Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto

Reflection: Problems in Translation

Reverend Amy Zucker Morgenstern
August 31, 2008
Palo Alto, CA

When I was a college student majoring in art and planning my senior thesis show, I made sketches for a sculpture that was to be called “Problems in Translation.” I had been thinking about the problems inherent in translating a poem from one language to another, perhaps because my other thesis, for my other major, religion, was about Japanese poems influenced by Zen. These problems are so insurmountable that great translators are really re-writing the poems. They cannot convey everything that the original author was conveying, in his native tongue, to a reader who shared that language; they have to decide what about the poem is most essential and convey that, sacrificing other elements (such as rhyme and rhythm) as untranslatable. Robert Frost said that poetry is what is lost in translation; I was interested in, tormented by, how much can be lost each time words pass between people, even in ordinary conversation between two people who speak the same language. I was acutely aware of how every exchange of words involves an act of translation. We are each an island of meaning, and words cannot always close the gaps between us. We use them as a bridge to reach each other, but they are ambiguous, they are confusing, they are based on assumptions we can only describe to each other using more words.

It’s as if we each carry around a dictionary in our minds, constructed by ourselves based on all our experiences. The meanings of our words diverge most in the vocabularies we use for the things that matter most: religion, love, morality. Do any two people agree on the meaning of such words as God, faith, love, marriage, good, evil? These words leave one person’s lips, and by the time they’ve entered another’s ears and been processed by that brain, using that mind’s dictionary, at times they mean something so different that they may as well have been spoken in English and heard by someone who speaks only Martian.

And yet, with all the potential for miscommunication, there’s something that does spark across the gap. The sculpture (which I never built, but who knows, maybe one day I will) was going to be a wall of pierced ceramic bricks. From one side of the wall it would appear that the other side must look the same, but in fact when you rounded the end of the wall and walked along the other side, you would find that that face of the wall was totally different in color, texture, shape; that your assumptions were wrong and the people on the other side were having a very different experience. I never really worked out the visual equivalent of my ideas to my satisfaction. Sculpture is an even more ambiguous language than English. But one key element of it (I realize now) was that you would see other viewers through the wall. Despite the mistakes in translation, and the bricks partially blocking your view, you would be able to recognize human faces on the other side, seeking, like you, to understand what was being said.

What I was groping for, even then, was an image to express my amazement and gratitude that despite the problems in translating even the simplest words from one English speaker to another, we do manage to communicate. We form friendships and spiritual communities and marriages and political movements. Somehow, against all reason, and with the odds stacked against us, using these subtle and misleading words we have, we reach out across the gap and feel another hand there. Maybe sometimes even walls can be bridges.

 

Sermon: Language and Deception by Dr. Tom Wasow