Speaking in Translation, or Speaking in Tongues

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• Speaking in Translation, or Speaking in Tongues
• Brian O'Keeffe (bio)

In his poem "Belderg," Seamus Heaney converses with a man from Ireland's County Mayo. Plowing his fields, the Mayo farmer unearths fragments of old millstones—so old as to date from the times when the Vikings came to Ireland. "They just kept turning up / And were thought of as foreign," says the man. Foreign they aren't, however: the soils of Ireland are cluttered with the relics and shards of newcomers—sometimes invaders—who began as foreigners to the island and then turned native. The talk turns to language: it too is a soil, deep with sediment, strewn with the broken stubs of putatively foreign words, but words that have nevertheless long since been added to the languages Ireland considers native and hence the languages of home itself. Heaney invokes the name of the homestead where he used to live—Mossbawn:

So I talked of Mossbawn,A bogland name. "But Moss?"He crossed my old home's musicWith older strains of Norse.I'd told how its foundationWas mutable as soundAnd how I could deriveA forked root from that groundAnd make bawn an English fort,A planter's walled-in mound.Or else find sanctuaryAnd think of it as Irish,Persistent if outworn.

The Mayo man's question is well taken: "bawn" sounds Gaelic but "moss" sounds English. How did the place-name for Heaney's home become a splice [End Page 85] of Gaelic and English? Indeed, couldn't it be parsed anew through the strains of Norse? But Heaney knows well enough that language is always forked—etymology tells us this. The etymon almost immediately divides and splits, word roots diverge and spread into the layered earths of language, grafting the names of home to the history of the foreign. So translate "bawn" into "fort" if you wish. Accent, by that translation, the history of English foreigners. Consider that a discreet theory of politics: didn't the Greeks tell us that politics began with the walled-in enclosures of the city, of the polis? Or translate "bawn" still into Irish (Heaney's poem is written in English) and consider linguistic sanctuaries beyond the pale, the palum, precarious refuges from the hegemony of English.

What I retain from Heaney's poem are those forked roots emerging from words. I also retain the way Heaney speaks of the "crossing" of linguistic music—language, for him, is a matter of mesh, imbrication, and cross-weave. But consider, now, the denizens of the crossroads and intersections between languages: aren't they translators, in a sense? Translators are intercessors and intermediaries always posted at the boundaries between languages—between "moss" and "bawn," between Mossbawn and the Mayo man's home turf of Belderg. There are always forks in the paths between languages. We therefore look to translators to guide us on our way. Let's accordingly call translators by their proper name: hermeneuts. Their god is Hermes. Their task, like Hermes's, is to interpret messages. Their station is beside what the Greeks called the "herm" pillar marking boundaries and crossroads.

So let's relocate away from Heaney's Ireland, find ourselves now in Greece, and try to imagine the gods and divinities of translation. Hermes is one, but not the only one, as we will see. Hermes's emblem is the caduceus—a staff entwined by two snakes crossing each other, coil by coil. But as one snake entwines with the other going up the staff, there are pinch points as the coils narrow into overlap before widening out again in sinuous curves. In his book The Parasite, the philosopher Michel Serres likens Hermes's caduceus to an hourglass: one bulbous shape, formed by those two curvaceous snake coils, is narrowed to a neck, and that neck joins to another bulbous shape that expands again. Serres sees that neck as the position at which Hermes, and all translators, stand: at the pinch point of intermediation. All languages and messages pass through that point. Imagine: a bulging sack of linguistic [End Page 86] diversity funneled through that slim neck, filtered by translation, sieved by Hermes...