TRANSLATION AND READING

By Rainer Schulte

Any time we are confronted with a text we are involved in the act of reading and
interpretation.

We know that there are various ways of reading and no two people will read a text the exact
same way.

Naturally, we cannot escape our cultural and social background, which in turn influences our
approaches to the reading of texts.

In an age of scholarly jargon, the act of reading needs to be rethought in some fundamental
ways. The methodologies derived from the art and craft of translation could serve as one
possible mode to revitalize the reading of literary works.

The translator develops reading techniques that are distinctly different from those of a critic
and scholar. First of all, we are dealing with a level of intensity. Translators look at each
word through the lens of a magnifying glass. The word's appearance, its rhythmic power and
its sound potential together with its placement within a sentence begin to affect the reading
process. For a moment, it might be advantage to reflect on a statement by Hans Georg
Gadamer, who in his work on "Wieweit schreibt Sprache das Denken vor?" ("To What Extent
Does Language Prescribe Thinking?"), succinctly expresses the relationship between reading
and translating: "Lesen ist schon Übersetzen und Übersetzen ist dann noch einmal
Übersetzen...Der Vorgang des Übersetzens schliesst im Grunde das ganze Geheimnis
menschlicher Weltverständigung und gesellschaftlicher Kommunikation ein." ("Reading is
already translation, and translation is translation for the second time...The process of
translating comprises in its essence the whole secret of human understanding of the world and
of social communication.")

Whenever we read works, whether they were written by a contemporary writer or an author
from the past, we have to translate them into our present sensibility. Reading is a continuous
process of translation, and the way the translator looks at every word and investigates its
rhythmic power and its semantic possibilities reaffirms that the act of reading, seen through
the translator's eyes, is dynamic and not static. The writer creates the text and the reader as
translator is involved in a constant process of re-creating the text. The immediate conclusion
that can be drawn from this attitude toward reading negates the assumption that literary works
can be reduced to one final, definitive meaning. At the same time, there cannot be one
definitive translation of any given work. The explosion of retranslations of a poem such as
Rainer Maria Rilke's "The Panther" bears witness to the tremendous multiplicity of possible
interpretive approaches to this poem. Translation thinking opens the notion of the multiplicity
of meanings and interpretations.

Through the process of reading, we the readers are transplanted into the atmosphere of a new
situation that does not build just one clearly-defined reality, but, rather, possibilities of
various realities. Readers are left with various options that they can interpret within the
context of that atmosphere. Even though words appear as fixed entities on the page, the
translator focuses on the uncertainty inherent in words whose contours can never be fully
delineated. Words exist as isolated phenomena and as semiotic possibilities within a sentence,
paragraph, or the context of an oeuvre.

The rediscovery of that uncertainty in each word constitutes the initial attitude of the
translator. Reading becomes the making of meaning and not the description of already-fixed
meanings. As the imaginative text does not offer the reader a new comfortable reality but,
rather, places him between several realities among which he has to choose; the words that
constitute the text emanate a feeling of uncertainty. That feeling, however, becomes
instrumental in the reader/translator's engagement in a continuous process of decision-
making. Certain choices have to be made among all these possibilities of uncertain meanings.
Whatever the translation decision might be, there is still another level of uncertainty for the
reader/translator, which continues the process of reading not only within the text but even
beyond the text. This proliferation of uncertainties must be viewed as one of the most
stimulating and rewarding results that the reader/translator perspective finds in the study and
experience of the text. Reading as the generator of uncertainties, reading as the driving force
toward a decision-making process, reading as discovery of new interrelations that can be
experienced but not described in terms of a critical, content-oriented language.

In general, readers are inclined to ask the question: what does a text mean? The response to
such a question would reduce the multiplicity of possible interpretations inherent in a text to
one single answer. The translator thinks in different terms. The initial question might be
changed from "what does a text mean" to "how does a text come to mean?" That change of
perspective reorients the techniques of reading. First of all, the semantic parameters are in a
constant state of flux. It is extremely difficult to define the exact meaning of a word, and
furthermore no two words will have the exact same meaning. As soon as a word is placed
next to another word, some of the original contours of each word begin to be modified.
Perhaps the major contribution that translation thinking brings to the act of reading is the
translator's practice of seeing words not as isolated pillars but rather as linkages to other
words. To comprehend the overall atmosphere and an author's direction of thinking in a given
work, the translator enacts a horizontal walking through a text. In a given poem, the reader
contemplates the direction of thinking that a particular word projects. Pablo Neruda opens his
poem "Arte Poetica" with "Entre espacio y sombra." (between space and shadow). Both
words indicate a movement of expansion. Keeping that characteristic in mind the reader can
then proceed through the poem to look for other nouns, verbs, or adjectives that suggest a
similar movement of expansion. And indeed the poem abounds with words that suggest
undefined contours and expansion: dream, wind, sound, bell, smell, noise, and a ceaseless
movement.

Reading from a translator's point of view represents a continuous process of opening up new
possibilities of interactions and semantic associations. In the translation process there are no
definitive answers, only attempts at solutions in response to states of uncertainly generated by
the interaction of the words' semantic fields and sounds. The reconstruction of these
associations differ with each reader and translator, which is ultimately responsible for the
varied interpretations that are generated by different readers of the same text. The
proliferation of multiple translations that many novels, and especially poems have undergone,
confirm the existence of different interpretations generated by the same text. Reading
institutes the making of meanings through questions in which the possibility of an answer
results in another question: What if? The translator/reader makes the reading activity a
process in which each word begins to assume possible semantic associations which prevents
the act of interpretation to become static.
Applying the translator's eye to the reading of a text changes our attitude toward the reading
process by dissolving the fixity of print on a page into a potential multiplicity of semantic
connections. The words on the page represent only a weak reflection of the situations that the
author intended to express. The translator/reader considers the word a means to an end, the
final destination of which can never be put into the limitations of static formulations.

The methodologies of translation can therefore be used to reactivate the act of reading as a
dynamic process that engages the reader in the experience of the literary work.