“We can only prohibit that which we can name,” wrote George Steiner in After Babel. Throughout the nineteenth century, the classic Greek and Roman texts were recommended for the moral education of women only when purified in translation. The Reverend J. W. Burgon made this explicit when in 1884, from the pulpit of New College, Oxford, he preached against allowing women into the university, where they would have to study the texts in the original. “If she is to compete successfully with men for ‘honours’ “ (wrote the timorous reverend), “you must needs put the classic writers of antiquity unreservedly into her hands—in other words, must introduce her to the obscenities of Greek and Roman literature. Can you seriously intend it? Is it then a part of your programme to defile that lovely spirit with the filth of old-world civilisation, and to acquaint maidens in their flower with a hundred abominable things which women of any age (and men too, if that were possible) would rather a thousand times be without?”
It is possible to censor not only a word or a line of text through translation but also an entire culture, as has happened time and again throughout the centuries among conquered peoples. Towards the end of the sixteenth century, for instance, the Jesuits were authorized by King Philip II of Spain, champion of the Counter-Reformation, to follow in the steps of the Franciscans and establish themselves in the jungles of what is now Paraguay. From 1609 until their expulsion from the colonies in 1767, the Jesuits created settlements for the native Guaranis, walled communities called reducciones because the men, women, and children who inhabited them were “reduced” to the dogmas of Christian civilization. The differences between conquered and conquerors were, however, not easily overcome. “What makes me a pagan in your eyes,” said a Guarani shaman to one of the missionaries, “is what prevents you from being a Christian in mine.” The Jesuits understood that effective conversion required reciprocity and that understanding the other was the key that would allow them to keep the pagans in what was called, borrowing from the vocabulary of Christian mystic literature, “concealed captivity.” The first step to understanding the other was learning and translating the other’s language.
A culture is defined by that which it can name; in order to censor, the invading culture must also possess the vocabulary to name those things belonging to the other. Therefore, translating into the tongue of the conqueror always carries within the act the danger of assimilation or annihilation; translating into the tongue of the conquered, the danger of overpowering or undermining. These inherent conditions of translation extend to all variations of political imbalance. Guarani (still the language spoken, albeit in a much altered form, by more than a million Paraguayans) had been until the arrival of the Jesuits an oral language. It was then that the Franciscan Fray Luis de Bolanos, whom the natives called “God’s wizard” because of his gift for languages, compiled the first Guarani dictionary. His work was continued and perfected by the Jesuit Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, who after several years’ hard labor gave the completed volume the title of Tesoro de la lengua guarani (Thesaurus of the Guarani Tongue). In a preface to a history of the Jesuit missions in South America, the Paraguayan novelist Augusto Roa Bastos noted that in order for the natives to believe in the faith of Christ, they needed, above all, to be able to suspend or revise their ancestral concepts of life and death. Using the Guaranis’ own words, and taking advantage of certain coincidences between the Christian and Guarani religions, the Jesuits retranslated the Guarani myths so that they would foretell or announce the truth of Christ. The Last-Last-First-Father, Namandu, who created His own body and the attributes of that body from the primordial mists, became the Christian God from the book of Genesis; Tupa, the First Parent, a minor divinity in the Guarani pantheon, became Adam, the first man; the crossed sticks, yvyráyuasá, which in the Guaraní cosmology sustain the earthly realm, became the Holy Cross. And conveniently, since Ñamandú’s second act was to create the word, the Jesuits were able to infuse the Bible, translated into Guaraní, with the accepted weight of divine authority.
In translating the Guaraní language into Spanish, the Jesuits attributed to certain terms that denoted acceptable and even commendable social behavior among the natives the connotation of that behavior as perceived by the Catholic Church or the Spanish court. Guaraní concepts of private honor, of silent acknowledgment when accepting a gift, of a specific as opposed to a generalized knowledge, and of a social response to the mutations of the seasons and of age, were translated bluntly and conveniently as “Pride,” “Ingratitude,” “Ignorance,” and “Instability.” This vocabulary allowed the traveler Martin Dobrizhoffer of Vienna to reflect, sixteen years after the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1783, in his Geschichte der Abiponer (History of the Abiponer People), on the corrupt nature of the Guaranís: “Their many virtues, which certainly belong to rational beings, capable of culture and learning, serve as frontispiece to very irregular compositions within the works themselves. They seem like automata in whose making have been joined elements of pride, ingratitude, ignorance, and instability. From these principal sources flow the brooks of sloth, drunkenness, insolence, and distrust, with many other disorders which stultify their moral quality.”
In spite of Jesuit claims, the new system of beliefs did not contribute to the happiness of the natives. Writing in 1769, the French explorer Louis Antoine de Bougainville described the Guaraní people in these laconic words: “These Indians are a sad lot. Always trembling under the stick of a pedantic and stern master, they possess no property and are subjected to a laborious life whose monotony is enough to kill a man with boredom. That is why, when they die, they don’t feel any regret in leaving this life.”
By the time of the expulsion of the Jesuits from Paraguay, the Spanish chronicler Fernández de Oviedo was able to say of those who had “civilized” the Guaraní people what a Briton, Calgacus, is reported to have said after the Roman occupation of Britain: “The men who have perpetuated these acts call these conquered places ‘peaceful.’ I feel they are more than peaceful — they are destroyed.”
Throughout history, censorship in translation has also taken place under more subtle guises, and in our time, in certain countries, translation is one of the means by which “dangerous” authors are submitted to cleansing purges.
(The Brazilian Nélida Piñón in Cuba, the decadent Oscar Wilde in Russia, Native American chroniclers in the United States and Canada, the French enfant terrible Georges Bataille in Franco’s Spain have all been published in truncated versions. And in spite of all my good intentions, could not my version of Yourcenar be considered censorious?) Often, authors whose politics might be read uncomfortably are simply not translated and authors with a difficult style are either passed over in favor of others more easily accessible or condemned to weak or clumsy versions of their work.
Not all translation, however, is corruption and deceit. Sometimes cultures can be rescued through translation, and translators become justified in their laborious and menial pursuits. In January 1976, the American lexicographer Robert Laughlin sank to his knees in front of the chief magistrate of the town of Zinacantán in southern Mexico and held up a book that had taken Laughlin fourteen years to compile: the great Tzotzil dictionary that rendered into English the Mayan language of 120,000 natives of Chiapas, known also as the “People of the Bat.” Offering the dictionary to the Tzotzil elder, Laughlin said, in the language he had so painstakingly recorded, “If any foreigner comes and says that you are stupid, foolish Indians, please show him this book, show him the 30,000 words of your knowledge, your reasoning.”