Lectures

us. Her original text was, ’No, no, it’s not like that, I’ve just got a strong affection for him’; but something inside her translated a key word, and made her say something else. For something inside her - from one of her points of view -affection was not quite the right word. The original word was modified, not replaced, so she could have it both ways. And one could say - as she herself implied - that the way in which her slip (or self-translation) was received by me was every bit as significant as what she herself had done. I partly detranslated the slip by implying that the starker sexual desire was the original text.  She and I at this moment are having an argument about which is the real, the original, the significant text (there is a whole rhetoric here of essentialism). And we both have the same problem: if a translation is assumed to have taken place, there must be an original text. I am in a more articulate position, because I am older, and the so-called professional she has been sent to; and because I at least speak as if I know, broadly speaking, what the original text is. It is forbidden sexuality. When she feels what she calls ’translated’ it is as if powerful people are ascribing to her an original text, and then accusing her of abiding by it. Re-description, one could say, becomes translation when it implies that there is an original. And authority is conferred on to the original. If we were to turn this round, and look at it from the point of view of the translator of a real text, the question becomes, what kind of authority does the text have - what kind of authority has been conferred upon the original text -that will constrain the inevitable re-description that all translation involves?

It is perhaps more bracing - more morally and intellectually rigorous - to think of the authority of the original text as either tyrannical, or as simply conducive to the necessary probity of the translator. That the text itself - and the institutional and social contexts within which it lives and has its being - provides some kind of limit or constraint on the translator’s particular art. But I think we should also talk - somewhat along these lines - of the comfort of the text; of there being some reassurance in the fact that there is a real text to translate. That in translation of a text - as opposed, perhaps, to a person - there is, as it were, something to be true to; there has to be some correspondence, without having to revive a dogmatic correspondence theory of truth. Clearly the whole notion of being in any sense faithful to an original is imbued with moral considerations. Robert Lowell warns us, in the Introduction to his Imitations, against translators of poetry turning out ’a sprawl of language, neither faithful nor distinguished’, implying that the translator has something to be faithful to, which might also include distinguishing himself through the poem he translates, as well as showing the poem itself to be a distinguished thing. The translator also uses the text to reveal something about himself; but it depends upon there being something there to be faithful to. The comfort of the text is that it is there, and that it is as it is. The words themselves don’t change around.

It is, of course, one of the pleasures and one of the irritations of going to see an analyst that the analyst - or at least, most analysts, most of the time - is always there at the appointed time. And this is a particularly vivid issue when adolescents come for analysis. In the war between safety and excitement, reliability is something of a mixed blessing. The adolescent who is hungry for new people and new satisfactions keeps coming back - if he is lucky - to the same old familiar people, his parents, and the person he has become in relation to them. He is at the same time translating himself and staying close to the original. He moves out but he keeps coming back. The question is, how far away can you go without feeling that you are beginning to disappear? Or beginning to turn into someone else? Someone perhaps unrecognizable to those people at home?

A fourteen-year-old Jamaican boy, who had come to this country to live with relatives when he was four, and had moved around between relatives and children’s homes ever since, was referred to me by his school for what they called, ’violent, bullying, aggressive behaviour’. In our first meeting he stayed for about ten minutes, told me insistently that he hated his school, and made himself instantly likeable to me. It was obvious to me that he wasn’t spiteful, but that there were things he needed to persuade people of. The only thing I managed to say was that I imagined there were things he was right to be very cross about. This was so obvious to him that he barely bothered to register it. But at the end, just as he was leaving, he said over his shoulder, ’Thanks for that, man’, and I thought, or wished, that he was referring to my remark. Then he didn’t come for several weeks. I pursued him with letters, and eventually he came back. He said that he had just forgotten to come. I asked him if he was worried about being forgotten, and he said, ’No one forgets me, I make sure’. I wondered if he had to work quite hard at this. And he said, curiously, ’By fighting, you mean?’, and I agreed. And he said, ’Man, you’re just translating my words, I don’t need this every week’, and he grinned, and then came every week. In Freudian style, he was affirming something by negating it. And the gist of this is simple, even though the consequences are not. What I think was being confirmed at that moment, was that there was something there to be translated, and that it was worth translating. The comfort of the text is that there is something - or someone, in this case -that one might be faithful to. Though this requires secularizing the language of faith, and so another translation.

V

If we translate a text there is, in a certain sense, an original text that is there to translate. If and when we translate a person, is there anything akin to this original text? There are obvious candidates: the original text might be the version of myself  I want others (and myself) to see, or the version of myself I work at concealing; or it could be the version of myself that my parents needed me to be; or some quasi-biologically based notion of an innate true self, my basic character, or temperament. If there is this quintessence of myself - that exists in representational form - to talk of translation or re-description would be utterly misleading. The project would be not re-description, but description; to get a more accurate, and therefore reliable sense of what I really am. The untranslated, and untranslatable self. The implication of this particular quest is that everything of value will follow from finding who one really is.

The alternative to this is the apparently more absurd and strangely plausible possibility that there is no original text, no essential self (or version of the self); that there are just an unknowable series of translations of translations; preferred versions of ourselves, but not true ones. So we need not aim to get closer to our true selves -or try to be better and better at being authentic - so much as be available for retranslation whenever we suffer and desire. And that we need not only suffer other people’s re-descriptions of us, but that we can also enjoy some of them, and be interested in the fact that this is what we are doing with each other. Instead of the culture of complaint in which we are forever aggrieved about being misunderstood, we would think of misunderstanding as the name of the game: except we would call misunderstanding translation (or dream-work). In this world we wouldn’t bother to think, ’Why doesn’t he/she understand me?’, we would simply be endlessly fascinated by what people make of us.  We would be as, if not more, interested in what people hear in what we say, than in what we think we are saying. And our conversation would then involve us working out, as far as we could, why we prefer some translations to others; and why we find some so offensive. But we would have to do this without believing that there is an original that we can compare the available translations with. The way people describe us, and the ways we describe ourselves, correspond to nothing except other descriptions (our mothers, our fathers, our analysts don’t know who we are: they have their versions). There is no real, privileged, original me to refer back to; but you might ask me what I think of your descriptions of me. I don’t, though, have the real, original text in front of me to check your (or my) descriptions against. I am like a country without a map; or a country that is being always impressionistically mapped. If racism, like sexism, is the militant refusal to allow people self-definition, the question then becomes, are people more or less vulnerable - and what exactly are they vulnerable to - without compelling essential definitions of themselves? What does not needing to believe that you have a true self, or a real identity, free you to do? If my own version of who I am (and what I want) is not a privileged one - is not taken into consideration - then I am less self-reliant than I thought.

The paradox I am proposing is the notion of translation without there being anything like an original text there to translate. So, in the notion of translating a person, what exactly is available for translation? Is the whole notion of translating a person simply a poor analogy? Or could it be part of what Raymond Williams called in his lecture, ’the will to a wider perspective’ which, as he rightly says, ’is always more readily accessible to a fascinated observer than to the sons and daughters of the history who had its defeats …in their bones’. In other words, it may be all very well for me to be promoting the wonders of translation - the fascinating freedoms of re-description - without taking seriously the very real constraints one comes up against in the quest for a wider perspective, a consciousness of possibilities. The defeats, over generations, that people have in their bones, could make the analogy of translation seem like part of the problem rather than the solution. Because one of the ingredients of the defeats Williams is talking about is of people being translated against their will, having translations imposed upon them by a dominant class or group. Not being permitted one’s own version of oneself - as a person, or as a group - is a fundamental
form of oppression. After all, if we are not the authority on who we are, who is? And if there is no authority now to confer identity upon us - if no original text of ourselves exists anywhere - how will we recognize an accurate version of ourselves? In other words, if oppression can be politely called imposed translation, what are the alternatives? 

We don’t tend to talk of a text collaborating with its translator, though the author of the text may do this. People often come for psychotherapy these days suffering from translations of themselves they don’t feel that they have collaborated in. There is a difference between a parent saying to a child, ’You’re a shy person’, and their saying to a child, ’Are there situations that make you feel shy?’ There is a difference between an analyst telling her so-called patient what his dream means, and telling her patient what his dream has made her think. In other words, at least in psychoanalysis - and perhaps not only there - the only good translation is the one that invites retranslation; the one that doesn’t want to be verified so much as altered. When it comes to books we may want to be reading the definitive translation of Madame Bovary; when it comes to people there could be no comparable definitive version. The analyst aims to give the patient something he can use and not merely copy to make his own new translation - not with slogans, but with food for thought, not passwords but invitations.

And yet these admirable aims of the analyst as facilitator, or midwife, or provider of tools -the analyst as collaborative translator - is also a cover story, because the analyst himself has his own preferred versions of the patient. There is, that is to say, no good collaboration without antagonism. Psychotherapy produces competing accounts of the patient and of the therapist. But what are they deemed to be accounts of, and is the aim to produce a definitive or a provisionally satisfying version? Once again - or put like this - it seems like an absurd situation. Two people trying to make a sufficiently satisfying translation of a person that can’t be located. Supposing there is agreement between the analyst and the patient about the patient’s history, what is it going to be checked against? Instead of asking, as one might of a translated text, is it accurate, have we got it right, did these events that we have reconstructed really happen to create the present predicament, we should be asking what kind of life would believing this make possible?  What could this translation lead you to do? One would be interested in the possible consequences of the translation; one would be referring forward, not referring back.
In translating a person - if the analogy is to be of any use - we have to do something different. We have to translate while suspending our belief in an original; and in the full acknowledgement that we could never get it right. Indeed, to believe we had got it right would be to implicitly assume the existence of this original, this ur-text of ourselves. The quest might not be for the Grail, but for the quest itself. The aim of psychoanalysis would be to free people to translate and be translated, rather than to acquire a definitive, convincing version of themselves.  In other words, when we set out to translate a person - to translate a text that doesn’t exist - we have to make it up as we, go along. But we have to make it up together.


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