Translation as a Derived Art

O ne of the more dismaying romantic ironies ever uttered about language is the nineteenth-century poet Fyodor Tyutchev's line from his poem "Silentium": 'A thought when uttered is a lie." "We speak and speak about language," Heidegger has said. "What we speak about language is always ahead of us. Our speaking merely follows language constantly. Thus we are continually lagging behind.... Accordingly, when we speak of language we remain entangled in a speaking that is persistently inadequate." (1971:75) Thinking about language is like trying to think about thinking. Language and thought are so close that their intimacy deceives us. Thought about language is a willo'-th'-wisp: we reach out to grasp thought about language, and both thought and language slip away. We can be aware of language and build rules from our awareness but we cannot penetrate the structural depths, except in glimpses. Like the conscious mind that knows the subconscious mind is thinking, but does not know what it is thinking, except in synaptic flashes, we are locked away from thought about language. If language itself is a lying medium, how can we sustain the idea that art-especially the art of translation whose bilingual paradoxes are notorious -can convey value? Is what we read a lie? Is what we read in translation a lie about a lie? The question I ask in this pessimistic context today is not, "Is translation a primary or derivative art?" but rather, "On what grounds will translation be accepted as a primary art?" My own experience of translation criticism and theory derives from familiarity with the so-called Soviet school of translation, and an interest in the recently developed modern field of translation studies. My biases about translation as a derived art are that translation is what Soviet translators call a high art; that more authentic breakthroughs in authentic new knowledge about the process of translation have been made in the past two decades than in the previous two millennia; and that modern ideas about translation have been converging on a worldwide basis. Translation is not yet accepted as a pri-