The Guardian has just announced the death of Stephane Hessel, an impressively accomplished individual and latterly the author of the tract Time for Outrage, proclaiming him an inspiration for the Occupy Movement.
…we continue to call for “a true peaceful uprising against the means of mass communication that offers nothing but mass consumption as a prospect for our youth, contempt for the least powerful in society and for culture, general amnesia and the outrageous competition of all against all.”
To you who will create the twenty-first century, we say, from the bottom of our hearts,
TO CREATE IS TO RESIST. TO RESIST IS TO CREATE.
Expat,
What a life Hessel lived. What a mensch.
Trying to parse that quote, though, mostly defeats me. It seems to be the sort of thing that would sound deeply moving and meaningful in French, but somehow loses almost all actual sense in translation.
An uprising against commercial television? What is ‘mass consumption’? I assume he means consumption of useless crap manufactured for a mass market, and certainly commercial mass culture is almost entirely devoted to selling crap to young people (except for the part that is devoted to selling crap to old people), but an uprising against mass media? A true and peaceful way to thwart mass media would be to turn it off, not read it or listen to it or pay it attention. Turn away from it. Ignore it. When the act of ignoring something en masse becomes and uprising, well….
Yes, well, welcome to the monkey house. Was there ever a time when the least powerful in society were treated with anything other than contempt? By anyone? Was there ever a time when general amnesia about the (actual) past (as opposed to the ‘past’ being sold by whoever is in power or would like to be) was not the rule? And, sadly, ditto for the outrageous competition of all against all. We could say that quicker, I think, couldn’t we? Say, the human condition?
Me, I’m all for a true peaceful uprising against the human condition. And I was a big fan of the Occupy Movement. They did more to call attention to the yawning gap between rich and poor that, in most American’s minds, until they were forced to face up to it, simply… couldn’t exist. Because that is not what kind of country or people we are. Or were…. And there is no putting that genie back in the bottle. I’ll join a true peaceful uprising against that kind of poisonous inequality. So, I think, will the majority of Americans, which is why the Republicans are running so frightened.
But then:
Really? I’m sure that sounds absolutely stirring in French. What on earth does it mean, what could it mean, in English?
That’s the solution? Merely to ‘create’? I suppose he means don’t let the bastards mold you into a mass market, don’t let them make the running, don’t let them tell you what you desire. Create your own desires and you will at least be living life as a human being instead of life as a mindless consuming slug. But even slugs create all day long. They create slime, it has to be said, and not much else, but- who is to say that to a slug slime isn’t the pinnacle of creation?
If he had said, “To inform oneself is to resist. To teach others is to resist…” That’s a slogan that might take people somewhere.
Many years ago I went to see the pyramids. In the evening I bought a ticket for the son et lumiere spectacle, where you sit and watch different bits of the complex at Giza floodlit, as stirring music plays and a famous actor’s voice intones. As it happened the French version came on first. I sat and listened, and it all sounded rather apt, even moving. When it was over, there was a brief interval, when the crowd, such as there was, the U.S. had just bombed Tripoli so there weren’t many tourists about, and the show started again. This time in English. The voice could have been Richard Burton’s (it was an old tape), but the script was identical to the French show, except (literately) translated. It was excruciatingly pompous and inane and banal and so utterly vacuous that I wanted to weep. I think I did weep a little, but only tears of sour mirth. And yet in French it all sounded so… profound.
Bluth,
Ever heard a speech by De Gaulle? First one I heard, I thought, Wow, I want to vote for that guy…what’d he just say?
The Weathermen had already pretty much convinced me that the New Left wasn’t going anywhere when I bought a new pair of shoes (which I badly needed) and was earnestly informed that I had just committed Consumption Terror. A few days later, when I got through laughing, I tracked the phrase back to its origin — Marcuse, maybe? I really don’t recall — and found the page it came from to be profoundly stirring. But no matter how I tried, it was gibberish when I tried to put it in English, and when I tried to explain what it meant (instead of just translating it) every bullshit detector in three counties started shrieking,
Hard to explain, isn’t it?
Nat,
Here is John Gray taking a shot at explaining it. Sort of. Maybe:
[my bold]
*Enter Kev?
Bluth,
Ezra Pound was bowled over by a German-Italian dictionary that offered “Dichten = condensary” — roughly, to “poetize” is to condense. Strip away the superstructure of language in just the right way and some otherwise inexpressible meaning has a chance to emerge, like one of those famous Zen slaps in the face. That doesn’t begin to address why we want meaning, except: if we find it, it must have been there, and if we welcome it when we find it, then it must matter to us. But if we find meaning in spite of language,,,
“Contempt for the least powerful in society” is a cold phrase in English because contempt is a cold English word. As used in French, there seems to be more of sense that contempt is an enjoyable fruit of privilege, that achieving a state of contemptuousness can seem like a desirable goal in life which threatens to seduce those who haven’t yet achieved it. That’s an idea that can be expressed as well in English as in French but not by “contempt” alone. I think that this is a text that resists simple translation but not necessarily one that can’t be recreated in English.
And now we have come full circle back to Constance Garnett!
A few more, courtesy of yours truly:
“To create is to submit. To submit is to create.”
“When science is ascendant, every truth is a scientific truth.”
“To know thyself is to know nothing.”
Bim,
Yeah, I know. One feels never so creative as when clicking on “submit,”
I’m leaving the other one alone.
Bim,
That’s an unusual sentiment. When you say submit, are you referring to your third quote:
Because to know nothing, to really know nothing, and then to submit to it…
That would be something very rare in the human world indeed.
Actually I did click ‘submit’ this morning. On a tax form. It wasn’t the least bit creative.
I swear it wasn’t, honest.
Bluth,
Well,,, I wouldn’t go so far as claiming that all simple translation is as bad as Constance’s, only that there are limits even for those who try to be careful.
Compare the method of Richard Pevear (an American poet who absurdly claims to not speak Russian) and the native Russian speaker Larissa Volokhonsky: “We work separately at first. Larissa produces a complete draft, following the original as closely as possible, with many marginal comments and observations. From that, plus the original Russian, I make my own complete draft. Then we work closely together to arrive at a third draft, on which we make our ‘final’ revisions.”
Nat,
Pevear and Volokhonsky; Yes and Yes.
Or maybe it’s ‘create’ in the sense of Eros. Which might be to say:
To love is to resist. To resist is to love.
If I was in huddled in the cold in the midst of an occupy crowd, I could find a lot of meaning in that. Especially if I was 22 and the woman standing next to me was, too, and….
Come on, Expat, you brought it to the table, what do you think?
Bluth & Natasha & Expat,
Thank you, thank you. I love aphorisms, as you all know (almost as much as I love Constance Garnett).
“The violence of language is only subdued by translation.” – bim_ballace
I don’t know. Just finished (and enthralled by) The Last of the Just in translation. But a translated poem would seem to be an entirely new poem, an act of acknowledged plagiarism maybe, unless the poem is nothing but “1=1″. On the other hand, maybe the same can be said of prose. I just don’t know.
======
Poem 46
1=1
- bim_ballace
Bim,
For a sketch of one possible refutation of 1=1, I recommend Borges, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius — but only in a decent translation, of course.
Bluth – been traveling today – just got home.
When I read the piece in the Guardian I thought that the actual tract might shed some more light on what animates my friends on the left. It didn’t, and the english translation seemed tortured, but as noted above perhaps it has deeper meaning in the original French – or perhaps not.
Expat,
He animated a whole lot of people, but probably only six or so in the US. He is respected, yes, but far more for his very long life’s work than for the pamphlets he wrote in his 90s, and then only among those who were inclined to have heard of him — inclined because they were already animated.
“Was there ever a time when the least powerful in society were treated with anything other than contempt? By anyone? Was there ever a time when general amnesia about the (actual) past (as opposed to the ‘past’ being sold by whoever is in power or would like to be) was not the rule”?
Appropriate sentiment for a Sunday morning? Better yet, appropriate for a discussion in which the notion of ‘lost in translation’ is topical?
And myths? Heyzeus kristi, circundar en un círculo.