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THE WORD IN THE WORD
A Few Remarks on the Art of Reading
In August 2007, Luis Camnitzer
initiated the project “The Last Book”, a collection of written and visual
texts, meant as a legacy for future generations and as a document of the
book-based culture of our time. “The Last Book” was intended to be a testimony
of how our civilization is mirrored by the printed word, in case this should
disappear by catastrophe or for other reasons, or mutate due to the strong
impact of the Internet and other media.
Is our book-based culture really in
danger? And, if so, is literary reading, as part of it, doomed to disappear or
to mutate? Nobody can see into the future, but if the word mutation is
interpreted as an aspect of innovation, then we can say that book-based culture
with all its facets is, to a large extent, but not in every respect, mutating.
We are witnessing rapid development of the media as carriers of information,
but the nature of the relationship between humans as receptors and processors
of information, and the information itself, be it mundane or artistically
sophisticated, remains basically the same. If we consider the realm of art and,
within it, the interplay between art consumers and works of art, the statement
appears valid that the nature of this interaction has not changed much in the
course of time. The same holds true with regard to the relationship between the
reader and a piece of literature in the process of its reception. Without
doubt, each generation of readers have their own premises when getting involved
with a literary work, but reading as a cognitive and aesthetic experience has,
in my opinion, been roughly the same across the ages.
A literary work is not a finite
product, but a permanent, creative process of encoding and decoding of reality,
process which takes place in our consciousness. It starts with the writer, who
encodes his own sense of reality generated by his personality, education and
environment. The peculiarities of his mother tongue play an important role in
this process. The resulting literary work undergoes a further performance in
the mind of the reader in the course of its decoding. Again, such factors as
education, personality and language characteristics (new ones when readers have
other mother tongues) leave their marks on the product in process. A new
fictional reality emerges, which is hardly likely to be identical to that of
the writer. The more skilfully and convincingly the writer processes his own
sense of reality, the higher the probability will be that the reader
experiences it in a similar way. Identity of experience is, though, out of the
question and actually undesirable, as it would mean that a completed work of
art is always and for all readers the same, an end product instead of a living
corpus apt to develop new potentialities.
To sum up, the relationship between
writer, writer's reality, text, reader and reader's reality can be represented
by the figure below. It becomes obvious that one piece of literature will have
as many fictional realities as readers. This is a sort of primary type of
translation, in which the writer
'translates' and the reader 're-translates' reality according to their
own perception of it.
writer
¦
v
reality' reality''
¦ ^
v ¦
text
- - - - - - - - - - - > reader
As indicated above, among the
features that make readers different
from one another, turning each one into a unique art receptor, a
significant role is played by how the specific structures of the readers'
languages shape their views of the surrounding reality. This amounts to saying
that people coming from different language communities have diverging
approaches to the same verbal contexts, whether in literary or daily use. But
when talking about receptors from different language communities, we usually
imply that that specific literary text is actually accessed in translation and
not in the author's original version. It is, of course, a secondary type of
translation, the transposition into a new language of the primary translation.
Doubtlessly, a difficult task considering all the mental processes involved in
this complex design.
What makes a good translator? Any
translator of poetry or prose can only do their work according to their
artistic intuition which, in its turn, is the result of years of involvement
with literature, culture and the complexities of civilization. In his or her
encounter with the poem, he or she is confronted with the end product of the
creative process of the poet. But is this really an end product? Yes and no.
From the poet's view it is an end product. What starts as an amalgam of
feelings, sensations and urges has been grasped, structured, organized and, ultimately,
materialized in words and images – an end product. For readers, translators
included, this end product is a beginning, a platform for interpretation. They
must undergo the opposite process, from the printed words to the mental images,
to the depths of whatever urged the poet to write that special poem in that
special way – to what Walter Benjamin calls “the unfathomable, the mysterious”.
To what extent the translator can
be successful in this endeavor widely depends on the degree to which that, what
I would call the primary amalgam, the raw material at the origin of the
literary work, especially of the poetic work, has been structured and organized
by its author into the end product. The more transparent this structuring of
the raw material is, the less demanding the translator's task will be, due to
the fact that the author's intention is easier to grasp. Where the author is
very parsimonious when putting flesh to the bones of his work, the challenge
for the translator is a huge one. An ideal solution to this quandary has yet to
be found.
Opinions about the requirements on
a good translator are, without doubt, diverse, but I believe that one of the
main aspects of this debate refers to the translator being, like every reader,
an individual receptor of the work of art. That means that, on the one hand, he
himself cannot claim ultimate comprehension of a literary work, and, on the
other hand, neither readers nor critics can expect any final or universal
translation from him. It is precisely the potential of every piece of
literature to be interpreted and, accordingly, translated in more than one way
that makes this work vital and durable.
Summing up, reading in general and
poetry reading to an even higher extent, are most complex processes which require
more than just skimming through clusters of words. I second NilavroNill Shoovro
in his assertion that superficial reading is not much worth. Thoughtful
reading, on the other hand, may be more time and attention demanding, but in
return it can be highly rewarding and enriching.
Dr.
Aprilia Zank
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