Deus absconditus
Barbara Burns talks to Clive Scott, whose book The Tremors of Translation: An Edition of Voltaire's Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne (1756) has recently appeared in Legenda’s Transcript series.
BB. First of all, congratulations on an accomplished and thought-provoking book about the art of translating poetry. You focus on Voltaire’s famous poem in response to the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, not only one of the deadliest natural disasters the world has seen in terms of human casualties, but also one of the most consequential in terms of the philosophical and religious debate it triggered. What prompted you to choose this 275-year-old work as the lynchpin of your study?
CS. To begin with, I was just thinking, in pretty abstract terms, about the new kinds of academic text that translation studies might look to develop, the better to reveal that translation is more ontology than methodology, more a very particular literary and existential activity, more an adventure in perception and consciousness, than it is a linguistic service or the transfer of a text from one language to another.
I had decided that I wanted to experiment with a new kind of edition, an edition with an exclusively translational orientation, designed both to generate its own translations and to encourage its readers, in their turn, to create theirs. A particular confluence of circumstances brought me to Voltaire’s Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne. I had been much moved, in February 2023, by the newspaper accounts of the earthquakes in Turkey and Syria, and was later, in September 2023, to read equally troubling accounts of the earthquake in Morocco. I wondered how I might express a sympathy for, and a fellow-feeling with, the victims of these disasters. I had worked on Voltaire’s poem on the 1755 Lisbon earthquake back in 1988, in a general study of French rhyming practices and, given that what expertise I have relates primarily to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it struck me that I might recover a useful scholarly innocence in returning to the eighteenth century, which would both serve my albeit vicarious commiseration with victims of disaster and ensure the freshness of my response to the business of translation.
It also occurred to me that, in proposing that the translated text should always be an expanding and centrifugal text, spreading transversally across different languages and different media, I might also imagine new translational partnerships, new collaborative enterprises, such that, for example, a translator and a newspaper might join forces, as different agencies, to give a new relief to the relevance and expressive immediacy of a ‘specialised’ or ‘academic’ text; it is for this reason that I imagined the format of my first translation of Voltaire’s poem, drawing on montaged texts from The Guardian/Observer’s accounts of the 2023 earthquakes, and on photographic material from the London Blitz and the Sino-Japanese War of 1937-45.
Finally, I should just say that Voltaire’s principal concerns are of course metaphysical rather than ecological, and revolve around the presence and nature of evil in the world and God’s responsibility in relation to it. Seeing that the climate crisis involves all the world’s religions, and that religious and moral issues play, relatively speaking, so little part in our ecological discussions, it seemed appropriate, if not imperative, to re-introduce Voltairean concerns.
BB. Voltaire’s poem is a tough read that does not shy away from gritty existential questions, but it’s striking that the poet ends with an affirmation of hope. How do you respond to that in the context of today’s ecological challenges?
CS. This book is in many senses driven by the underlying question: does Voltaire’s writing manage to transform hope from the last resort it seems to be in his poem, to a first resort, from a final, desperate consolation, to empowerment? For humankind’s ability to reanimate hope as a constructive and appliable principle, as that which bears us up against a universal-law-enforcing deus absconditus, we need to grasp the initiatives of our own reason, so that through the secularisation of history and a tolerant relativisim of usage and culture, and through a linguistic practice both secular and relative, we can find our way through to the most appropriate and effective modes of governance and social organization. This principle of an empowered, dynamic and applied hope is as vital to our present ecological concerns as ever it was for an eighteenth century releasing itself from the repressions of the sacred, from ‘l’Infâme’.
BB. Your book is titled The Tremors of Translation, and you call the three translations which you offer ‘tremors’, in the sense that this is ‘a metaphor for the act of translation itself’. As readers progress from one translation to the next, they discover increasingly creative renderings which re-imagine the source text and stretch them in their understanding and participation. Can you explain what you were aiming to achieve?
CS. Yes, the book’s main title – The Tremors of Translation – was, I thought, something of a risk, was flirting with bad taste, simply because it makes a ‘convenient’ metaphor of a catastrophe which costs much human suffering. But from a purely geological point of view, translation might be regarded, and pursued, as a seismic change to a textual landscape, a change not just concerned with language, but with large spans of time and space and their associated perceptual habits. The 1755 Lisbon earthquake shakes us today with its ecological consequences, where, as we have said, it is for Voltaire more an issue about metaphysical causes.
For me, translation raises this question: how do we need to write/translate in order best, that is, most tellingly, to measure our distance from the source text? In that sense, my view of translation is anti-historicist and can afford to be, because it is designed for a so-called polyglot reader, a reader who can read the source text in its original language; so translation, for me, does not attempt to reproduce the source text, but to map out, in multiple translations, the ways in which we might adapt the source text eco-systematically as it were, to our own environment.
But however far we travel from the source text, we must insist that it, and all other translations of it, are kept in view, because translation is not about producing a viable version but about tracing our ongoing and unending relationship with the source text, and, correspondingly, not about turning the source text into a single ‘fairest of fair copies’, but about compiling the totality of its possible textual manifestations, including the inclusion, in those manifestations, of other, non-verbal media.
BB. Can you talk us through your three versions of Voltaire’s poem and highlight some key points?
CS. I have already described a little of the sources and objectives of my first translation: the attempt to produce a ‘cooperative’ enterprise in which the participation of contemporary newspaper cuttings helps to carry Voltaire’s text forward into a linguistic usage not available within French neo-classical verse-conventions – as Voltaire himself regrets – but for which he might be reckoned to be reaching. Accordingly, this first translation seeks to ‘loosen’ Voltaire’s text, to shift its ground in readerly perception and consciousness, to vary its expressive nuances by attention to margins, capitalization and punctuation.
The second translation or tremor sets out from the proposition that the destruction of Lisbon, as a divine punishment, or at least as a suffering too easily acceded to by the divinity, might, like Babel, ironically allow the release of new existential potentialities from the very ‘curse’ of linguistic diversity; languages – and, in this translation, photographic images, too – begin to understand how they can originate new experience, an experience from scratch as it were, where the model is provided by sentences as used in grammar books (and by ‘found’ photos). In this version, I develop the triplet as my verse-form, because of its connections with Trinitarian thinking and with terza rima, and its capacity for a multi-vocalism.
The third tremor is set between the eighteenth-century chain of being and contemporary aspirations for ecological embedding, between the divinely sanctioned hierarchies of status and the relationally ever-changing, again with the accompanying linguistic and image-making implications. It is keen to install a fluidity of translational or transversal relations, between the cultural and the natural, the iconic and the indexical. This fruitfully dialogic and vocative impulse is enacted in the first pages of the translation by the poem’s layout, its alternating left-hand and right-hand justifications of margin. But a task remains: to convert the representational into the performative and perlocutionary, into a language of immediate effect, a language able to cross boundaries between the human and the non-human worlds. This involves some experimentation with the onomatopoeic and ‘alternative’ orthographies. The final pages of this translation come back to the triplet as the vehicle of its argument, interspersed with lines with other ‘graphisms’, designed to generate new kinds of interlocutory and communicative energy.
BB. This is an academic study that is infused with the joy of inventiveness. How was your passion for translation kindled?
CS. I first turned to translation in the latter half of the 1990s, for two reasons: first, the foundation of the British Centre for Literary Translation at the University of East Anglia in 1989 by W. G. Sebald, who had been a close working colleague all along; and second, the growing educational desire to build bridges between the critical and the creative – translation was the perfect creative testing-ground for my enduring cross-language interest in verse-forms and their different expressive capabilities.
BB. What were the most demanding aspects of this project?
CS. I think the most challenging aspect was the attempt to find Voltaire’s speaking voice, in a very literal sense, beneath or within the trappings of neo-classical verse conventions. This challenge was rewarding in the sense that it pointed up differences between the human and the divine word, which in turn posed the question – again! – about what the human world’s ambitions for language should be, socially and ecologically, and how translation might seek to contribute to those ambitions. I soon ended up with more on my plate than I could comfortably manage.
BB. You state on the back cover of your volume that your approach is ‘to disestablish the text, to project alternative contexts of formation and to call standard knowledge of the text into question’. Which aspects of academic tradition do you think we can safely let go of when we’re dealing with an eighteenth-century text such as this one?
CS. Of course, this book has grave implications for literary study, for notions of literary history. What does it mean to do justice to Voltaire? How necessary is it to do justice to Voltaire? How should the present age live with Voltaire? The version of translation that I seek to promote is on the whole suspicious of the formation of, and sense of obligation to, historical identity, and in favour of the relational and transferable, wary of any insistence on the irreversibility of time and more inclined to the achronological and reversible. The real question is not whether I should develop a close and accurate knowledge of Voltaire and the eighteenth century, but what I should do with what knowledge I have, in order to keep Voltaire very much alive for us.
BB. You say that you write as an encouragement to your readers to translate. Do you think that, despite the flowering of Translation Studies, both students and established scholars are still afraid of translating literary work, especially poetry, because of the complexity of cultural mediation which it involves? Why is it important to encourage this creative discipline, especially in these days of machine translation?
CS. As I’ve said, one of the book’s chief but risky preoccupations is the uncovering, in all its physical detail, of Voltaire’s voice. Translation is a meeting of transferable subjecthoods, a speaking dialogue between the author of the source text and the translator: the translator must espouse the subjecthood of the source text’s You in order to respond, as an interlocutor, with his/her own I. Translation is intersubjective. We must learn to find, and reciprocally to activate, in the written and printed, the lineaments of a voice, to find in language the configurations of paralanguage, the non-verbal inputs of voice – tone, intonation, loudness, degree of accentuation, tempo, pausing, the varied details of enunciation and articulation. It has not been usual to suggest that translation should concern itself with these matters. And machine translation is stone-deaf to paralanguage. Translation is an intersubjectivity, but of bodies, of bodily rhythms and articulations. The body of a speaker/reader is what animates a text and what translation seeks to reply to.
The ‘complexity of cultural mediation’, of which you speak, too easily becomes an inhibiting and distracting obstacle, weighing the translator down with restrictive obligations (translate a French alexandrine by iambic pentameter), with dilemmas about priorities and compensations, and with readings which inevitably become historicist. A translational practice which centres itself on interlocutory subjecthoods, on the self-expression of the speaking body and on the dialogue of readerly consciousnesses will, I hope, encourage existential ease in the translator and remind us how integral and indispensable to each other literary-translational creativity and the performing body are.
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