Beyond Translation: Essays Toward a Modern Philology

Comparative Literature, Fall 1997 by Raffel, Burton

BEYOND TRANSLATION: ESSAYS TOWARD A MODERN PHILOLOGY. By A. L. Becker. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,1995. xii, 438 p.

Wonderful nuggets of information lie scattered, all helter-skelter, in the pages of this right-minded but infuriatingly sloppy book. It is deeply useful to learn that "A Burmese typewriter does not automatically move along to the next space when a letter is struck" (p 234), or that in Javanese wayang drama "Arjuna and Cakil live in different conceptual worlds and that their meeting is not caused but is rather an accident, a coincidence of these worlds" (p. 34, emphasis added), or that, again in wayang, "It is primarily the clowns who try to tell the audience what is happening" (p. 39, emphasis added) . But though I call this a book, it is so termed only because I have only 1200 words for my review: this is in fact not a book, but a wannabe collection of essays, rambling, repetitive in the extreme, capable at one moment of intense, arch pedantry, and the next moment of such genuinely illuminative statements as "rhythm is probably the most basic and powerful cohesive force in language" (p. 203) or the description of the Burmese way of writing as "the natural shape of remembered knowledge" (p. 388).

The problem lies-as lawyers often say of fraud-in the inception.

1) Becker tells us quite explicitly that he writes "essays" rather than scholarly articles; see the "Afterword: Apologia for the Essay" (pp. 429-31). He refers, revealingly, to his delight at being permitted to give what he calls "an open lecture, without any topical pressure" (p. 367, emphasis added). Precisely: in the usual sense of the word he does not ever have a topic, but only experiences, attitudes, and opinions. The book's title, Beyond Translation, might be better formulated as "Beyond Language"-a phrase he himself uses more than once (pp. 383, 413).

2) So far as I can tell, nothing in this book was in fact written for this book, but for journal publication, as essays in collections, or as talks. Fine: but in assembling such heterogeneous material there is an obligation to avoid the staggering amount of sheer repetition in Becker's pages. Apart from other references to Ortega y Gasset, there is a particular Ortega passage which he quotes, so help me, twelve times (pp. 5, 73, 80, 106, 163, 291, 298, 311, 320, 370, 379, 423). When one reads that Becker's analysis of wayang was greeted "by Javanese friends with an ultrapolite version of `So what else is new?'" (p. 299), it is not useful to read twenty-three pages further along, that "the repeated response of my Javanese friends was 'What's so new about that?'" (p. 322). There are innumerable other examples, some almost as bad as the Ortega passage already noted.

3) Perhaps because he has no particular topic, no overall organization, he often shoots from the hip-and misses. In South East Asia, he claims, "memory preceded understanding, an order practiced by few in our culture other than classical pianists" (p. 199). What about learning the alphabet by rote? the multiplication tables? "thirty days hath September"? Or he will say, referring to the capabilities of different languages for allowing "choices of words or phrases in given positions within figures" that the Javanese "have a rich vocabulary" of such choices, adding, in a parentheses, "much richer than ours" (p. 327). No experienced linguist (or translator) should be caught dead making such absurd claims.

4) Or caught dead mistranslating such a straightforward Indonesian sentence as "Wayang purwa adalah sebagai perlembang kehidupan manusia didunia ini." Becker renders this: "Traditional shadow theater is a signification of the life of man in this world," but what the Indonesian sentence in fact says is "Traditional shadow theater is like [sebagai] a signification. . ." To say "it is like a car" is clearly not to say "it is a car." We all make mistakes, but this is pretty elementary and tends to cast doubt on the author's linguistic authority-as does the statement that "in Malay . . . there isn't a word for something . . . like [the word] I" (p. 285). Two pages later, he himself speaks of non-Malays and Malays speaking "of herself or himself as I or aku in the other's language" (p. 287). And aku does indeed mean "I."

But despite these many and unfortunately insistent flaws, despite the often egregiously self-inflating tone and the coy asides, all of which make the book distinctly laborious reading, there are solidly useful things to be found in these pages. Becker is emphatically not laying the groundwork for a "modern philology"; he lacks either the vision or the breadth of understanding required. (Significantly, far and away the best chapter in the book is the one he wrote jointly with his musicologist wife,Judith.) Becker is not himself an angel, but he is plainly on that side. I will be retelling some of his stories and perhaps, who knows, citing some of his more choice observations. There are not many people, I suspect, who will enjoy reading Beyond Translation, but in the end it proves a modestly rewarding exercise.