The Conference of the Tongues

Theo Hermans

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317640202
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The Conference of the Tongues offers a series of startling reflections on fundamental questions of translation. It throws new light on familiar problems and opens up some radically different avenues of thought. It engages with value conflicts in translation and the social accountability of translators, and turns the old issue of equivalence inside out. Drawing on a wealth of contemporary and historical examples, the book teases out the translator's subject-position in translations, makes notions of intertextuality and irony serviceable for translation studies, tries to think translation without transformation, and uses a controversial sociological model to cast a cold eye on the entire world of translating.

This is a highly interdisciplinary study that remains aware of the importance of theoretical paradigms as it brings concepts from international law, social systems theory and even theology to bear on translation. Self-reference is a recurrent theme. The book invites us to read translations for what they can tell us about translating and about translators' own perceptions of their role. The argument throughout is for more self-reflexive translation studies.

1. The End

Let us begin with a series of remarkable events. They unfolded in a place called Palmyra, in a far corner of New York State, just south of Lake Ontario. There, on the evening of 21 September 1823, a quiet Sunday, a young man named Joseph Smith, a farmhand then aged just eighteen, received an unexpected visitor. Joseph Smith had never met this person before. The stranger, a tall, bearded man, wore a long white robe, and his presence filled the room with light. Looking more closely, Joseph noticed that the visitor’s bare feet floated approximately twelve inches above the ground. Joseph had experienced the occasional vision before, but he had never seen this. The visitor was an angel. Speaking the universal angelic tongue, the angel introduced himself in English as Moroni and engaged the young farmhand in conversation. He informed him of the existence of an ancient book written on gold plates, and of ‘seers’ prepared by God for its translation. The book, he declared, contained “the fullness of the everlasting Gospel” and “an account of the former inhabitants of this continent” (Hill 1977: 57). On departing, Moroni assured his host that he would return in due course to direct him to the gold plates, which he said were buried in a nearby hill.

Moroni paid Joseph Smith several more visits in the next few years, each time bringing the same message. Then one day he announced the time had come. In the early morning of 22 September 1827, following the angel’s directions, Joseph Smith dug up and carted home a pile of gold plates that had been stowed in a stone box in a hill called Cumorah (in Manchester, New York). The plates were made of thin gold leaf and could be rifled like the pages of a book. They were later estimated to have weighed around sixty pounds. They were embossed with text in a hitherto unknown script which bore a passing resemblance to both Hebrew signs and Egyptian hieroglyphs. At this time, the late 1820s, Egyptian hieroglyphs had not yet been properly deciphered. In France, Jean-François Champollion, the founding father of Egyptology, had made his first breakthrough in 1824 working on the recently discovered Rosetta Stone. He was appointed professor of Egyptology at the Collège de France in Paris in 1826 and would spend the rest of his short life (he died in 1832, aged forty-one) compiling his great Egyptian grammar and dictionary.

Joseph Smith was luckier. As the angel had predicted, he found two stones buried together with the gold plates. They were small, transparent, three-cornered diamond-like stone disks mounted in loops of metal wire. These were the ‘seer stones’ or ‘interpreters’ Moroni had spoken of and even given names, Urim and Thummim, terms which also occur several times in the Old Testament (Exodus 28, 30; Deuteronomy 33, 8; Ezra 2, 63 and another four places). By placing the transparent stone disks on his nose like a pair of glasses (or, as some accounts have it, under his hat), Smith would be able, to his own amazement, to read the script on the gold plates, and therefore to translate it.

Having brought the plates home, Smith kept them hidden, as Moroni had instructed him to do. He began to translate late in December 1827. Speaking from behind a screen to shield the plates from his companions' gaze, he initially dictated to his wife Emma, then to two friends and followers, Martin Harris and Oliver Cowdery. Some time in the spring of 1828 Harris took 116 translated pages away to show his sceptical family, who promptly lost or possibly destroyed them. The angel severely rebuked Smith and instructed him not to retranslate the lost pages.

Two years later the translation of the book, a weighty tome, was ready. By then Joseph Smith had gathered round him a number of disciples. In June 1829 the most faithful among them witnessed two more apparitions of the angel Moroni, during which they were allowed to see and touch the gold plates for the first and last time. Afterwards all signed statements confirming what they had witnessed. They also confirmed that during Moroni’s visitation a voice descended from heaven assuring them that the book was true and the translation accurate (Brodie 1945: 77-9; Bushman 1984: 107; Hill 1977: 91-2). The volume appeared in print in Palmyra in March 1830. The title page mentioned Joseph Smith as “Author and Proprietor”, but this was probably for copyright reasons; the designation was later changed to “Translator”. Smith’s loyal friend and disciple Martin Harris first mortgaged and then sold his farm to cover the costs of printing five thousand copies.

Together with the Christian Bible the book became the foundational text of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, also known as the Mormon Church after the Book of Mormon as translated into English by Joseph Smith. Mormon, the main prophet whose life and work is chronicled in the Book of Mormon, was also the father of Moroni, who appeared to Smith in the guise of an angel. The Mormon Church grew rapidly in the 1830s, despite hostility from local people. Joseph Smith was murdered in Carthage, Illinois, in June 1844. Some years later his successor, Brigham Young, led the growing Mormon community to Salt Lake City, Utah. Today the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, with its headquarters still in Salt Lake City, numbers approximately twelve million worldwide and runs a vast business empire as well as the world’s largest genealogical archive. The Book of Mormon is available online for all to read.¹

Words from above

The Museum of Mormon Church History in Salt Lake City has a manuscript page from Joseph Smith’s English version of the Book of Mormon on permanent display. I have seen this page. It is written in a rather elegant longhand and, remarkably for a translation, shows not a single deletion or correction. As I pored over this unusual artefact and wondered about its pristine state, a helpful museum attendant came up to me (“Are you interested, sir?”) and explained that Smith dictated his translation virtually without hesitation, guided as he was by “the gift and the power of God”, as indeed the title page of the Book of Mormon has it, and also by Urim and Thummim, the two ‘seer’ or ‘interpreter’ stones which enabled him to read, understand and render into fluent English the otherwise incomprehensible signs on the gold plates.

The fate of the gold plates is also of interest. It is directly connected with the pronouncement that determined the status of Joseph Smith’s translation. During the two final visitations of the angel Moroni in 1829, when Smith’s earliest disciples were granted sight of the gold plates, a voice from on high announced that the book was true and the translation accurate. In the words of one witness, David Whitmer: “While we were viewing [the plates] the voice of God spoke out of heaven saying that the Book was true and the translation correct” (Hill 1977:91). The divine utterance authorised the translation to serve in place of the original. This is what subsequently happened. At the end of the session the angel Moroni took the plates under his wing and vanished with them. They have not been seen since. However, their disappearance need not worry us. We know that we possess a wholly adequate translation, equivalent to the original. As a result, we no longer need recourse to the original. The translation has replaced it, totally.

The heavenly pronouncement only confirmed what the miraculous nature of the translation’s creation already intimated. Aversion helped along by “the gift and the power of God” must be correct. In this respect the story of the Book of Mormon shows similarities with that other remarkable tale, that of the origin of the Septuagint.

The Septuagint is the Greek version of the Hebrew Old Testament produced in the third century BCE on the orders of the Egyptian king Ptolemy Philadelphus for the Greek-speaking Jewish community in Alexandria. Accounts of the creation of the Septuagint differ to some extent. They agree that seventy-two translators completed the task of translating the Jewish Bible in seventy-two days. According to the oldest account, the so-called ‘Letter of Aristeas’ (probably written around 130 or 100 BCE), the translators took great care to compare notes and consult among themselves as they composed their Greek text. When the version was complete and found to be accurate in every respect, it was ordained that no-one should presume to alter it in any way. Indeed the king, upon being presented with the scrolls, recalled that several individuals who had earlier translated parts of the Holy Book too rashly, had been punished by God with bodily afflictions.

According to the most influential account of the Septuagint, that recorded by Philo of Alexandria (also known as Philo Judaeus) around the beginning of the Christian era, the translators worked independently of each other, in separate cells. After seventy-two days they emerged with identical Greek texts (Schwarz 1955: 17-44). This astonishing feat, seventy-two identical translations of a long and complex original, could only be explained as the product of divine inspiration. God’s spirit had presided over the interpreters and breathed the one correct rendering into each translator’s ear. Philo is emphatic that under divine guidance the translators “arrived at a wording which corresponded with the matter [of the original], and alone, or better than any other, would bring out clearly what was meant” (Schwarz 1955: 23).

Saint Augustine, like most of the early Christian theologians except Jerome, appears to have accepted the supernatural origin of the Septuagint. In On Christian Doctrine (De doctrina Christiana, probably written ca. 416-19 CE) he still allowed for the possibility that the translators consulted among themselves, but his major work, The City of God (De civitate Dei, written 410-28), favoured the more miraculous account. Here Augustine argued that “in truth there was the one Spirit at work in them all” and that “the same one Spirit was manifestly present in the scholars when without collaboration they still translated the whole in every detail as if with one mouth (1972: 820, 822). He also perceived a reason for this divine intervention: “this was the purpose of their receiving such a marvellous gift of God; that in this way the authority of those Scriptures should be emphasized, as being not human but divine” (ibid.). As a result, the Septuagint translators were freed of “the servile labour of a human bond-servant of words” (Augustine 1972: 821; Schwarz 1955: 41).

The accounts of the creation of the Septuagint and the Book of Mormon oblige us to assume that in each case the relation between translation and original is one of full equivalence. In each of these texts the translator and the originary speaker speak with the same voice, intent, force and authenticity. As a result, no dissonance or interpretive difference opens up between original and translation, and the translator, as the producer of the secondary discourse, nowhere utters a thought or occupies a subject-position that is not wholly consonant and indeed identical with that of the first speaker. The first three witnesses who were present during the angel Moroni’s visitation in June 1829 stated that they heard the heavenly voice declare: “These plates have been revealed by the power of God, and they have been translated by the power of God” (Bushman 1984: 106). Augustine wrote likewise in The City of God that the Septuagint had been achieved “by the power of God,” and “the very same Spirit that was present in the prophets when they uttered their messages was at work also in the seventy scholars when they translated them” (1972: 821; Schwarz 1955: 41). The translation, that is, can speak for the original. It can effectively replace the original.

On this point the Book of Mormon is rather more emphatic than the Septuagint. The Book of Mormon’s gold-plated original has literally disappeared without trace. We also have an explicit statement, a revelation straight from heaven, affirming the translation’s unique quality and complete adequacy, granting it full authority to speak for and even in lieu of its original. This makes the Book of Mormon the most dramatic example I know of a translation which is not only promoted to fully equivalent rank with its original but has so totally occupied the latter’s place as to hide it from view once and for all. Joseph Smith’s version has pushed Mormon’s scriptures into irretrievable obscurity, overwriting them wholesale.

There are two aspects of these stories which need elaborating. The first bears on the notion of equivalence. The accounts of the origins of the Book of Mormon and the Septuagint suggest that equivalence, understood as equality in value between a translation and its original, comes about as a result of verbal statements concerning the relation between the texts involved. The statements, as speech acts, possess performative force. Both in the case of the Book of Mormon and of the Septuagint the initial assumption is that a translation, as a text seeking to echo a pre-existing text, is not automatically put on equal terms with the original to which it refers. Putting both texts on the same footing, lifting one up to the other’s level of authority by means of a verbal utterance, constitutes a performative speech act. In the case of the Book of Mormon the intervention takes the form of words falling from the sky: the book is true and the translation correct. The statement instigates the equivalence between Joseph Smith’s translation and the encrypted gold plates. This equivalence is total, as the disappearance of the gold plates demonstrates. Because the two versions can each stand for the other, one can also render the other redundant, and has in fact done so. The story of the Septuagint lacks the apodictic enunciation and subsequent disappearing act that make the Book of Mormon so spectacular, but it, too, relies on a divinely inspired origin to lever itself up to a state of equivalence with the Hebrew Bible. Philo of Alexandria speaks of the Greek and Hebrew versions as “sisters, or rather as one and the same, both in matter and words” (Schwarz 1955: 23). Augustine implored Jerome to use as the source for his Latin translation of the Bible, not the original Hebrew of the Old Testament but the Greek Septuagint, adding that any translator who insisted on working from the Hebrew would still be right only if he came up with a version that was in agreement with the Seventy (1972: 821; Schwarz 1955: 41).

Equivalence, which I will continue to interpret as meaning equality in value and status, is not a feature that can be extrapolated on the basis of textual comparison. Rather than being extracted from texts, equivalence is imposed on them through an external intervention in a particular institutional context. In other words, equivalence is proclaimed, not found. As we will see below, the proclamation is effective only if the conditions are right. Moreover, a translation raised to equivalent status with its original will necessarily be recognised as a correct representation of it, indeed it is of necessity the only correct representation. This explains why Moroni forbade Joseph Smith to retranslate the 116 pages which Martin Harris’s family had allegedly mislaid or destroyed. A new translation would run the risk of throwing up divergent renderings and these would undermine the claim of divine inspiration if the Harris family were acting in bad faith and intended to entrap Smith by producing the initial translation at a later date. With reference to the Septuagint the ‘Letter of Aristeas’ mentions that after the translation of the Seventy had been presented and approved, an imprecation was pronounced on any who dared add, omit or alter anything at all in the Greek text (in Robinson 1997: 6).

Equivalence does not preclude differences in meaning. Augustine knew perfectly well that a close comparison between the Greek Septuagint and the Hebrew text of the Bible disclosed numerous divergences. He accounted for them most ingeniously by claiming, in The City of God, that if there were things in the Greek that were not in the Hebrew, God had wanted to say those things only in Greek; if there was anything in the Hebrew that was not in the Greek, God had wanted to say those things in Hebrew only; and if the Greek and the Hebrew said different things, God had wanted to say all those things, but some only in Greek and others only in Hebrew (Augustine 1972: 821-2; Schwarz 1955: 41-2). For Augustine, the Septuagint and the Hebrew Bible were fully equivalent authentic versions of the same message. God spoke with equal force, with equal directness and with equal authority in each version.

Relevance theory distinguishes between descriptive and interpretive use of utterances. Descriptive utterances are statements about the world, and they may be true or false (for example, “it is raining”). Interpretive utterances are statements that represent other statements, and they are judged by their degree of resemblance to those other statements (Sperber and Wilson 1986: 224-31; Wilson and Sperber 2004: 621 ). Ernst-August Gutt has used this distinction as a basis for his view of translation as interpretive use (Gutt 1991). With respect to the Book of Mormon and the Septuagint, we see the distinction collapsing, or, better perhaps, becoming irrelevant. For all we know, Joseph Smith’s English resembles Mormon’s script, but we cannot ascertain or measure the resemblance and so we read the Book of Mormon descriptively, not interpretively. And if God speaks with equal force in the Septuagint and in the Hebrew Bible, then the Greek may well resemble the Hebrew, but we may as well read either, for we can hear the divinely inspired word directly in both.

This takes us to the second aspect that needs highlighting. In these cases of wholesale equivalence, the translations have to all intents and purposes ceased to be translations. A translation which is declared to be, and is recognised as being, in all respects equal to its prototext, may well continue to be a translation in a genetic sense but it no longer functions as such. The user is now confronted with two wholly and exactly corresponding authentic texts embodying a single underlying intention. Talking of the Septuagint and Hebrew versions of the Bible, Philo of Alexandria suggested we should “speak of their authors not as translators but as prophets and priests of these mysteries” (Schwarz 1955: 23). It may have been accidental but it certainly was no less symbolic that Joseph Smith was first entered as ‘author and proprietor’ of the Book of Mormon.

Vienna’s treaties

Nowhere do we see this practical and radical consequence of the positing of equivalence more clearly at work than in the very different, modern, juridical context of the Convention of Vienna. Delving into this topic means a change of scene as we switch from the history of religi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1. The End
• 2. Before the End
• 3. Irony’s Echo
• 4. Real Presence
• 5. Connecting Systems
• 6. The Thickness of Translation Studies
• Bibliography
• Index