TRANSLATION AND READING

By Rainer Schulte

Any time we are confronted with a text we are involved in the act of reading and
interpretation. We know that there are various ways of reading and no two people will read a text
the exact same way. Naturally, we cannot escape from our cultural and social background, which
in turn influences our approaches to the reading of texts. In an age of scholarly jargon and clichs,
the act of reading needs to be rethought in some fundamental ways. The methodologies derived
from the art and craft of translation could serve as one possible mode to revitalize the reading of
literary and humanistic works.
Translators develop reading techniques that are distinctly different from those of a critic
and scholar, because they look at each word through the lens of a magnifying glass. The words
appearance, its rhythmic power and its sound potential together with its placement within a
sentence begin to affect the reading process. For a moment, it might be advantage to reflect on a
statement by Hans Georg Gadamer, who in his work on "Wieweit schreibt Sprache das Denken
vor?" ("To What Extent Does Language Prescribe Thinking?"), succinctly expresses the
relationship between reading and translating: "Lesen ist schon bersetzen und bersetzen ist dann
noch einmal bersetzen...Der Vorgang des bersetzens schliesst im Grunde das ganze Geheimnis
menschlicher Weltverstndigung und gesellschaftlicher Kommunikation ein." ("Reading is already
translation, and translation is translation for the second time...The process of
translating comprises in its essence the whole secret of human understanding of the world and of
social communication.")
Whenever we read works, whether they were written by a contemporary writer or an
author from the past, we have to translate them into our present sensibility. Reading is a

2
continuous process of translation, and the way the translator looks at every word and investigates
its rhythmic power and its semantic possibilities reaffirms that the act of reading, seen through the
translators eyes, is dynamic and not static. The writer creates the text and the reader as translator
is involved in a constant process of re-creating the text. In the process of recreating the situations
in a work, each translator brings a modified interpretation to the text, which clearly negates the
assumption that literary works can be reduced to one final, definitive meaning. Correspondingly,
there cannot be one definitive translation of a poem, a novel, or a play. The many translations that
have been published of the poem The Panther by Rainer Maria Rilke shows how many different
interpretations there can be of one single poem. The very nature of translation thinking leads to
the acceptance of multiple meanings and interpretations.
Through the process of reading, we the readers are transplanted into the atmosphere of a
new situation the reality of which has to be deciphered by the reader, which can lead to a variety
of interpretive approaches. Even though words appear as fixed entities on the page, the translator
focuses on the uncertainty inherent in words whose contours can never be fully delineated. Words
exist as isolated phenomena and as semiotic possibilities within a sentence, paragraph, or the
context of an oeuvre.
The rediscovery of that uncertainty in each word constitutes the initial attitude of the translator.
Reading becomes a continuous process of making meaning and not the description of already
existing fixed meanings. As the imaginative text does not offer the reader a new comfortable
reality but, rather, places him between several realities among which he has to choose, the words
that constitute the text emanate a feeling of uncertainty. That feeling, however, becomes
instrumental in the reader/translator's engagement in a continuous process of decision-making.
Certain choices have to be made among all these possibilities of uncertain meanings. Whatever the

3
translation decision might be, there is still another level of uncertainty for the reader/translator,
which continues the process of reading not only within the text but even beyond the text. This
proliferation of uncertainties must be viewed as one of the most stimulating and rewarding results
that the reader/translator perspective finds in the study and experience of the text: Reading as the
generator of uncertainties, reading as the driving force toward a decision-making process, reading
as discovery of new interrelations that can be experienced but not described in terms of a critical,
content-oriented language.
In general, readers are inclined to ask the question: what does a text mean? The response
to such a question would reduce the multiplicity of possible interpretations inherent in a text to
one single answer. However, the translator thinks in different terms. The initial question might be
changed from what does a text mean to how does a text come to mean? That change of
perspective reorients the techniques of reading, since it is extremely difficult to define the exact
parameters of a words meaning. As soon as a word is placed next to another word, some of the
original meaning-contours of each word begin to be modified. Perhaps the major contribution that
translation thinking brings to the act of reading is the translators practice of seeing words not as
isolated phenomena but rather as linkages to other words. To comprehend the overall atmosphere
and an authors direction of thinking in a given work, the translator deciphers the direction of
thinking that a particular word projects. That form of horizontal thinking through a poem can
easily be illustrated in Pablo Nerudas poem Arte Poetica that opens in the following way,
Entre espacio y sombra. (between space and shadow). Both words indicate a movement of
expansion. Keeping that characteristic in mind the reader can then proceed through the poem to
look for other nouns, verbs, or adjectives that suggest a similar movement of expansion. And
indeed the poem abounds with words that suggest a movement of expansion: dream, wind, sound,

4
bell, smell, noise, and a ceaseless movement.
Reading from a translator's point of view represents a continuous process of opening up
new possibilities of interactions and semantic associations. In the translation process there are no
definitive answers, only attempts at solutions in response to states of uncertainly generated by the
interaction of the words' semantic fields, sounds, and visual appearance on the page. The
reconstruction of these associations differ with each reader and translator, which is ultimately
responsible for the varied interpretations that are generated by different readers of the same text.
The proliferation of multiple translations that many novels, and especially poems have undergone,
confirm the existence of different interpretations generated by the same text. Reading institutes
the making of meanings through questions in which the possibility of an answer results in another
question: What if? The translator/reader makes the reading activity a process in which each word
begins to assume possible semantic associations which prevents the act of interpretation to
become static.
Applying the translator's eye to the reading of a text changes our attitude toward the
reading process by dissolving the fixity of print on a page into a potential multiplicity of semantic
connections that support the overall atmosphere encountered in a novel or poem. The words on
the page represent only a weak reflection of the situations that the author intended to express. The
translator/reader considers the word a means to an end, the final destination of which can never be
put into the limitations of static formulations.
The methodologies of translation can therefore be used to reactivate the act of reading as
a dynamic process that engages the reader in the experience of the literary work.