Page:Performing Without a Stage - The Art of Literary Translation - by Robert Wechsler.pdf/51

 literary effects of this growth of English-language culture are the writing in English of more works from more cultures and increasing translation out of English into all the world’s other languages.

When I spoke with Serge Gavronsky, he had just finished writing a paper on the Babel tale. His thesis, he told me, was that “man has outwitted God. Man has transformed punishment, that is, the multiplication of languages as a result of having built the Tower of Babel, into the only thing that is worth our being on this earth, and that is a literary signature, the growth of literary expression throughout the globe. . . . Had those settlers in the Euphrates delta not transformed clay into bricks, which I will use as a metaphor for texts, and had they not. . . arrogated to themselves the pleasure of creation, which is the Tower of Babel, I would not be a translator, neither would there be any literature, because Genesis is particularly clear on this: there was one language, but there were few words. . . . [U]nderneath the confusion there will be profusion, the multiplicity of languages. . . . [W]hat God believed was a proper form of the second Fall — it’s clear, the first Fall was eating the [fruit of knowledge]. But Genesis says also that if you do eat of the fruit of knowledge, your eyes will be opened, and you will have, like Myself, the ability to distinguish between good and evil. That means, metaphorically, that when they ate of the fruit of knowlege, they were then no longer blind, and if they’re no longer blind, metaphorically speaking, they can read. That was the first Fall, which allowed them to read, and the second is the Tower of Babel, which allowed them to write. . . . [A]nd the translator is the gobetween, the one which allows the mother texts throughout the world to be available. He is the midwife, he allows the text to reemerge under a different national sign, but he does it, he carries, he trans-ports, as the Greek word for metaphor says. That’s what a metaphor is: it transports from here to there. That’s what translation does, too.”

In the New Testament there happens to be a solution to the curse of Babel, which not surprisingly inspired the single most important translation project of modern times. Pentecost is the solution, and the project is the translation of the Bible into every language on Earth. Here’s what Acts 2 says, again in the King James Version: 51