There are some books for whom the text is a demonstration of the subject matter; the form of the writing communicates (or metacommunicates) the writer's ideas. Beyond Translation: Essays Toward a Modern Philology, by A.L. Becker, is such a book. This collection of essays and addresses traces three decades of study of Southeast Asian languages by a professor emeritus of linguistics and anthropology at the University of Michigan. In its form, the book can be viewed as a kind of matrix. On one axis we might arrange certain core principles that have guided Becker in his work (he might call them the philologist's "tools"): ideas such as emic and etic analysis, silence across languages, attunement, the linguistics of particularity, and others. On the second axis might appear the various texts to which Becker devotes himself. These are drawn from diverse languages and genres ranging from Burmese proverb to Javanese folktale and shadow theater to sentences from classical Malay. In reading the book, we see the core principles successively related to different texts such that each iteration evokes a deeper understanding of the principles. In the end, these principles become the "texts" themselves, framed by the proverbs and folktales. This mutualness of concepts and illustrations eloquently demonstrates the co-evolution of language and context, of text and observer, which are the book's central themes.
The book is, in a general sense, about the process of coming to see in a new way through the defamiliarization that accompanies the learning of a distant language. A premise of this book is that we inhabit systems of thought and feeling that bear only superficial resemblances to those of culturally distant groups. Becker shares with Heidegger, Gadamer and other hermeneutic scholars the belief that our being is formed in our very way of experiencing and living in language. The research task Becker has set himself is the discovery of just how different are the lingual worlds we construct.
Any translation of a distant text raises questions of equivalence between the translation and the original: equivalence of vocabulary and idiom, of syntax, and of the social arrangements and everyday experiences that a particular language presupposes. Becker frames these difficulties of translation as inevitable conditions arising from the "exuberance" and "deficiency" of all language, an idea he develops from the work of Ortega y Gasset. Every utterance is deficient -- it says less than it wishes to say, and at the same time every utterance is exuberant -- it says more than it intends. The philologist seeks to bridge these inequivalences through an interpretive process that moves from the translation or "gloss" of the text toward a more fully contextual appreciation of the source. In the ongoing effort to remove the exuberances and fill in the deficiencies, a richer, more subtle sense of the original passage emerges. In many of the essays Becker examines and reflects on the linguistic data in the kind of detail that seems, to a nonspecialist, extraordinary. Yet the book invites and sustains a conversation with a much wider audience than linguists, by urging us to recognize how "texts" and "contexts" of many kinds relate in dynamic ensemble.
Like hearing or reading certain poems, the learning of a distant language can be defamiliarizing; by proposing new distinctions while relaxing others, a distant language compels us to question the assumptions of our own language. Becker touches on several such moments of defamiliarization arising during his fieldwork. One occurred in his early learning of Burmese as he studied traditional forms of writing. As Becker explains in the essay, "The Elusive Figures of Burmese Grammar," Burmese script is written in a "center- periphery" notation rather than in the linear phonetic sequence to which we Westerners are accustomed. The distinction is nicely captured in his description of a Burmese typewriter. Rather than jumping forward to the next space when a letter is struck, the carriage of a Burmese typewriter "sits still" so that the single character produced on the page can be progressively modified by adding marks above, below, in front of, or behind it. Learning Burmese script, with its strange orientations to the "front" and "back" of words, was initially defamiliarizing, but proved to be critical to Becker's eventual appreciation of the center-periphery form as a basic icon in Burmese epistemology. Becker does not seem to say that defamiliarization is an inevitable outcome of distant language learning, but rather is an orientation toward the learning itself (one which, he implies, is available to "learners" of many kinds.)
Becker's writing about language affords wonderful opportunities to be defamiliarized. As Bateson and others have noted, we are often misled by our everyday metaphors for describing communication process. In the absence of a relational vocabulary, we often refer to communication as a kind of "substance" moving in "space" (with its entailing notions of "barriers" and "breakdowns,") thus obscuring its systemic qualities such as might be better captured in the analogy of communication as a "dance." Becker, here, selects a different, almost sculptural idiom for communication, suggesting that "in using language one shapes old words into new contexts," what the Javanese describe as "pushing old language into the present." Becker's languaging about languaging (here his choice follows Maturana and Dewey, again underscoring the processual) is one of the pleasures of reading this book.
Some texts resist our attempts to push them into the present, as Becker learned when he tried to translate a story of Gregory Bateson's for a class of Malay students in advanced linguistics. As he recounts the incident in "Silence Across Languages," the story concerns a computer scientist who asked his computer, "Do you compute that you will ever think like a human being?" The computer, after analyzing at length its own computation processes, responded "that reminds me of a story." Following Becker's recitation of the story to the audience of students, there was no laughter, only silence. Later, he was led to reflect on all of the prior texts, unfamiliar to the Malay students, that the story presupposes. Ironically, Bateson's central idea, that in storytelling we connect disparate domains together in order to create new contexts, was undoubtedly a familiar one to his listeners.
Much of the uniqueness of Becker's work lies in his efforts to bring together the materials and tools of textual interpretation with cybernetic notions of self-regulation and constraint, a combination which will offer many readers with a new way of conceptualizing interpretive processes. To begin with, any language both enables and constrains the expression of particular meanings. As Becker notes, "completely spontaneous linguistic activity is impossible. [since] other people could not understand it -- or even recognize it as a language" (p. 27). Comprehensibility of a story or any other text critically depends on many sorts of constraints, explained here as contextual relations or conventions, which establish the text's coherence, its novelty, its reference to things outside the text. The process of moving toward an emic understanding, is, in part, a process of appreciating the many kinds of constraints that operate locally on the text.
Equally important, emic understanding implies a change in the linguistic observer's self-awareness toward a recognition of his or her own biases. Emic understanding is often misinterpreted as a kind of "insider's perspective." According to Becker, it is more fittingly understood as a "self-conscious understanding, a process that the outsider undergoes; a deliberate process of foregrounding dissimilarity and self-consciously methodically correcting the exuberances and deficiencies of one's outside understanding" (p. 233 ).
The ongoing process of self-correction by an observer, what Becker calls "attunement," is essential to the aesthetic appreciation of distant texts. It also challenges us to explore and extend our thinking about intercultural communication more generally. Understanding human encounters across cultural boundaries requires more than simply describing culturally situated communicative practices and symbols, and the significant meanings they hold for cultural participants (although this may be an important first step). Intercultural understanding also challenges us to consider how people from different cultures go about establishing common ground -- how co-participants actually manage to get anything done when, for example, they are working together or simply being together. The modern philology proposed by Becker offers a viewpoint for reconceptualizing the mutual processes that allow for intercultural communication to take place, not as a competition between participants' different frames, but as an opportunity to ecologically create new ones.
While the textual analyses in this collection will undoubtedly be of great interest to linguists and Southeast Asian specialists who engage similar texts in their scholarly work, the epistemological and communicative implications raised here speak to a diverse audience across many disciplines. The themes explored in this collection regarding the deeply social nature of all languaging are of potential interest to many of us who engage others in dialogue in both teaching and research relationships and within other human systems. Beyond Translation invites us to speculate about non-distant "translations" in everyday encounters as we consider the professional languages we employ. Other readers will undoubtedly see both more and less than I have in Becker's work. Most importantly for me, this work draws attention to how the process of studying and representing others must include some awareness of one's own self as part of this process, thereby encouraging new dialogic possibilities.
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