Can These Bones Live? Translation, Survival, and Cultural Memory

Abstract

Introduction. "Can these bones live?" -- 1. Figuring translation : lovers, traitors, and cultural mediators -- 2. Genre and genealogy : the slave narrative translated otherwise and elsewhere -- 3. Scenes of inheritance : intergenerational transmission and imperiled narratives -- 4. The memorialist as translator : Jorge Semprún -- Epilogue. "The home of the photograph is the cemetery" : a second-generation Holocaust narrative. Review: n her 1993 book Comparative Literature: A Critical Introduction, Susan Bassnett wrote that comparative literature had ceased to be a viable discipline and translation studies should take its place. A decade later Bassnett admitted that the statement was deliberately provocative and that translation studies and comparative literature should not be seen as distinct disciplines but rather as “methods of approaching literature, ways of reading that are mutually beneficial” (Bassnett 2006, 6). There are still debates going on as to whether translation studies is a discipline in its own right, but for a change this is now taking place not in the context of comparative literature but in relation to modern languages, which seem to be in crisis, at least in the British and American universities. Within this uncertain situation one thing is certain: the view of translation studies proposed by Bassnett, as an analytical approach to be applied to a variety of textual and cultural phenomena, is gaining popularity. Emily Apter's The Translation Zone (2006) is good evidence of this, and now we have another example, Bella Brodzki's Can these Bones Live? Translation, Survival, and Cultural Memory. Brodzki opens her book with a long exposition on the changing role of the concept of translation and its place within a wider field of critical theory. Acknowledging her indebtedness to Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida and J. Hillis Miller, she defines the nature of translation in the following way: More than ever, translation is now understood to be politics as well as poetics, an ethics as well as an aesthetics. Translation is no longer seen to involve only narrowly circumscribed technical procedures of specialized or local interest, but rather to underwrite all cultural transactions, from the most benign to the most venal. It is the purpose of this book to show how these broader conceptions of translation are embedded in the practice of translating itself. (p. 2) This general statement is further placed in the context of the ongoing debates within translation studies. Brodzki challenges Venuti on his major concepts of foreignization and domestication, indicating that the pattern is not that simple if we consider translation between minority languages. She looks at translation as a way of ensuring the text's survival, draws our attention to the importance of translation in constructing literary history, and locates translation at the very centre of the processes of communication. One thing Brodzki declares she will not do is to concentrate on “translation practice as a procedure or technique” (p. 12). In this book, then, translation is a theme, a recurring motif, a metaphor; it is used as an overall intellectual concept that links chapters devoted to a variety of texts. This is clearly stated in the introduction: This book brings together and juxtaposes a diverse collection of twentieth-century literary texts, both fictional and autobiographical, in which translation performs overtly and covertly - as an intensive structuring and thematic device within a narrative, and as a coextensive process of transporting and transposing meanings, both vertically and horizontally, within the same language, as well as across different languages, cultures, genres, and modes of artistic expressions. Each chapter examines a discrete example of a different translation effect or protocol, beginning with a rather circumscribed literary thematic that radiates out toward the interpenetrating planes of history and culture. (p. 12) Apart from the introduction, which provides a good account of Brodzki's critical approach to the texts, the volume has four chapters and an epilogue. The first chapter discusses translators as characters in literary texts written by Italo Calvino, Cynthia Ozick, Barbara Wilson and Philip Roth. Here Brodzki suggests that the translator as a literary character seems to signify enigmatic, often estranged ways of being and that the figurative presence of translation in our lives is more pervasive than we normally think. The second chapter focuses on the literary representation of slavery, but it also traces the routes along which the slave narrative genre and the topic migrate, transform and evolve. In effect Brodzki is looking here at what happens to the memory of events and how history and memory merge and coexist in different narrative forms. The texts under consideration are Charles Johnson's Oxherding Tale (1982), Buchi Emecheta's The Slave Girl (1977) and Andr Schwartz-Bart's La Multresse Solitude (1972). Brodzki views these books as the twentieth-century translations of slave narrative and identifies a clear link between slavery and translation: Perhaps it is not by chance that slavery and translation, along with metaphor, share a certain tropic quality: both are schematized and put into operation through similar means. They necessarily involve passage, movement, displacement, the transfer of bodies, languages and texts. (p. 72) However, following Benjamin's (1968) concept of translation, Brodzki claims that these translations do not leave the original unchanged. In fact, translation problematizes the very meaning of words such as “original” and “language”. They both become fluid concepts, remaining in constant change and transition. Benjamin's understanding of translation also informs the subsequent two chapters. Brodzki writes about the social transfer of memory and how this mode of transmission may contrast with a historical account of past events. But the discussion here does not concern ordinary memory; it is a specific memory in a post-traumatic state. In chapter 3 we have a reading of a French Holocaust survivor memoir Chamberet: Recollections from an Ordinary Childhood (1987) by Claude Morhange-Bgu and T. Obinkaram Echewa's I Saw the sky Catch Fire (1992), which is a postcolonial novel set in the context of the 1929 tax revolt in Nigeria, known as “The Women's War”. Brodzki looks at these texts and the original events as if she were considering originals and their translations. However, as we know, the paradox is that the original is now accessible only through translation, that is, through the narrative which is based on the memory of what happened and not on any other record of the actual events. The case of the French Holocaust memoir is the only one in this book where Brodzki looks at translation as what she calls a “technical” procedure. She discovers that the English translation of the French text was in fact the first edition of this memoir in any language, and draws the conclusion that at the time when the memoir was written there was no “receptive audience” (p. 126) for this kind of writing in France. It is a pity this issue is left without further analysis, because it is no exception for a Holocaust memoir to have complex ontologies in which translation plays a significant role. Andrea Hammel's (2004) study of Ruth David's and Ruth Klger's memoirs is a good illustration of how this phenomenon can be critically accounted for. The fourth chapter continues the “memory” motif. The discussion of Jorge Semprn's writing supplements the question of memory transfer with the issue of mourning. For Semprn, who lived through the Spanish Civil War and survived Buchenwald only to realize that his brand of left-wing ideology was in ruins, writing was a way of mourning and coping with loss, a response to what Brodzki calls “shifting circumstances experienced over the course of a lifetime” (p. 188). The last chapter of the book, the “Epilogue”, is Brodzki's personal story, and an attempt to translate the past. She writes about her family's return to Poland, the country where her father originated. It is a moving narrative about tracing the remains of Jewish life, mostly destroyed family graves, and coming to terms with the impossibly traumatic past. Language, translation and a photographic image play a central role here at many levels. There is a straightforward issue of not being able to communicate fully in Polish and imagining what may and may not have been understood or interpreted by the Poles. There are also projections based on American assumptions about what Poland was like in 1980 - a country which Brodzki describes, alluding to Chagall's paintings, as the place where “there was no ice cream” and “cows walked blithely on the roofs” (p. 190). Perhaps this last layer of the narrative tells us more about post-Holocaust American-Jewish identity than about Polish realities of any kind. But there is also a very personal issue of learning about the past at the site of the crime through the narrative of the family's only survivor. There is no doubt that the volume demonstrates how the concept of translation can be stretched, and how it can aid the literary critic at a time when literary and critical theory has become rather static. On the one hand, it is good to see how the concept of translation can migrate and supplant traditional literary criticism. On the other, clearly some readers may view this use of translation as merely a formal device that works to bind together a collection of somewhat eclectic literary essays. Despite these potential objections, this is a book that opens up some new perspectives and lets a breath of fresh air into comparative criticism. Bassnett should be pleased to see her prophecy come to fruition. Piotr Kuhiwczak University of Warwick, UK p.kuhiwczak@warwick.ac.uk