Even a literal recording — another contradiction — even highest-fidelity holographic videotape of what I and my friends said and did at that precise moment would still be a rough transcript requiring interpretation. That pause between his sentences: anger or exasperation? The pitch, volume, and tempo of his words: do those variables, integrated across context, indicate half his impatience, uncertainty, wonder at what is about to happen? Everything I might say about this place involves decoding. Things say in one language and mean in another. No getting across that gap without the ultimate transitive, to translate.
Out of unshakable habit, I look up the word. English occurrence dates from the thirteenth century. Latin origin: to relocate, carry across, port over. Among the dozen definitions (including to bring to a state of spiritual or emotional ecstasy), the now familiar biochemical one: to transform the information stored in messenger RNA into a polypeptide structure by means of the genetic code. An upstart translation of the parent meaning: to move the substance of a text from one language or dialect into another. To translate Shakespeare into Bantu, or the secretary of defense into English.
I follow the idea down to its core, where, rather than reveal itself, it dissolves. I ask the Ur-question of whether translations, unlike Todd, can be both beautiful and faithful at the same time. I nudge that old impasse concerning whether to translate all "Na-poleon" s into "Bismarck" s when porting a limbered piece across the Rhine. I live with the line about how all translations are obsolete the moment they are made, how the death of marines in Lebanon calls out for a new draft on Thucydides. What I can't decide is whether passing words from one language to another is even possible.
Pragmatically, I know it must be, for I do it all day long. Like Dr. Johnson's friend Mrs. Carter in reverse, I once could translate Epictetus as well as make a pudding. Every piece of impenetrable information I ever ported to my eternally hungry clients was born in interpretation and carried out under the guidance of rough analogy. Even now, working exclusively for myself, every genetic concept I acquire is a stand-in isomorph for an alien domain. Letters as bases. The genome as five-thousand-volume library. The ribosome as reading head, messenger RNA as strip of recording tape. Enzyme as if-then command. The presence of amino sequences inferred through the pattern of dark bands on paper. Traits located by tracking genetic markers. The ages of the earth as bands of sedimentary rock. The forms of finches radiating outwards. Sperm with heads and tails. Radiation garbling messages, introducing noise. Mendel as the Darwin of heredity. Darwin as left fielder, batting third for the Science Hall of Fame. Life as computer, steam engine, automation, animate puppet, clay shape breathed full of spiritus dei.
For out of olde feldes, as men seith,
Cometh al this newe corn fro yeer to yere;
And out of olde bokes, in good feith,
Cometh al this newe science that men lere.
Translation inhabits every sentence ever predicated. Nothing is what it is but by contrast, cracking, porting over. Every part of speech is already a figure of speech. Not long before I stopped going back, I visited Dr. Ressler, once more alone in the quiet of the control room. He was compiling a catalog, with nineteenth-century Linnaean diligence, of examples of tone-painting (I mistakenly heard "tome-painting") in Bach vocal works. We listened to scores of examples, figures as generic as joy, hastening, or humility, as literal-minded as flames, fire, sheep grazing, or the rich being sent empty away. He played a jagged, dissonant 'cello descent, buzz-saw violent. "How do they put it in the King James? "The veil of the temple was rended'?"
"In current versions, it reads something like 'And their public religious building was damaged by plate slippage.' "
Ressler smiled. "No wonder they burned Tyndale. Of course, for Bach, it was 'Der Vorhang im Tempel zerriss in zwei Stück von oben an bis unten aus.' Which is another story altogether."
"I thought you said you didn't know any foreign languages." Except I do no one any harm by remaining here, in French.
"Every scientist my age had to read a little German."
"And a little Latin?"
He shrugged. "For nomenclature."
"Greek?"
"No farther than the letter names, believe me."
"Why should I? And tone-painting?"
"Well that, yes. But is that a language?" he slid away quickly. "Is it redundant, specific, rigid, nonambiguous? Can we really hear what it means?"
"First tell me what "The veil of the temple was rended' means."
"Good point," he said. Or words to that effect.
But just because translation is everywhere necessary, it doesn't follow that it's possible. Even the perfect translations of mathematics beg the question of what is being carried over where. The length of this two-dimensional extension expressed in number. The value of that number expressed as a numeral. If performing the same operation on both sides of an equation does not change the expression's validity, what does it change? Why is the last line of a proof surprising, if its truth is already hiding tautologically in the lines above?
The load is inseparable from the cart. What I say depends on what ï say it with. The most resourceful conversion cannot take the simple phrase "Words are very rascals" and transplant the sense, stripped of conveyance, into Oriental pictographs where adjectives are conjugated, sentences have separate logical and grammatical subjects, and verbs have no tense or mood but context, cannot perform the exchange without everything except simple-minded correspondence being lost.
Conversion's impossibility only increases when the languages have recently diverged. Mother, maman, madre, mutter come nowhere near meaning the same thing. I need only boot, fringe, or grid to prove that we and the Brits are indeed two people separated by the barrier of a common language. "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" does not mean "This is not a pipe," any more than Magritte's famous symbol is smokable. All four texts no longer mean what they separably say: they are a packet, together standing for the inability to extract thorns from dialect briars.
The decline of the world in my lifetime precipitated by Vatican II and Webster III is just the latest echo of the collapse of Babel. Frank's favorite painter had to do this topic twice, in porting it to another idiom. Difficulty did not begin when God caused everybody on the work crew to render "pass the hammer" in his own unintelligible idiom. It began with "hammer," a real thing in itself, separate from that solid, cold, workable weight strapped into the flat of the hand. Every assertion is already a comparison, wedding a thing to a thing, a thing to an action, a thing to a quality, temporarily joined at a given moment from a given vantage. Shifts betray without ever leaving the mother tongue. Stravinsky once called Verdi the Puccini of Music. I know exactly what he means, but could not say it any other way.
The coding problem begins with a single word, shorthand simile. Simple naming is already unstable. There is no other way to say a thing except by its name, yet the name never says it. Once, I knew what it felt like to be the first to use a metaphor. To invent metaphor itself. I loved someone who was sunk in winter, someone who didn't watch where he walked. Garden in his face. Nest in hair. Pearls for eyes. Wall between us. Words dispersed us like the cold points of stars. The joints splay that should pull flush. Dovetailed comparisons wear out, go threadbare. But tonight, for no reason — because of a transposition converting two very different dates — language coils, starts up again. I apply my key, my adapting bit, until something fits, shifts, carries over. The conversion closing in on me will never aeain be so clean as one eene. one enzyme.