Literary Translation and the Making of Originals

Karen Emmerich

• Editorial: Bloomsbury Academic
• Año: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781501329920
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Literature
• Categoría: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature

Literary Translation and the Making of Originals engages such issues as the politics and ethics of translation; how aesthetic categories and market forces contribute to the establishment and promotion of particular "originals"; and the role translation plays in the formation, re-formation, and deformation of national and international literary canons. By challenging the assumption that stable originals even exist, Karen Emmerich also calls into question the tropes of ideal equivalence and unavoidable loss that contribute to the low status of translation, translations, and translators in the current literary and academic marketplaces.

1

“A message from the antediluvian age”: The Modern Construction of the Ancient Epic of Gilgamesh1

Ever do we build our households,

ever do we make our nests,

ever do brothers divide their inheritance,

ever do feuds arise in the land.

Ever the river has risen and brought us the flood,

the mayfly floating on the water.

On the face of the sun its countenance gazes,

then all of a sudden nothing is there!

—The Epic of Gilgamesh (tr. Andrew George)

At some time we build a household,

at some time we start a family,

at some time the brothers divide,

at some time feuds arise in the land.

At some time the river rose (and) brought the flood,

the mayfly floating on the river.

Its countenance was gazing on the face of the sun,

then all of a sudden nothing was there!

—Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic (tr. Andrew George)

For over 2,000 years, beginning in the late third millennium B.C.E., oral and written stories of a legendary king of Uruk circulated in several languages in the region between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. The wide distribution of these tales was facilitated by the spread of a series of empires throughout the region that brought canons of scribal texts to the far ends of their dominions. Toward the end of the first millennium B.C.E., as these empires gave way to others with different languages of administration, the writing system in which these stories had been consolidated and copied out by generations of scribes was replaced by new, more efficient scripts. Cuneiform was forgotten, and the stories with it. Only after another two millennia of dormancy were tales of this king brought to light by explorers and early archaeologists who unearthed countless fragments of inscribed clay tablets, and by pioneers of the field of Assyriology who set out to decipher these unfamiliar scripts and languages.

What we now know as the epic of Gilgamesh has been the object of a century and a half of decipherment, scholarly reconstruction, and translation, involving fragments found all over the Near East that date to many historical eras. These bits of text were inscribed in several historical and geographical varieties of the Akkadian language, including Assyrian and Babylonian, as well as in Hittite and in the Sumerian of the oldest surviving tales, whose hero was named Bilgamesh. Most current-day readers encounter Gilgamesh in editions based on the so-called Standard Babylonian version, which circulated throughout the Middle and Neo-Assyrian Empires, traveling widely over space and time. This version included a prologue inviting readers to open “the tablet-box of cedar,” lift out the tablets, and read out “all the misfortunes, all that Gilgamesh went through” (quoted here from the more scholarly of Andrew George’s two published translations of the reconstructed epic, 2003b: 2). Gilgamesh, a formerly unruly and unjust leader, has been broken by the loss of his friend Enkidu and tamed by his own subsequent soul-searching wanderings in distant lands. He has returned to Uruk with a “message from the antediluvian age” (539), a lesson learned both from Uta-napishti, survivor of a great flood, but also from his own encounters with the deep: his confrontation of the sheer fact of human mortality and his consequent attainment of “the totality of knowledge of all” (in Maureen Gallery Kovacs’s translation: 3). Gilgamesh returns, rebuilds the “ramparted walls of Uruk,” and “Engrave[s] all his hardships on a monument of stone” (in Benjamin Foster’s translation: 3), a story that then finds its way onto the tablets in the box of cedar (or copper, depending on the translation), where it waits to tell its cautionary tale for the benefit of future generations.

The epic’s message, as it has come down to us, is thus in part about the importance of societal or cultural continuity in the face of human mortality, a continuity to which the tale seeks to contribute. Yet the history of the epic’s loss and rediscovery has additional messages to impart: about the discontinuity of traditions, and about the transience not just of people but of ancient texts and their meanings, which can only be “revived” by shaping an original in the image of a translation, rather than the other way around. Just as Gilgamesh must travel far afield and experience deep loss in order to return a better ruler, the tale of the epic’s rediscovery also involves a series of journeys, conquests, departures, and domesticating “returns,” as European Orientalists traveled to the Near East and traced a reverse journey carrying extracted archaeological materials “back” (a word they used, and which I repeat in full irony) to private collections, museums, and other institutions in the West. And just as the initial dissemination of texts about Gilgamesh was made possible by the spread of a series of empires through the ancient Near East, so too was its rediscovery wrapped up in expansionist European politics. Even the deciphering of Akkadian was discussed by scholars of the day in profoundly nationalist terms. Yet this new rhetorical realm could ultimately picture its discoveries only in the light of inherited discursive regimes, resulting in what David Damrosch calls the “profoundly assimilative” (2003: 57) ways of reading the epic that abounded in the nineteenth century, as Gilgamesh reemerged into a society obsessed with origins and progress, travel, science, and encounters with the unknown, and whose far-flung intellectual adventures were so often undertaken in the hope of discovering that society’s own true past. These assimilative readings are, of course, the basis for our own twentieth- and twenty-first-century understandings of what Gilgamesh is and means.

This chapter explores these tropes of origins and reproductions, travel and domestication, in order to probe the pervasive paradigms of equivalence that have structured modern readers’ encounters with this ancient work and with the languages in which it was written. In it, I challenge the notion that a stable original exists upon which translations might be based. Setting aside the many other ancient versions of the tale, our texts for even the twelve-tablet Standard Babylonian version are derived not from any particular set of tablets; they are, on the contrary, composite texts formed by piecing together multiple textual witnesses.2 And unlike the Homeric epics, for which texts that began to assume relatively fixed form in the tenth century C.E. are now often taken for granted as objects of study even by specialists,3 the textual makeup of even this one version of Gilgamesh continues to shift, as excavations turn up new fragments and as we revise our understanding of its language and surrounding culture. Yet I do not mean to set Gilgamesh aside as an exception to the rule of how we encounter ancient works, or any works for that matter. On the contrary, I use it as a limit case that invites us to question our conventional reliance on other supposedly fixed texts as well. It may be easier for us to get on with the business of interpreting works attributed to Sappho or Homer if we can all agree on what the texts (however fragmentary) for their works are—but this is a matter of convenience, not truth. Claims to textual stability are either disingenuous or naïve, for ancient and modern works alike.

But a more crucial contribution of this chapter lies elsewhere: in its unpacking of the ways in which the task of re-membering the epic, of assembling its fragments, has gone hand-in-hand with an assimilative “remembering” of these forgotten languages. I show the process of deciphering cuneiform and codifying the meaning of Akkadian words to be steeped in the rhetoric and practice of a certain kind of translation, by which phonetic and semantic equivalents are assigned to cuneiform symbols such that presumed equivalence on other levels can follow. This, too, is a system for establishing conventions rather than of establishing truths. I am particularly interested in the role bilingual dictionaries play in structuring a paradigm of seeming equivalence between this ancient language and modern ones. I am also interested in the tension between a post-poststructuralist suspicion of the very idea of stable textual meaning and the fact that this ancient literature—if it is literature, and even if it isn’t—can be experienced only in translations for which these dictionaries are crucially enabling. For these cuneiform texts, and for ancient Mesopotamian languages more generally, lexical equivalence is, I suggest, less discovered than assigned. And while the results continue to be contested and debated—is the tablet box copper or cedar?—the process of decipherment nonetheless entails building at least a partial, functional consensus that ventriloquizes ancient texts in terms of likeness to (and difference from) an ever-changing contemporary context.

This argument has consequences far broader than the case study I have chosen; it bears, too, on certain disciplinary modes of language pedagogy, and on the policing of translations via word-level comparison with dictionary definitions, which obscure the fact that such definitions arise from a process of building consensus rather than of discovering truth. I turn to Gilgamesh because, as a language lost in antiquity and rediscovered in the modern era, Akkadian offers a prime site for an investigation of this kind. In the following pages, I trace the fraught processes of the decipherment of this language and the textual “reconstruction” and reception of this work in four sections. I begin with an overview of early Assyriologists’ modes of assimilating ancient Near Eastern texts to the current concerns of their day, which I follow and substantiate with a close look at a single instance of translation comparison that, while intended to demonstrate the success of decipherment, actually reveals some of the fault lines in this project. I then move to the great Akkadian dictionary projects of the twentieth century, which, I argue, exhibit a tension between a practical need to assign concrete, usable definitions to words and a desire to elaborate forms of encyclopedic knowledge that resist attempts to assign word-level equivalents. Lastly, I touch briefly on some contemporary editors’ and translators’ ways of dealing with the textual uncertainty of the Gilgamesh materials. What binds these sections together is the fluctuating pull and push of what we might call domesticating and foreignizing impulses, both in translation and in the broader discursive approach to a culture so distant in place and time.4 Throughout, I argue that the constitution both of “original” texts and of the translingual schema that enable translation are highly contested processes whose results can only be taken for granted insofar as the contestation itself is willfully or otherwise forgotten.

Foreignizing domestications: The assimilative mode of Orientalist thought

The nineteenth century was, as Edward Said has shown, the grand century of Orientalism, a set of discursive practices that rationalized the political domination of the inhabitants of the Near East by portraying them as exoticized, infantilized others. In Said’s formulation, the colonial enterprise cannot properly be understood as a mere show of imperial force; rather, this violent annexation was bolstered and even facilitated by forms of knowledge about the Orient created by and for individuals and institutions in the West. Materials from the Near East were acquired wholesale by Western travelers and disseminated back at home “as a form of specialized knowledge […] reconverted, restructured from the bundle of fragments brought back piecemeal by explorers, expeditions, commissions, armies, and merchants into lexico-graphical, bibliographical, departmentalized, and textualized Orientalist sense.” This textualization, Said writes, involved the creation of “dictionaries, grammars, commentaries, editions, translations, all of which together formed a simulacrum of the Orient and reproduced it materially in the West, for the West” (Said 1994: 165–6).

It is difficult to imagine a more apt description of the process of deciphering the languages of ancient Mesopotamia: fragments of inscribed tablets and paper pressings of monumental inscriptions were sent to institutions and private collections in Britain and Europe, where they were pieced together, copied, printed, made legible, discussed in lectures and essays, unpacked in grammars and dictionaries. Alongside this textualization of the Orient came its literal objectification. For instance, the wild success of Austen Henry Layard’s Nineveh and its Remains (1849)—a memoir of the excavations that turned up, among other things, the first known textual fragments of the Gilgamesh story—fueled the construction of the Assyrian wing of the British Museum, which was built in part to house the massive statues of winged bulls and lions that Layard shipped to England from the field.5 This fetishization of unique oriental “originals” was, meanwhile, accompanied by their rampant reproduction for popular consumption, ranging from the drawings in Layard’s memoir, to jewelry and knick-knacks modeled on Assyrian motifs, to Frederick Charles Cooper’s Diorama of Nineveh, an archaeological simulation that appeared in London’s Gothic Hall in 1851.6 The intellectual conquest of the Near East, enabled by and complicit in its political conquest, thus also gave rise to a series of reproductions that both domesticated and exoticized these textual and material finds.

Not coincidentally, this period of “Assyromania” was also one of intense debate over the age of the world and the origins of human his...