The years had flowed by like water and I knew quite well how unreceptive I was to the illusion of imperviousness, but I also knew how much I depended on that illusion. My dilemma became much clearer in the summer of 1991 than it had been in Germany in 1987 during my apprenticeship in Göttingen. My New York publisher, Grove Press, planned a collection of short stories and a collection of essays for my American debut. Various translators had taken on the short stories, and, together with my editor, I tried to improve their English versions. The Romanian text lay on the table next to the French and Italian translations. Fortunately for me, the American editor spoke both those languages. Together, we jumped from one language to the next and reworked the English version. How each sentence tried to express something became less important than what it tried to say. It was a logical, “Aristotelian” reduction to erasure, a kind of Darwinian struggle for existence in which originality could prove to be the greatest disadvantage. As Walter Benjamin said, “any translation which intends to perform a transmitting function cannot transmit anything but information — hence, something inessential.”
My book finally appeared in a version that had been cobbled together from many sources but sounded reasonable in English. Despite my three months in purgatory, I was delighted to hold the book in my hand. Seeing it displayed in the bookstore’s windows and reading the flattering reviews, I was forced to remind myself that the ordeal of translation is a privilege many gifted authors, at home or in exile, never receive.
Was I accepting a surrogate, an impostor, a shallow impersonator? I reminded myself that I had read Spanish, French, Russian, Italian, and German literature mostly in translation and how important it proved to be in such an encounter with great masters. In translation, of course, always so or mostly so.
The first sentence of my 1984 collection of essays, On the Contour, goes like this: “The unity of a people is, above all, one of language.” I truly believed that language was the matrix, the fundamental, formative factor of communication between the individual and community. During that period, I was attacked in the socialist press as “extraterritorial.” That is, foreign, cosmopolitan, antinationalist, antiparty.
In the end, as we can see, I could not avoid becoming a true extraterritorial, expatriate, exile. Yet, as Wittgenstein says, “The boundaries of my language are the boundaries of my world.” Common sense, or the not quite tender age in which my exile occurred, should have been cause enough to disabuse myself of the chimera of writing. Still, I have continued the adventure begun in the difficult political conditions of my own country and language.
An author’s exile is a terrible trauma for the writer, skinned and unsouled, forced to replace the internal organs of his linguistic being. It has proven, more than once, to be his suicide.
The simulacrum offered by translation, although just a substitute, a surrogate, a double, can provide some unexpected relief. It has similarities with exile itself; it’s a textual migration, a process of migrating from a place (a language) of departure to a place (a language) of destination. In the same way, it is a process of rebirth and adaptation of the nomadic text to a new context.
Assimilation entails the translation of the ego into another language and culture, where it tries to find its place and its expression. Aggressive “distortions” (to recall, again, dispossession and dependence) bring with them incentives of uncertainty. Conscious or unconscious mimesis often marks the childishness inherent in the spectacle of assimilation.
The exile has new, particular themes for reflection. He is, in the end, a hybrid, a compromise between what he brought with him and what he acquires later.
Translation provides a new linguistic form for the old content. We find, in the process of linguistic relocation, many of the modulations that the exile experiences himself. The text is a living body, a being. The final product must belong entirely to the new language, to the target language, as they say, and not to the old language. The transformation takes a defined period of time and the result is already beached on the new shore, in the new linguistic territory, the new textual residence. In contrast, the exile often swings, for a long time, if not forever between the past and the present. Between formation — deformation — reformation, between different possible egos until, gradually, the double appears to represent him on the new social stage. It is an osmosis: loss and gain, wound and revitalization, the fracture of the old and the nutrition of the new, an intense exchange of energies.
Exile is also an extraordinary process of education and re-education, especially for those who come to the new land as adults. Where one begins and where one ends are poles of a privileged existential adventure, with intense suffering and exaltation. The great school of pointlessness, of dispossession, and in the end, of death, the ultimate dispossession, does not exclude scenes of exhilarating jubilation. Feelings of rebirth are gifts of inestimable worth to our ephemerality.
As with everything human, the extreme condition of exile contains both loss and gain, hopelessness and hope. The trauma of translation also has positive effects. It has happened more than once that in checking even an imperfect translation, I have discovered certain word choices I like better than in the original. I have then changed the original Romanian to a word translated from English. Translation may sometimes be, as the Romantics said, the best literary criticism. You are forced to see where the text is clumsy.
We should remind ourselves that Proust only found himself through Ruskin’s translations. In translation, in writing as translation, he found a model and a voice. “I have two more Ruskins to finish,” he wrote in 1904, “and after that I will try to translate my poor heart, if I haven’t died by then” We can never emphasize the importance of translations enough, for the expansion of knowledge, for dialogue among nations. Especially, though, for the individual discovery of unforeseen, great friends. More important friends than those we meet in the morning for a coffee.
I am connected to Paul Celan by more than Bukovina and the camps of Transnistria, which marked our fates in different ways. Celan’s German, from the beginning a language of exile, came to the Habsburgian province of Bukovina from Vienna and not from Berlin. He called his brief, carefree youth in Bucharest a time of word games and puns. He believed his German gave him an unfair advantage over his friends who wrote in Romanian. Eugen Ionescu claimed that he himself would probably have been a better writer in Romania than the more important one he became in France. My Romanian biography and language were not just episodes in my youth. My “word games” have lasted throughout the greater part of my life, as an alternation between horror and joy, danger and rebirth, apathy and creativity, back to drama, humiliation, uprooting.
It was in Paris, and not in Vienna or Berlin or Zurich, that Celan settled and continued to write in his exiled, nomadic German. No wonder he considered language to be the poet’s homeland, even when the language is German and the poet a Jew. Even when the language is Romanian and the writer a Jew, I would add …
Had Paul Celan won his well-deserved Nobel Prize, which country could have claimed him? The prize is explicitly awarded to an individual and not a country. I was not surprised when V. S. Naipaul responded to the news from Stockholm by saying that he did not belong to any particular country. He should have added, I think, that he does indeed belong to a language. And so should Elias Canetti, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and Kafka, too, for that matter, had his marvelous, nocturnal cryptograms managed to reach that dubious committee of world glory.