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A few years ago I was invited by Stanley Wells to Stratford
to organize and run a seminar on "Shakespeare in
translation" based on three main issues:
1. aspects of the history of Shakespearean translation into
various languages;
2. theories of dramatic translation;
3. the actual experience of translating Shakespeare into
French, Italian, Spanish and other
languages.(footnote
1)
Apart from different opinions concerning the problem of
rendering Shakespeare's iambic pentameter into other
languages, the overall discussion revealed an interesting
convergence of both theoretical and practical approaches,
which witnessed a radical change in contemporary
sensibility, connected with the recent developments of
dramatology as a specific method for tackling texts which
are not to be considered only as literary texts in the way
novels or poems are. Most of the participants, if not all,
agreed on the following crucial points:
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a) dramatic translation must take into account the
non linguistic codes embedded in dramatic language;
dramatology can offer important keys to the
locating of the theatrical route within the
dramatic text: since drama is both voice and action
in space, any dramatic translation should first of
all be faithful to the performative aspect of
speech;
b) whenever possible, a certain amount of
literalness in Shakespeare translation proves to be
- strangely enough at first sight - not only more
faithful to the literariness of the text, but also
more functional to its theatrical implications than
any kind of explanation or expansion of
meaning;
c) the original semantics and rhetoric should be
saved even when this may mean a little forcing,
overstretching, the semantic import of the target
language;
d) rhythm (which is part of the prosodic pattern,
but is also strictly related to syntax and
rhetoric) is no less important than semantics;
nonetheless the subject of a free choice as regards
a codified or an uncodified metre in the TL text
was left open.
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I will here try to go briefly into the issues just sketched.
Let us start from dramatology which investigates the
specific features of a language in which other non
linguistic (theatrical) codes are embedded. Following the
Aristotelian distinction between narration
(diegesis) and drama
(mimesis), we may all agree that
diegesis is self-sufficient in its textuality; it privileges
the utterance (enoncé)
over the utterance act
(énonciation); it does not
need a pragmatic context to which to refer; it is shaped
according to a temporal axis mostly based on the past; it is
able to move easily from one temporal and spatial level to
another. Dramatic mimesis, instead, is institutionally tied
to the speaking process
(énonciation); it
requires a pragmatic context, which is virtual on the page
and actualized on the stage; its temporal axis is always
based on the present; its space is that of
deixis.
As Pirandello put it, theatre is essentially "spoken
action". Drama in fact expounds a story through a dynamic
progression of intersecting speech-acts and corresponding
actions. Speech-acts articulate along deictic and
performative segments, since dramatic language always refers
to a pragmatic context, and at the same time implements the
joints of the story. In a word, it is language in
situation which inscribes in itself the non-verbal or,
more precisely, the implicitely lexicalized messages of its
referential and pragmatic context. Meaning in drama seems to
depend primarily upon deixis, the referential axis which
regulates speech-acts: even rhetoric, just as grammar and
syntax, is related to deixis, which subsumes and sorts out
the meanings vehicled by the images, by the linguistic modes
(prose, poetry), by rhythm, by the different styles of the
characters, by proxemic relations, by the kinesics of
movement etc. (footnote
2)
Moreover, the situated message, the speech-act, while
necessarily being referential, must at the same time
perform something on the stage. A dramatic speech
act is never a simply locutionary act: it is rather
illocutionary (having the task of informing,
ordering, warning, undertaking) and/or perlocutionary
(bringing about or achieving something by saying words)
[according to Austin's
definitions](footnote
3).
And that is not all. As has been noted (for instance, by
Ducrot), even the imperative and the interrogative forms
have a performative quality in drama, since they express
command or uncertainty, and therefore turn out to be acts of
commanding or interrogating. We can go even further and
consider as intrinsically performative: a) syntax, b) style,
c) rhythm, and d) metre, as stylistic features of characters
in action/situation.
Let me sum it up: dramatic performativity unfolds itself
within deixis and constitutes the core of a genre which
represents an action (the original Greek sense of drama)
through the speech acts of characters talking and moving on
dectic tracks within ostensive and spatial relations. On
both the performative and the deictic levels the dramatic
language conveys most, if not all, of the stage signs
(belonging to codes and conventions) which contribute to the
overall, multimedia theatrical performance: intonation,
mimic, gestures, proxemics, kinetics etc. (what Brecht
altogether defined as Gestus).
(footnote
4)
Accordingly, the semiological unit of dramatic language
seems to be a complex sign, or, better, a band of sign
relationships to be identified within the speaker's
dectic-performative action, which amounts to an oriented
enunciation which cannot be considered, interpreted as a bit
of information, an image or a narrative microsequence, but
rather as an indexical and pragmatic utterance on the stage
(but already inscribed within drama). Characters
speak in many ways: they ask, answer, imply, simulate,
declare, allude, narrate, anticipate further acts, presume,
pretend, command etc., and in doing this they address each
other, or refer to objects, or parts of the stage, or to the
audience. Therefore, we can divide the seemingly incessant
flow of their speeches into several units according to the
characters' deictic-performative orientations, which
correspond to the shifting of their spatial and locutionary
attitudes.
Translation should try to follow as closely as possible this
complex - both linguistic and semiotic - track. I will soon
go back to the specific features of dramatic language. But
first I would like to dwell briefly on the literary richness
and complexity of Shakespeare's texts, a literariness which
should never be overlooked by regarding his plays like mere
scripts for the stage, pre-texts for acting. The
extraordinary linguistic and thematic richness of his plays
offers a textual evidence of a highly imaginative mind
caught within the dramatic contradictions of a turbulent
age. In translating Shakespeare one must be aware that what
needs to be rendered is not only the play of characters and
the play of actions, but also the play of cultural codes and
modes of perception of an epoch which was questioning its
own historical heritage, and opening the way to new unstable
cognitive, axiological and ideological parameters. Reality
was becoming manifold, uncertain, and relative: it was,
metaphorically speaking, a stage endowed with numerous
wings, showing a prismatic play of multiple points of view.
Every aspect of the world was liable to be newly recoded,
and it is in such a vertigo-like scenario that we must
locate the enormous energy of Shakespeare's language, which
dramatically hybridizes world pictures, styles, ideologies,
perceptions. Language itself underwent a sort of radical
shake-up, which Shakespeare's inventiveness took to its
extreme, producing hybrid registers and styles, a flurry of
new words, -- especially compounds --, and stretching the
syntactical potentialities beyond the limits of what was
conventional or generally accepted. As many critics have
noticed, Shakespeare had an extraordinary ability to
activate the various different senses of almost every word,
and unexpectedly to either put them together or set them one
against the other;. There followed a dramatic concert of
meanings sometimes difficult to follow, especially when a
number of contrasting semantic perspectives are opened
up.
As a result, the translators has not only to face
linguistic, but also epistemological problems, because he
must bring about a similar cognitive and imaginative
turbulence. But, after all, in spite of the sometimes
insuperable difficulties, Shakespeare's plays are still very
much alive just because they continue to transmit a rich
idea of how an elusive world can be refracted through a
complex and "myriad-minded" perspective.
The translator must therefore deal with the multi-levelled
energy of his texts in order to keep them vital and
communicative also to a modern, non-English reader. More
specifically, he has to render in the target language the
energy of dramatic speech, which is virtual on the page,
while showing on stage all its pragmatic significance when
combined with the extralinguistic codes. The multifaceted
energy of a Shakespearean drama can be briefly sketched as
follows:
1. It springs from the complex representation of a rapidly
changing world.
2. It is linked to the theatrical space: any
enunciation is related to the speaker, to other characters,
to objects (real or imaginary), to the audience; it is
related to a multicoded performance involving mimic,
gestures, movements etc.
3. It has to do with the dramatic time, the "here and
now" in which the speech-acts absorb both past and future,
pushing forward the "continuous present" of drama.
Any dramatic translation will consequently be both
interlinguistic and intersemiotic since it must take into
account the stage devices embedded in the original text. I
will start with a few simple examples of deixis. In
Hamlet II.2, Polonius expounds to the king and queen
his theory on the cause of the prince's madness, and, when
asked if he is quite sure of it, he peremptorily puts his
life at stake: "Take this from this if this be otherwise"
("Spiccate questa da questo se questo sta in altro modo").
His play on three this (the first two
referential, the third anaphorical) belongs to his
rhetorical attitude, while being at the same time a stage
figure which should not be paraphrased in translation, for
instance with something like "Cut off this head from this
trunk if this which I have been telling you comes out not to
be true". Similarly, Macbeth's phrase on entering the stage
for the first time as a king (III.1) "To be thus is nothing
/ But to be safely thus" ("Essere così è nulla
se non si è con sicurezza così"), is an
extraordinarily elliptic meditation on the precariousness of
his new rank: Macbeth is here marked by the signs of royalty
(a crown on his head, maybe a sceptre in his hand), and the
double deictic thus is distributed in the
figure of parallelism reinforced by strong accents, thereby
showing the rank of Macbeth and immediately pointing to its
vanity. In this case too the translated text should not
paraphrase, unravel, the theatrical ellipsis.
The stage track inscribed in drama is not always so evident.
Let us take for example Hamlet III.4.220, where
Hamlet leaves his mother and addresses the dead Polonius
with grim irony: "Come, sir to draw toward an end with you".
The primary linguistic meaning is "to finish with you", but
the phrase at the same time activates, on the theatrical
level, a secondary meaning which has to do with the
interpretation of the verb to draw as to pull,
to haul. While saying these words, Hamlet is in fact tugging
away the corpse. The dramatic language shelters an
intersemiotic play, as is confirmed by the following scene
(IV.1), when Gertrude answers the question of the king about
the movements of Hamlet. Where is he gone? "To draw
apart the body he hath kill'd". I have rendered the two
meanings: "Venite, signore, per tirare fin in fondo
il discorso con voi".
We have said that the performativity of drama articulates
along deictic orientations related to the various ways in
which characters move and address each other. The asides
make this point particularly evident because the characters
suddenly change their referential axis from an interlocutor
to another or to the audience. However deictic orientations
embedded in dramatic speeches are always dynamically at
work, even in soliloquies. I will briefly refer to one of
Macbeth's many monologues (in II.1). Let us see some of its
segments:
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Is this a
dagger which I see before me,
The handle toward my hand? | Come, let me clutch
thee. |
I have thee not, and yet I see thee still. |
Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible
To feeling as to sight? Or art thou but
A dagger of the mind, a false creation
Proceeding from the heat-oppressèd brain?
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I see thee yet, in form as palpable |
As this which now I draw. |
Thou marshall'st me the way that I was going,
And such an instrument I was to use. |
Mine eyes are made the fools o'th' other
senses,
Or else worth all the rest. | I see thee still,
And on thy blade and dudgeon gouts of blood,
Which was not so before. | There's no such
thing.
It is the bloody business which informs
Thus to mine eyes.
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First, we have the vision of an imaginary dagger. Then, the
character addresses directly the object with an accompanying
gesture, and his frustration is soon clearly inscribed in
the language. Questions about it then arise, but the
character then changes his meditative attitude and asserts
the reality of his vision by comparing it with the solid
evidence of his own dagger which he draws with a gesture.
This is sufficient to show why all translation must be
faithful to deictics and performatives. What I wanted to
show is the energy of a language which should be rendered in
translation with a great fidelity to its deictic
articulation.
If dramatic language always moves, and performs, as a
consequence syntax must be one of the main vehicles of
performativity. Drama is in its own nature pluridiscursive
and pluristylistic, such a plurality being entrusted first
of all to the linguistic modes of different characters who
speak, and therefore act, according to their peculiar roles
and functions. Consequently, the translator must avoid
homologating them at this level which appears to be first of
all syntactical, because it is here - as well as through
grammar, lexicon, style, rhetorics, and even rhythm and
metre - that the characters deploy their attitudes and
tactics together with their axiological and ideological
assumptions. The tactics through which they argument
seem to me first of all syntactical, thus organizing their
speeches in a way that at the same time characterizes them,
makes them act in and through language, and lends rhythm to
their stage movements. Speech-acts mean, beyond and above
their semantics, according to their syntagmatic
expression.
Let us see, for instance, in Hamlet, I.2, the first
long speech of the king, which at the same time
characterizes him as a subtle and suspicious character, and
deploys his indirect and machiavellian tactics:
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Though yet of Hamlet our dear brother's death
The memory be green, and that it us befitted
To bear our hearts in grief, and our whole
kingdom
To be contracted in one brow of woe,
Yet so far hath discretion fought with nature
That we with wisest sorrow think on him
Together with remembrance of ourselves.
Therefore our sometime sister, now our queen,
Th'imperial jointress of this warlike state,
Have we as 'twere, with a defeated joy,
With an auspicious and a dropping eye,
With mirth in funeral and with dirge in
marriage,
In equal scale weighing delight and dole,
Taken to wife. Nor have we herein barr'd
Your better wisdoms, which have freely gone
With this affair along. For all, our
thanks…
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This speech shapes itself - through its convolutions,
parallelisms, oxymora, suspension -- as the utterance of an
illegitimate king who is looking for the legitimization of
his newly grasped power. He starts with a seven lines
sentence, in which his first concern is that of both
remembering and arguing the necessity of
forgetting the past legitimate king. His second
sentence develops through seven more lines: note the
oxymora, the parentheses, the suspension of the verbal
function. His syntax is a subtle net of semantic balances
aiming at obtaining consensus. An intent that comes to the
fore in the following three lines, where he addresses the
notables of the kingdom for the support they have given him
for his coronation and marriage, and flatteringly gives them
credit of better wisdoms. Up to this point he has
made a speech of domestic policy. Now he can pass to foreign
policy and informs the court of what they already know ("Now
follows that you know young Fortinbras…"), and he spins
a sentence of nine lines, which is followed by another of
thirteen! His strategic procedures are much more important
than what he actually says. The translator therefore should
not disentangle the passage by using shorter sentences and
giving them a less convoluted manner.
Think, on the other hand, of the rhetorical and pedagogical
syntax of Polonius. Just one example from his speech to
Laertes in I.3:
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… Beware
Of entrance to a quarrel, but being in,
Bear't that th'opposed may beware of thee.
Give every man thy ear, but few thy
voice;
Take each man's censure, but reserve thy
judgement. (footnote
5)
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Quite different, of course, is the syntax of Hamlet,
extremely varied according to his interlocutors (or to
himself as interlocutor in the soliloquies) - a syntax at
times fragmentary, at other times high-sounding, or mimetic,
or parodistic, or destructive: in a word, without a centre,
as Hamlet is, always exploring language without being able
to discover neither the foundations of being nor the
strategy of existing.
To sum it up, syntax is essential to performance on the
stage. But of course syntax is just one component of
dramatic language, conterminous with style, rhetorics,
rhythm and metre. Think for example of the decisive
importance of the syntactical and the rhetorical
components in relation to the stage action of characters
such as Iago and Othello. Iago's language develops through
disjunctive, suspensive, and negative clauses; Othello's
mainly through expanded and assertive constructs.
Accordingly, the rhetorics of Iago exploits the rhetorical
figures of irony and litotes, whereas that of Othello often
moves around hyperbole.
Of no less performative relevance are figures such as
antanaclasis (for instance in Richard III); and,
generally speaking, all the figures of speech (or
schemata in Greek) contribute to both the meaning and
the rhythm of dramatical exchanges: I mean the figures of
repetition (anaphora, epiphora etc.) and the figures related
to order (anastrophe, hyperbaton, isocolon etc.). Brian
Vickers has put it very clearly:
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"Modern criticism has rediscovered the tropes
extremely well […] but the figures
have yet to be generally accepted […]
The figures sometimes involve changes of meaning,
but they are primarily concerned with the shape
or physical structure of language, the placing
of words in certain syntactical positions,
their repetition in varying patterns (to make an
analogy with music, tropes exist in a vertical
plane, like pitch or harmony; the figures exist in
a horizontal plane, like rhythm or other
stress-devices)…" [my italics]
(footnote
6)
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Dramatic exchanges may turn around such figures throughout a
whole scene, as we can see in the verbal duel of Richard and
Lady Anne (Richard III, I.2). A brief selection
(Example 6) may be sufficient to show how speeches rebound
from one character to another:
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70
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75
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80.
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.85.
..
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RICHARD.
Lady, you know no rules of charity,
Which renders good for bad, blessings for
curses.
ANNE. Villain, thou know'st no law of God nor
man.
No beast so fierce but knows some touch of
pity.
RICHARD. But I know none, and therefore am no
beast.
ANNE. O wonderful, when devils tell the truth!
RICHARD. More wonderful, when angels are so
angry.
Vouchsafe, divine perfection of a woman,
Of these supposèd crimes to give me
leave
By circumstance but to acquit myself.
ANNE. Vouchsafe, diffused infection of a man,
Of these known evils but to give me leave
By circumstance t' accuse thy cursèd
self.
RICHARD. Fairer than tongue can name thee, let me
have
Some patient leisure to excuse myself.
ANNE. Fouler than heart can think thee, thou canst
make
No excuse current but to hang thyself.
RICHARD. By such despair I should accuse
myself.
ANNE. And by despairing shalt thou stand
excused…
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The duel goes on through the figures of anaphora (with
change of value: positive-negative, negative-positive: ll.
68-70, 74-75, 75-78, 81-83), epiphora, parison and isocolon
(a bit everywhere), chiasmus distributed in two different
speeches (ll. 71-2) etc. Translation should devote
particular attention to such rhetorical texture which marks
the rhythm of exchanges.
Rhythm is a highly performative vehicle in drama. It has
been defined as a measured flow (the original Greek
meaning of the word) of accents or strokes according to
particular patterns which may or may not establish a regular
metre. Grammar, syntax, and style run side by side through
rhythm. In drama, and particularly in poetic drama such as
Shakespeare's for the most part is, rhythm and metre do make
voices act. The question is: how can translation
render the original sound? In search for impossible
equivalences, it has to deal with the different body and
skin of the words of another language, starting from the
morphological and phonological levels, and then it has to
arrange these new bodies and skins, all of them endowed with
different sounds and lengths, within rhythmical and possibly
metrical measures. An impossible, and at the same time
inevitable, task. Which raises a preliminary and unavoidable
question: should the original metre be rendered in a regular
metre of the target language? In another words, should
rhythm be formally reorganized in a regular recurrence of
durations and stresses? The question of course is open, but
my opinion is that translating blank verse into a regular
metre (which in Italian would be the hendecasyllable) may
after all betray the sound and music and distribution
of meaning of the Shakespearean line. My preliminary choice
has therefore been to stick to rhythm rather than to metre,
since fidelity to rhythm may better render the syntactical
and rhetorical levels which especially contribute to the
performativity of speeches. If we go back to the king's
first speech in Hamlet, we may easily see how, though
regular, the blank verse overflows its measure with frequent
enjambements and therefore does not seem here to
perform what is rather entrusted to the overall rhythm
and syntax.
Different is the case of songs, such as Feste's or Ariel's
or Autolycus' etc., which exhibit a distinctive music
(together, sometimes, with a music proper which was supposed
to accompany words) and do have an intrinsic performative
quality. These I have always tried to render through a more
or less regular metre and through rhymes. Different is also
the case of rhyming couplets when they have more than
the historically conventional function of closing a scene,
or a semi-scene, and may therefore sound rather clumsy in
the framework of quite different contemporary conventions.
See for instance the abundant use of couplets in the first
and third scene of Richard II, where they appear as
the very form through which the ceremony of a challenge,
that between Bolingbroke and Mowbray which secretly involves
the king himself, deploys its false incidents and rituals.
The king pretends to act as a neutral judge of the dispute,
but he is in fact the real accused. His defense relies on a
false ceremony in which he asserts impartiality and at the
same stresses his royal role that minimizes his parentage
with Bolingbroke. The exchanges in this false ceremony often
articulate in couplets, where rhymes sometimes rebound from
one character to another and always regulate both their
attitudes and their movements:
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II. 164-73:
RICHARD. Norfolk, throw down! We bid; there is no
boot.
MOWBRAY
[Kneeling] Myself I throw, dread
sovereign, at thy foot.
My life thou shalt command, but not my shame.
The one my duty owes, but my fair name
[…]
The which no balm can cure but his heart blood
Which breathed this poison.
RICHARD Rage must be withstood.
Give me his gage. Lions make leopards tame.
MOWBRAY [Standing] Yea, but not
change his spots. Take but my shame…
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Metre therefore shows here a distinctive performative
function which should not be lost in translation. An
analogous importance metre has in many other possible
examples (just think for instance of the exchanges between
Romeo and Juliet at their first encounter). But otherwise
plain blank verse may, in my opinion, be sacrificed to the
advantage of rhythm, syntax, and rhetoric.
Translation has to cope with the large overall questions of
syntax, rhetoric, style, rhythm and metre. But at the same
time it must face the micro structures of single
overdetermined words, of cultural units, of linguistic
knots, of local or intratextual isotopies or pluriisotopies,
of semantic fields and synonimic clusters, and of textual
cruces.
Here I can give only a sketchy survey of some of these
problems. I will start from denotation and connotation
conveyed by a single lexeme. Let's take an example from
Hamlet, II.2.174, when Polonius asks the distracted
prince: "Do you know me, my lord?", and receives this
disconcerting answer: "Excellent well, you are a
fishmonger". The denotative sense of the word being of
course a seller of fish, the connotative is "pander", an
oblique charge to Polonius (in Q1 it is clearly a charge for
having used Ophelia as a bait for confession, since this
exchange comes after the Nunnery scene in which
Hamlet, at a certain point, has clearly become aware of the
trap laid against him; in Q2/F this charge appears less
perspicuous) The Italian translations usually miss the
connotation, while I have tried to render it relying on
intonation and suspension in order to transmit the idea of
Polonius' selling not just fish but his daughter:
"Eccellentemente: siete un venditore, di pesce".
Lexemes may also be
cultural units, which translation must consider and decide
whether to transmit according to their historical value or
not. Let's take an example from Titus Andronicus,
III.2.12, where the desperate Titus thus addresses the poor
Lavinia disfigured and defaced: "Thou map of woe, that thus
dost talk in signs..." How should one render the word
map? Commentators usually actualize the
meaning: see Maxwell (Arden edition) who glosses it as
"image, embodiment". Italian translators too usually follow
this reading adopting words ranging from image
(immagine) to figure (figura). I
have decided to stick to the original: "Tu mappa di dolore,
che così parli per segni". The word map was at that
time particularly rich with meanings, being as it was at the
center of various cultural codes: technical-cartographic,
mercantile and commercial, adventurous and fantastic. In
literary texts it revealed a great imaginative suggestion:
see John Donne for example. And see Shakespeare, Twelfth
Night, III,2,79-81, where Maria, referring to the
beguiled Malvolio who is reading the forged letter, says:
"He does smile his face into more lines than are in the new
map with the augmentation of the Indies". In Titus's speech,
map is particularly pregnant, since it agrees
with the metaphorical exchange between microcosm and
macrocosm so recurrent in the whole play, and it perfectly
adheres to the verbal function talk in signs: the
defaced Lavinia can only talk in signs in order to reveal
her story in the same way as contemporary maps talked in
signs about known and unknown lands.
Isotopies - i.e. in a very rough definition, lines of
meaning mainly entrusted to grammar and semantics - may be
explicit or implicit. Often metaphorical, they always should
be pinpointed and rendered in translation. To give just one
example, see Macbeth, V.3.12-25, where Caithness and
Angus discuss the situation of the desperate Macbeth under
siege and point to his state of mind:
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CAITHNESS. Great Dunsinane he strongly
fortifies.
Some say he's mad […] But for
certain
He cannot buckle his distempered cause
Within the belt of rule.
ANGUS. […] Now does he feel his
title
Hang loose about him, like a giant's
robe
Upon a dwarfish thief.
MENTETH. Who then shall blame
His pestered senses to recoil and start,
When all that is within him does condemn
Itself for being there?
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The clothing metaphor bocomes immediately evident when, from
buckle / belt (he cannot any longer
dominate/constrain his distempered cause - an
overdetermined clause: his uncontrollable passion, his
mental sickness; his now indocile followers - to obey him,
we pass to hang loose and robe.
The clothing paradigm had established itself in I.3.107-8:
"Why do you dress me / In borrowed robes?", he
had asked Angus who greeted him with the title of Thane of
Cawdor, and afterwards in the same scene Banquo had thus
commented the event "New honours come upon him, / Like our
strange garments, cleave not to their mould / But
with the aid of use." (ll. 142-44). Much more secret is the
metaphorical isotopy at l. 23, "His pestered senses to
recoil and start", where a bellum intestinum
is hinted at: Macbeth is now unable to dominate his senses,
and his very personality splits down, the metaphor being
that of his vital functions as fettered horses which recoil
and start refusing to stay calm in a stable. His
starting like a frightened horse had already
been noted, in the ghost of Banquo scene, by Lady Macbeth
who reproved him for "these flaws and starts" (III.4.62) -
and she used the same verb in her later sleepwalking scene
"you mar all with this starting" (V.1). A translation should
keep track of all these occurrences and employ, though at a
distance, the same words.
(footnote
7)
But when different metaphorical isotopies knit together in a
single passage the task of translation gets much more
difficult, and sometimes impossible. Let's take just one
example, from Hamlet, I.3.126-31, where Polonius
dissuades Ophelia from continuing her relationship with the
prince:
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Do not believe his vows; for they are brokers
Not of that dye which their inve-stments show,
But mere implorators of unholy suits,
Breathing like sancti-fied and pious bawds
The better to beguile
|
In his typical syntax and semantics, he here conveys several
lines of meaning, which certainly could not be fully grasped
by his audience. The pluriisotopy springs from the initial
brokers, which, as has been noted by Nigel Alexander
(in his Macmillan edition), "maybe of three kinds and
Polonius unites all three functions in this complex series
of images: a) dealers in finance who are not of the true
colour or appearance (dye) which their authorising documents
(investments) indicate but simply solicitors for improper
requests who talk as if their proposals were holy and
religious in order to deceive their clients, b) go-betweens
in matters of love who are not of the kind of men claimed by
the garments they have borrowed (from the church) but simply
makers of lewd and immoral suggestions who talk the language
of marriage vows in order to deceive their victims, c)
dealers in old clothes - though this meaning is less fully
worked out." And he concludes: "Hamlet is thus a shady
financier, a pander who promises marriage, and an old
clothes man." The three isotopies, developing from the three
different agents, continually overlap, so that all key words
sound ambiguous, open to more than one meaning (thus
transmitting the ambiguity and falseness of Hamlet's
courtship as Polonius wants her daughter to understand:
investments (financial documents, garments of
go-betweens, second-hand clothes), implorators
[apax, neologism] (solicitors, entreaters),
unholy suits (prophane procedures, improper
mediations), bonds (contractual obligations, marriage
vows, warranties). Here we are really past the limit of
translatableness.
(footnote
8)
Theatre directors
know it very well and usually cut passages like this!
I will now come to paradigms, synonims, matrix-words.
However different in their language and style may be the
characters of a play, the semantics of a text offers
paradigms which are typical not only of a character, but
also of the entire work. See for example in Hamlet
the paradigms or semantic fields of sickness, flesh, ear,
weapon, prison, madness. These semantic fields produce
synonimic constellations which throughout the action exhibit
an open or secret internal hierarchy.
Let's take the paradigm of madness in Hamlet.
It may be strictly madness (of the 71 occurrences in the
canon 22 appear in this play); but it is also
"transformation", "distemper", "lunacy", "affliction of his
love", "wildness", "melancholy" (per Claudio), "lunacy",
"ecstasy of love" (per Polonio), "ecstasy" (per Ofelia) ecc.
The translator has to find the right synonims for a semantic
field which operates through attenuation and through the
questioning of the real state of Hamlet, who, in his turn,
had defined and declare it as an "antic disposition".
Rendering matrix-words (as has been shown by Barbara
Folkart, Les invariants de traduction), is of crucial
importance since they act in the textual economy not so much
as lexical units but as keys of a semantic system. And this
is a very difficult task for the translator who must
approximate at the same time the synonimic cluster and its
internal hierarchy. Just one example from Titus
Andronicus, II.3, the scene in the forest where,
following the plan of Aaron, Martius and Quintus plunge into
a horrible pit or hole. It is one of the most symbolically
strong and overdetermined of the horrific paradigm of this
tragedy. The pit or hole is a tomb (l. 228 monument,
l. 240 grave) and an infernal cave (l. 236
Cocytus), and it is defined by synonimic net (pit,
hole, hollow, den) oscillating at the connotative level
from the mortuary to the sexual meaning. It is, implicitly
or explicitly, a mouth which sucks or breathes (l. 224
blood-drinking pit, l. 236 Cocytus misty
mouth) or eats (l. 235 devouring, l. 239
swallowing). And it is also the womb of an enormous
beast (l. 229 ragged entrails), and finally, at the
culmination of all this alarming symbolism, it is a uterus
or a vagina which swallows and buries instead of procreating
(l. 239 swallowing womb). Mouth, tomb, womb
(womb-tomb), the horrid pit or hole (l. 193 the
loathsome pit, so it is initially defined by Aaron), it
is therefore the place of a double terror, terror of morte
and of sex as death. In the synonimic field, the lexeme
pit appears to be hierarchically privileged,
since it is the first to occur with the most perturbing
qualifications. It is a highly frequent lexeme in this drama
(10 occurrences, and all of them in this scene, on a total
of 20 in the entire canon). Looking at the canon, one
discovers that pit finds in King Lear (IV.6.128-29) a
very strong overdetermination as the final monstruous image
of female sex ("There's hell, there's darkness, there is the
sulphurous pit - burning, scalding, stench, consumption!").
The hierarchy of this synonim field seems to be established
both textually and macrotextually with the dominance of pit.
Accordingly, in my translation I have opted for
buco as the matrix-word, and then for buca,
fossa, tana, cava, for the other lexemes, and
so I trust that I have rendered somehow the relational and
differential play of synonyms in the scene. The choice of
the matrix-word may have a performative value in the
interpretation of directors and actors.
Finally, but at the very beginning or at the very core of
the translational work, we have textual criticism. In fact,
a translator has to deal as a philologist with quite a wide
field of textual problems, the solution of which affects not
only the language but also, on many occasions, the
performance. I can here present a very scanty typology of
cruces.
Let us start from a simple one, that of the different
attribution of a speech which may change radically the
meaning of a scene. Take Titus Andronicus, V.1.47-53,
where Aaron has been taken prisoner together with the child
he has had by Tamora, and Lucius, who wants them both hanged
immediately, orders: "A halter, soldiers, hang him on this
treee, / And by his side his fruit of bastardy". Aaron asks
him not to touch his son: "Touch not the boy, he is of royal
hand". Lucius does not bend: "Too like the sire for ever
being good. / First hang the child, that he may see it
sprawl - / A sight to vex the father's soul withal". At this
point, in the ancient editions, Aaron intervenes in a
desperate attempt to save his son "Get me a ladder. Lucius,
save the child". But both Pope and Capell attributed "Get me
a ladder" to Lucius, leaving to Aaron "Lucius, save the
child"; and Capell added a stage direction which supported
the emendation: "A ladder brought, which Aaron is made to
ascend". The emendation radically changes the action: in the
ancient editions, Aaron takes the lead; in almost all the
modern editions that accept the emendation, Aaron seems to
be passively obliged to climb the ladder to the gallows. It
seems to me that the ancient reading makes more sense: in
order to save his child Aaron asks for a ladder and climbs
it spontaneously to the gallows where he will recite his
gospel of horrors. Here we can see how the translator's
choice may affect the action itself. My translation followed
the ancient reading.
Shakespeare's texts still keep many secrets. Translation may
help to discover some of them. For instance it can
disentangle confused original passages, and even recent
conflations which bring to ridiculous results. Take for
instance, in Hamlet, IV.2, the passage (Example 13) where he
treats Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as sponges:
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ROSENCRANTZ. Take you me for a sponge, my lord?
HAMLET Ay, sir, that soaks up the king's
countenance, his rewards, his authorities. But such
officers do the King best service in the end. He
keeps them, like an apple in the corner of
his jaw, [Q2 reading] - he keeps
them like an ape in the corner of his
jaw [F reading] - he doth keep you
as an Ape doth nuttes [Q1
reading], first mouth'd to be last swallowed.
When he needs what you have glean'd, it is but
squeezing you, and, sponge, you shall be dry
again.
|
In this case only the usually reviled Q1 offers a
satisfactory reading. The other two lack either the subject
(Q2) or the object (F). Q1 offers the full meaning and a
logical one, since it defines as nuts the food preserved by
the ape in its mouth, something tasty and small enough to be
taken in the corner of a jaw in order to grant the last
savour. The compositors of Q2 certainly misunderstood the
manuscript and comically ruined the sense, making the
comparison disappear and incongruously putting a big object
like an apple in the corner of the King's jaw. Not less
comical was the interpretation of the compositors of F: they
saved the Ape but took out the food and so ruined the
comparison, awkwardly obliging the King to open his mouth
even more in order to lodge his officers, Gargantua-like, in
one corner of it. Stubbornly sticking to their
uncompromising contempt for Q1 as a degenerate offspring of
the pure text, our recent editors refuse any help from it:
John F. Andrewes follows Q2, Harold Jenkins and Philip
Edward follow F, while G.R. Hibbard makes a bizarre
conflation of Q2 and F ("He keeps them, like an ape an apple
in the corner of his jaw") and the same does Stephen
Greenblatt, and also, though putting an ape between square
brackets, Susanne L. Wofford. None of them want to
acknowledge the fact that in this case it is Q1 that gives
sense to the authoritative text, and not the
reverse.
(footnote
9)
Much more difficult, and open to debate, is the
interpretation of a passage where the meaning still appears
to be obscure. Take Macbeth, V.5.9-15:
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I have almost forgot the taste of fears.
The time has been my senses would have cooled
To hear a night-shriek, and my fell of hair
Would at a dismal treatise rouse and stir
As life were in't. I have supped full with
horrors:
Direness, familiar to my slaughterous thoughts,
Cannot once start me.
|
In the previous scene, Macbeth had furiously insulted the
servant who entered to announce to him that ten thousand
soldiers were approaching the castle of Elsinore. Even
before he could pronounce a word, Macbeth had damned him for
his white face, for those "linen cheeks of thine" which "are
counsellors to fear". On that face, in fact, he had seen the
mirror of his own fear. In this scene he is preparing
himself for the imminent battle, when a cry of women from
within stops him short and Seyton goes to see what has
happened. Then he has this penultimate soliloquy, which has
not received the attention it deserves, differently from his
last soliloquy on the waste of time ("Tomorrow, and
tomorrow, and tomorrow..."). In this case too I perceive a
neglected overdetermination of sense in an expression ("I
have supped full with horrors") which does not seem to me to
have been satisfactorily analysed. I will start by noting
that he qualifies his forgetting fear with a significant
almost, and uses a gustative metaphor, the
taste, to transmit this disturbing feeling. Fear receives
therefore an oral connotation that goes back to a remote
time of childhood which emerges in the lines immediately
following. Soon afterwards we find the expression cited
above and centred on another gustative metaphor. First of
all we must ascertain the "age", so to speak, of the past he
is going back to: relatively recent, indeterminate, or
remote? The expression "The time has been" (l. 10) is
normally used by Shakespeare - in the same way as the
expression "the time was that", or "when" - to indicate a
very distant time, either individual or historical. In III.4
Macbeth had employed the same expression to evoke the
ancient barbarous age which preceded "the gentle weal", the
bond of civilisation: "The time has been / That, when the
brains were out, the man would die..." (ll. 77-78). We are
thus authorized to infer that the time of his life Macbeth
is here referring to is very remote: in fact, it appears as
a time of imaginary fears, a time in which his "fell of hair
/ Would at a dismal treatise rouse and stir". The
treatise is a story or, better here, a fairytale. In
this connection we should remember the rebuke he receives
from Lady Macbeth in III.4.62-65: "O, these flaws and
starts, / Impostors to true fear, would well become / A
woman's story at a winter's fire / Authorized by her
grandam." Soon after this voyage into the past in order to
find the roots of his fears and dismiss them, Macbeth adds:
"I have supp'd full with horrors". Critics usually overlook
the semantic density of the gustative metaphor, and link it
either to the "our poisoned chalice" of I.7.11 or to the
banquet of III.4, when the ghost of Banquo had appeared to
Macbeth. In my reading, and in the resulting translation
choice I have adopted, the metaphor is rather related to the
imaginary of early childhood. I was intrigued by the verb
supp'd and consulted the Oxford English
Dictionary very carefully. There I discovered that the verb
"to sup", besides the more usual sense, derived from the Old
French super, of "to eat one's supper" or "to
dine", offers an alternative, and now obsolete, sense,
derived from the Old English supan, i.e. "To
take (liquid) into the mouth in small quantities", "To take
a sip or sips" (and see for example Ben Jonson: "Might I of
Iove's nectar sup"). The deepest meaning here would then be
that of a horror linked to the orality of childhood (an
orality to which Lady Macbeth was referring to when she
defined, in I.5, the nature of her husband as "too full of
the milk of human kindness", and no matter
whether that milk mingled with fear). A superb hero in the
battle, Macbeth presents himself from the very beginning as
a man impregnated with fear. According to this reading,
having introjected fear, Macbeth tries to exorcise it by
means of projection, by acting it out and bringing terror
everywhere. In his flight from the horrible through the
practice of the horrible, by creating "strange images of
death" (as in the mediated perception Duncan had of him),
Macbeth has finally become the fear, and still is
doomed to be haunted by it till the very end.
(footnote
10)
Finally, I will give an example of debatable emendation in
one of the most difficult passages in the canon: The
Winter's Tale, I.2.136-144:
|
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Folio
reading:
... Can thy Dam, may't be
Affection? Thy Intention stabs the
Center,
Thou do'st make possible things not so held,
Communicat'st with dreams (how can this be?)
With what's unreall: thou coactive art,
And fellow'st nothing. Then 'tis very credent,
Thou may'st co-joine with something, and thou
do'st,
(And that beyond Commission) and I find it,
(And that to the infection of my Braines,
And hardning of my Browes.)
Rowe's emendation:
…Can thy Dam? may't be -
Imagination! thou dost stab to th'
Center.
Thou dost make possible things not be so held,
Communicat'st with Dreams &emdash; how can this
be?
With what's unreal, thou coactive art,
And follow'st nothing. Then 'tis very credent,
Thou may'st co-join with something, and thou
dost,
And that beyond commission, and I find it,
And that to the Infection of my Brains,
And hardning of my Brows.
|
The first editors, starting from Rowe, could make no sense
out of the Folio reading and thought it better to emend the
passage heavily. Pope and Johnson followed Rowe in breaking
down the enjambement between the first and the second lines
and in substituting Affection with
Imagination, and the question mark with
the exclamation mark. Also, in the fifth line Rowe
substituted the colon of the Folio with a comma, thus
linking With what's unreal to thou
coactive art, and he was followed in this emendation
by Johnson, Warburton, Theobald, and then Malone, Collier
and Clark, these last three removing even the comma in the
line in order to make the link absolutely clear. Warburton
and Theobald still kept Imagination in the place of
Affection, but the later editors, starting from
Steevens, returned to Affection, while keeping the
exclamation mark and breaking down the enjambement from the
previous line, with the only notable exception of
Collier.
The reading of this difficult passage was thus established:
in modern editions, apart from Imagination, Rowe's
version, with all its extremely relevant changes in
punctuation, and consequently in meaning, is still, with a
few exceptions, the accepted one.
(footnote
11)
How is this passage consequently interpreted? A critical
line which goes from Capell to Kermode reads
Affection as the passion of jealousy which is
beginning to shake Leontes. Another line (Steevens, Malone,
etc.) reads Affection as meaning "imagination", even
though it rejects Rowe's emendation. Still another line,
more faithful to the punctuation of the Folio, refers
Affection to Hermione (thy dam) and interprets it
as "lust", according to the meaning specified in OED 3.
Stephen Orgel (The Oxford Shakespeare) points out
that "the referent of 'thy intention' is unclear, and upon
this depends the meaning of the remainder of the speech.";
but Jean Howard (The Norton Shakespeare) opts for
Leontes' jealousy: "Passion (probably the passion of
jealousy), your intensity (intention) pierces my heart or to
the core of my being".
To sum it up, is Leontes referring here to Hermione's
passion (love and lust) or to his passion (jealousy)? The
Folio's reading is not that ambiguous: it is Hermione's
passion. But are we sure that this passion is lust as it is
conveyed by the word Affection at the very beginning
of the passage? In Greene's Pandosto, the
source of the play, we find first affected and then
affection twice at the beginning of the story, and
while the narrator points out that it was a lawful, innocent
feeling, he also ambiguously brings the reader to suspect
that there is more than affection in this relationship.
(footnote
12)
A bit earlier in this same scene, when Leontes begins to
feel suspicious, we read:
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Too hot, too
hot!
To mingle friendship farre is mingling bloods.
I have tremor cordis on me. My heart dances,
But not for joy, not joy. This entertainment
May a free face put on, derive a liberty
From heartiness, from bounty, fertile bosom,
And well become the agent. 'T may, I grant.
But to be paddling palms and pinching fingers,
As now they are, and making practised smiles
As in a looking-glass; and then to sigh, as
'twere
The mort o' th' deer - O, that is entertainment
My bosom likes not, nor my brows. (ll. 108-119)
|
He is clearly questioning the nature of Hermione's
entertainment of Palixenes: is it lawful or not? Is
it just affection or something more? In the later passage,
he seems, at the beginning, to meditate on the same point:
may it be only affection? But immediately afterwards he
decides that it is too intense, too strong, to be only
affection: it is lust, begotten by a preceding imaginary
desire or fancy. I suppose that Shakespeare expanded the
last statement quoted in Greene's narration, the hero
abandoning the idea of a "honest affection" between his wife
and his friend, and musing on the "disordinate fancy" of the
former.
The whole passage shows the complex shifting significance of
a meditation in progress, and therefore a dramatic energy,
which depends on ambiguous or rare words. Let us consider
them.
Affection has 83 occurrences in the canon, and its meaning
goes from emotion to feeling, to inclination, and
passion.
(footnote
13)
Its ambiguous significance is best displayed in The
Merchant of Venice, IV.1.50-52, where Shylock says:
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You'll ask me why I rather choose to have
A weight of carrion flesh than to receive
Three thousand ducats. I'll not answer that,
But say it is my humour. Is it answered?…
Some men there are love not a gaping pig,
Some that are mad if they behold a cat,
And others when the bagpipe sings i' th' nose
Cannot contain their urine; for
affection,
Mistress of passion, sways it to the
mood
Of what it likes or loathes.
|
Here affection appears to be hierarchically superior
to passion, and chronologically preceding it: it
points to the condition of being affected by
something very profound and impenetrable, almost a secret
malady of the mind. If we follow the Folio's reading, we
should then imagine that Leontes, soon after mentioning
Affection in the sense of friendly feeling, shifts to
the other acceptation of passion or lust. This shifting
should be seen in his immediate addressing himself to its
dubious significance: "Thy intention…". And
intention is another complex word, meaning both
aiming at something, like in the Latin intendere (to
tend to, to aim at), and intensity. It is therefore
both the subject Hermione is addressing her affection to,
and the apparent intensity of its manifestation, which is
frightening Leontes. This dangerous meaning of
Affection stabs the centre: another rare word,
which in Shakespeare means the centre of the universe or of
the earth or of man, and in this case his heart. But why is
he using centre and not heart?
In all probability because the flow of his thinking is here
dismissing the idea of a more superficial affection
than that of friendship and concentrating on the extremity
of passion, which is at the same time Hermione's lust and
the effect it has on his very centre of being (the two
passions - lust and jealousy - being at this point closely
interwoven).
Hermione's passion is now seen as limitless because it
springs from the deepest layers of her mind: it was there
even before finding the subject, Polixenes, on whom
it now discharges itself. It lay hidden in her dreams, in
what is unreal (another rare word in Shakespeare,
since it occurs only twice, here and in Macbeth,
3.4.106, "unreal mock'ry, hence!"). According to the Folio's
punctuation, the semicolon intervening here, thou
coactive art is not linked with the previous phrase:
coactive is an hapax and should mean here
"coercitive", "compulsory", as registered from 1605, and not
necessarily "acting in concert", as stated by OED
with reference to this passage.
(
footnote 14)
If Hermione's passion has always been there, hidden in her
most secret fantasies, it can very well co-joine
(another hapax) with something real - with Polixenes
at the moment - and being that coactive, once it has found
its target, it knows no limits: it goes beyond
Commission, another strange word in the
context, which seems to mean beyond any lawful authorization
of her conscience.
In a few lines of great dramatic intensity, Affection
has undergone a radical change, losing any shade of
friendship and turning into passion (and lust), and
not only that: it has shown to Leontes its secret source in
Hermione's unconscious, where it lay in the shape of
imaginary desire and lust even before investing itself in a
real lover. Woman is intrinsically a whore - as we can see
in other passages in the canon: just think, for instance, of
Posthumus' tirade on female innate lasciviousness - and her
affection amounts to the infection of his brain, now
working in its turn in the imaginary space within
nothing and something, which is damnation.
Read in this key, the Folio's reading needs no emendation.
It is the task of the actor to make clear the elliptical
shifting from the interrogation of Affection to the
answer it receives.
To conclude, the translator has to force his way into the
original text with a greater indiscretion than that of the
critic who may not lose the advantage of a distance in
relation to his object. The translator is bound to enter the
object, to investigate it, to palpate it in all of its
connections and fissures, and, in a process which is at the
same time interlinguistic and intratextual, he may sometimes
discover hidden meanings that the native reader or critic is
no longer capable to perceive since certain phrases have
been accepted in his language in slightly different ways or
because he is conditioned by a somewhat automatic
comprehension of sense. The translator's discoveries then
may come to rivitalize, to regenerate the text, renewing its
secret energy. From this point of view, translation
can liberate forces which had remained hidden to native
speakers and even to critics. The interlinguistic exchange
may therefore provide surprising additions to textual
hermeneutics.
Another aspect of translation concerns the amount of
estrangement which it conveys into the target text.
Estrangement being essential for any artistic invention, as
has been shown for example by the theory of information, any
disautomatization of the target language in the process of
translation amounts to new expressive potentialities.
(15)
Footnotes
1) Jean-Michel Déprats, Giorgio
Melchiori, Manuel Conejero, Niels Hansen, Mladen Engelsfeld,
Henryk Zbierski, Suheyla Artemel, Kristian Smidt, Daniel
Yang.
back
to text
2) Shifters for Jakobson,
embrayeurs for Benveniste, deictics are those
elements of language which situate the message
(Weinrich).
back
to text
3) For just a couple of examples of absolute
performatives look at 7) in the handout (first and second
passages).
back
to text
4)
As Styan put it quite a few years ago, "The language of the
good dramatic poet especially carries the submerged imagery
of gesture and movement".
back
to text
5)
"Guardati dall'attaccar briga, ma se ci sei dentro /
comportati in modo che l'avversario debba guardarsi da te. /
Concedi a tutti il tuo orecchio, ma a pochi la tua voce; /
accetta l'opinione di ognuno, ma ri-servati il tuo giudizio
..."
back
to text
6)
Shakespeare's Use of Rhetoric, in a New Companion
to Shakespeare Studies, edited by K. Muir and S.
Schoenbaum, Cambridge, 1971, 86-7.
back
to text
7)
"Chi può allora biasimare / i suoi sensi inceppati se
recalcitrano e scartano, / quando tutto ciò che ha
dentro si condanna / per il fatto di
trovarcisi?"
back
to text
8)
"In breve, Ofelia, / non credere ai suoi voti, che sono
mezzani, / non del colore che mostrano i loro vestimenti, /
ma meri procacciatori di cause profane / che suonano come
impegni pii e santi / per meglio
ingannare."
back
to text
9)
ROSEN. Mi prendete per una spugna, mio signore?
AMLETO Sissignore, che assorbe il favore del re, le sue
ri-compense, le sue influenze. Ma tali funzionari servono al
re la miglior portata, alla fine. Egli se li tiene come fa
la scimmia con le noccioline, in un angolo della mascel-la,
i primi a essere messi in bocca e gli ultimi ad essere
ingoiati.
back
to text
10)
My translation: "Ho quasi dimenticato il sapore delle paure.
/ C'è stato un tempo in cui i miei sensi si sarebbero
gelati / a udire un grido nella notte, e l'intero scalpo /
ad un racconto pauroso mi si rizzava e fremeva / come se
avesse vita. Ho poppato ogni orrore / fino ad ingozzarmi, e
il terrore, familiare / ai miei pensieri omicidi, non
può più / farmi
trasalire."
back
to text
11)
Orgel's edition, The Oxford Shakespeare, maintains
the Folio: "… Can thy Dam, may't be / Affection? Thy
etc.").
back
to text
12) "Bellaria, who in her time was the flower
of courtesy, willing to shew how unfeignedly she loved her
husband by his friend's entertainment, used him likewise so
familiarly that her countenance bewrayed how her mind was
affected towards him, oftentimes coming herself in
his bed chamber to see that nothing should be amiss to
mislike him.This honest familiarity increased daily more and
more betwixt them […] there grew such a secret
uniting of their affections, that the one could not
well be without the company of the other [...] He
[Leontes] then began to measure all their actions,
and [to] misconstrue of their private familiarity,
judging that it was not for honest affection, but for
disordinate fancy, so as he began to watch them more
narrowly…".
back
to text
13)
OED: II Of the mind. 2.a. An affecting or moving of the mind
in any way; a mental state brought about by any influence;
an emotion or feeling. 3. Feeling as opposed to reason;
passion, lust. Obsoleto. Dal 1300. 4. State of mind
generally, mental tendency; disposition. Obsolete. 5. State
of mind towards a thing; disposition towards, bent,
inclination, penchant. Archaic. 6.a. Good disposition
towards, goodwill, kind feeling, love, fondness, loving
attachment. 10. An abnormal state of the body; malady,
disease.
back
to text
14)
OED: 1. Of the nature of force or compulsion; coercive,
compulsory. Rare. 1605 T. Bell: The Pope hath no power
coactive over any king. B. In passive sense. 1596: coactive
fasting. 2. [co+active] Acting in concert. 1611:
WT
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15)
See what Maurice Blanchot has written to this purpose: "If
it is true that a language seems to us so much more
expressive and true as we less know it, if words are in need
of a certain ignorance in order to preserve their power of
revelation, such a paradox is not at all surprising since
translators always meet up with it, which is one of the
principal obstacle and at the same time the principal
resource of any translation."
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