Emotions, Language and Identity on the Margins of Europe

K. Giorgi

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137403483
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Europäische Geschichte

When a word describing an emotion is said to be untranslatable, is that emotion untranslatable also? This unique study focuses on three word-concepts on the periphery of Europe, providing a wide-ranging survey of national identity and cultural essentialism, nostalgia, melancholy and fatalism, the production of memory and the politics of hope.

1

Emotions into History

Untranslatability

A good translator, it is often said, should be bicultural as well as bilingual. He or she should have a high degree of cultural and linguistic knowledge in each language that enables them to recognise, interpret and convey nuance and allusion. Where literary translation is concerned, then, they will be expected to convey not only the meaning of the text, but the sense of it also. Etymologically, to translate is to ‘carry over’; however, this raises the question of what is carried over. And, then, of what remains. Because even if one believes that a translator should aspire to these holistic heights, something does always remain.¹ The claims of untranslatability upon saudade, lítost and hüzün, whether explicit or implicit, all allude to a complex and privileged experience of emotion and history in which, even if the meaning of the word could be fully carried over, a truly meaningful understanding of it could not. Only from a deep emotional as well as collective historical experience, they suggest, would one even begin to comprehend what is at stake. Since it defies redefinition by others, a claim of untranslatability is always intended to be a declaration of cultural integrity.

As Anna Wierzbicka has pointed out, culture-specific words are ‘conceptual tools that reflect a society’s past experience of doing and thinking about things in certain ways; and they help to perpetuate these ways.’² Let us then pick up the thread left by Nabokov to look at another Russian word that provides a good example of this – dusha (душа). Dusha usually glosses as soul or spirit, but also refers more broadly to the spiritual sensibility and inner life of a person. It is an emotional and moral quality in that it is moral to be emotional – a dushevnyi person feels strongly, even if those feelings are harmful – and dusha is valued as the antithesis of the rational, the banal and the quotidian. Other Slavic languages have identical or near-identical cognates (e.g. duša, душа, dusza), but russkaya dusha is said to be unique, bound up in a particularly Russian approach to interpersonal relationships, cultural production and history.³ The concept gained traction amongst the Russian intelligentsia of the nineteenth century, who found it useful for defining their people’s spiritual qualities against those of the degraded and excessively rational West.⁴ In Dale Pesmen’s enlightening study of perceptions of Russian dusha in post-communist Siberia, many of her respondents assume that while dusha is a constant element of Russianness, it is nevertheless vulnerable to historical circumstance. Some of them comment that the changes brought about by perestroika had injured dusha in people, because the system encouraged them to be selfish, and to focus too much on material pursuits at the expense of their internal lives; thus, while communism had made people’s lives mean, their hearts had been purer too.⁵ This is not unproblematic. By implying that Russians need restrictions for their dusha to thrive, these theories risk perpetuating notions that despotism, submission and autocratic leadership at the expense of personal freedom are the Russian lot and in fact allow them to ‘be themselves’.

Dusha does not exist in a void, but is part of a whole Russian lexicon. Like any word, its meaning (or meanings) is understood through its relationship to other words and concepts, as well as through repetition and contextual use. In a sense, then, removing a word from its linguistic environment does naturally render it more difficult to translate, and this is precisely what Pascoaes, Kundera and Pamuk do when they single out their word-concepts for special attention. Being separated from their natural context frees them up to take on whatever new or embellished meanings the writer wishes them to have. A word becomes ‘untranslatable’ – or at least more difficult to translate – the moment it is separated from its lexical flock.

There are certainly social implications here, for untranslatability is as much about exclusion as it is about celebrating cultural uniqueness. Hegel observed that each party mediates its own identity through the extent to which it recognises the other, and the same is true of linguistic knowledge and recognition.⁶ If we cannot comprehend the sociolinguistic bases of a culture, that is, if we cannot read it and if we cannot participate fluently in it, we cannot participate fully. And nonparticipation equals social (not to mention legal) disadvantage. Sociolinguistic literacy is an essential component of participation in a society, and the sense of belonging that derives from it.

Adding emotions to the mix further complicates matters. The idea that being part of a language group provides access to a particular consciousness is not new. But this idea reached its most coherent and influential form in the linguistic nationalisms of the nineteenth century, following the ideas of Fichte and Herder in particular. In Herder’s conception, nations were organic entities that developed according to the spirit of their people, or Volksgeist, which was transmitted primarily through language.⁷ The concept of the Sprachnation (language nation) made language the determining marker of national consciousness, and implementing language uniformity became an important part of defining new nations – often at the expense of minority language groups. The natural borders of language comprehension were elided with the new geopolitical borders of the modern nation-state.

The concept of untranslatability was implicit in these philosophies. The spirit of a people might reside in its language, but that language contained a whole world of experience, perception and feeling that could never be decoded. If language is linked to collective consciousness, then those who have more than one language have more than one consciousness. True bilingualism, then, might not always be desirable, for it can be perceived as a lack of patriotism or outright disloyalty, and the belief that ‘those who do not speak like us do not think like us’ then provides an excuse for the dominant monoculture to indulge in persecution and discrimination. Those who speak another language have a whole world to themselves to which they can escape and operate freely. The mystery of what they do in that world, and what they ‘carry over’ to the other, has been the source of countless anxieties and injustices.

Naming emotions

What, then, does it mean to label feelings and emotions ‘untranslatable’? We use language not only to communicate but also to classify – to give order to our world and make sense of our responses to it.⁸ The words native speakers use to describe emotions are not ‘culture-free analytical tools’, but come laden with all the semantic devices which that language’s culture imposes upon them.⁹ In short, giving a name to something influences our perception of it. Accordingly, when a feeling or emotion is named it is recognised not just as a new condition but one that is distinct from others. So while we perceive sadness, melancholy, depression, despair, acedia and anomie as being related in the affective states they describe, they are unique in that each bears its own history and associations: depression is a pathology of modern life; acedia is associated with the Christian concept of sin; and anomie is inextricable from its sociological origins. In a similar way, the English lexicon has adopted conceptual words from other languages – such as Schadenfreude, ennui and karma – that are not sterile and universal but bring with them a certain amount of cultural baggage. Other, more quotidian words – such as ‘algebra’ from Arabic, ‘tomato’ from Aztec and ‘kindergarten’ from German – have arguably not.

Where sadness or suffering are concerned, naming can bring them into public consciousness and, in so doing, reduce both the stigma of shame and the anxiety of isolation. Cultural and symbolic articulation via naming not only enlarges the potential scope of these feelings by moving them into the open but also validates them by giving them the status, in the long term, of historical phenomena – with all the pretensions to posterity and truth that go with this. The naming and classification of diseases provides perhaps the most obvious example of instances where afflictions have become respectable via official recognition. Moreover, as the ever-expanding new editions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM, indicate, it is easier to bring a pathology into the world than to get rid of one. Naming an illness gives the sufferer the comfort of knowing what is wrong with them, the practitioner a problem to solve, the pharmaceutical industry a target market and society a cultural reference point.

With our three word-concepts, which negotiate between an individual affliction and a communal one, the case is not very different. While saudade, lítost and hüzün are not, in the conceptual frameworks examined here, recognised disorders, attaching these words to their respective fatalisms goes some way towards creating a space for public acceptance.¹⁰ Definition instantly grants a kind of legitimacy, however precarious and questionable this might be.

The act of naming shifts the burden to the wider community. The affliction no longer resides solely with the afflicted – now, it exists in its own right. If we as individuals are powerless against such feelings, it is no wonder. Their authority derives from those who name them, most commonly medical practitioners but also, as this study discusses, the ‘unacknowledged legislators’ of the world – the poets and writers who seek to define the collective body.

Naming an affliction can also serve to humanise its sufferers. The word banzo, for instance, was used from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries to describe the condition of severe trauma and disassociation suffered by slaves recently arrived in Brazil.¹¹ It covered various symptoms including apathy, cessation of eating, geophagy (dirt-eating), self-harm, catatonia and psychosis.¹² In this case, the naming of the slaves’ trauma allowed a Portuguese physician, Luís Antônio de Oliveira Mendes, to suggest that slavery was a disease-causing pathogen like any other.¹³ Although the Brazilian slave trade did not end until the 1880s, and banzo as a diagnostic word has been consigned to the annals of defunct diseases, the term was revived in the twentieth century to describe experiences of longing and displacement that some Brazilians of African origin feel for their ancestral homeland.¹⁴ Similarly, Chagossian islanders, expelled by the British from their native Diego Garcia and prevented from returning, have named their homesickness sagren.¹⁵ In both cases, having a word that can articulate the uniqueness of their suffering may not diminish it, but provides, at the very least, conceptual ownership and the small element of agency and dignity this implies.

The opposite can also be true. ‘Drapetomania’ was a word invented by Southern physician Samuel Adolphus Cartwright in 1851 to describe the ‘disease’ of slave abscondment.¹⁶ In Cartwright’s conception, a slave who defied God’s natural order and desired freedom was simply ill, and many southern slave owners were delighted to be handed a pseudoscientific justification for their exploits. While Cartwright’s invention was dismissed fairly swiftly, particularly in the abolitionist North, drapetomania as a relic of racist pseudoscience remains a good reminder of the dangers of definition.

Another is that naming a condition may actually perpetuate it or even bring it into being. Jean Starobinski has referred to the talk surrounding fashionable illnesses as a ‘contaminating agent’ which, by inveigling itself into the popular consciousness, actually causes people to suffer from conditions such as neurosis or psychosis.¹⁷ Starobinski was of course referring to mass suggestion, psychosomatic illness and self-diagnosis, but his assertion that a named affliction is at once a comfort and a curse is a salient one. ‘Verification’ can be a powerful means of altering perception of the self and others, with the impact ranging from entirely harmless to very hazardous indeed.

Nostalgia: an early word-concept

The case of nostalgia provides an early example of the problems in declaring a particular body of people to be imbued with a certain emotional disposition. The concept has not, after all, always been the apolitical referent of bittersweet longing that it is considered today. Combining nostos, meaning ‘home’, and algia, ‘pain’, the pseudo-Greek term was coined in 1688 by Johannes Hofer, a Swiss physician who, according to the classificatory zeal of the time, sought to elevate Heimweh, or ‘homesickness’, into the pathogenic pantheon.¹⁸ Troubled by the high incidence of debilitating longing among young Swiss soldiers posted abroad, Hofer put it down to the fact that few of them had ever been displaced from the maternal bosom – of either mother or motherland. This explanation was not, however, uncontroversial. It was denounced by some Swiss commentators as unpatriotic, since it suggested that the youthful soldiers were weak-willed or even cowardly, and so a disgrace to their nation.¹⁹

The pathologisation of longing therefore was, for some, insufficient to remove responsibility from its sufferers. Nostalgia was linked to an overwhelming love of one’s country, which might indeed be considered a positive thing, yet it was at the same time representative of a distinctly unpatriotic debility. Could one suffer excessive nostalgia and still be ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1  Emotions into History
• Part I  Saudade and Portugueseness
• Part II  Ltost and Czechness
• Part III  Hzn and Turkishness
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index