the text, the author himself with all his authority. Theproblem of the limits of interpretation is closely connected with the problem ofthe sign’s alterity and dialogism, and cannot be treated separately from thelatter.

Translation necessarily consists in negotiation and contract which concernthe relation between translator andtext and not between translator and author. Negotiation and listening, negotiation and answeringcomprehension are inseparable here. Their dialogic nature is given by thealterity, autonomy, resistance, objectivity, in a word, materiality of the text to betranslated.

The meaning of a sign cannot be circumscribed to a certain type of sign orsign system, such as a given historical-natural language. Meaning coincides withthe interpretant trajectory, which knows no boundaries of a typological orsystemic order. This is particularly obvious in the case of the hypertext, butthis also concerns translative processes where the interpretants, whether verbalor non-verbal, belong to another language, to another linguistic-culturalmodelling system.

Furthermore, the hypertext escapes the deductive model according to which agiven trajectory starts from certain premises and leads to a given conclusion.Deductive logic is replaced by associative logic, which is the logic of translation understood asreading-writing, it involves active participation and responsive understandingat the highest degree. Similarly to the hypertext, the relation between premisesand conclusion is established through associations based on the translator’spersonal memory, on the drift of his remembering, on his interests, curiosity,experiences, ability to “distract,” such that deferral from the interpreted signto the interpretant sign is not decided by constriction, by deduction as in theindexical relation. Here, instead, the relation between interpreted andinterpretant proceeds by hypothesis, it is based on reader initiative andinventiveness, and requires inferences mainly of the adductive type—which incertain cases are particularly risky.

The hypertext emerges as something towards which a translation should tend.Answering comprehension in reading-translation should take a text-readinghypertext as its model. But this type of reading is not yet very familiar to us.For centuries reading has implied following the author, never losing sight ofhim, watching where he comes from and where he is directed to the extent thatany digressions, distractions or stops in his discourse even end up annoying thereader.

Some texts are written by the author to deviate the reader and leave himfree to choose his own reading trajectories. According to Roland Barthes (1984),some authors have warned us that we are free to read their texts as we like bestand that our choices are of no interest to them. With such reflections Barthesrefers particularly to literary writing, which calls for a sort of rewritingprocess in order to be read.

In this case, hypertextuality is a consequence of the predominantlydialogical character of the literary text, of its inexorable intertextuality,its capacity to shift the signifier, which opens signification in the directionof significance. But, to fully achievetheir status as hypertexts through reading, these texts require education inreading which literary criticism impedes when it concentrates reader attentionon what the author says and on the autobiographical, psychological, ideological,historico-social reasons for saying it.

Beyond contents and technical modalities in using hypertexts, we mustunderline the epistemological and methodological contribution that may come fromthe intermedial hypertext for our understanding of the text and, consequently,for an adequate approach to the text in translation processes.

The hypertext augments the associative and personal character of reading, itestablishes a movement with the text according to various senses, it freesreading from a single type or system of signs, it accustoms us to a dialogicrelation with the text. All this can influence our approach inreading-translation, reading capable of creating differentiated trajectories,reading with the eyes raised, reading as “writing-reading,” as saysBarthes.

Informatic hypertext practice has at last blocked the excessive interestthat readers have shown in the author for centuries, it abolishes the privilegeconferred upon the sources (in terms of people, historical context, etc.) of atext. Such excessive interest and privilege has generally been sanctioned andaugmented by literary criticism—the only discipline in schools and universitieswhich attempts to provide a method for the way we approach texts, contributionsin this sense from such disciplines as textual linguistics or semiotics of textare recurrently missing.

What is important to underline in the hypertext is the text and the multipletrajectories according to which it may be read. Censorship in relation tonon-linear, “disorderly,” erratic readings, readings that drift and lose theirbearings, may at last come to an end as a consequence of the way this text isproduced, characterized as it is by hypertextuality and multimediality. Withthis type of censorship, respect for authority, the author’s, according to whicha text is usually read, also comes to an end. In this case the reading-textpredominates over the pre-scribed text. Also because the multimedial hypertextis not the word of an author, but the result of a multiplicity of differentcontributions, competencies and expressive means.

The multi-medial hypertext frees the text-reading as such, whatever thetext’s function. From this perspective, the multimedial hypertext achieves aCopernican revolution in the sense that itshifts the centre from the author to the reader, if not for thefirst time, certainly in the sense that it institutionalizes this shift,eliciting a reading-writing rather than reading-fruition process, the writing ofreading (independently from recourse to the written sign, transcription).This capacity that the multimedial hypertextrenders visible is important to evidence for translation theory as theobjective a reading-translation should work towards when understood in termsof answering comprehension, especially in the matter of the literarytext.

The hypertext is a method for theamplification of the capacity for writing as amodelling procedure. Writing as modelling characterizes language understood as a species-specificfeature distinctive of mankind. Similarly to language thus described, thehypertext does not proceed in a linear sense. Instead, it organizes connectionsamong parts that are distant from each other in the interpreted-interpretantnetwork forming that text. Linearity is superceded by the network. In this sensethe hypertext is less limiting, less binding than the traditional written text,or better, than the traditional way of writing andreading. The hypertext shows that to write and to read is notnecessarily to write and to read in sequence, to channel thought into one lineafter another, and according to a privileged order as we have been taught sincechildhood.

The hypertext is not only a method.As anticipated, a methodics can bedelineated starting from the hypertext, with important implications fortranslation practice and theory. Literary texts show a strong movement in thedirection of the hypertext.

The dialectics revealed by the Russian formalists between the “fabula” andthe “plot” reveals the literary text’s vocation for the hypertext. And that inall this the translator is passive is by no means true: his expectations,inferences, “answering comprehension,” his impatience are not only calculated,but determine the organization itself of the text, its style and syntax:lector in fabula, as Eco says. Asmuch as it may be linear, a novel presents, suggests “multiple readings” invarious degrees, depending on the level of monologism or polylogismcharacterizing that text.

The poetic text lends itself to multiple readings at the highest degree. Thefact that the poetic text is difficult to translate is a symptom of what wouldseem to be its linearity, but this, however, is only apparent: a singlesignifier may lead into different interpretive trajectories. For this reason itis often difficult to find a corresponding signifier in another language withthe same capacity for shifting. In French, Baudelaire’s L’Albatros opens with the word “Souvent” which in Italian is translated as“sovente” or “spesso.” The problem is that this translation inevitably loses aninterpretive trajectory that signifies in the direction of “sotto vento”[1] (Prete, 1994), and it alsoloses the connection with “souvenir”[2] which are evoked by the French word.

“Decentralization” of the hypertext, the fact that it does not have a fixedcentre, but is a system that can be infinitely decentred and recentred, hasimplications for the de-centralization of cognitive activities as theircondition for orientations that are open and unprejudiced. Such an attitude isparticularly necessary in the relation with a foreign language and intranslation practice understood in terms of interlinguistic dialogue. Thecapacity for decentralization and recentralization becomes the formativecondition of identity open to alterity, identity capable of interrogatingautomatisms and customary pragmatico-interpretative trajectories. From thisperspective, the practice of the hypertext accustoms us to the sign’s shiftingand, therefore, to the capacity for interrogation of the universe organized ingiven sign systems, those of the source language in the first place. Thisprocess makes it possible to receive and give hospitality in another language toa text in translation that was originally modelled in a completely differentlinguistic-cultural universe from the original.

3. Destination of the Translation and Language as Writing

Who is a translation meant for? This is the question asked by WalterBenjamin at the beginning of his essay entitled “The Translator’s Task” (1997[1923]). The naive reply is: “[F]or readers who do not understand the original”(p. 151 in TTR). The translation saysthe “same thing” (ibid.) as theoriginal, but in a language they do not understand. This “same thing,” it wouldseem, is what the original intends to “communicate” (ibid.). Translation mediates, transmits,communicates.

The problem is whether or not the text is made specifically to communicate.A poetic work has very little to tell and to communicate. “Neither message norstatement is essential to it” (ibid.).Any translation which intends to communicate would mediate somethinginessential, it would transmit the inessential.

If a text is meant for a reader, it is meant for a reader in the original.The translator would then be at the service of a reader the text was notoriginally meant for. In this case the text would resist translation not becauseof any difficulties involved in being translated into a given language, butrather because it was not made to be translated, it was not meant for thespeakers of that given language. However, the text is not even meant generallyfor speakers in the original; it is meant for a receiver who is not simplyexpected to understand the text (“Clean up the mess, do you understand me!”,“Yes, I understand”), but to understand it responsively (responsive understanding).

The problem of translatability is the problem of the text’s destination andtherefore of the text’s intention of being translated.

This intention is not the author’s. In the case of literary texts the authorhas no authority. This is due to the artwork’s independence from the author, tothe “essential solitude of the work of art” (Maurice Blanchot, 1955).

Such an intention is not present in the original either. The problem of thetranslatability of the text is generally the following: whetherhistorical-natural languages consent to translation which is the problem ofcommunication among the different historical-natural languages. The truth isthat this problem is of no concern to a given historical-natural language. Allit requires is that we say, and that we say in that language. Language obliges us to say (Roland Barthes: “languageis fascist”, see Barthes, 1978), and to say init.

But there is also the problem of literary genres: do literary genres consentto translation? This is the question of the translatability of poetic genres.Thus we are reconducted to the relation between translation and communication:as anticipated, if the translation is expected to transmit what is communicatedby the text, a poetic work has very little to communicate. By mediatingcommunication, translation mediates something inessential, and if the translatorin turn begins to compose poetry, what we obtain is “the inexact transmission ofan inessential content” (Benjamin, 1997 [1923], p. 152).

The text’s intention of being translated concerns neither the reader nor theauthor, nor a given historical-natural language, nor literary genres. As stated,it is a question of destination: to whom or to what is the text destined?Certainly it is addressed to whoever can read it, to whoever knows the samelanguage. But with such a statement, are we not talking about authorialintention once again? And again about the limits imposed upon the author byhistorical-natural language and by genre?

Instead, destination of the text and, therefore, its intention of beingtranslated concerns the text’s relation to language. Here the term “language” is understood as a simulationdevice or modelling device, capable of producing an “infinite number of possibleworlds” (Leibniz), as the “play of musement” (Peirce).

This is what Thomas A. Sebeok understands by language which he distinguishes from speech. Speech has a specificallycommunicative function, while language is firstly a modelling device. Language only assumes acommunicative function subsequently, that is to say, when with the appearance ofthe primitive form of homo sapiens sapiensspeech enabled the externalization of language. Moreover, this process leads to thequantitative amplification and qualitative transformation of the communicativecapacities of nonverbal procedures which humans share with other animals.Language subtends human sign systems, including historical-natural languages,and distinguishes them in species-specific terms from other forms of animalcommunication. The latter use signs that are typologically homological withrespect to human signs (signals, icons, indexes, symbols, names, as above allSebeok has shown), but these signs are not fixed in a structure like languageunderstood as a modelling device and, therefore, they cannot becomelanguages.

Writing is inherent in language as a modelling device to the extent that thespecific characteristic of writing consists in its investing the same elementswith different meanings according to their chronotopic positioning. In otherwords, writing is inherent in language as a signifying device to the extent thatit is characterized by syntax. Thephonetic sign itself is writing. Language is already writing, even before theinvention of writing understood as a system for the transcription of vocalsemiosis, indeed even before language is connected to phonation and theformation of historical-natural languages. When, subsequently, writing returnedas a secondary cover to fix vocalism, it used space to maintain the oral wordthrough time investing this word with a spatial configuration (cf. Kristeva,1992, p. 61).

Language as it is today has been influenced in its development by the use ofphonetic material, but all the same it has not lost its character of writingantecedent to transcription. This is evident in the articulation ofhistorico-natural languages, in the iconic character of the verbal sign itself(signification through positioning, extension, as in the lengthening ofadjectives in the superlative or of verbs in the plural, etc.) discussed byJakobson (1963), and in the capacity for innovation. Chomsky considerscreativity as a specific characteristic of verbal language. On the contrary,creativity is a derivative in verbal language, while instead it is proper tolanguage understood as writing, as a human modelling device.

Benjamin (1963, pp. 159-235) also seems to insist on the connection betweenlanguage and writing as understood above when, focusing on “allegory,” heevidences its “character of writing,” when he reflects upon hieroglyphicwriting, on the ideogram, and on the relation between thought and “originalwriting,” on language as writing that is not reduced to serving communication,on the letter that withdraws from the conventional combination of writing atomsand signifies on its own account as “image” thanks to its iconic character: in the “baroque” “thewritten word tends toward the visual,” which from a linguistic point of viewleads to the unity of the linguistic baroque and the figurative baroque(ibid., p. 176ff.).

The fact that human beings “have something to say to each other” does notstand outside the world produced by language understood as a human modellingdevice. Therefore, we cannot resort to the need to say something as a means ofexplaining the origin of language in Lamarckian terms (on this aspect see thecritical considerations made by Ferruccio Rossi-Landi, 1985, pp. 225-226).“Verbal language does not arise from a general need to communicate” (ibid., p. 233), but rather from the need fora certain level in social communication. This involves both communicativeprocedures which have not yet developed into nonverbal languages, therefore are not yet specificallyhuman, as well as the modelling (and not communicative) procedure of language,species-specific to human beings, through which the world is signified andinterpreted.

First of all we must highlight the non-reducibility of language to merecommunication, otherwise we could not place the linguistic capacity in acoherent framework of the phylogenesis of nerve structures and relativepsychical functions.

Ibid., p. 234

Though language found its major means of externalization and augmentation invocalization and in verbal (oral and written) signs generally, this does notmean that such externalization and augmentation are not possible through otherlanguages as well. On the other hand, “in-fants” (who, as the term says, do notspeak) communicate very efficiently through nonverbal terms (being a question ofvital communication). Not onlythat: through the support of this type of communication they also acquire verballanguage. And when, as in the case of deaf-mutes, the development of language inthe phonic form is impossible, we may observe that writing (if adequatelyelicited by those who care for these people) finds other possibilities ofimplantation (gesture, design) that enable development of the capacity forlanguage, without support from speech. And sometimes the results arenoteworthy.

The character of writing proper to language enables verbal and nonverballanguages to function as signs on their own account, a sort of excess withrespect to their cognitive, communicative and manipulative function, which isalso present in animal behavior though only in terms of repetition. Theconsistency of dialogism among interpretants and, therefore, the capacity tosupersede signality in the direction of signness, to surpass signification in the direction of significance (what Barthes, 1971, calls the third sense with respect to communication orthe message and to signification) are associated with writing as itcharacterizes language.

4. Artaud Translator of Carroll. L’arve etl’aume

L’arve et l’aume is the title ofAntonin Artaud’s French translation of HumptyDumpty, sixth chapter of Throughthe Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll. Artaud translated this textas an intern in a psychiatric hospital in Rodez, September 1943. Subsequently,in 1947, he reviewed his translation with important corrections in the proofsfor publication in the journal, L’Arbalète, directed by Marc Barbezat. Artaud adds the subtitle“Anti-grammatical enterprise on Lewis Carroll and against him.”

Artaud very soon (June 1944) expressed the conviction that he had reachedhis translation as though it were his own original work and personalcomment.

After six years of internship in a psychiatric hospital and transfers fromone hospital to another, in February 1943 he finally reached the asylum in Rodezwhere he was entrusted to Doctor Gaston Ferdière. In a letter to the latterdated September 17th of that same year, Artaud announcedthat his name was Antonin Artaud and that he was “only a writer.” Also, herequested work that was precise and objective to which he could “anchorhimself,” proposing a translation of Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass for the painter Delanglade. He hadalready translated for Ferdière a little poem from the same volume entitledTèma Con Variazióni.

By curious coincidence, as recounts Artaud in a letter to Ferdière (23September 1943), Delanglade brought him HumptyDumpty to translate in the afternoon of the same day. Artaud,that morning, had begun writing again (therefore, on the same day, but before seeing the text). What he wroteconcerned the meaning of words, which he thought he was sure about and which, onthe contrary, escaped him after having experimented them. Why? Words meant whatI made them say, that is, what I put into them. Consequently, he was surprisedwhen Ferdière himself signalled the passage from Carroll’s book on the problemof verbal invention and, therefore, yet again the open problem of the origin oflanguage. “The question is,” says Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many differentthings.” “The question is which is to be master—that’s all!,” says HumptyDumpty.

From insanity to problems of language, to problems of meaning: a trajectorythat was familiar enough. Only here transition comes about through the mediationof writing, writing in Through theLooking-Glass, but beforethe latter, and before the work of translation, through Artaud’s own writing,Artaud who was “only a writer.”

But L’arve et l’aume is alsowriting in which a practice exercised through the years surfaces painfully andasserts itself angrily, as Artaud works towards the theatre of cruelty. Thisleads to Artaud’s antigrammaticality,against the French language, against the pre-scribed text, against Lewis Carrollhimself, against the order of discourse. What is at stake here, in this work oftranslation, as in the theatre of cruelty, is “existence” and “flesh,” the body,life.

Word play in Carroll, including his use of portmanteau words which Artaudinitially described as being characterized by stupefying topicality, do not gobeyond a caricature of equal exchange between signified and signifier withoutdenouncing the pretence, hypocrisy, sacrifice, removal and repression upon whichsuch exchange logic is based, without undermining social structures, productivemechanisms, ideological assumptions served by exchange. Ultimately, Carroll’swriting was representative of thesuperfluity of being (cf. Deleuze, 1993). Carroll peeps into the looking glass,but knows how to keep away from the double he glimpses, the shadow. An infinityof psychical trickeries, with no passion. Affected language. The revolt evokedby Carroll’s works is sedated by Carroll himself. The battle of the deep, itsmonsters, the mix-up of bodies, the turmoil, the subversion of order, encounterof the bottommost with the elevated, of food with excrement, words that areeaten, Alice’s underground adventures(the original title of Alice’s Adventures inWonderland), all this is supplanted and cancelled, as observed byDeleuze, by a play of surfaces: rather than collapse, lateral sliding movements.As says Deleuze, the animals of the deep become paper figures withoutconsistency. Carroll’s Through theLooking-Glass invests the surface with a mirror and starts a game ofchess. Not that the surface has less nonsense than the deep, but it’s not thesame kind of nonsense. Pure events without contaminations shine above mixed upbodies, above their actions and intricate passions. Like vapours from the earththey release something incorporeal on the surface, a pure expression from thedeep: not the sword, but the strike of a sword; a strike without a sword like asmile without a cat (Deleuze, 1993, pp. 37-38).

Artaud moves across the text by Lewis Carroll (to read is “read across”) in what becomes an antigrammatical enterprise against Carrollhimself. Revolt against the self and against the ordinary conditions of selfbetrayed by Carroll’s text, in the dual sense of “betray”—that is, loss(“through to loss of the whole body”) and revelation in spite of oneself—,becomes the aim of the reading-translating-writing text by Artaud (cf. letter toH. Parisot of 20th and 22nd September,1945, in Artaud, 1989). Artaud fails to translate just one fragment in the poem“Jabberwocky,” in the chapter entitled HumptyDumpty. As he explains in his second letter cited to Parisot,Artaud did not love this poem which suffered from affected infantilism.Jabberwocky is the work of a coward who never wished to suffer his work beforewriting it. I love poetry by the famished, the diseased, the outcasts, theintoxicated, says Artaud: François Villon, Charles Baudelaire, Edgar Poe, Gérardde Nerval, and the poetry of those tortured by language, who are at a loss intheir writings, and not the poetry of those who pretend they are lost so as tomake a better show of their consciousness and science of both loss andwriting.

All the same Jabberwocky regards him, reflects him like a faded image. Infact, it is Artaud’s text that is represented. His text, the translating text isthe double with respect to which Carroll’s is a bad imitation, a vulgarreproduction. This puts Artaud in a position to claim that Jabberwocky isnothing more than the result of plagiarism, the edulcorated copy, spineless andineffectual, of a work written by himself (cf. Artaud’s letter to H. Parisot of20th and 22nd September, 1945).And he wished to add a post-scriptum for publication, in which he stated that onreading Lewis Carroll’s poem on fish, being, obedience, the sea and God, on therevelation of a blinding truth, his sensation was that it was he who hadconceived and written that poem in past centuries only to find his own work inthe hands of Lewis Carroll (letter to M. Barbezat of 23rdMarch, 1947, now in the preface to L’arve etl’aume, 1989). Ultimately, Carroll’s text was considered to be nomore than a transcription, while thetranslation is the creative writing.

In translating Carroll’s text Artaud produces a text with respect to whichCarroll’s text sounds false and incomplete. The pre-scribed text had beencrossed and the reading-translation was not its repetition but a betrayal, anantigrammatical enterprise against it, an act of cruelty. For this reason andwithout contradicting himself with respect to his initial statement, Artaudclaims that if his poem is compared to Carroll’s text in English it will beobvious that it belongs to him, Artaud, and is not at all the French version ofa text in English (cf. ibid.).

Critique of representation, of the imitative and reproductive relation, isat once critique of transcription and recovery of writing, of ante litteram writing, of human life itself,of the body as writing.

Critique of transmitted discourse, of the pre-scribed text, of memory,tradition, historical-natural language, of the economy of truth, ofresponsibility with alibis which makes for a good conscience. The word and itsannotation, phonetic writing, cease to be dictated, citation, re-citation andorder. The word withdraws from the generality of the concept and fromrepetition, identification, reiteration, levelling onto signality, as suchcompletely subjugated to a process of codification and decodification. Torecover the word as writing is to exalt the unrepeatable part of the utterance,that part which cannot be reconducted to the constant elements of ahistorical-natural language. The utterance rediscovers its uniqueness,unrepeatability, responsivity, responsibility without escape, without alibis:“qu’une expression ne vaut pas deux fois, ne vit pas deux fois; que toute paroleprononcée, qu’une forme employée est morte et n’agit qu’au moment où elle estprononcée ne sert plus et n’invite qu’à en rechercher une autre” (Artaud, 1964[1938], p. 117). Writing as transcription is cancellation of the body, of thevital gesture, of the utterance, which can occur but once.

The scene of verbal and nonverbal writing as the scene of writing and nottranscription is a space without an archè, it is anarchic, inother words, it is not reproduced on the basis of another space, an alibi, it isa totally exposed space, full of risks. And its time is not the time of phoniclinearity, but diachrony in which recovery of presence in representation, inrepetition, is impossible. The word and the written sign become gestures bywriting freed from transcription, projected beyond representation, beyond thelanguage of words and beyond the mnemotechnic function of annotation, ofphonetic writing. The word rediscovers its materiality, its resistance, itsconsistency as a signifier which is not subservient to a signified, which is nottransparent or subordinate to discourse intention. The word and gesture becomebody once again and do not dissolve in the direction of sense. They meet in theglossolalia that runs throughArtaud’s poetry. Return to the threshold where the word is no longer a cry, butnor is it rarefied in the concept, in meaning: this explains Artaud’s interestin the problem of the origin of verbal language and of historical-naturallanguages, expressed in his return to writing beginning from madness. The wordmaintains its alterity, its singularity, its difference, with respect to anyreturn to a scene different from the one it consists of, a scene that mustguarantee its identity and recognizability, that must act as an alibi.

L’arveetl’aume: on the one hand, matter(purport) as understood by Louis Hjelmslev, on the other, human “language”understood as a modelling device, as writing, producing interpreteds andinterpretants on the plane of content and expression. Similarly to Hamlet’scloud which changes aspect from one moment to the next, sign work investsmatter, as understood by Hjelmslev, with different forms, and it is on matterthus understood that every historical-natural language traces its specificsubdivisions; matter is physical, acoustic in the case of historical-naturallanguages, relatively to expression form, but it is also the amorphous “mass ofthought,” relatively to content form. In the same way, as regards linguisticwork deposited in the different historical-natural languages, like sand whichcan be put into different forms, like a cloud which can take different shapes,matter may be formed or restructured differently in different languages (cf.Hjelmslev, 1961, §13, “Expression and Content”). In spite of its alterity withrespect to a given configuration, in spite of other possibilities, matter alwaysgives itself as signified, it obeys a form and presents itself as matter.“Obey,” a central verb in L’arve etl’aume.

The stiffening, the ossification of words, that codify, block and paralyzethought, this is but one aspect of the general sclerotization of human signswhich must restore the forgotten resources of language understood as an infinitemodelling process, as writing. The consequence of such sclerosis, of suchhardening and petrification, says Artaud in LeThéâtre et son Double, is that culture on a whole prevaricatesover life, dictating law to life instead of being a means to understanding andpracticing life: “Quand nous prononçons le mot de vie,” specifies Artaud,“faut-il entendre qu’il ne s’agit pas de la vie reconnue par le dehors desfaits, mais de cette sorte de fragile et remuant foyer auquel ne touchent pasles formes” (Artaud, 1964 [1938], p. 19). On the one hand, life thus understood,arbre; “matrix matter” (Carlo Pasiin Carroll, 1993, p. 78), larva, embryon, egg; on the other, forms susceptibleto petrification, aume, the being that human life has become.

To a petrified culture that perseveres in self-reproduction, therecorresponds a petrified conception of theatre, theatre of representation,petrified theatre. But theatre has its shadow, that forms its double: “Mais le vrai théâtre parce qu’il bouge et parce qu’il sesert d’instruments vivants, continue à agiter des ombres où n’a cessé detrébucher la vie” (Artaud, 1964 [1938], p. 18). The withering of verbal andnonverbal language, its limitation, has led to the loss of the relation to theshadow, to life, to the body. Official language must be broken in order to reachlife, the human being’s habitual limits must be refused, the boundaries ofso-called reality must be infinitely broadened, beginning from thereconstruction of theatre, the specialized place of representation. Thisrequires preparation, calculation. We cannot be content with being “simplesorganes d’enregistrement” (ibid., p.133).

Being is repetition, victory over living, over the alterity of the body.Being is life which perseveres in being, in self-repetition, on the level ofwords as well, in reconfirming itself, withdraws from life; conatus essendi, which economizes on itself,does not expose itself, does not want risks, preserves itself. Being is thepresent which by restraining itself, keeping itself aside, in reserve, foridentity ends up losing itself. Death caused by obstination of presence, deathas repetition. As says Derrida, to refuse death as repetition is to assert deathas expenditure, waste, present and without release. In this sense the theatre ofcruelty could be considered as the art of difference and of expenditure withouteconomizing, without reserve, without release and without history. Platocriticizes writing as body, Artaud as cancellation of body, of live gesturewhich only ever takes place but once (cf. Derrida, Preface to Artaud, Le Théâtre et son Double, in Artaud, 1961,pp. xxx-xxxi).

In Artaud’s translation of HumptyDumpty, the translating text supersedes the text claimed to be the“original” and reunites with the matrix matter, the arve, through an act of cruelty—which hadalready been calculated and practiced for some time on the scene of the theatreof cruelty, even before having encountered this text by Carroll,—against thetext, against the English language, which Artaud knows well, and against theFrench language. The result is a metamorphosis-rebirth in a text that claims tobe more original that the original text, because it carries itself over to andexposes itself to its very own origin more than the original had ever riskeddoing.

This gives rise to a sensation of maximum proximity among the two texts,which Artaud signals in his post-scriptum, but also of their maximum distancingand difference. “Car on ne se rencontre pas avec un autre,” like Lewis Carrollin his poem “Jabberwocky” in HumptyDumpty, “sur des points comme : être et obéir ou vivre et exister.Mes cahiers écrits à Rodez pendant mes trois ans d’internement, et montrés àtout le monde, écrits dans une ignorance complète de Lewis Carroll que jen’avais jamais lu, sont pleins d’exclamations, d’interjections, d’abois, decris, sur l’antinomie entre vivre et être, agir et penser, matière et âme, corpset esprit” (Artaud, 1989, pp. 7-8).

5. Life, Survival and Translation

Translatability concerns the relation between text and language, andthe more a text has crossed a historical-natural language in the direction ofwhat Benjamin calls “pure language” (Benjamin, 1997 [1923], p. 162) (this is thecrossing over which makes for aliterary text), not only the more is it translatable, but the more it calls for translation (ibid., p. 152). Translation is called for:“if translation is a mode, then translatability must be essential to certainworks” (ibid., p. 153).

Thanks to its relation with “pure language” (ibid., p. 162) not only is the text translatable, but it isdestined to be translated, and “It is clear that a translation, no matter howgood,” says Benjamin, “cannot have any significance for the original.Nevertheless, it stands in the closest connection with the original by virtue ofthe latter’s translatability” (ibid.,p. 153).

Benjamin considers this relation as a “vital connection,” (ibid.) so much more intimate preciselybecause, as in vital manifestations, translation does not have any significancefor the original. The artwork survives in translation, just as a life formsurvives in its descendents, but neither in one case nor in the other does thisconcern individual life.

In the case of artworks, translation does not add anything to their life,but rather constitutes their “survival” (ibid.). Works of art have a life, “to which translation bears thehighest witness” (ibid., p. 158).Benjamin makes a point of specifying that the idea of life and of survival of artworks “should be considered with completelyunmetaphorical objectivity” (ibid., p.153).

A very close relation is established between the “text” and “life.” Thisconnection is confirmed by the relation identified in a “global semioticperspective” (Sebeok) between semiosisand life.

Both in the case of the translated text and of life that survives insucceeding generations, relations of translation connect “generator” with“engendered,” where “translation is a mode” (ibid., p. 152), relations between interpreted and interpretant, where a relation of absolute alterity connects the “original” with the“translation”: that which is engendered is another life, which flourishes inanother time and does not belong to the life but to the “afterlife” (ibid., p. 153) of the original.

No doubt something persists in the connection between the original and itstranslation, and between the living and the engendered, where a relation ofresemblance intervenes; but such persistence foresees separation, discretion,“the dead time” (Levinas, 1961); resemblance foresees diversity, irreduciblealterity.

Translation depends (in the dual sense of “being made possible” and of“being caused”) on affinity among historical-natural languages, determined bytheir shared participation in “pure language.” Writes Benjamin:

If the kinship of languages manifests itself in translation, it does sootherwise than through the vague similarity of original and copy. For it isclear that kinship does not necessarily involve similarity. In this contextthe notion of kinship is in accord with its narrower usage, to the extentthat in both cases it cannot be adequately defined by similarity of origin,although the concept of origin remains indispensable in defining thenarrower usage. —Wherein can the kinship of two languages be sought, apartfrom a historical kinship? No more in the similarity of literary texts thanin the similarity of their words. All suprahistorical kinship of languagesconsists rather in the fact that in each of them as a whole, one and thesame thing is intended; this cannot be attained by any one of them alone,however, but only by the totality of their mutually complementaryintentions: pure language.

1997 [1923], p. 156

In our interpretation “pure language” corresponds to “common speech” or“linguistic work,” as understood by Rossi-Landi (1998 and 1991), or, if we passfrom the verbal to the semiotic, to “language,” as understood bySebeok.

Shifting from historical-natural language to “pure language” by opening anddialogizing historical-natural languages, so that one language is viewed withthe eyes of another (Bakhtin), translation is more than mere communication, it“is more than a message” (Benjamin, 1997 [1923], p. 158); this is obvious in thetranslation of literary works where communication is inessential.

Though we have shifted Benjamin’s discourse on translation in otherdirections with respect to his own, and though we have translated him into ourown words and interpreted him in the light of other languages and other texts,we may conclude our considerations with his own words which now resounddifferently in this new context:

Just as fragments of a vessel, in order to be fitted together, mustcorrespond to each other in the tiniest details but need not resemble eachother, so translation, instead of making itself resemble the meaning of theoriginal, must lovingly, and in detail, fashion in its own language acounterpart to the original’s mode of intention, in order to make both ofthem recognizable as fragments of a vessel, as fragments of a greaterlanguage. For that very reason translation must in large measure turn itsattention away from trying to communicate something, away from meaning; theoriginal is essential to translation only insofar as it has already relievedthe translator and his work of the burden and organization of what iscommunicated.

Ibid., p. 161

(…) True translation is transparent, it does not obscure the original,does not stand in its light, but rather allows pure language, as ifstrengthened by its own medium, to shine even more fully on the original.

p. 162

(…) To set free in his own language the pure language spellbound in theforeign language, to liberate the language imprisoned in the work byrewriting it, is the translator’s task.

p. 163

Translation does not represent theoriginal text, but rather portrays it,in other words, the effect of a translation is to re-veil and not to un-veil the original which gives itself as icon and not idola (cf. Luciano Ponzio, 2000), deferring from the said to saying, from the sayable tothe unsayable. “The interlinear versionof the holy scriptures is the prototype or ideal of all translation” (ibid., p. 165).