Dimitris Lyacos’s Poena Damni is one of the most highly regarded works of contemporary European literature. Renowned for combining, in a genre-defying form, themes from literary tradition and elements from ritual, religion, philosophy, anthropology, the trilogy reexamines grand narratives in the context of some of the enduring motifs of the Western Canon, most notably violence, mental illness, the scapegoat, and the return of the dead. Developed as a work in progress over the course of three decades, it has been translated in more than twenty languages, and has given rise to musical, visual, and theatre projects. Chapters from the trilogy’s prequel, Until the Victim Becomes our Own, were published or are forthcoming in MAYDAY, Image Journal, River Styx and Chicago Review.
Toti O’Brien (TO): In our recent interview for Another Chicago Magazine, we discussed translation as a facet of the broader field of communication, of which it mirrors the progress. You pointed at the constant refinement of the channels, the faster and faster transit of signals from senders to receivers, and predicted an ever smoother flow of data (works of literature included) worldwide. This inevitable curve implies gains and losses. If the goal is to make information readily accessible to the maximum of receivers, the most “inaccessible” contents (those belonging, for instance, to minorities far-removed in language/culture/mentality from the target “users”) will be first “domesticated,” and then—if too wild to be tamed—gradually go extinct. So we might end up, in a perhaps-not-too-distant future, in a world where more and more people will be able to share a less and less diverse, less and less articulate cultural heritage.
“We Are Domesticators,” is the title you chose for our previous interview about translation. Any critical note in this statement? Is there substantial difference between domesticators and colonizers? Is domestication of the “foreign” just a way of colonizing in a de-colonial era? If not, what has changed?
Dimitris Lyacos (DL): It looks as if we have reached a point in history in which cultural domestication has become inevitable, and it doesn’t seem very probable that the flow might be reversed. The era of colonization targeted specific areas and peoples, forcing them to conform to an imposed rule. Inevitably, this implied struggle as well as resistance on the side of the dominated. In our times, domination as an exercise of power is becoming increasingly redundant, and—while it is still present in many cases—its course is reversed. There is no longer an outward movement of the colonizer toward the land of the colonized. The “colonized” willingly seek access to the metropolis, to some real or imagined center of operations. The western model, in its cultural and technological garb, has become ubiquitously available as a predominant point of reference. And if you can’t have access with your physical body, you just log into the web and turn into a node intersected by an endless amount of communication paths. You are not alone anymore. I remember seeing a monk in Mount Athos, last year, and another one at the Church of Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, a couple of months ago, both absorbed in the world of their smartphones. They were domesticated by communication, like you and me. Think of the stylites instead: those hard-core monks who in their effort to isolate themselves found refuge on a pillar, and craved to be translated (in the biblical sense of the word) by God rather than by computer code. They opted for un-domestication. They extracted themselves from the grid and remained in the wild. You could also call the Piraha people in the Amazon rainforest “undomesticated,” as long as they refused outside contact. In their language, they call themselves Hi’aiti’ihi’, which means the straight ones, and they call the rest of us crooked heads. Their language has no colors or numbers. They use present tense only, and recursion—an indispensable characteristic of all languages, according to Chomsky—does not appear in theirs. But, last thing I know, ten years ago a school was set up to teach them Portuguese, and they were given electricity and TV to go with it. So, the Piraha people got transposed, translated into the wider world, after all.
TO: You are describing translation/domestication as a global, inevitable spiraling motion— somehow (paradoxically, as we are speaking of culture, language, society) a sort of natural phenomenon. Hence, opposing it would be ludicrous and judging it (negatively or positively) futile.
The fact that both your trilogy (of which the Greek original hasn’t yet appeared) and your forthcoming book have been/are being widely translated, the swift pace of this happening, the great care you devote to the translating process, all this can be seen as a will to go with the flow. If you agree, can you explain your motivations? Can you especially clarify your peculiar, unique choice of letting the original yield the right of way to translations?
The main characters of your books, though, as they cross a kaleidoscope of cultural discourses, harbor a sort of stubborn idiosyncrasy, so resistant I’d call it irreducible. If your books, in all of their complexity, can be and are widely translated, they ironically voice a point of view of great discrepancy, almost a disconnect, not so distant from that of…a stylite. I see a paradox, here. Do you?
DL: I am not busy with translation in order to promote access to my work. When I am involved in the process, I am interested in translation itself, as a means to understand a little more than what the original tells me. I am going “out of home,” although I may not go very far. Understanding becomes more of a discovery, the more alien the world or concept we attempt to comprehend. That is why I brought up the Piraha. We intend to discover their world, but their worldview runs opposite to ours: it is consciously insular and based on personal experience. When Daniel Everett—the missionary turned linguist thanks to their influence—spoke to them about Jesus, they asked him a simple question: did he personally know this “Jesus”? He replied he didn’t, and that was the end of the matter for them. Contrary to the Piraha, we, with our “colonial science,” are attracted to the unknown. We translate, we interpret and mediate between different worlds, we become system-builders. We relate concepts in the quest for an Αρχή, a single immovable foundation that will invest our world with meaning. We investigate the commensurability of our physical theories, we translate the one into the other, seek to match the quantum microcosm with the gravity macrocosm in order to unify everything in one big, organic entity. This inclination is with us since the time of the Presocratics. I am no different. I am a product of this culture. I work in order to understand, and what enhances my understanding I further translate into my books. Understand, clarify, harmonize: connect. The system at which we are aiming is inimical to opacity. Our Babel project needs translators. The Other must become transparent, come across. Now, if that does not happen, there must be a fault either in him, or us, or our translating practices. Against all that, Eduard Glissant preached for opacity as an inalienable right of people that can’t and don’t wish to be understood—that refuse our systems of domination. In fact, could suffering in his slaves’ “Open Boat” be translated? To go back to our conversation on violence1: Shoah victims recount their experience, but words are unable to carry the weight. Or, think of Bartleby the Scrivener: he “would prefer not to,” he’d rather stay mute in word and action. In chapter Y of Until the Victim Becomes our Own, the inmate refuses to queue up for his medicine, have dinner, or move altogether. When I came across Bartleby, which was after I had finished my book, I was astonished by the coincidence of both characters’ “disconnect,” as you call it.
TO: You are confirming the dichotomy I find so interesting…You, as a product of western culture, seek to understand and connect. Your protagonists achieve to remain elusive, quintessentially “fugitive.” Against an impressive spread of translations, the original of your trilogy is unpublished to this day. See? Something manages to remain out of reach—a wedge of opacity cast within the transparency.
DL: The absence of the original Greek makes me think of other cases in which a source text remains inaccessible. Of course, religious texts are the most prominent example. It may be because of this reason that we attempt to “follow Moses to the mountain” in order to ground our textual tradition. We take the existence of some unknown Ur-texts for granted, like a sort of unalterable foundation. In the context of literature, original-language texts play a similar role. They are the benchmarks out of which translations and interpretations derive. We take them to be fixed and solid, even though, for the most part, what solidifies an original is its publication—securing the prototype of a reproducible text that shall remain unchanged despite its reproductions. The situation was not so clear-cut before the advent of printing, however, and different “originals” were available, as one may observe in the case of medieval manuscripts. Texts, at that time, were more malleable—they appeared in different versions. The story of Poena Damni is somehow similar: the three books were revised several times post-publication. Hence, editions in different languages were translated from different “original versions.” I have a preference for the latest version, but whatever my preference may be, a reader has the right to think otherwise. Each reader approaches the various crystallizations from her individual standpoint, and they are appropriated accordingly—each text she is confronted with is the real thing for her. This is her own original, and will amalgamate itself with the rest of her experiences to become part of her world. It will not matter if the text is a product of a series of transformations, “internal translations” during authorial revisions, followed by “external translations” across languages. In the circumstances, I dare say that all of those versions count both as originals and “translations” of previous versions that stand beneath them. In fact, they are all translations, as the Latin etymology has it: transferences. I suppose one might tag me as an anti-foundationalist here—a bit like the old lady who replied to Russell’s explanations during an astronomy lecture that the earth rests on the back of a large turtle. When he inevitably asked her where did that turtle stand on, she gave it to him: it was turtles all the way down. In my case, at least, the old lady is right. My turtle stands on a column of turtles, and there is a whole sequence of even larger turtles underneath mine as far as the eye can see.
TO: You are almost equating authorship to a form of translation…And you are stripping the “original” of all presumed sacrality, even privilege. In your words, the text becomes a fluid entity and its “freeze-frames” equivalent, independent realities. Such a view subverts notions of textual hierarchy—which are challenged anyway by the very structure of your books, their layering, their palimpsestic quality.
Coming back to your culturally-engrained quest for understanding, to the process of having your books translated as a means of exploration…You work closely with your translators. Does this active role give you access to the target culture in significant ways?
DL: The question sounds to me, a little, like asking a prisoner whether his working as a cook while doing time would help him become a chef when he is released. He might develop some useful skills, but he would still need to learn a lot if he is going to be running the kitchen of a restaurant. I’d say I am equally “in prison,” as far as my linguistic and conceptual skills are concerned. It is true that I am actively involved in the translation process when it comes to the languages I know, but all of these languages share common characteristics with each other. They belong to what Whorf has called SAE, Standard Average European. This is supposed to be an area of convergence of syntax, grammar, and vocabulary that probably has become more unified due to long linguistic and cultural exchange, dating back to the Migration Period in the 4th century AD. I suppose that this so-called Sprachbund—this language-bond—has played a role in similar conceptual developments, and therefore a similar worldview. Of course, there are dissonances that I experience when I work with my translators, there are hurdles to overcome, but they are more on the technical side, they relate to the effort to match faithfulness with transparency—create an idiomatic text in the target language that functions as equivalent to the original. On the other hand, when I work with a translator who is out of the SAE environment, I don’t think I am able to appreciate the importance of the leap. It is exciting when, for instance, Arzu Eker, my Turkish translator, fills me in about the SOV (Subject, Object, Verb—instead of our SVO) structure of the Turkish sentence as well as its lack of genders, but I am not equipped to appreciate such discrepancies and assess whether they would imply cognitive variations for the mind that employs that structure. I wish I spoke languages outside this “Sprachbund,” but I am not sure that if I did speak, say, Hopi or Chinese, I could ever manage to bridge the gap. At most, I might come to understand what it would be like for me to speak Hopi, but I couldn’t possibly know what it would be for a Hopi to speak it. I would always be forced to translate the Hopi point of view into my familiar, Bahana2 structures, and this translation might “reduce” it, project only a shadow into my platonic cave, or prison kitchen.
TO: I understand that, the more distant the target language from the cultural nucleus where the original belongs, the more one needs to relinquish “ownership,” let the text (as you already implied) undergo a kind of metamorphosis—possibly, espouse and highlight, via language, a different worldview.
DL: Is the world sliced up in different manners by different languages? Do concepts have a linguistic foundation, do they flourish and evolve in accordance with a social, linguistic, and cultural milieu, or is there one universal language of the mind, common to all of us and prior to each linguistic specification—what Jerry Fodor called mentalese? Are meanings out there in, say, “a museum of meanings,” and each language simply changes the tags underneath the exhibits? If meanings and concepts, however, do not have this universal, extra-linguistic stability, but are instead relative, then it would be dangerous to iron out the conceptual variations between languages and assume their full commensurability. These are puzzling issues, and the fact that we never stand outside our theories to survey the world, but we are always bound to work from within—hoping to discover how the whale in whose belly we lay looks—does not make matters easier. We are informed, of course, that each culture has had its own cosmology: the Aztec and the Jews, the Australian Aboriginals and the Norse. Correspondingly, we have a theory that cuts up the world in subatomic particles, atoms, molecules and cells. In view of the fact that these different worldviews are founded upon different concerns, different perspectives, arduous discussions have arisen about cross-concept translatability: the Hopi time controversy is one notorious case among others. I wonder whether (pace the simplistic New Age idea of a timeless Hopi culture) we are in a position to ground the Hopi concept of time within our clock-informed, linear, conceptual time schemes. The Hopi say “the sun moves slowly or quickly,” while we say time goes faster or slower. Their utterance is enveloped in practices whose full significance may evade us. After having buried their own, the Hopi never visit the cemetery again. Could that relate to the way they view time, or timelessness, for that matter? I don’t know. Often, among cultures that have been alien to us, we have been keen to translate our perspective to them rather than give theirs the respect they merit. Our gods, our Christian God, if you wish—together with all the relevant concepts and appendages of our religious system—has been announced through translation among peoples, and eventually we have managed to alter their worlds. Indeed, in what language does the Word of God appear to humans before it gets translated? Is every language in possession of equivalent concepts for the Word of God to be uniformly translated and understood? I don’t really know. Could translatability be a question of intelligence, so that when we’ll fully develop our AI capabilities all patterns of information shall become transparent, universally accessible? Or shall we reach a point, following an explosion of the so-called technological singularity, when we ourselves will become un-translatable relics? I don’t know. We have been piling a lot of wreckage so far, and at the same time we do some edifying work too, as we are being translated into the future. Such is the storm of progress that propels the Angel of our History.
1 “Violence and its Other”, published on The Common, July 2024
2 Hopi for white person.
