Jaan Kaplinski’s day, January 20, 20231, was titled “Kaplinski in Translation and Letters.” I was asked to talk about translation in general. I was ready with the theme proposal, it seemed suitable for Jaan Kaplinski. “On translation in general – following Kaplinski’s example” is a better title for what follows.
I went to the translation office of the foreign literature department of the University of Tartu in the first half of the eighties, when at first Ain Kaalep taught there, and Kaplinski when Kaalep lost his health. He talked about the history of Middle Eastern time and thought, mainly from the Bible, cultural history and books, with an emphasis on the writing of the Bible in different centuries by a number of people, so that the books differ from each other in terms of context, style, rhythm, and this historical part is important in the formulation.
The lectures of the translation office at that time can be compared with the lectures given by Kaplinski as a professor of humanities at the University of Tartu in 2000-2001, which were published by the publishing house of the University of Tartu in 2009 under the title ” Parallels and parallelisms”: Kaplinski identified – then in the translation office – important concepts of the biblical semiosphere and spoke about the name of God or the logos in more or less the same way as Tõnu Luik in his philosophy course.
The technical details of the translation, the evaluation of translation correspondences have been left out; we didn’t do any language exercises. “Dealing excessively with names instead of things is one of the byways of mental activity and usually leads one to a dead end or is itself a sign of dead end and idleness. Virge spirituality can even be a little careless in language, meanness of expression is alien to him.”2
So Kaplinski talked more about things that were somehow translated, fixing them verbally. However – “the world [ei ole] a semiotic phenomenon, things are not composed of words, letters or hieroglyphs. The world is reflected and grasped in the most detailed way by our imagination, much is lost when translating it into language. Let’s leave aside the question of how images are born and develop, what role sensations, perceptions, and certain ready-made models, gestalts, play here. In any case, much of the original information is lost, it happens step by step, on the way from the original image to the final language, including the form expressed in the formal language of the exact sciences. To put it briefly and clearly, language is a means of communication, not a means of hearing and describing the truth.”3
The word translation is used here, in a liberal arts professor’s lecture, as Kaplinski mostly used it: “What really happens in our consciousness is translation, translation from language to language, from image to language, from language to image , from images to signs, and so on. Naming and describing is also translation. The peculiarity of translation is that, in most cases, one thing can be translated in many different ways, a situation, an event, a landscape can be described in many different ways, some of which are equally adequate and inadequate.”4
What is really happening in our consciousness is translation. You may want to learn more here. “But what happens in a person’s head when he translates?” asked Heli Allik Jaan Kaplinski. Kaplinski replied: “I can’t explain what happens in the translator’s paper. I myself tend to believe in some kind of “pre-language”.Mentalese‘sse”, where there is not yet a clear distinction between imagination and words, where there are other forms instead of nouns-nouns, a quite suitable word is the Finnish “mielikuva”. “Language is an inevitable intermediate step, which translates directly from language to language does not give good results, machine translation is clear proof of this.”5 Language → pre-language → language, this is how Kaplinski was able to explain the translation.
Kaplinski was a poet, essayist and translator – so goes the lexicon of Estonian writers. But he was also a linguist; in the translation office, he has repeatedly stated that he obtained a specialization in structural and applied linguistics in addition to his specialization in French philology at university. “I carefully read books on the philosophy of language in my youth,” he says in his professor’s lecture, 6 and in the future “[olen] to linguistics while remaining in the field of science”7.
For a linguist, language is form, not substance. In Saussure’s classical formulation, “the totality of linguistic phenomena, that is, language, can be represented as a series of contiguous subdivisions, which extend both into the indeterminate plane of vague ideas and into the no less indefinable plane of sounds”. where «intrinsically chaotic thought is forced to refine itself by breaking down into parts»,9 in order to be usable in communication.
For Kaplinski, thought as a concept is “so vague, so vague”,10 that it would not be able to respond to what happens in a person’s head when he translates, replaces one language with another, gives another form to a thought broken down into words.
“I don’t agree with the idea that we think in a specific language. No, we don’t necessarily need a language to think. I can try to fix some machine part without knowing the name of any of the parts, it helps to understand that role plays one or the other part of this machinery. And this understanding does not need a linguistic formulation-expression. I believe that thinking is much more an activity based on perception, that our thinking is instead more linked to seeing , hearing, touching, the activity of our body and our senses.”11
Is the translation arbitrary and does the translator have the power to articulate an inarticulate thought at will? Generally he has no other choice, it depends on his cognitive filter. “But I’m not sure,” says Kaplinski, “whether the translator’s personality should be revealed in the translation, I rather prefer a neutral translator who is a mediator and uses his skills to hide rather than express himself.” 12
At this point it is worth comparing Henno Rajand to Kaplinski, who is defined in the writers’ lexicon as a linguist – but after the profession of translator. For him too, language «thought is a relatively simple structure that can be expressed in language»,13 thought in quotation marks.
“The linguistic system does not prescribe what to think about what, therefore also what to say about what. Language is a means of transmitting thoughts, in the case of distorted or absent thoughts, it is also a means of transmitting lies, stupidity and meaninglessness. The linguistic system can function freely in an inactive mode, which happens both in normal thinking and in case of brain damage. The choice of the components of thinking – what to say about what – is localized in the brain itself, rather than in the speech centers. “14
The worldview of general linguistics frees the translator from the literalist demand for accuracy, because the language of thought and the language of communication do not overlap, and also from the need to obey the norms that organize language, because they do not organize cognition . But general linguistics does not say how to translate, what to say about what.
Neither Rajandi nor Kaplinski gave any thought to the science of translation. “I don’t know translation theories,” Kaplinski said only. “I tried to read something about it, but it seemed to me that it was all more science as an end in itself. The translator really doesn’t need these theories, the sense of language, the sense of style and everything called talent, instinct or what matters.”15
Science for science’s sake is probably something different from science for knowledge’s sake, it is – science’s sake – going against the storm, meaning impossible. The last image was formulated by Jaan Kaplinski, translating Tomas Tranströmer. Furthermore, “a translator’s job is often, I guess mostly, bread and butter, and you also have to translate something that doesn’t particularly interest or fascinate you. Then sometimes you translate something completely different for your own enjoyment and convenience. “16 The situation is contradictory if the work of bread is understood as pain and effort.
Kaplinski’s translation is questionable elsewhere as well. “Of course many foreign words are difficult to translate, so the language of works represented by English-French is a little more innovative than the original good heritage language. The small nation really needs such a translation language.” itself. The Estonian language begins to lose its individuality and increasingly becomes a language of translation.”18
“We can use synonyms, say dunes instead of dunes, or mix words from different languages, as was often done in my childhood home, where vegetables were often called gemys”;19 multilingual language, where thought is structured by mentales or mielikuva, it helps to bring me closer to the point, but “I’m pessimistic, I believe that in one generation the Estonian language has become SAE [Standard Average European] a clone that is used officially, instead of which young people probably start speaking English.” 20
He did not want grammatical interference of the Indo-European language into the Estonian language. The pessimism was so bitter that the translation had to be changed: “I took and wrote a poem in English. There is a whole collection of it”,21 “being a Russian writer [on] true pleasure”22. “People are already such that sometimes they just want Something Else. Turn the other side in bed,” Kaplinski wrote in his blog on January 10, 2021. Turn the other side in Russian, Polish, French, Russian, Swedish, English, German, Spanish, Latin, Greek, Chinese, also in silence.
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1 https://jaankaplinski.eu/uncategorized/jaan-kaplinski-paev-2023/
2 Jaan Kaplinski, Critical Thoughts on Flying Rubber Bands. Hammer and Sickle, 1980, April 4.
3 Jaan Kaplinski, Parallelisms and parallelisms. Tartu: Tartu University Press, 2009, page 80.
4 Ibid., p.238.
5 Interview with Jaan Kaplinski. To Heli Allik’s question, Estonia is not so small that it cannot accommodate diverse understandings of language and translation. The translator’s voice III, 2015, page 147.
6 Parallels and Parallels, page 170.
7 Ibid., p.166.
8 Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, translated by Tiit Kuuskmäe. Tallinn, Varrak, 2017, page 187.
9 Ibid., p.188.
10 Parallels and Parallels, page 80.
11 Interview with Jaan Kaplinski, page 147.
14 Ibid., p.145.
13 Henno Rajandi, Functionality and completeness in the description of language. Language and Literature, 1978, 12, p.726.
14 Henno Rajandi, Language: process and system. Language and Literature, 1977, 2, p.80.
15 Interview with Jaan Kaplinski, page 142.
16 Interview with Jaan Kaplinski, page 147.
17 Jaan Kaplinski, The possibility of possibilities. Tongue. Looming, 1969, 5, page 739.
18 Interview with Jaan Kaplinski, pp. 150–151.
19 Parallels and Parallels, page 81.
20 Interview with Jaan Kaplinski, page 151.
21 Jaan Kaplinski, My Estonian language. Sickle 1994, 14 January.
22 Interview with Jaan Kaplinski 2015, page 151.
2023-12-24 09:19:00
anna-lange-on-translation-in-general-literature