The lady of the mirrors
Jean PaulhanThere are solutions stranger than problems. Because the problem at least was only a_ question; but the solution poses a thousand problems. And certainly we have found the reason for the literary paradox 1 : it is that the terrorist is himself this pure spirit, infinitely free of language, which the rhetorician called for. By which Terror and Rhetoric are both founded - one to say what it says, the other to be what it is. There remains a curious difficulty.
I can well admit, with common sense, that the hesitation between such and such words, the oscillation, the return and the indefinite weighing, betray the play of a thought purer in language than usual, since it has not yet found but is seeking its expression: a thought before words, if ever there was one. With the same evidence, I know what this man thinks at the crossroads who comes and goes, and sometimes chooses the right road and sometimes the left; or that other who, at the end of the precipice and already carried away, hesitates between two tufts of grass where to hold on. This evidence, however, has another side: a side of shadow and paradox.
This is because we had to suppose the thoughts of the terrorist. We deduced it from his various comments. We do not attend it. Moreover, it seems that the terrorist himself remains powerless to identify it, to know it (because he persists in his pretension). And what, after all, is a thought in us of which we are not conscious, if not a simple cloud? It seems in truth that we have limited ourselves to replacing the old with a new paradox, and to shifting the difficulty rather than resolving it.
I. MACHIAVELISM OF RHETORIC
Society said of Madame Camoin that her prestige was due to the contradiction into which she equally threw friends and adversaries, sometimes busy criticizing her for her excessive gentleness and sometimes for her ferocity, her stubbornness or her nonchalance - thus forced, in the end, to admit to her some secret which passed between gentleness and violence, negligence and will. And Chesterton says of Christianity, in the same sense, that after having criticized it for being too optimistic - but also much too desperate; too tender — but also too brutal; too detached - but also too practical, his enemies should finally admit that he is rather what pushes violence as well as gentleness, optimism as well as pessimism, to the limit, and gives them their frank colors.
Thus we should say of Rhetoric that it derives its virtue from the confused mass of objections that it raises. “I write without order,” says one, “and as things come to me; to order emotion is to lose it. — I apply to writing without order, says the other: the first draft is only convention.” Thus we reject Rhetoric, here, because it is artificial, and there, because it is natural. “It’s pure contortion, and the mind twists and turns. — It’s pure naivety, the mind follows its old inclination.”
Objections, but just as much praise. "I bend the incessant flight of my thoughts to fixed rules," says one. I thus give it an origin and an end - an existence." But the other: “I restore to my mind, through the rule, its natural rhythm and weight.” Thus we also praise Rhetoric, as we blamed it earlier, because it is nature and because it is artifice, because it suits the mind and because it is opposed to it.
But to those who take into account both praise and blame, it would rather seem that Rhetoric possesses a secret which transcends artifice and nature, the concerted phrase and the spouted phrase. In short, no remark can be made about it which does not enter into its plan.
Before tackling it frankly, I am only trying to popularize the rhetorical problem. We sometimes say that a certain feeling became true because we believed it. But of Rhetoric, conversely, it would be necessary to say that it becomes true to the extent that we do not believe it: thanks to these gropings around it, and these various refusals. Nor can it be said that she pleads the false in order to know the truth. But, more precisely, that she pretends to plead the false to provoke the true. “She reproached me,” said Rousseau, “of being too bold, to give me to understand that I could be more bold.” So does Rhetoric, like courtesans. As if there were no linguistic combination to which the mind could not respond with new inventions.
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It is a commonplace of law that it is not enough to forge new laws to prevent quarrels and wars; on the contrary, the obscurities multiply by the comments that we give and the difficulties increase as we foresee them. Because comments and predictions in turn generate new trials which are added to the others. So it is with Rhetoric, if it offers no rules which do not lend itself to contrary reflections. A tyrant, if he were interested in trials for their own sake, would have every interest in multiplying laws. But who is not interested in Letters for them? It will therefore be necessary to multiply the precepts, the conventions, the units. Certain topics will be prohibited. The novelist (for example) will have the right to write about love — but not about money. The playwright, of friendship, and family feelings, but under no pretext of daydreams or health. Certain stylistic tricks, certain figures will be permitted, and others forbidden. The most subtle rhythmic combinations will be required. As two men who use the same language lose their particular soul less than they reveal it and in some way give birth to it, so do two authors who speak by chosen subjects and themes: Phèdre distinguishes Racine from Pradon; Amphitryon, Molière by Plautus. If Rhetoric was ever invented, it was undoubtedly to highlight the personality of writers. If she recommended (with such gentle insistence) not to seek to be personal, it was to better observe to what extent one could not avoid being personal. Finally she stubbornly invited each writer to “dance in chains”.
However, we must not let this image mislead us. It may well be exhilarating to dance in chains. I've never seen anyone achieve this (or maybe the channels were wrong); and of the writer himself, if I must finally admit that the rule serves and exalts him, I find it difficult to imagine by what means. Now as long as I remain uncertain here, Rhetoric is incomprehensible to me - at the mercy of the first argument that comes along. Here is the crudest. Pascal criticizes the poets for having invented certain bizarre terms which they call poetic beauty: these are golden century, wonder of our days, rose lips. “But (he adds) whoever imagines a woman on this model which consists of saying small things with big words will see a pretty village girl, all full of mirrors...” It is too easy for Voltaire or Ironside to respond on this point that lips of rose or century d'or are not “big words” or constrained sentences, but the naive expression of surprise and delight. From which we will in turn conclude that lèvres de rose must finally respond to the purest thought, at the crossroads of two languages, and that which allows both the opinion of Pascal and that of Voltaire. But I would like to see this thought better.
In fact, here we are rejected at our first difficulty. I won't approach it head-on. But I will first try to illustrate, through related examples, its breadth and scope.
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Who knows exactly what he's thinking? Phédon thinks he hates Junie, it's the beginning of a great love. Hermas considers himself indifferent to Lélie: it’s because he is far too sensitive to her. Claude believed himself grateful to Celsus, who saved him; but he rejoices in a death which takes away both Celsus and recognition. Morals readily admit that the heart can be learned, like a language.
It is an acute form of the error. We are constantly dealing with feelings such that it is impossible for us, or at least difficult, to observe them in ourselves. The preacher was mocked for saying, “For modesty I fear no one.” But we must bring out the paradox, which the mockery hides: it is contradictory to be modest, and to know that we are modest. Because modesty consists of diminishing oneself. But if you know that you are diminishing yourself you also know that you are actually greater than you seem. So you stop being modest. So it is, conversely, with pride. We can roughly say that it consists of giving yourself importance. Now if you see that you are exaggerating your importance, you stop exaggerating it. Seeing oneself proud is the result of modesty; seeing oneself modest, pride.
So do many other states of mind and thoughts. Goodness, devotion consists of doing this or that — and not knowing that one is good or devoted. If the hero discovers his courage and the seriousness of the danger that threatens him, he immediately ceases to be a hero and becomes a suicide. Space, time, civilization are clear ideas to us as long as we do not look at them too closely: but as soon as they are mentioned, they become blurred and obscured - inexpressible as soon as we try to express them, elusive, to grasp them. And far from the rhetorical state finally being an exception, it should rather be said that here it follows the fate of all thought.
The fact remains that this fate offers here some trait more bizarre than is common, and to which we feel less resigned. It is because courage, time or modesty were without pretension: simple ideas or feelings, which it is too natural to see disturbed by our attention. But Rhetoric made us a promise, which it does not keep. To hear it, it was to reveal to us the authentic spirit, pure thought. What, if she flinches at her first step on a trivial obstacle.
II. WE DO NOT ATTEND OUR THINKING WITHOUT ALTERING IT
It is curious that the unconscious, as psychologists and psychoanalysts portray it to us, is usually only a second-hand unconscious. These are thoughts, worries, obsessions, which would just as well be conscious if some social taboo did not get in the way: laws, conventions, scruples.
But here we are forced to suppose, conversely, an unconscious of nature. In fact, the simplest remark — but the most obvious — should have led us there the first time.
This is because thought alone can give us knowledge of thought. To be aware of any idea, concern or feeling is first of all to take from them the part of thought necessary for our view. We never see them pure; we never reflect—reflection being also thought—only a thought diminished by this reflection. Man no more grasps his intact spirit than he sees directly his nape or his neck. There is still ice cream for the neck and neck. There is none for the mind. It is possible that original thought has its unknown powers, its mysterious connections, its extreme freedom. But men know nothing about it - I'm not just saying psychologists and philosophers (who seem to have set out to reassure us on this) but the first person who comes along, the man in the street, you and me. And undoubtedly there is no more haunting anguish than that which stems from this ignorance, if I judge by the tales and myths that it stirs up. Elsa wants to know who Lohengrin is, and Lohengrin disappears. If Psyche sees Love, Love vanishes. If Lot's wife turns around, she becomes a pillar of salt; Orpheus looks at Eurydice, and Eurydice returns to the Underworld. Precautions change nothing: however quick the glance, however slight the tilt of the head, everything is already accomplished. I leave these pleasant worries, which take the place of myths for us: the dog who chases his tail, the cat who wants to catch his shadow; the man haunted by the desire to see himself, even if only once, as if he were not himself — the most naive or subtle legends also warn us that the closest to us is the best hidden. Each man carries in his secret, as long as his life lasts, the invisible lover who was given to Psyche.
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But the legend also says that we do not give up. It remains surprising to us that the torch (as the proverbs say) does not illuminate its base, that the gaze cannot be captured by the gaze, and that man “knows everything, except himself”. It is unbearable for us that Orpheus cannot see Eurydice. And I am willing that our fear of another country, of an unknown country, only expresses in its own way our preoccupation with our unknown country, and the only forbidden one. But let it be forever forbidden to us, that at least we do not accept.
Here one can imagine more than one method and one investigation. The most “natural”, those which first come to mind, fail: neither haste and extreme abruptness, nor negligence, absence or self-effacement teach us anything that passes our banal thinking. Rather, it would seem that dreams or daydreams, automatic writing, deep singing, cries further accentuate the common processes of our consciousness: more thoughtful than reason, more calculated than our calculations, more literary than literature, and always in the fashion of the time. Should we be surprised: we do not see at all why the thought which observes would necessarily be faster than the thought observed; nor the obvious secret thought, when the familiar thought fades away. It has been said: it is only a kind of thought, to which our desire for a solution alone lends, depending on the case, various qualities; and it is not for turning faster that the dog is more likely to catch its tail.
Where the direct route is ineffective, there remain indirect routes. It has been said that it would be enough for man, to know himself, to patiently observe his conduct and his actions. It may be; but ultimately I don't see what new things such an observation could teach us. Even if I admit (which is not proven, and hardly seems probable to me) that my behavior resembles my deep thought and translates it more precisely than my reflection does, the fact remains that it is still by reflection that I grasp this behavior. So that the same distortion, which I was wary of, will be exercised here - and all the more freely since a first expression has every chance of leaving him with a thought whose integrity is already threatened, if not forever compromised. We can assume a more efficient method here.
There is at least one point that we cannot avoid taking for granted: it is that our reflection - since it is aware of our real thought, and of the same nature as it - at least is not mistaken at all. This is because it captures a part of the original thought - deprived of its own nuance and its essential feature, it may be; distorted as much as we want. But finally a part, and such that we could from it - if we managed to know in what the deformation consists and what is the trait of which reflection deprives it - reconstitute primitive thought. It would be enough to observe elsewhere the proper play of reflection and the nature of the deformation that it entails. Elsewhere, I mean on some thought that it was given to us to grasp before and after the reflection, so that this distortion was found to be redoubled. But it is enough to pose the problem to see a solution.
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There is a feature of every translation, to which I do not know that sufficient attention has ever been paid: it is - to take things at their simplest - that it expresses some feeling or thought which had already received its expression. Even as the translator strives to forget the words of the original text to retain only the spirit, and however passionately he wants to be penetrated by the impressions he receives from it, he cannot but completely neglect the letter, and the attentive reader remains free at any moment to confront one text with the other. But this confrontation takes on a singular price in our eyes.
Because if there is a specific character of the expression as such - and for example a certain alteration that it brings to thought - we must therefore admit that the alteration will be found, in the second text, redoubled. I leave the chances of error which can come into play here. I take the strictest and most faithful translation possible: it must present in our hypothesis, in proportion to its fidelity, a regular difference from the first text, which will be the proper mark of the expression. So that all that remains for us — to go back from the primitive text to the pure thought it expresses — is to discover in it and reduce a difference of the same nature.
And simply we will be careful to choose a kind of translations where this difference has a chance of being clearly pronounced: whether it is a question of two languages of very different structure, as would be a civilized language and a primitive language; either of the same language, at two moments of its duration, at two places of its use, where the slightest difference is highlighted: thus of current French, confronted with slang and French of the 16th century.
It is enough to ask the question to find an answer: there is no attempt to translate Kikouyou or Cherokee into current French (and equally English and German), of the slang of butchers or scarps into literary French, and of the language of the 16th century into that of the 20th, which does not give us to suppose, from one to the other language, a difference of nature — so clear and so striking that it could have been the subject of more than one very serious study: exactly the language to be translated — slang, Cherokee or Villon language — seems to us more pictorial at the same time and more concrete than the language in which we translate it.
III. FROM A PATH TO AUTHENTIC THINKING
Victor Hugo said that common French is limited to naming things, but that slang shows them. He gave the example, among others, of lancequiner (to rain), where the drops of rain, he said, are happily compared to the lances of the lansquenets. Head is only an abstract word for us, but bille, boule, trognon, flask, coffee maker or calabasse make an image. Babillarde is more expressive than letter; to make sales pitch than to gain favor, etc.
Many languages other than slang should be mentioned here. It has long been admitted, on the strength of Diderot and Rousseau, that savage peoples and children used a completely poetic language. We still admit it sometimes. When little Jacqueline says that the swans plough the water and that her brother speaks gropingly, the family is confused with admiration. Now the furrows of the water, the head or the good graces should seem no less images to us, if habit did not erase their vivacity for us. The same habit, however, hides from the child or the scarf the metaphor he uses: marble or coffee maker are no less abstract to him than our head; babble board, than our letter. As for lancequiner, it is Hugo alone, carried away by the translator's illusion, who discovers a metaphor there. The word is a regular derivative of ance 2 (water). The illusion can take yet another form. This is because primitive language seems more concrete to us than our languages. We have always spoken willingly, at all times, of the naivety of old authors, of their respect for the smallest details, of their inability to deal with the abstract. The explorers admire, for their part, that the Lapp or the Luganda have no word for reindeer, but a particular word for the one-year-old reindeer, another for the two-year-old reindeer, one for the three-year-old reindeer, and so on. No word for the arm, but one word for the right arm and one for the left arm.
It is easy to answer that French says poule, poulet, poussin, rooster, but has no word, like Lapp, for the species to which these various animals belong (which does not mean at all that it does not form the abstract idea). That English distinguishes between loving God and loving potatoes but has no word (like Malagasy or French) which serves both feelings. From which it follows quite clearly that the Luganda or the Sami, in turn victim of the reversed illusion, will see in French or English an excessively concrete language. But the error matters less to us than the illusion.
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It is curious that the mind is slower than the hand or the eye in discarding its natural illusions. The black spot we see in the distance is not a speck of dust nor a dwarf, but a man like us. We know: we believe we see a man. But we continue to admit (and more than one serious book has no other subject) that slang and distant languages are figurative and concrete, but our own language very abstract. If I look for the reason for a constant illusion, this is what I find: it is that any translation, and the more faithful it is, has the first effect of dissociating the stereotypes of a text. It restores their independence to the elements of meaning that the first language associated. If I read carelessly:
Beautiful children you lose the most
Beautiful pink of your hats 3
I can have a vague feeling of some loss or decline, and be content with it. If I am a careful translator or commentator, I will first recall that there was a fashion for flower hats, even in the most serious society. From there, I will explain that the most beautiful rose in the hat designates here, metaphorically, the most precious good. Here is my translation done well enough to give the feeling of a language that is both pictorial and concrete. But where are the image and the concrete? In this translation alone, and in the operation by which I render a semi-obscure sentence to its detailed meaning. Villon's contemporary could only hear a very simple commonplace, and something like that for us: “He lost the flower of his youth, the flower of his years.” Thus babbler, bille, plougher, one-year-old reindeer, right arm do not give the feeling of the concrete or the image except during the operation which translates them. But it is our head, our furrow, our rooster and hens which will appear to the primitive, to the child, to the scarp, concrete images and details. This is because they must start by detailing them, and picturing them, constructing a whole sentence on the occasion and like a little fable.
I am not recalling anything here that is not common practice for translators. When André Gide observes, from A Thousand Nights and One Night, that the translation of J.-C. Mardrus, undoubtedly unfaithful to the storyteller's thoughts, restores to us further the very spirit and imagination of the Arabic language 4 ; when Paul Mazon notes about the translations of the Iliad this insurmountable difficulty: it is that by translating the Homeric formulas in their concrete detail, we distort the natural movement of the text 5, they only better mark the distortion inherent in all translation - for which it is finally time to seek a remedy.
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That any reflection, however, acts on our original thought in the way that translation alters a text, I want no other proof than common consent. We commonly admit that analysis breaks down and petrifies our impulses, our emotion. Thus Lot's wife becomes salt, and stone the Gorgon's visitor. There is no myth here that does not show us dispersion and ice on the soul as soon as we look at it. And Paul Mazon speaks of the Iliad translated in the way that old mythologies describe Love, as soon as Psyche looked at it. Only perhaps we know now how it would be possible to avoid ice, and deformation.
It would be enough to return to the translation — and just as well to the mind — the stereotypes, the places, the abstract arrangement of which our gaze has deprived it. Because the problem that arises for translators is only capable of receiving one solution: it is not, of course, to replace the clichés of the original text with simple abstract words (because the ease and particular nuance of the formula are lost there); nor is it about translating the cliché word for word (because we are thus adding to the text a metaphor that it did not include); but it is necessary to get the reader to know how to hear in cliché the translation as the reader, the primitive listener, must have heard it, and at any moment return to the image or the concrete detail, far from lingering there.
The thing requires, I know, a certain education of the reader, of the author himself. Perhaps this is not asking too much of man, if this effort is also the one which will allow him to go back from immediate thought to authentic thought. If it is not only about the Iliad that it will inform us exactly, but about this more secret text, which each of us carries within us. We recognized, in passing, the rhetorical treatment.
We sometimes say, lightly, that the rules are purely arbitrary on the part of rhetoricians and grammarians and that we do not at all see what necessity of thought could be met by rhyme or the number of feet. But if, on the contrary, it is the given thought which carries, by the very fact of this gift and our gaze, all the signs of the arbitrary and the false, we must first recognize in the rhythm, the rhyme and the feet this singular value and merit: it is that by returning to the mind the stereotypes and the places of which our attention deprived it, they restore it to its original state, and us to our condition of sons of the sun.
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A singular adventure happened to us: as if the problem that we began by posing, far from being resolved subsequently, had in some way been reversed. It was first of all a sort of scandal of reason that rhetoric only took on its value by reference to an unconscious mind - real, I am willing, and whose effects we observed, but such that it escaped our grasp.
But this spirit has continued to escape us. Our discovery went elsewhere: in short, it was not at all because rhetorical thought was abnormal and artificial that we remained powerless to imagine it, it was because it was a little too normal and natural - I mean too close to nature and to those original thoughts of which our ideas and our feelings, as soon as we distinguish them, are nothing more than a distorted echo.
I did not say that the discovery was rare, or in the least unexpected. All in all, it does little more than justify the impression that came to torment us at every moment. And what else could have meant the concern, common to rhetoricians, of a spirit a little more spiritual than usual? It was indeed with regard to Rhetoric that the paradox of reflection seemed particularly intolerable to us. Finally, who does not know from experience that there is more than one poem and one verse in which the eternal, the immediate, the intimate and specific to all, like day and night, space and time, are reflected as in a mirror - one of those mirrors with which we adorn the pretty country girl.
1 - cf. Measures, January 15, Rhetoric is reborn from its ashes. ↩
2 - Where does l'ance, or lance come from (cf. hedera-lierre) and suffix quin, quine (cf. rouquin, etc). ↩
3 - Villon ↩
4 - Some books, Works, t. III. ↩
5 - Madame Dacier and the translations of Homer. ↩
Text published in the magazine Mesures, April 15, 1938 - No. 2.