Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

The Task Of The Translator: Armenian Golgotha And The Conspiracy Of

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

  • The Task Of The Translator: Armenian Golgotha And The Conspiracy Of

    THE TASK OF THE TRANSLATOR: ARMENIAN GOLGOTHA AND THE CONSPIRACY OF HISTORY
    By Hovig Tchalian

    Asbarez
    Apr 29th, 2010

    A film about the Armenian Genocide, Ravished Armenia, was recently
    screened in Pasadena's Armenian Center. The film, directed by Eric
    Nazarian, is thought to be the first about the Genocide made in the
    United States.

    The film is in part a retelling of the Genocide memoir of Aurora
    Mardiganian, published soon after she came to the United States in
    1918. Interestingly, the film is also a partial reconstruction of
    the book's original film version, made in 1919 and now lost. As the
    announcement of the film suggests, paraphrasing the book's editor,
    "it would seem that history conspired to destroy Ravished Armenia, the
    only personal filmed record of what took place between 1915 and 1918."

    Unlike other films based on books, therefore, this one has an unusually
    complex history that includes reconstructions of both print and film
    versions, in the larger context of Genocide reconstruction.

    And yet, the process of making even this complex a film - about a film,
    about a memoir, about historical events - relies fundamentally, like
    all others, on the reconstitutive act of translation, across genres,
    cultures and historical periods. The act of reconstituting the memoir
    and the story it tells is susceptible to the historical "conspiracy"
    mentioned in the film announcement, it seems, precisely because it
    is grounded in translation.*

    The complexity of translation can be better demonstrated, perhaps,
    with a seemingly simpler example, the translation of a Genocide memoir
    from Armenian into English. The example in this case is the April 2009
    publication, into English, of Armenian Golgotha, the Armenian-language
    memoir of a Genocide survivor, the priest Grigoris Balakian, translated
    by his great-nephew, the poet, author and scholar, Peter Balakian.

    The memoir is lengthy - the English edition extends to over 500 pages.

    The process of translating it took the better part of ten years,
    with several translators collaborating with its chief translator,
    Peter Balakian, to complete it. Understandably, therefore, completing
    a translation of this magnitude may encounter numerous difficulties
    along the way, some mundane and others more profound. As the translator
    suggests, for instance, there is the difficulty of his great uncle's
    early 20th-century Armenian to contend with (xxix). But even this
    seemingly mundane issue of translation encompasses two distinct
    aspects - the historical and the cultural. Grigoris Balakian's
    Armenian has to be translated across the decades and, only then,
    cross the cultural and linguistic threshold from Armenian into English.

    As the German-Jewish intellectual and critic Walter Benjamin suggests
    in his essay "The Task of the Translator" about the German and French
    versions of the word "pain," "In 'Brof' and 'pain' the intended object
    is the same, but the mode of intention differs. It is because of their
    modes of intention that the two words signify something different to a
    German or a Frenchman, that they are not regarded as interchangeable,
    and in fact ultimately seek to exclude one another." (Benjamin's choice
    of words, "pain," is not without irony here. As a Jew, he fled Nazi
    persecution, only to commit suicide in 1940, on the brink of capture
    on the Spanish border.) In this early statement in Benjamin's essay,
    the separation of the German and French languages embedded as a fissure
    in the notion of pain itself, rent as it is between two different
    "modes of intention," suggests a fundamental obstacle to overcome,
    a determining mechanism of translation.

    Since English is the modern lingua franca, translating words into
    English places the translator at the cross-roads of many more than
    two languages and cultures. In Armenian Golgotha, for instance,
    place names act as a potentially divisive obstacle. While Peter
    Balakian's co-translator, Aris Sevag, only mentions them briefly, he
    nevertheless hints that making the memoir accessible to the widest
    possible readership entailed the apparently unthinkable, replacing
    Armenian place names with their Turkish ones, which have, ironically,
    gained much wider currency (xliii).

    The act of translating a historical memoir such as Armenian Golgotha,
    therefore, is fundamentally wedded to history. As Benjamin is acutely
    aware, times change, and with them historically derived uses and
    conventions: "For in its continuing life, which could not be so called
    if it were not the transformation and renewal of a living thing, the
    original is changed. Established words also have their after-ripening.

    ... What once sounded fresh may come to sound stale, and what once
    sounded idiomatic may later sound archaic." The writer of the memoir
    himself is caught in this historical flux. As Peter Balakian admits,
    his great-uncle is susceptible to the conventions and faults of
    his age: "sometimes he essentializes Turks in a racialist way
    characteristic of the period" (xviii).

    These at times more mundane considerations become, in Benjamin's
    rendering, characteristic of the separation of languages and,
    through the attempt at uniting them, part of a larger struggle that
    yokes history and language: "If the kinship of languages manifests
    itself in translation, it does so otherwise than through the vague
    similarity of original and copy. For it is clear that kinship does
    not necessarily involve similarity. ... Wherein can the kinship of
    two languages be sought, apart from a historical kinship?"

    It is perhaps not surprising, therefore, that the roles of historical
    witness and originary writer are difficult to disentangle, even at
    the memoir's inception. In this regard, the struggle of translating
    Armenian Golgotha ninety years after the fact first manifests itself in
    the act of writing the memoir, itself caught in the mesh of history. In
    his Author's Preface, Grigoris Balakian clearly expresses his feelings
    of inadequacy and uneasiness at depicting the events of 1915. In fact,
    he presents himself as a historian of sorts, one desperately needed by
    the rapidly dwindling Armenian nation: "Although you had many writers,
    poets, novelists, playwrights, and especially journalists and editors,
    you never had a historian" (456).

    The feeling of deep ambivalence that the act of committing his
    observations to print precipitates for Grigoris Balakian has its source
    in the historical events he is witnessing. The writer sounds as unsure
    about the prospects of doing justice to what he sees as he is adamant
    about his need to make the attempt: "I myself felt both weak at heart
    and of pen, to write about the great annihilation that surpasses even
    the bloodiest pages of human history" (454). But as his confession
    suggests, this unambiguous profession of personal inadequacy primarily
    reflects the "surpassing" magnitude of the events he sees unfolding
    before him. Balakian makes this aspect of the telling explicit only
    two pages later in the same preface: "Never doubt my story of the
    great crime, and never think that what has been written herein has
    been in any way exaggerated. On the contrary, I have written the bare
    minimum, because it is not humanly possible to describe the horrific
    and ineffable martyrdom of over one million dead sons and daughters"
    (454).

    As the author puts it, it is his gargantuan task of making "a critical
    analysis of your [i.e., Armenia's] real inner life hidden behind the
    curtain" (456), what he calls a page later "veiled secret moments,"
    that causes him considerable anxiety: "as you had no historian, it
    was a thankless task to truthfully write this chapter of contemporary
    Armenian history with its veiled secret moments and, in so doing,
    to become everyone's enemy" (457). Balakian's "thankless task"
    encompasses not only witnessing the genocidal events but having to
    relive them in the retelling, coupled with the awesome burden of
    conveying them to posterity, whole and intact.

    Balakian's attempt to reveal the "secrets" hidden behind the
    historical curtain bears an uncanny resemblance to Benjamin's
    description of the translator's encounter with a similar "secret,"
    the truth or "message" lodged in the language of the poet he seeks
    to translate: "But what then is there in a poem - and even bad
    translators concede this to be essential - besides a message? Isn't
    it generally acknowledged to be the incomprehensible, the secret, the
    "poetic"? That which the translator can render only insofar as he -
    also writes poetry?" The truth of the original memoir that Peter
    Balakian, or any other translator, is concerned about 'capturing'
    corresponds in this particular memoir of Genocidal atrocities to
    what Grigoris Balakian refers to as the "ineffable martyrdom" of
    the victims, both in turn reflecting what Benjamin locates in the
    hard, intractable "kernel" that resists any attempt to translate it,
    through language and across history: "[translation] nevertheless at
    least points, with wonderful penetration, toward the predetermined,
    inaccessible domain where languages are reconciled and fulfilled. The
    original does not attain this domain in every respect, but in it lies
    that which, in a translation, is more than a message. This essential
    kernel can be more precisely defined as what is not retranslatable
    [sic] in a translation."

    But as we saw in Grigoris Balakian's own confession, while the
    translator's task is critical, it ultimately leads away from him and
    toward what the writer calls the "thankless" task act of recomposition,
    of historical translation. The memoirist is a historian, because
    both translate. They are linked in their attempt at being true to
    the original, by what we might call their equally uneasy relationship
    to history - the translator's to the memoir and the memoir's to its
    own witness.

    As such, the memoirist's attempt at rendering the ineffable transcends
    any subsequently simple attempt at fidelity on the translator's part.

    As Benjamin succinctly defines it, the "distinguishing mark of bad
    translation" is the "inexact transmission of an inessential content."

    The act of truthfully translating "content" takes the translator far
    beyond a simple attempt at fidelity, the narrow effort of being true
    to the original. It confronts him instead with the far more daunting
    task of capturing its essence, of representing the 'whole' truth.

    Benjamin mentions the ideal translator's role as a poet for a reason -
    not primarily because it makes him a better wordsmith but because it
    implies that he has what we might call, for lack of a better term,
    the 'sensibility' of a poet. As Peter Balakian reminds us in his own
    preface, he is both a poet and a translator. But Benjamin's rendering
    of the act of translation, as well as the circumstances of Grigoris
    Balakian's memoir, suggest that we should see the reminder as a
    fundamentally historical act - not a mention of the translator's
    appropriate skills or abilities so much as a summoning of his
    correspondingly appropriate identity for taking on his task.

    Benjamin's emphasis on this correspondence that transcends fidelity
    points to the central question surrounding any witness account - its
    value, beyond those of similar ones, in reinstating an otherwise dim
    historical reality. There are, after all, countless other observer
    accounts, including perhaps the best known, that of the Henry
    Morgenthau, Jr., the American Ambassador to Turkey at the time. What
    seems to distinguish Grigoris Balakian's account is its status as
    memoir. As both eyewitness and survivor of the atrocities, Balakian is
    at once an 'outsider' and an 'insider.' Armenian Golgotha, therefore,
    bears a unique relationship to the events it describes, one available
    to only a small handful of eyewitness accounts. As Peter Balakian
    suggests, "many readers will find that Armenian Golgotha, because of
    its intimacy with Turkish culture and the Anatolian landscape, will
    be another important text that tells the story of the eradication
    of the Armenians from inside Turkey and reveals Turkish denial as a
    continued assault on truth" (xx). Peter Balakian is referring in part
    to the physical, literal landscape, the wilderness of Anatolia into
    which Grigoris Balakian escaped and in which he survived for four long
    years. But beyond that, the words evoke the larger milieu of Anatolian
    culture, politics and history that the memoir evokes. It is entirely
    fitting, therefore, that such a memoir is situated at the crossroads
    between two cultures, embedded as it is in the Anatolian landscape,
    "intimate" with Turkish as well as Armenian history and culture,
    its status as the ultimate witness against denial in part a result
    of straddling the threshold between them.

    But can we, as a result, conjecture that the memoir's intimacy
    with its environment captures the writer's deep understanding of
    the victims' plight better than, say, Morgenthau's? While there is
    ample reason to do so, claiming the memoirist's status as an insider
    also presents a difficult conundrum - the fact itself shields others
    (i.e., non-Armenians) from the truth. Keeping in mind Benjamin's
    rendering of the translator's complex and multi-layered task, it
    is worth considering that our own historical distance from events
    of the past is no more preferable to, say, Morgenthau's linguistic
    or cultural distance from the victims themselves. It is here that
    Benjamin's characterization of the translator's task is especially
    pertinent. By recognizing the inherent complexities of translation,
    he also hints at their ultimate resolution: "Just as fragments of
    a vessel, in order to be fitted together, must correspond to each
    other in the tiniest details but need not resemble each other, so
    translation, instead of making itself resemble the meaning of the
    original, must lovingly, and in detail, fashion in its own language
    a counterpart to the original's mode of intention, in order to make
    both of them recognizable as fragments of a vessel, as fragments
    of a greater language." Armenian Golgotha is a perfect instance of
    Benjamin's fragment, its correspondence with the Anatolian context
    suggesting their embedding in a "greater language."

    But while Benjamin's prophetic language places the reconstitution
    of the primordial "vessel" in a supra-historical, messianic future,
    the task of both Balakians is nonetheless resolutely historical. Peter
    Balakian's reference to Raphael Lemkin, the Polish Jewish legal scholar
    who coined the term "genocide" in 1943, is telling in this regard:
    "While it is likely that Lemkin never read Armenian Golgotha because of
    the obstacle of translation, he had accrued a depth of understanding
    of the events of 1915 such that his own knowledge of the Armenian
    Genocide is vividly borne out by and embodied in Balakian's memoir"
    (xx). Balakian singles out "translation" as the primary "obstacle"
    facing Lemkin but one that never prevented him from "understanding"
    the victims' plight. While separated from the events of the Genocide by
    both historical and linguistic distance, Lemkin is able to 'translate'
    the events depicted in Armenian Golgotha - the memoir's Benjaminian
    "secret" or "kernel" - across the cultural-historical threshold by
    fashioning the same deep, visceral, understanding that the memoir
    "embodies." In other words, as a reader, Lemkin displays the kind of
    identity, the sensibility, required of the ideal translator.

    Such an act of rewriting is, of course, also fraught with a kind of
    ambiguity at least as complex as the writer's own. That ambiguity
    represents in part, as we saw earlier, the uneasy moment of Grigoris
    Balakian's originary act. But it is also the subsequent act of
    rewriting, of translating, the memoir across the cultural-historical
    divide that opens up the possibility of denial, which purports to be
    simply another, or different, re-writing, like the conflicting account
    in a historical trial, presented, in Peter Balakian's evocative
    phrasing, by a "testifier" (xxiii). Grigoris Balakian mentions,
    for instance, an early and more localized rewriting of history, a
    disturbingly subtle form of denial: German soldiers Grigoris Balakian
    meets speak of Armenians as money-hungry "Christian Jews," conflating
    Turkish rhetoric with German stereotypes, reinterpreting history at the
    very moment of its making (xviii). In moments such as these, what the
    sponsors of Ravished Armenia justifiably characterize as the anonymous
    "conspiracy" of history becomes a deliberate vehicle of betrayal.

    As Walter Benjamin suggests, the attempt at reconstitution both
    enables and complicates the task of the translator. It is here that
    the burden - better, the responsibility - of translation takes on a
    deeply historical character. The publication of Armenian Golgotha in
    English brings to light the complex kernel, the "hidden secret," at the
    center of Grigoris Balakian's memoir. Its publication a year before
    the screening of Ravished Armenia, a film based on a lost original,
    also reminds us that, while no act of translation is immune to the
    conspiracy of history, it is also far from irrevocably subject to
    the betrayal of its agents.

    *The Latin root of translation, translatio, means to "carry across."

    All Rights Reserved: Critics' Forum, 2010.

    Hovig Tchalian holds a PhD in English literature from UCLA.  He has
    edited several journals and also published articles of his own.

    You can reach him or any of the other contributors to Critics' Forum
    at [email protected]. This and all other articles published
    in this series are available online at www.criticsforum.org.  To
    sign up for a weekly electronic version of new articles, go to
    www.criticsforum.org/join.  Critics' Forum is a group created to
    discuss issues relating to Armenian art and culture in the Diaspora
Working...
X