Thursday, September 01, 2005
(8:34 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Style: In Translation
Last night I finished the book on Nancy and began Agamben's Remnants of Auschwitz. I've written extensively on the terrible writing style of the former -- the way a simple word is always replaced with a complicated word that is nearly a synonym and not quite, leading to a certain unnecessary haziness surrounding the entire argument -- and so turning to Agamben was a welcome relief. Certainly philosophers (in the tradition with which I am familiar) can be vague, but the really good ones seem to me to be vague in a productive and measured way -- their vagueness, when it occurs, stems directly from their command of language, their consciousness of what can be said and to what degree.Reading a poorly-written book all day made me less trusting, however, so that occasionally I would stop at a word or turn of phrase that most others would regard as innocuous, asking myself, "Is this really what he's trying to say? Does this really fit?" Then I'd realize that I was reading a translation and that part of the tacit etiquette of reading a translation is precisely not paying too much detailed attention to individual words -- that's the price we agree to pay for the convenience of not learning the language in question. But what if I were to learn Italian and read Agamben in Italian? Certainly if Agamben was the first author I read, I would be unable to judge his style. Necessarily distrusting my own skills as a reader, I would blame myself for any unnecessary obscurity or awkwardness I perceived in his prose. And rightly so!
But when do I get to judge? When have I gained the right to judge? For instance, in French, I have read Derrida, Badiou, Nancy, and Bourdieu. Derrida seems to me to be the most artful stylist, whereas Bourdieu is probably the clearest writer -- but I still am not informed enough to make such judgments. I am beginning to be more familiar with French pronunciation, but I still can't hear the (potential) music of French prose -- certainly can't come close to reading French as such. And what strikes me as a particularly good turn of phrase is always something that cannot be so economically expressed in English. It's not surprising or disappointing that I'm "still" comparing against English; it would take many years of hard work, including extended periods in a French-speaking environment, for there to be any expectation of anything else.
Have I even read enough in English to make these judgments, though? I was an English major, and I took itvery seriously in terms of reading all that one was supposed to read, but was it enough? Perhaps an equivalent process took place when I learned to appreciate English literarily -- not a single author, but a single movement, a single style, so that, most likely, literary modernism becomes the standard by which all other eras are measured. The style of a Spenser or Milton is opaque to me except insofar as it is comparable to literary modernism -- I don't understand why one would write long continuous narrative in verse, for instance. I can't understand the choices those earlier authors made in their becoming, but only in comparison to something that feels more normal, more like home.
Perhaps the only way to understand those choices is to try to join in, just as the way to learn a foreign language is to go to a place where it's dominant -- perhaps if I were a poet, then I would understand the attractiveness of the Spenserian stanza (or perhaps not even then, in this particular case), even if I didn't feel there was any work left to be done in that form. Perhaps.
