TRANSLATION

Translation is generally imperialistic, at best producing a creative hybrid, but more frequently destructive, turning what is translated into hash or comedy or a mirrored image of the translator. Translation rarely achieves the translucency that the word implies.

Obviously, if the underlying structure of the translator's language, medium, and sensory profile are all compatible with the form translated, it is easier to retain the effect of the original.

We could say of a Rembrandt: this is a portrait of a man with a golden helmet. But, as George Steiner writes in Language and Silence, absolutely nothing that can be said about Franz Kline's painting Chief will be pertinent to the habits of linguistic sense. "The patches of color, the skein of wire, or the aggregates of cast iron seek to establish reference only to themselves, only inwards." A de Kooning canvas has no subject of which one can render a verbal account. It bypasses language & seems to play directly on the nerve ends.

The same applies to much contemporary dance, film & music, especially electronic music. When we ask the contemporary artist to explain himself in words, he refers us back to his work. Isadora Duncan said, "If I could tell you what it meant, there would be no point in dancing it." She was reluctant to translate her efforts into English, a medium whose structure was wholly different from, and incompatible with, her particular dancing.

Translating Rembrandt into English or any Standard Indo-European language is possible, I believe, because of a correspondence in structures. All Standard Indo-European languages separate time & space through grammar; Rembrandt separated time & space through three-dimensional perspective. Both favor self-expression, self-portraiture. What Montaigne wrote, Rembrandt painted.

In art history, similarities of design are generally explained as being the result of either convergent evolution or diffusion or genius. That these similarities might arise from similarities in life styles & sensory profiles &, above all, in deep structures of media, none of which is necessarily related to evolution or diffusion or greatness, is less frequently considered.

Glenn Miller said he could always tell when he & his band were really "in the groove" during World War II, because when this happened, the fringe of natives who were standing around outside the GI's would all begin to move in rhythm with the music.