Translation, Identity, and Heterogeneity

Researchers will already recognize the conference theme as an ancient one. At the very beginning of European literature we find the work of the tragedian Aeschylus who explores the idea of identity and the image of the foreigner in his play The Persians. At one point in this work, namely in a scene set in the city of Susa, the royal counselors come together with Queen Atossa, the widow of King Darius and mother of Xerxes, to discuss the destiny of the army that has departed to war against the Greeks. The queen has had a dream and a disturbing premonition of things to come. The dream and premonition are confirmed when a messenger enters to proclaim the defeat of the Persian forces at the battle of Salamis, including the massacre of all the soldiers on the island of Psittalia. Happily the queen learns that Xerxes has escape this calamity. Later the queen invokes the spectre of King Darius and learns of more misfortunes in the fields of Boeotra and the plains of Platalas. When the imperial scepter disappears, Xerxes himself enters the queen’s chambers, wounded and wailing, rehearsing the names of the dead combatants and the destruction of the army.

Aeschylus represents the battle of Salamis as a great Greek victory over an enemy. But this foreign enemy is not fully different from the Greeks because it possesses important Greek qualities. The enemy, the “other” speaks Greek and lives on the frontier between the Greek and the barbarian way of life. The Persians call upon Zeus as god and themselves rely upon nomoi “laws” that the Greeks recognize. From Aeschylus’s perspective, there is little difference or diversity in the Greeks and the Persians of this frontier regions. Both Greek and Persian form a kind of hybrid people group.

Interestingly, this first tragedy in the history of European literature comes to us from a foreign, an Asian, place. Similarly, the first poem in the history of European literature, The Iliad, is set on foreign soil; and a foreign venue also give the location of Herodotus’s Histories that narrate the war of Greece against the Persians.

It is precisely in the Asian boundary-land and frontier that we discover for the first time reflections on the concept of alterity “otherness.” It is an encounter of one people group with another across a frontier, an encounter that results in a hybridization of language, culture, and life style. Along the coast of Asia Minor, the Greeks lived under Persian dominion even though at the time Greek culture dominated even the Persians. Here, along the coast of Asia Minor, the scope and limitation of alterity was being defined. In this political and cultural space cultures are merging, marking their boundaries, establishing identities and profiles, and learning how to identify an insider and an outsider.

Another of Aeschylus’s tragedy deals indirectly with frontiers: The Agamemnon. As we know, Agamemnon sacrifices his daughter Iphigenia because he has offended the goddess Artemis, the twin sister of Apollo. Artemis is the daughter of Zeus and Leto, and on occasion Aeschylus identifies her with the goddesses Selene and Hecate as a personification of goddess of the Moon. She is also the Diana of the Latin Pantheon as well as the goddess of the hunt, protector of forest animals, and patroness of fountains and brooks. But she also serves as the goddess who heals and saves and who protects young girls at birth. She is found as a goddess of crossroads. As the goddess who saves lives she does not allow Iphigenia to be sacrificed and instead substitutes one of the servants for her. She translates (in the literal sense of the word) Iphigenia to the country of Tauris or Tauri, where she receives initiation into one of the priesthoods. Diana is a goddess whose name does not originate in Greek; it is perhaps Asiatic, and therefore she can be considered a goddess of the frontier, of the boundary and limit; her reign is situated along the boundaries of the world. And this is why she is the goddess of the liminal: she rules over piers and of coasts, over those places that are neither land nor sea. A hybrid figure, Diana emerges out of medley of cultural intersections and linguistic interactions. The frontier that protects against the “other” turns out in the case of Artemis to have a more porous, ambiguous role. The person of Artemis underscores the fragility of the margin, but also confirms its intangibility and its capacity to be distinguishable and recognizable.

There is a great book by Seamus Heneay, The Spirit Level, where Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, a tragedy invoking the name of Artemis, appears together with a poem invoking and dedicated to Brigid, the Irish saint. The name Brigid derives from Brigit, the Celtic goddess of healing, fire, blacksmithing, poetry, knowledge and fertility. Brigid, the Irish saint is the patron of poets, blacksmiths, and healers. To honor her, the Irish celebrate a feast called Imbolc, in honor of coming of spring and during which they pour milk on the land as a symbol of fertility. In the same manner that Artemis is the goddess of crossroads and boundaries, so Brigid represents a boundary-figure that marks the existence of frontiers. This is just what Artemis did for her original Greek culture, making it a land of liminality and transition between East and West. In Greek culture language and symbol continually shifts their significance as they search for possible new translations.

Structural diatectology can help us here. It conveys an understanding of how cultures reveal diasystems, that is, environments, scopes, atmospheres that move between cultures. Such a concept was introduced by Uriel Weinrich, who showed the connection between a linguistic structure and its variation in a bordering people group. In his study he utilized work in contact studies and interference linguistics. In this sense, a diasystem allows us to interpret those dark, shadowy zones that are linguistic frontiers, subdividing endlessly into discrete varieties. It is possible to understand a diasystem as a zone in which language and cultural systems of certain historical periods enter into contacts and relationships that are characterized by opposition as well as reciprocity. In this relationship, one system may antagonize another, exerting a certain pressure over another, forcing the second to reorganize and take into account the first. In the frontiers where systems meet and contact each other, one functions as hegemonic and the other as dominated. Although this contact reveals that the two systems are not equal, it is nevertheless important to remember the warning by Corrado Grassi. He said that the hegenomic system does not simply dominate and absorb into itself the dominated system. It is not just simple adaptation of one system to another. Rather it is a matter of one dominated system reacting to another hegemonic one, a reaction in the course of which the dominated systems looks to resolve the imbalances created by the contact with the hegemonic system. What results is not a collection of possibilities but a set of diversities. Such dynamism constitutes the vitality of a linguistic system, but it is extensible to the contacts between any cultural system. Think, for example, of the contact between two literatures, where one is always hegemonic, but where the dominated system does not simply adapt to the schematics of the hegemonic; it rather reacts reorganizing itself and becomes part of the larger polysystem formed by the merging of two systems.

Homi Bhabha has said of contacts and frontiers between cultures that there is a third space, an inter-space, in which we are forced to rethink the historic identity of a culture as fully homogeneous. Bhabha sees consequences for culture in so far as the idea of a third space eleminates the possibility of considering cultural knowledge as a fully uniform, unchanging code. The existance of a third space permits us to think that ambiguity belongs to the process of interpretation; the third space tells us that the identity of a culture is not homogeneious, that cultural purity does not exist. Bhabha knows that the symbols of a culture do not have a fixed origin and that they undergo continuous rewriting and translation. Culture turns out to be a mobile space that continually restructures itself and searches for a dynamic equilibrium. Once an identity is constructed, then succesive adjustments make it difficult to show any clearly defined boundaries and fronts. Especially relevent here is the concept developed by Garcia Canclini of hybridism, a feature of culture that shows culture to beunited to an unstable frontier, possessing an identity resulting from encounters, superpositions, revaluations. Hybridism signifies that culture lives on a frontier, stretching itself across a space that is both inside and outside, a place that results from continous translation and tranference of significance. Cultural identify originates precisely in, and is a consequent of, these translations.

In the beginning of The Persians, the chorus of elders lists the chieftens who have followed Xerxes; in so doing, this work tallies up the peoples that contitute the empire. What Aeschylus shows is the multiple elements of Persian identity. Characteristically, the Persian Empire is constituted by diverse peoples, races, tongues, religions. Diversity is a recognizable hallmark. In this way, and out of this contrast, we recognize who is Greek. Persians are a complex, multi-lingual, multi-cultural consortium of peoples, while the Greeks are one and unified, lying outside the Asiatic continuum . Greek culture transform itself into one discreet entity, absorbing some external cultural features, excluding others. The diasystemic culture in which many Greeks live contrasts with their own unity and identty. It is through self-representation that the Greeks put themselves into their narrations. The Greeks discovered themselves and recognize themselves as they narrated the wars with the only universal empire of the day, Persia.

Stuart Hall is correct when he refers to late modernity and says that identity is disunited, resulting from complex discourses antagonistics social practices. In this sense all identities are more or less unstable representations that set in motion antagonistic relations, as underlined by Cornejo Polar in the concept of continued transformation. Frequently identities are the inevitable results of ideological choices that bring with themselves ideologies and discusive (reflective) practices that guide the notion of identity. As Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak noted, identify cannot be separated from ideology, just as it cannot separate from rethoric.

In this regard, Gideon Toury’s notion of a polysystem is crucial. This notion helps us understand that in the creation of an identity translation strategies play a central role.

To construct a cultural identity means to construct a representation of one’s own proper territory; it means to delimit a relevant frontier that identifies a diasystematical zone. This construction stems from a dialectual process in which a dominated and a hegemonic culture meet; it is not the result of a natural process inherent in culture. Cultural identities do not maintain a fixed status from a given starting point; rather, they are the fruit of a socio-semitical interaction with other identities and cultures. In principle, identity and culture exist only within a hybridized territory. Only with the passage of time do we see specific attributes and identities, distinguishing qualites and features as early and later, central and marginal. One of the final stages in the process of frontier and boundary building occurs when cultures evolve into nation states and political institutions.

Aeschylus ends The Persians with Xerxes’ lament. But the lament over the destruction of the Persian army must be considered in relation to the stupor of queen Atossa as she reflects on the diversity of Greek culture. Aeschylus makes it clear that the queen’s astonishment is in full bloom prior to the arrival of a messenger bringing the news of a disastrous defeat; this news highlights the contrasting motive of victory which has its counterpart in the contrast between Greek and Persian culture and identify. Greeks and Persians have the same gods and attribute the same royal, though inexact functions to the gods. Nonetheless the Greeks declare themselves independent of the other peoples belonging to the Persian Empire; the Greeks are masters of their own traditions and languages that mark the frontier between them and the Persians. For the Greek identity and for our own modern identity, separation, diversity and frontier go hand in hand.