Logos Multilingual Portal


The principles of language in the human consciousness


1. Literary language as the expression of national cultures



c) The "plastic" tradition

We find another important distinction between national linguistic cultures in the concept of "canons". There are cultures apparently convinced that their national linguistic identity must be shaped by a "theology of models", and cultures in which transgression of the canon is the statutory poetic element. This contrast cannot easily be systematized. Take the French model, for example, with Boileau the arbiter of the Beautiful, and Racine with his tragedies compiling a veritable "liturgy" of arguments sustaining that language should remain impermeable to the distractions of sentiment. The inevitable consequence is that one has had a proliferation of subversive movements, and schools of disobedience, tending to characterize the evolution of French literature: from de Sade to Lautrémont, through Nerval and Baudelaire, then Mallarmé, Breton, and so on... But transgression signifies the existence of an accepted standard, and translators must know the standards if they are to avoid superimposing their own creative urges over the purely imitative, "acting" skills that the process of translation involves. Thus, anyone wanting to translate Verlaine must necessarily know something about the Parnassians in order to recognize and understand the codes parenthesized by the poet in pursuing his personal aesthetic revolution. Similarly, to translate Jean Paul one needs to be fully conversant with the jargon of notaries, theologians and practitioners of the law, permanent victims of that sharp irony employed by the German writer with the controversially French name. For Heine, the translator must explore the Volkslied, those lengthy ballads which conjure up the pietistic Germany of the Rhine. The stone to overturn for clues in this instance will be Des Knaben Wunderhorn, the collection of popular poetry compiled by Brentano and von Armin.

The problem is the same for theatre: in the Elizabethan masque one has a tradition based on a fusion of words and music, with prosodists adopting metres and rhythms in which devices such as the play on words and the nonsense lyric are taken to the limit. In Germany on the other hand, the prevailing form is the Puppenspiel: the puppet theatre, dominant since the Baroque era; consequently, the linguistic context reflects an experimentalism involving the exploration of many and various idiolects, often as a vehicle for caricature. Lessing would attempt to restore order to the situation, but Goethe's Urfaust with its cheerful linguistic anarchy shows how, for a German writer, the approach to drama could be one of drinking anew from the untainted springs of nature. In France, by contrast, the theatre is courtly, academic, with linguistic connotations centred on the tradition of lively debate, propositions, and the conversation of amorous intrigue ¾ a language characterized by elision: that whole ritual whereby words serve as status symbols and at the same time as instruments of consensus, a ritual parodied by Molière in his Bourgeois Gentilhomme.

Along with the problems relating to differences between national traditions, one has the problem of codes in an overall sense. Not even punctuation marks are subject to universal rules. The translator taking on Nietzsche comes up against a whole system of "unwritten" language, a proliferation of abstruse indications that include double dashes, and single words stranded between full stops, or left as if to vibrate between two sets of suspension periods... Another example: in translations of Kafka, the short and figurative sentences of the original are often merged to produce a more fluid and "neo-latin" form, perhaps on the basis that the German used by the praguian Kafka was not a living language but a jumble of bookish substrata. True enough, but Kafka gives expression to that power which is the history of language: the high-sounding tones of "sublime" utterance are bent to serve the purposes of caricature, "concealed by too much light", that produces the sulphurous aftertaste of his prose. Kafka's punctuation includes commas placed to interrupt the continuity of his prosody, and semicolons that introduce no new clauses but leave inert descriptions of enclosed places hanging in the air: devices used as if colours by a painter, or rests by a composer, a medium for countless moods and figures employed in connotation which ¾ if we acknowledge that literature is the art of the unsaid ¾ is far more important than denotation. Now, given that German had its origins in the translation of the Bible, undertaken by Luther while hidden away in the castle of Warburg to escape being burned as a heretic, it is clear enough that this sententiously economical procedure adopted by Kafka is designed, as Luther would have it, to "paint the devil on the wall"... Hemingway too, in The Old Man and the Sea, plays with the style of biblical sayings, suspended out of time, using caesurae and scansions in such a way that punctuation marks become tone colours, like the voices of organ pipes. The level of connotation is altogether different, however. In this instance we are presented with an Ethical notion ¾ the Calvinistic idea of sacrifice, in the contact between hands and hard matter as conduit to a state of grace ¾ and at the same time with an Aesthetic notion of the sea as a mother gathering up tears and redeeming them from their insignificance, quite the opposite of that Gnostic challenge directed at God-the-Father by Kafka.

In short, every page of literature is a score, denoted according to the conventions of national language. The process of transposing autoreferential signs from one linguistic system to another is exegesis, at once the premiss and consequence of every interpretation. In the next chapter we will look at the opposing ways in which inclusive and exclusive languages respond to foreign cultures and their creations, indeed to what Spengler would call the different quality of "culture" and "civilization".