Quarterly Essay 52 Found in Translation

In Praise of a Plural World

Linda Jaivin

• Publisher: Quarterly Essay
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781922231277
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Translating & Interpreting
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Whether we're aware of it or not, we spend much of our time in this globalised world in the act of translation. Language is a big part of it, of course, as anyone who has fumbled with a phrasebook in a foreign country will know, but behind language is something far more challenging to translate: culture. As a traveller, a mistranslation might land you a bowl of who-knows-what when you think you asked for noodles, and mistranslations in international politics can be a few steps from serious trouble. But translation is also a way of entering new and exciting worlds, and forging links that never before existed.Linda Jaivin has been translating from Chinese for more than thirty years. While her specialty is subtitles, she has also translated song lyrics, poetry and fiction, and interpreted for ABC film crews, Chinese artists and even the English singer Billy Bragg as he gave his take on socialism to some Beijing rockers. In Found in Translation she reveals the work of the translator and considers whether different worldviews can be bridged. She pays special attention to China and the English-speaking West, Australia in particular, but also discusses French, Japanese and even the odd phrase of Maori. This is a free-ranging essay, personal and informed, about translation in its narrowest and broadest senses, and the prism – occasionally prison – of culture."About six years ago, President George W. Bush was delivering a speech at a G8 summit, when, made impatient by the process of translation, he interrupted his German interpreter: 'Everybody speaks English, right?' …" —Linda Jaivin, Found in Translation

The Prince: Correspondence

George Pell

A predictable and selective rehash of old material. G.K. Chesterton said: “A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.” Marr has no idea what motivates a believing Christian.

George Pell

The Prince: Correspondence

Geraldine Doogue

Unaccustomed as I am to find myself in easy agreement with Cardinal George Pell, I did approve of his response to David Marr’s essay. It was published in the same week that I was to conduct a Gleebooks conversation with David in Sydney, and I was intrigued as to how the essay’s subject would respond. Would he ignore David altogether? Would he forensically rebut all the accusations and the terrible timeline of clerical malfeasance and church neglect in Victoria? Would he try loftily to contextualise his decisions? As it turned out, he chose none of those options but did comment and land some blows, in my view. “Marr has no idea what motivates a believing Christian.” That last statement especially rang true for me. My final sense was that for all David’s writing’s usual elegance and flair, it came with plenty of baggage, only some of it declared. And it didn’t wrestle sufficiently with its own conclusion: that, above all, Pell simply could not contemplate a world without an operating Catholic Church. So yes, his best efforts would always, always be expended on its behalf, without apology, because he believed he was acting, by proxy, in the long-term interests of the wider society. I think this is a correct core judgment on the perplexing Pell, the man David ultimately found somewhat empty and hollow.

Okay, that is David’s verdict. But amid his impressive statistics about legalities, I wanted reference made to another set that is easily found: one that indicates the vast scope of Catholic activities in Australia – not as a sop for the sex abuse crisis, but to flesh out the central conundrum of this terrible story. This Catholic Church is a vital provider of services to the current fabric of Australian life. Seven hundred thousand schoolchildren are in the Catholic sector, served by 82,000 staff; sixty-six hospitals, including nineteen public hospitals, are run by church-related entities; the St Vincent de Paul Society is the largest and most extensive volunteer welfare network in the country, and the church is the largest welfare provider outside government. That is merely a snapshot of a vast network of engagement. Spelling some of this out could have only augmented David’s work. In fact, it may have highlighted the very confusion that plagues many of us, trying to imagine how this committed church restores itself beyond the shame.

I am not seeking to exonerate the hierarchy, who’ve clearly not observed proper duties of care and compassion. I have vented my spleen often on this over the years and, to some extent, am beyond my worst anger. In many ways I welcome a harsh secular light being shone on the innards of the institution, because I fervently hope it acknowledges that it can only thrive with the help of the secular world.

The truth is that for many Catholics, Pell is something of an enigma. After the Gleebooks event, I received a fascinating email from a man who asked not to be identified. He defined himself as “traditional” in both Catholic belief and practice, but like so many of his ilk, he said, he was extremely disappointed, even angered, by the actions, attitude and character of the current cardinal, George Pell. Though the cardinal was so often described as an ally of people like him, this writer felt that Pell, despite his character defects, had bullied and bluffed his way through life. But then came the real hammer-blow.

On Wednesday evening one elderly gentleman asked whether Cardinal Pell was a “closet atheist” (or something similar). David Marr replied by stating that he was certainly not an atheist. However, David did not understand what I perceive to be the subtext of that question, which I frankly think only a Catholic can get. The gentleman expressed the feeling, held by many of us, that the cardinal has no spiritual sensibility, no ability to express spiritual or (pure) human love in any fashion whatsoever. This feeling has caused me to wonder on many an occasion whether, with Cardinal Pell, we have our first “secular” archbishop of Sydney. So often his approaches to things seem entirely secular, wrapped occasionally, but certainly not always, in religious form.

Whoa! Well, neither I nor many of his greatest known critics within the church would probably go that far. So it is complicated, even for Catholics – let alone for lapsed high Anglicans, the faith that was David’s self-professed poison till university days. Pell is clearly a recognisable type of cleric from Australia’s history, in that he isn’t afraid of power or the wielding of it, which David acknowledged favourably … sort of. But there was surely more to wrestle with here. I felt David was excoriating Pell for not abandoning the church when he discovered the horrors. But could Germans abandon Germany, I asked him, once they fully grasped what their Fatherland had descended to during the war? Others have volunteered another analogy: should lawyers abandon the law on discovering some terrible abuse of it? David replied that his yardstick was how much Pell tried to change his beloved institution once he found out what had happened, how much he tried to really search for answers. And he had found the cardinal wanting. Fair enough. I couldn’t disagree on that precise need to re-imagine this vital institution for the wider good. That is the work at hand: a colossal reinvigoration of the church in Australia. I would love to see David tackle that in years to come.

Geraldine Doogue

The Prince: Correspondence

Michael Cooney

David Marr on Cardinal Pell, like Lytton Strachey on Cardinal Manning – and surely Marr’s Eminent Australians for Black Inc. is not so very far in the future? – essays “the light which his career throws upon the spirit of his age, and the psychological problems suggested by his inner history.” Unlike David Marr, I’m qualified to consider only one of these.

As an adviser to Labor leaders Mark Latham, Kim Beazley and Prime Minister Julia Gillard – not Mr Rudd; file that for other correspondence – I have dealt with Cardinal Pell and his private staff from time to time over many years. (It’s a fact that until Prime Minister Gillard’s decision to establish the royal commission, these dealings never included any matter relating to child sexual abuse.)

In His Eminence’s dealings in politics, perhaps as distinct from those in the church, the cardinal acts as a person of influence, not of power. He speaks through intermediaries; he acts on understandings; he asks little of the government of the day. Leave school funding alone, leave Catholic health care alone, leave euthanasia alone … until the end, leave royal commissions alone. He is a conservative, after all. A bit of help for World Youth Day here, some support for the McKillop canonisation there. David Marr notes the cardinal’s political alienation from the big Catholic commissions and NGOs, which is certainly the case; he’s also operationally isolated from them, practically remote. I can’t recall, or even really imagine, his raising an issue to do with employment services contracts or hospital funding reform.

This approach is almost the opposite of deal-making. Not so much you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours, as don’t scratch my car and I won’t scratch yours. It’s not hard to say yes.

Cardinal Pell is also not always wrong.

Of course, no politician I have worked with thinks that the cardinal speaks for or directs a voting bloc of millions. They all know that many bishops better represent the “median Catholic voter” and many Catholic organisations have more direct power in the land. But of course, no politician I know thinks the Cardinal doesn’t matter more than any other Catholic bishop, and of course, he’s treated differently. Any of the Catholic bishops could call on friends in the parliament and the cabinet, but for one thing, not many of them want to. I suppose they have confirmations to perform. In my own experience, and for what it’s worth, what gives this archbishop of Sydney his quintessential political influence is that unlike any other Catholic leader – unlike almost any other churchman in Australia – he can genuinely command a national audience.

In this respect, his political influence comes, above all, from the work of journalists, including his critics; people like David Marr made him.

Cardinal Pell can get on TV.

*

For many years, my strongest impression of the cardinal has been of his age. Australian politics is no gerontocracy: in public affairs, a Catholic bishop often seems to be the oldest person in the room; the cardinal is always the oldest person in the room. And he doesn’t just seem old and slow when you introduce him to a bright, nervous young guest at a banquet in the evening; he seems old and slow when you are sitting next to him at the cricket in the early afternoon. I saw him manage to make a person as serene as Kim Beazley seem like a time-­conscious chief executive.

The Hong Kong democrat Martin Lee was supposed to have said of Tung Chee Hwa, the first Beijing-appointed chief executive of Hong Kong: “Trying to change Tung’s mind is not like trying to change your father’s mind. It is like trying to change your grandfather’s mind.” This is not to say Cardinal Pell can’t be persuaded. But it does mean you can only persuade him on his own terms.

Take school funding. He declined John Howard’s offer of more money for many Catholic schools in 2001 because it went with direct funding of the schools, rather than bloc funding of his system. He attacked Labor’s 2004 schools policy, under Mark Latham, which promised billions of dollars in extra funding to thousands of Catholic schools in Australia but cut the funding of two (yes, two) Catholic high schools in Sydney. We got him over the line in 2006. We didn’t give him everything he wanted; we also didn’t take away anything he wanted.

He is a conservative Cardinal – and he is a political conservative.

David Marr reminds us that Cardinal Pell resisted calls for a royal commission for years. Following the then prime minister’s decision to hold one, she asked one of her ministers to inform Pell that an announcement would happen within an hour or so. The cardinal asked for a little more time to inform the Catholic bishops before the announcement – just another hour or two – and this was agreed. A short time later, the Liberal leader, Tony Abbott, issued a statement, for the first time supporting a royal commission. David Marr is probably correct that on this occasion Abbott showed he was not “Pell’s puppet.” The connection is surely a more equal one than that.

*

Professor Greg Craven, now vice-chancellor of the Australian Catholic University, once told Julia Gillard that, with her passion for rigour in education and her confidence that rigorous education could provide opportunities to rise, she might be the first Christian Brother to serve as prime minister. He later related this to me, hoping, I presume, that I would advise a baffled PM that it was a flattering observation. He knew his audience in me, at least.

I am a Christian Brothers boy. So is my father, so are my sons. We are mocked by the Jesuit characters in James Joyce as “Paddy Stink and Mickey Muck.” My schoolmates who got jobs through old-boy networks got them in the building trade.

There’s a moment I find very moving in Ron Blair’s play The Christian Brothers. This is an Australian one-hander first performed in 1975 in which the actor who plays a Christian Brother addresses the audience as his class. It’s not sentimental about the order. Early in the play, Brother offers this advice:

Next year of course is an external exam, probably the most important you’ll ever sit. One tip. Don’t put AMDG or JMJ at the top of your page – anything that will give you away as a Catholic. And if you do a history question and you have to mention the pope, don’t on any account refer to him as the Holy Father …

I hear this line in the voice of the man who taught me the words to “The Minstrel Boy,” Brother “Bob” Owens. (“Bob” for his resemblance to Bob Hope; but we were ten and it was 1982 and none of us had heard of Bob Hope; how did we know to call him that? Did our uncles tell us?)

In performance it’s a joke, of course. But it plays on my heartstrings, not only with the personal pathos of the situation but also with its evocation of the great paradox of Catholic education in Australia; precisely this mixed feeling about “the world,” about the whole human society beyond the school and the order and the church. Brother is trying to give his boys a fair go in the world through education – he sees “boys and girls pouring out of the colleges and the convents, and taking positions of responsibility in the professions and the public service” – but it’s a world he has also tried to teach them to despise. What’s more, he knows that the world will despise those girls and boys – “nothing frightens them more” – and can foresee that they will betray themselves into defeat with some shibboleth he has taught them. Does he hope for this? Or fear it? God knows.

I have a Protestant-educated Catholic friend who says, melodramatically: “they can smell the Blood of Christ on us.” Anyway, the world will hate us. But I do feel I would have Brother Owens’ permission to refer to His Eminence as Pell.

*

James McAuley wrote of his parents, “How can I judge without ingratitude?/Judgment is simply trying to reject/A part of what we are because it hurts.” How can we judge our spotless Mother, the Church?

Ask a person steeped in the life and culture of science to judge and assign responsibility and learn the lesson of the history of scientific racism and social Darwinism and Tuskegee. Ask a person steeped in the life and culture of the German-speaking peoples to comprehend the horrific reality of the whole journey from the Beer Hall Putsch to Auschwitz. What does this evil say about everything that came before it and within which it was formed? What does it mean for what we do next? God knows.

After all that has happened, all I can humanly do is two things.

First? Try to grasp the horror, in its scale and detail. Here Marr is almost perfect and his essay is almost ideal. Marr doesn’t know the church. Indeed, he’s surprised by it: surprised that it excommunicates Marxists, surprised that it runs public universities, surprised that its leaders prepare for office with their “head[s] in the tur...

Table of contents

• Front matter
• QUARTERLY ESSAY 52
• Contents
• In Praise of a Plural World
• Acts of Violence
• No Bridge Too Far
• The Balance of Trade
• Seven Pear Blossoms Later …
• Interlude One: Sub Stories
• Barbaros at the Gate
• You Wake Up Refreshed
• Interlude Two: Tales from the Zone
• Another Man’s Wine
• Eros and the Machine
• Sources
• Correspondence: The Prince
• Contributors
• Copyright
• Subscribe