Unshed Tears: Meaning, Trauma and Translation

Summary

‘What we most fear, I suggest, is not death; nor even physical anguish, mental decay, disintegration. We fear most the loss of meaning. To lose meaning is to lose one's humanity, and this is more terrifying than death.’

Joyce Carol Oates

In the early nineteenth century, Schleiermacher noted that ‘understanding is an unending task’ and ‘the talent for misunderstanding is infinite’. In more recent times, meaning has been understood as an endless deferral; the more one tries to grasp it, the more it appears ungraspable. This rings especially true if we consider the particular form of understanding that is translation. Since the meaning of a text is closely attached to its ‘letter’ – its sound or signifier – translation can never be a simple transfer of meaning. Indeed, no matter how accurately one brings meaning ‘home’, the result is inevitably approximate, partial – a fraught compromise reached through negotiation and compensation.

If meaning is constantly deferred and displaced, however, what kind of ‘testimony’ can translation truly offer? In other words, how can translation bear witness to its reference – the source text?

I will tackle this question by examining the relationship between translation and two other types of witnessing: psychoanalysis and literature. In particular, I will explore the notion of trauma, which has attracted considerable interdisciplinary attention over the past few decades. Trauma is an experience that ‘simultaneously decades and demands our witness’, challenging the way we normally understand meaning. Since Sigmund Freud's pioneering work, trauma has been fruitfully investigated through literary writing. ‘If Freud turns to literature to describe the traumatic experience,’ Cathy Caruth argues, ‘it is because literature, like psychoanalysis, is interested in the complex relationship between knowing and not knowing.’

In this essay I will consider some key aspects of trauma and discuss how they relate to translation. I will then provide a close-reading of a story that, in my view, exemplifies the structure of the traumatic experience: Katherine Mansfield's ‘Life of Ma Parker’. Finally, through the analysis of my own translation of that story, I will propose a rethinking of translation as a form of testimony that originates where a direct access to meaning seems to be denied.