When a colleague of mine got the go-ahead to translate Toni Morrison’s most celebrated novel to date, Beloved (1987), into Macedonian, she was immediately faced with one of the most difficult questions a translator faces, the exalted choice of a translated text’s language register. She feared, and still does (despite the incredible work she did produce) that Morrison’s multivocal narrative was about to lose its complexly compelling use of linguistic magic.
How does one translate a textual challenge, which in turn, questions the romantic notion of pain as a beautiful, “humanizing” emotion, by calling the reader’s attention to the role pain plays in undoing language, not only the language of pain, but language in general, without spoiling it?
If we think of translation as a visceral act that any self needs to undergo, then we can examine Morrison’s narrative for what it speaks to/for us, as it ‘bears witness’ to those voices that have been robbed of a saying. Looking for a starting point in my own ‘translation’ of Beloved, I found the ideas as outlined by Professor Bernard W. Bell, in his essay titled “Beloved: A Womanist Neo-Slave Narrative; or Multivocal Remembrances of Things Past” equally challenging to the task. Bell proceeds to examine Morrison’s choices as a novelist who does not only “tell a story”, but helps a story which has been known for so many generations “find its voice.” He reads Morrison’s use of figurative language, i.e., her omnipresent narrative voice’s employment of “the metaphors of personal and communal wholeness in the text”, as enlivening “the psychological realism of [the text’s] womanist themes of black kingship, motherhood, sisterhood, and love.” These quintessential themes that have been pushed aside for such a long time in the history of fictional representation come to life in Morrison’s text as she, according to Bell, delivers her “most extraordinary and spellbinding womanist remembrances of things past.” For Bell, Morrison has managed to reverberate the slave narrative genre by writing a ghost story, a postmodern ‘neo-slave narrative’ which “speaks in many compelling voices and on several time levels of the historical rape of black American women and of the resilient spirit of blacks in surviving as people.”
As I have mentioned before, I do find Professor Bell’s interpretative ideas of Morrison’s ‘womanist text’ both challenging and rewarding, for their equally multivocal perspective. However, I have always been interested in the relationship language and memory partake on in the making/unmaking of the narrative self, especially if the ‘historical self’ has been dismissed of its existence, ‘shoved under the rug’. It seems to me that Beloved asks of us as readers to question persistently where selfhood is indeed located (in an individual, in a community, in a social practice, in a text?); whether language and memory, already dissolved by pain, ‘bear witness’ to the construction of a self.
Having taken Professor Graham’s English 770 journey, in the fall semester of 2003, I was exposed to numerous scholarly ways of sizing up the self’s-(re)presentation in a literary format. Needless to say, they have provided compelling leeways into my own quest for an understanding of this evocative process. But I still question the link between language and memory, particularly when an individual’s pain cannot be clearly conveyed.
Can pain be at least examined privately, in order to validate ‘the self’ to itself? If pain is not publically utterable, can we comprehend the suffering it causes, can we contemplate it?
I think Morrison’s text allows for us to look at this question either way. On the one hand, pain cannot make us real; if reality (empirically speaking) is a place reserved for memory, pain can, like the acknowledgement of a self’s existence, be revoked at any time. On the other hand, pain does make us fully human, at a large expense to our ‘humanity’. Does it mean that being human is like being ghostly, spectral and substantial, fictional as real, occupying an ever shifting identity?
In a sense, Morrison text constantly reevaluates our definition of humanity, of a self, of a voice, of a consciousness. It teaches us that a self remade in kindness is no more real than a self made in violence, as we seem to forget how easily a self is made and unmade, willingly or not. Morrison’s narrator teaches us how to “reconstruct and reconsider the unspeakable human cost of American slavery, racism, and sexism, then and now – to whites as well as blacks, to men as well as women - , and to sympathize with Sethe, black mothers, and black families in their struggle against white male hegemony to affirm their self-worth as a racial group.” It taught my translator friend how to read the slave narratives of our people (transmitted orally from generation to generation, only to be written down/acknowledged after years of torment and guilt), how to appreciate their silences, how to uncover their univocal structure, how to speak as translators of a resounding text. It enabled them to give life to Morrison’s auto-ethnography, to find it a shape and a meaning in a strange Slavic language of memory past and memory present, as it taught them the truth of the complex nature of double consciousness of Morrison’s selves, and of those belonging to the men and women of our culture’s bound history. It taught me to begin to understand without passing on my essentialist 20th century logic on everything I have found cruel and repulsive in my cultural existence. It taught me to read and to listen.
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