Terroir.
A French term that describes qualities that products of the earth—wine, tea, animals, humans, even—absorb from their region and culture, from their sense of rootedness. Though the term is French, the concept extends beyond France—each tea plantation in China, for example, has its own unique terroir, as does each coffee plantation in Latin America.
In terroir, much depends on circumstance and environment. Soil composition, minerals in water, rainfall, slant and amount of sun, purity of air, care from human hands—countless permutations allow for countless possibilities. Thus no plot of land is identical to another, and one year’s harvest is distinct from previous ones. Yet, we say that the grapes, tea leaves, and coffee beans embody the “essence” of their land.
In translation too, we speak of “essence”—the “essence” of a work which a translator supposedly seeks to transfer from one language to another. A number of scholars have opposed this notion, including Lawrence Venuti, Antoine Berman, and Matthew Reynolds.1 But though the concept of essence has perhaps begun to fade from translation theory, the related question of culture has taken its place. To foreignize or to domesticate?
The two approaches have assumed ethical weight.
Through the metaphor of terroir, I hope to show why approaches focused on foreignization are limiting for the same reasons that domestication is narcissistic and “essence” an illusory oversimplification. Although a translator does hold responsibility for having socio-cultural-historical awareness in her work, holding foreignization as the main moral objective in translation encompasses too vast and inaccurate a scope. Like the intricacies of terroir, so too should the relationship between a translator and her work encompass particularities of a much more minute—but equally significant—scope, such as authorial intention and identity, close reading, and the translator’s personal, even emotional, motivation. Just as the complexity of terroir lies not in a fruit’s ability to embody an entire culture or country, but rather in its capacity to evoke a minutely specific spot of soil and sun, so too does the complexity of a translation lie not in any overarching ability to incarnate the culture or history of any nation or people, but in its deep comprehension and interpretation of an individual work.
Foreignize, Domesticate: Limited “Ethical Attitudes”
Lawrence Venuti writes: “the terms ‘domestication’ and ‘foreignization’ do not establish a neat binary opposition that can simply be superimposed on ‘fluent’ or ‘resistant’ discursive strategies . . . the terms ‘domestication’ and ‘foreignization’ indicate fundamentally ethical attitudes towards a foreign text and culture . . .”2 Indeed, Venuti is insightful to note, as Matthew Reynolds has, that foreignization and domestication are not opposing poles in translation practice; every translation negotiates between one and the other from passage to passage.3 Venuti’s conceptualization of foreignization and domestication as “ethical attitudes,” and his conceptualization of the former as the moral antithesis to the latter, however, poses limitations. Venuti emphasizes the importance of foreignization as resistance against cultural and national narcissism, a narcissism which he claims is inherent in domesticating approaches to translation.4 His perspective is indeed “useful in demystifying the illusion of transparency in a contemporary English-language translation,” especially when such translations perpetuate universalist ideals that are, according to Venuti, not only far from reality but also a complacent form of ethnocentricity.5 After all, cultural differences are real and do not conform to one-to-one equivalences that allow “transparent” communication between cultures; to assume that any difference can be surmounted by one’s translating language, one’s own language, is to arrogantly claim that one’s own culture is the key to universal understanding, a dangerous concept which Venuti calls, “ethnocentric violence.”6 But in his ground-breaking theory, there is an over-emphasis on cultural difference and cultural embodiment in translation; the translation that Venuti promotes—“translations that are . . . most interested in the cultural differences of the foreign text”—is reductive because it attempts to contain too vast a scope.
Indeed, as Venuti explains, “the ‘foreign’ in foreignizing translation is not a transparent representation of an essence that resides in the foreign text . . . but a strategic construction . . . foreignizing translation signifies the differences of the foreign text . . . by disrupting the cultural codes that prevail in the translating language. In its effort to do right abroad, this translation practice must do wrong at home, deviating enough from native norms to stage an alien reading experience . . .” For Venuti, the “foreign” is not an essence that a translator can simply exhibit through a transparent window of translation, but rather an approach to translation that destabilizes the standard translating language to announce and maintain the presence of the Other. But this approach assumes that the Other necessarily wants to be announced, or even that its presence is so innately unlike our own that it absolutely must be announced so we do not mistake it for the Self, that to “do right abroad,” to do the Other “justice,” is to create an “alien reading experience.” This assumes that the alien, the Other, is decidedly not, inherently not, the Self—and to assume this is to return, ironically, to a question of essence.
I am not promoting a universalist approach, but rather drawing attention to the national and cultural bounds that underlie holding foreignization as an “ethical attitude.” Matthew Reynolds’s comment on what he calls “Translation Rigidly Conceived” is particularly revealing here: “The word ‘literature’ likes to be located . . . a literature typically attaches to ‘a language’ which expresses ‘a culture’ (often a national culture). Assumptions about translation adhere to this way of thinking. It suggests that the task of the literary translator must be to take a text that belongs in one literature-language-culture and recreate it in another. The emphasis on nationality in literature nourishes the view I have called, ‘Translation Rigidly Conceived.’”7 An overemphasis on foreignization shares the assumption that a translator’s “ethical” duty is to recreate the foreign culture in the translating language, “recreation,” in Venuti’s case, through subverting the translating language’s dominant dialect. But when a translator seeks to create an “alien reading experience” focused on revealing cultural difference, when a translator assumes that a foreign work and language embody culture which she must then convey through her own translating language, what exactly is the “culture” of these “cultural differences” that she is trying to reveal? Is a translation of Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time) into English, for example, supposed to embody French culture? Or specifically nineteenth- and twentieth-century French culture? Or, more specifically still, the culture of Paris and certain communes in France during the years of Proust’s life? Or even the particular culture of the social and artistic circles which Proust frequented during those same years? Here, let us recall the metaphor of terroir. Fruits of the earth embody the land, express the land, not as an essence, but through nuances in their own flavour, tannin, fragrance, and colour. In much the same way, Venuti encourages translators to adapt the translating language to announce the presence of the foreign. A French wine thus embodies and expresses the French earth, just as an English translation of a French book ought to express the presence of the French culture.
But is that how it works?
Does a single batch of red wine from 2009, cultivated at a single winery in the Mâcon-Mancey region of Burgundy embody the French earth? A very small part of the land, yes, but decidedly not the French earth. Neither does any single work embody an entire language, or a language an entire national culture, not only because of historical realities such as colonization and globalization, but also because any national culture is too vast for any single work to embody. Venuti is correct in remarking that “Meaning is a plural and contingent relation, not an unchanging unified essence, and therefore a translation cannot be judged according to . . . concepts of semantic equivalence or one-to-one correspondence,” but ironically by so heavily insisting upon foreignizing through destabilizing the translating language so as to give the impression of a “foreign” reading experience, Venuti reduces culture’s own plurality and contingency, and when the translator’s goal is thus to create an ambiance of Otherness in her work, she perpetuates the implication of a foreign “essence.”8 Moreover, though destabilizing the translating language by varying dialects, registers, and vocabulary can challenge the sensation of being “at home” in one’s own language and the narcissism that accompanies such a sensation, an approach which uses this destabilization to maintain a sense of foreignness risks projecting domestic values associated with the destabilizing elements onto the foreign text.9
I propose that neither foreignization nor domestication should be adopted as “ethical attitudes” to translation even though a translator must indeed negotiate between one and the other constantly in practice. Domestication and foreignization can aptly describe certain considerations a translator takes for particular passages and sentences, but as mindsets with value judgements of ethicality, they risk giving translators the illusion of being gatekeepers between entire cultures, as responsible for either serving the myth of universality or preserving literary works as cultural relics rather than as works created by specific individuals who, themselves, do not embody cultures. If a translator begins a translation with the ethical goal of preserving cultural differences and creating an “alien reading experience,” the translator’s mission takes on immeasurable scope; with a goal as ambitious as illuminating foreign Culture and a foreign Other, we may lose ourselves in the abstraction and myth of culture as a kind of essence and forget the specificity and limited scope—though not necessarily limited significance—of the literary work in question.
Rather than insisting upon such an ambitious, even arrogant goal, a translator can return to the specificity of the literary work she is translating and begin there. What does the text itself convey? What socio-cultural-historical questions does the work itself choose to pose? By returning to specificity, we engage with the terroir of a single literary landscape, a minute but rich landscape. A winery that seeks to cultivate and produce wine grapes that will embody the nation will inevitably fail, but a winery that seeks to produce grapes that will express into wine the unique conditions of their environment during one particular year, may succeed.
So too with the terroir of literature and translation, and this literary terroir is more diverse still.
Why? Because ultimately, we are not grapes.
“Is any text ever ahistorical?”—Why We Are Not Grapes
“Is any text ever ahistorical?” a peer once asked me, rhetorically, because, of course, the answer is, “No.” All texts are products of their socio-historical-cultural contexts because just as grapes are products of their soil, so too are humans products of their place and time. Translators therefore do, indeed, have a responsibility to be highly aware not only of the backgrounds of the works and writers they are translating, but also of their own background and what their own experiences might bring to their work—in forms such as emotional and empathic attachment, or resistance to modes of thinking presented in the foreign text, or personal biases—for these experiences influence the way they interpret the work they are translating. A translator is not a transparent vessel for the foreign author.
I agree with Venuti in his critique of the illusory authorial presence in a translated text, how translation should not be considered a “second-order representation . . . with the effect of transparency, producing the illusion of authorial presence whereby the translated text can be taken as the original” because, as Venuti insightfully comments, “translations are different in intention and effect from original compositions . . .”10 To this idea we might add Reynolds’s description of translation as a double interpretation—a translator interprets a foreign text and renders her interpretation into a translation, but this translation too is a work that calls for readers’ subsequent interpretations.11 Yet because a translator is interpreting the words of a foreign author, though a translator can never inhabit the author’s mind or assume the author’s identity, she also cannot disentangle herself entirely from authorial intention—and nor should she. For translation entails a triple interpretation—the foreign text itself is already an interpretation—the author’s. A literary work is therefore not a transparent window into culture, society, or history either—for it is a writer’s personal reaction to circumstances in her place and time—and it is a limited place in a limited time. So just as a reader cannot omit from her mind the translator’s interpretation of a text and how it might affect the reading experience, a translator also cannot conceptualize a literary work as a transparent window into another national culture; authorial interpretation matters, and interpretation is always closely related to intent.
Intent. This is why humans are not grapes. Though both grapes and humans experience a highly limited surrounding context from which they may draw expression, grapes do not choose how they express the plot of soil and sun from which they grow. Humans, however, are always commenting on, supporting, resisting the circumstances of their lived experiences, and in their literary works, they choose how to present those experiences and interpretations. Although Venuti is correct to remark that “no writing can be mere self-expression because it is derived from a cultural tradition at a specific historical moment,” it is equally important to recognize that any kind of “cultural tradition” reflected in a literary work has already been filtered through the subjectivity of self-expression.12 Thus humans, like texts, are indeed never ahistorical, but because of the complexities of intent, both are also more than historical. Humans form their own perspectives on culture and rootedness, perspectives which then inform their interpretation of their limited socio-cultural-historical context. Because of these varying perspectives, humans can also form different conceptions on how they want to be presented through translation.
“The very idea of a ‘mother tongue’,” writes Adriana Jacobs, “like a strange cocktail, is a concoction of real and imagined elements and a site of multilingual encounter.”13 What is foreign? What is home? Though these questions have always been significant since diaspora and migration are not modern phenomena, nevertheless these questions have attracted perhaps especially close attention in our day and age. Even the notion of “mother tongue” is fraught with uncertainty, because the language we grow up speaking does not necessarily conform to our senses of identity, history, or culture—a complexity that challenges the conception that language embodies a culture. When even “mother tongue” becomes an unstable concept, an unreliable indicator of identity, when “foreign” and “domestic” become as intertwined as “real” and “imagined,” it is no surprise that writers do not always want to be translated as “Other.”
Although Tim Parks has reason to argue that “to imagine . . . that Henry James could ever be to the Italians what he is to us, or Giovanni Verga to us what he is to Italians, is nonsense,” this does not change how certain authors want to be understood, which directly affects how they want to be translated, as exemplified by Teju Cole: “I trust my translators utterly. Their task is to take my work to a new cohort of my true readers, the same way translation makes me a true reader of Wisława Szymborska, even though I know no Polish, and of Svetlana Alexievich, even though I know no Russian,” even saying, “thanks to translation, I become a German writer.”14 As a translator, I agree with Parks regarding the limitations of translation; I question the feasibility of transforming Cole’s work so as to make him become a writer of a different nationality, I can even question the abstraction of “true readers” just as I question the abstraction of foreignization, but I cannot question that Cole himself does not want to be foreignized through translation. Should his translator ignore his wishes and create an “alien reading experience” instead, so foreignized so as to make readers of the translation reluctant to identify as Cole’s “true readers”? The answer is complicated, because while a translation has its own purposes and intentions beyond those of the foreign text’s, it is nevertheless indissociable from the foreign text and from authorial intentions. Perhaps a translator could justifiably choose to deviate from Cole’s wishes and aim for an “alien reading experience” (though she might then lose her role as his translator), but this choice would become less justifiable if a writer’s desire to not be foreignized stemmed from the very issue of cultural identity.
Let us consider Jhumpa Lahiri, who chose to move away from English to write in a language initially foreign to her, Italian. Though she writes in Italian herself, as opposed to having her work translated into Italian, her reasoning for moving away from English is pertinent to translation as well. As Rebecca Walker remarks, “to write ‘I’ in a language of one’s own, ‘other’ than those inherited from family or from the process of socialization, creates a space of agency, of willfully displaced linguistic subjectivity.”15 In Lahiri’s case, as Walker explains, the language of her “own” is a language in which she has no cultural roots, which allows Lahiri to “embrace a multiplicity that, though not without its own painful moments, resists settled notions of linguistic, national, and cultural identity and frees her from the sensation of a perpetual foreignness” as a daughter of Bengali immigrants in the United States. Lahiri cannot speak her mother tongue—Bengali—fluently, and yet her “adopted” mother tongue, English, only increases her sense of “estrangement” by reminding her that she lives “in a country where her own language of Bengali is considered foreign.”16 In Lahiri’s case, chosen uprootedness through a change in language is a means of creating distance between herself and the fractured identity which cultural and national bounds have rigidly imposed on diasporic realities. Walker adds that by writing in Italian, Lahiri actively “frees herself from the fixation on an ‘imaginary homeland.’”17 To become foreign to oneself can be a means of appreciating the “multiplicity” of one’s own identity, recognizing that “mother tongue” is not straightforward, but rather, as quoted above from Jacobs, “a concoction of real and imagined elements and a site of multilingual encounter.” If a writer’s desire is to become foreign to herself by immersing herself in a foreign language, then to translate her work with the goal of emphasizing its “home” culture through a foreignizing approach would only retether the work to the very national and cultural bounds it attempts to surpass. Not all writers will gain sufficient fluency in a foreign language to be able to enact wilful “displacement” on their own as Lahiri has, but this is where translation can play a role. Although a translation is not intended to solely serve the wills of a foreign writer, nevertheless, it would be irresponsible to insist on foreignizing a writer who does not want to be foreignized for reasons such as fractured cultural identities.
We return to the importance of specificity. A literary work holds a limited scope because a writer only has limited experiences of her national culture, history, and society, limited experiences which are then filtered through her subjective interpretation and commentary. To this limited scope we add the complexity of fractured identities, of multiplicity within the self, such that even to the writer, “foreign” and “domestic” may be difficult to differentiate. To this complexity of identity, we then add intent—that just as not all writers want to be domesticated in translation, not all writers necessarily want to be foreignized either. Countless permutations allow for countless possibilities, just like with terroir.
So how might a translator decide on what approach to take?
It depends on the foreign work, on the words themselves.
Word by Word: Close Reading
“Foreign” in a literary work is not exclusively nationally or culturally oriented. We need to move beyond limiting notions of “foreign” and “domestic” conceptualized along national and cultural lines; every writer brings a unique foreignness to her work, a foreignness that reflects to varying degrees the writer’s socio-cultural-historical realities, but which is also more than those realities combined. To express Proust’s “foreignness” is not to express the “foreignness” of the French language, nation, and culture, but rather the subjective perspective offered by a single man informed by a particular lived experience and with a particular approach to writing. It is the foreignness of a single mind that a translator can try to express and give haven to.
But how does this work in practice?
I propose an emphasis on close reading.
Again, authorial intention is important, not because a translation seeks to “channel” the author’s views or voice, but because the intention directly relates to how the author presents the world in her work, which is ultimately the world which a translator must interpret. While authorial intention can sometimes be explicitly known, it also manifests in the stylistics of a work, which we can study through close reading.
For example, a passage from Proust’s Du côté de chez Swann18:
Et chaque caractère nouveau n'y étant que la métamorphose d'un caractère ancien, dans de petites boules grises je reconnaissais les boutons verts qui ne sont pas venus à terme ; mais surtout l'éclat rose, lunaire et doux qui faisait se détacher les fleurs dans la forêt fragile des tiges où elles étaient suspendues comme de petites roses d'or . . . Cette flamme rose de cierge, c'était leur couleur encore, mais à demi éteinte et assoupie dans cette vie diminuée qu'était la leur maintenant et qui est comme le crépuscule des fleurs.
Let us first avoid the mentality that a passage like the one above necessarily embodies some essential culture that reflects cultural differences between France and the translating language, differences which we must then make as our imperative to discover and reveal. Let us begin with what is on the page: a passage on dried flowers in tea. By close-reading the sentences, we discover an emphasis on imagery—colours such as green, pink, and gold abound, but softened both because we are told so—“l’éclat rose, lunaire et doux” for example—but also because the aural devices in the passage “tell” us so: “faisait se détacher les fleurs dans la forêt fragile des tiges”—the alliterative use of “f” creates an impression of softness and fragility, which further emphasizes the flowers’ twilit state. Proust renders the impression softer still by using his famously long sentence structures, such that there seems to be no abrupt end to this quiet, somnolent scene. From these stylistic devices alone, we can infer at least part of Proust’s authorial intention: to create in precise detail a twilit atmosphere echoing themes of suspension between existence and non-existence, life and death, reminiscent of the half-life which memories live when by chance they either re-emerge or remain submerged forever. Having inferred this intention, a translator can then choose whether and how to render as best as she can the atmosphere which is Proust’s focus in this passage, perhaps through stylistic imitation.
Despite Antoine Berman’s critique of imitation as capable only of parodic reproduction, imitation is nevertheless useful for staying close to a foreign text’s stylistic elements, which is especially important when, as in this case, the stylistic elements contribute to a greater theme in the work.19 If a translator of the work into English tries to preserve these stylistic elements—incorporating alliteration of soft consonants, retaining the sentence’s length and lullaby-like rhythm—her translation might ultimately be foreignizing since contemporary standardized English, with its hard consonants, grammatical order, and opposition to “run-on sentences,” does not often resemble Proust’s French. But this will be a foreignization with an appropriate scope—it will be English that does not sound quite like contemporary standardized English not because it is supposed to “sound French” and thus reflect “French culture” and alert us to “cultural differences” but because it is crafted to specifically resemble Proust’s French. Again, this is the foreignness of a single mind; this precision helps to ensure that we do not project onto a foreign text “cultural differences” that are not actually there.
To the merits of close reading, we can add one more: the close, even intimate relationship between translator and each word, sentence, and passage she renders, fosters a new kind of conception of “authorship” that transcends the denigrating connotations of imitation and reproduction. As Kate Briggs writes, “there is this close involving time spent with the sentence the translator is working on (then, the great sequence of sentences) that the translator is not wrong . . . to feel that she has written herself.”20 When a translator reads closely into every literary nuance in a sentence or passage to find the literary devices and themes that demand the most attention from her, when she then reflects on these devices and themes, considering why they attract her attention and how they might be significant to her interpretation, when she then chooses how to render them into the translating language, the thought and time which such a process demands do, in some ways, make her creation—even if a pastiche—her own.
Return to Terroir
Translating with the desire to emphasize “cultural differences” is not without merit, but it must reframe itself to reinhabit the specific “terroir” of the work in question. Besides, just as a person is not solely a combination of society, culture, and history, nor is a translation solely a site for resistance and cultural dialogue. Politics, cultural interaction, and power dynamics do factor into translation—hence why a translator holds responsibility for being informed about contexts pertinent to the works and authors she translates, as well as aspects of her own background that will, ultimately, complicate her interpretation—but to focus solely on these larger questions is to ignore the deeply personal connection between text and translator that is also a valid and often necessary motivation for translators to translate.
Kate Briggs captures this complexity: “We need translations. The world, the English-speaking world, needs translations . . . But I wonder: is it really for the world that the translator translates? . . . The translator takes the world by the back of the head . . . against its face she says: Look, world, I am doing this for you. Is that how it goes?”21 Briggs replies to her own question by suggesting that while such ambitious and far-reaching motives are real and necessary, nevertheless there are more personal, and equally poignant, motivations at work that propel the translator and enrich the translator-translation relationship.22
Sometimes a translator translates for reasons similar to the ones that explain why Lahiri writes in Italian: to appreciate her own multiplicity which straightforward notions of culture and nation fail to comprehend. I do not translate Proust with the lofty goal of illuminating French and English cultural differences supposedly reflected in the French and English languages so as to humble the (indeed narcissistic) anglophone world. I translate Proust because it is the one space in which I do not have to so painfully engage with my fractured identity as an immigrant and a child of immigrant parents, as a writer and translator who always hesitates before answering questions such as, “What is your mother tongue?” I translate Proust because his writing moves me, and I want to express how it moves me by translating it. I have no roots in French culture, and my roots in anglophone cultures are intertwined with complexities such as immigration, diaspora, and British colonization, which makes my engagement with both languages through translation more interesting but also less straightforward.
As Adriana Jacobs quotes Gertrude Stein: “Writers have to have two countries, the one where they belong, and the one in which they live really. The second one is romantic, it is separate from themselves, it is not real but it is really there.”23 We develop our own perspectives on our rootedness and how we want our rootedness to be perceived. Though we are influenced by national and regional cultures and histories, we are not “channels” for a pure representation of our “cultures.” Our minds, though shaped by socio-cultural-historical realities, do not always want to reside where they supposedly “belong” or where others insist our minds “belong.” It is not a writer’s duty to embody the cultures ascribed to her—and as much as a translation serves purposes different from those of the foreign text, nevertheless the close, indissoluble relationship between the translation and the foreign text demands, I believe, some consideration for the author’s intentions and identities. And though a translator should be highly cognisant of her own background and biases that tint her interpretation of the foreign work, and cognisant of the author’s background that tint the author’s own work, it is not a translator’s duty—or even in her capacity—to be a cultural gatekeeper or embody the “culture” of her translating language.
If a literary work has its own terroir—formed by the author’s unique socio-cultural-historical and personal experiences that then create a subjective interpretation of the world as depicted in her work—then it does not embody a nation or a national culture; it only reflects—and even then, subjectively—the limited scope within the author’s knowledge, perspective, and experience. A literary work is thus not a transparent window into national or linguistic culture, just as a single batch of wine or tea is not a transparent embodiment of its nation’s earth, sun, and rain. But it is precisely because terroir is minute and specific rather than overarching and universal that makes it so profound.
The myth of essence is a myth because “essence” is an oversimplification. To truly appreciate a “land,” we must first recognize that a land is composed of countless sites of earth, some with shared features, but each ultimately unique. To truly appreciate a “culture,” we must first recognize that a culture is composed of countless interpretations, some shared more widely, some less so, but each ultimately unique. Countless permutations allow for countless possibilities.
It is fortunate that humans are more than their socio-cultural-historical surroundings, that humans can and want to shape their own expressions of their rootedness; it is fortunate that, ultimately, humans are not grapes, because the terroir of literature and translation, the terroir of the stories which humans can tell, is then all the richer.
