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The Fiction of Translation:
Abdelkebir Khatibi's Love in Two Languages
Thomas O. Beebee
Amour bilingue (1983) the mimesis or fictional account of a love affair; let u
suppose that this love affair takes place between two people--already an
oversimplification, for throughout the text there are pronoun shifts be
tween the "I" and the "he" and the "she" and the "you," and concomitan
changes from second- to third-person address, so that the structure of this
love becomes triadic, as the supposedly dyadic relationship of translatio
always is; let us further suppose that the affair is between a bilingual
Maghrebine man and a somewhat less bilingual French woman- again,
the text gives only clues, such as the "le climat gris et maussade de so
enfance," (18) ("gray and gloomy weather where she had spent he
childhood" [12]), the reference by the narrator to French as his secon
language, and the occasional Arabic words which faintly illuminate hi
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64 Thomas O. Beebee
Literature articles
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Fiction of Translation 65
This is to say that bilingualism and plurilingualism are not recent events in
these parts. The Maghrebine landscape is still plurilingual: diglossia (be-
tween Arabic and its dialects), Berber, French, Spanish in the north and
south of Morocco.2
Thus, to take the most obvious example, in the compass of one hour on the
television program Star Trek, the aliens had to be encountered, a conflict
discovered and intensified, and a resolution achieved. The demands of the
genre left very little scope for long-term scholarly research. As a result, the
program depended heavily on a "Universal Translator." (129)
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66 Thomas O. Beebee
painfully aware of th
follow Jose Maria Ar
profundos includes a
order to depict the b
Khatibi's purpose is d
process distorts the su
Though Sternberg's
basic point is well tak
mimetic device for dep
al world, which may
ways in which such re
fictional work's them
there can be no discu
means of translation. A
issue that I would like to use his treatment of translation as mimesis in
Translation as Mimesis
Un jour, devant une cabine de traduction simultande, il lui avait dit : <<Veux-
tu que nous nous y enfermions pour nous traduire mutuellement?>> Par la
suite, il lui acheta une machine A traduire et qui lui efit servi--quelle id6e!-
lorsqu'elle decouchait de continent en continent. (57)
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Fiction of Translation 67
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68 Thomas O. Beebee
Calligraphy provide
word into its visual
portance by includin
his chapter headings
Amour
Cover of Amou
SubStanc
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Fiction of Translation 69
Calligraphy bypasses mi
within the grapheme rath
raphy thus resembles not
story point at rather than
Khatibi's fictional world,
calligraphy rather than a
calligraphy, let us listen to
The Splendour of Islamic Cal
... all kinship of languages that goes beyond historical derivation is based
on this: that in each of them individually one thing, in fact the same thing,
is meant-something, however, that cannot be attained by any one lan-
guage alone, but only by the totality of their mutually supplementary inten-
tions: pure, universal language. (84)
As the title of his essay indicates, Sternberg begins with the external
reality of polylingualism, and proceeds to show how such a reality can be
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70 Thomas O. Beebee
reproduced metonym
mimesis. If one begins
lation as interior real
would proceed not mi
the invisible, immutab
as metaphor rather t
some of the most im
allegorical rather tha
lation of Evgeny One
allegory of his relati
which swelled Pushk
tomes in English, is
Kinbote's overwhelm
opus. And how can w
to write the Quixote
translation? At any r
who interprets Jor
Quixote" as a commen
ready extant book in
and job of work. It ca
Love, impossible and
book. "Que se traduis
this love?" [1011), ask
divide along love's do
According to the for
did not: what fractions of their two cultures were able to converse with
each other through the screen of mutually incomprehensible languages?
Language is a source of jouissance, but not a channel of communication; the
inequalities between their two languages presage the final separation:
Night and day I trembled. What panicked me? A bloody tribute to your
language. The magnificent law of oaths never fails to betray. That a being
should be crushed by words that have been instituted and no longer ex-
press his own most personal speech is an abstraction of unbearable love.
(83)
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Fiction of Translation 71
Love means in this text through its (non)position in the no-man's land,
just as jouissance occurs in this love affair in the bilangue: "Avec toi, je
jouissais entre deux langues, I'une traversant l'autre" (87-88). The mean-
ings (which are of course non-meanings, belonging to neither language) of
the bi-langue lie in the interstices between its associated words, just as love
occurs between two people. The bi-langue is thus portrayed as the son of the
lovers, with translation the process of its begetting:
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72 Thomas O. Beebee
Cultural imperialism t
both the historical r61
own culture. This forg
culture).
The absolute location of a device [on the schema given above] ... can in
itself tell us very little about its actual mimetic effect or force or function,
which can never be determined a priori but turns in each case on a large
complex of variables and constraints general and specific, historical and
poetic, sociolinguistic and generic, textual and contextual. In different con-
texts, the same translational form may serve different functions and the
same function may be served by different forms. (233)
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Fiction of Translation 73
The misunderstanding
colonialism's discontents
inevitable, but is ideolog
a fiction created by nin
Charles de Gaulle's fran
disposition du monde u
universel de la pensde"
perhaps more ancient v
which human sinfulness
(Khatibi, Splendour 39).
which here is revealed a
hubris (the Arab belief t
that they had mastered
this anecdote is a realisti
the tower of Babel. In Ge
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74 Thomas O. Beebee
And yet, in the unremitting effort to repel the other is the unconsc
realization of the illusory nature of our endeavor. For as Derrida, Kh
and others have noted, the line of demarcation between inside and out
same and other is a most tenuous one. (5-6)
Il se calma d'un coup, lorsqu'apparut le << mot > arabe << kalma > avec son
equivalent savant << kalima o et toute la chaine des diminutifs, calembours
de son enfance : << klima o ... La diglossie << kal(i)ma o revint sans que
disparuit ni s'effaqat le mot << mot >. Tous deux s'observaient en lui,
pr~6dent l'6mergence maintenant rapide de souvenirs, fragments de mots,
onomatoppes, phrases en guirlandes, enlac6es A mort : ind6chiffrables. (10)
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Fiction of Translation 75
"wmad" h" from calmer, "to calm" Arabic "word" diminutive of "kafima"
childhood memories
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76 Thomas O. Beebee
Peut-etre aimait-il en elle deux femmes, celle qui vivait dans leur langue
commune, et I'autre, cette autre qu'il habitait dans la bi-langue. O( 6taient-
ils donc dans le regard, l'61an, le d~sir mutuels?
Ce n6tait
mais pas une
une sorte sym6trie ladepermutation
d'inversion, l'un A l'autre,
d'ununamour
vis-A-vis vertical etA parall.le,
intraduisible,
traduire sans r6pit. L'intraduisible! passion de tout amour, quand le d6sir
tombe dans l'oubli de soi separe. (26)
Perhaps he loved two women in her, the one who inhabited their common
language and another as well, the one who inhabited the bi-langue. Where
were they then in the reciprocal glance, the mutual momentum, the shared
desire?
Khatibi's novel can thus be regarded as the inversion of the true story
of the conquest of Algiers. In these two stories, as Sternberg puts it, the
same form of translational mimesis-the construction of a pidgin--serves
two entirely different functions.
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Fiction of Translation 77
... n'est plus dsfinie comme transport du texte de d6part dans la litt~rature
d'arrivee ou inversement transport du lecteur d'arriv~e dans le texte de
depart ... mais comme travail dans la langue, decentrement, rapport
interpo6tique entre valeur et signification, structuration d'un sujet et his-
toire ... et non plus sens. (Meschonnic 313-14)
NOTES
1. The table is Sternberg's (224), with some alterations and the addition of
amples.
2. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations into English are my own.
3. "Hay un falso utopismo ... consistente en creer que lo que el hombre desea,
proyecta y se propone es, sin mis, posible" (438) ("There is a false utopianism ...
which consists of the belief that what man wants, projects, and plans is also immedi-
ately possible").
4. In explaining an illustration of his book on Islamic calligraphy (co-authored
with Mohammed Sizelmassi), Khatibi notes that kalima "simply means 'word'" (127).
WORKS CITED
Benjamin, Walter. Die Aufgabe des libersetzers / The Task of the Translator. Tran
Hynd and E. M. Valk. Delos 2 (1968): 76-99.
Derrida, Jacques. "Des Tours de Babel." Trans. Joseph F. Graham. Difference i
lation. Ed. Joseph F. Graham. Ithaca NY: Cornell UP, 1985. 165-248.
Deniau, Xavier. La Francophonie. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1983.
Eco, Umberto. "The Semantics of Metaphor." Role of the Reader: Exploration
Semiotics of Texts. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1979. 67-89.
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78 Thomas O. Beebee
-. La M6moire tatoude. A
Khatibi, Abdelkebir, and
New York: Rizzoli, 1977
Marx-Scouras, Danielle.
26.1 (Spring 1986): 3-10.
Meschonnic, Henri. "P
podtique II. Paris: Gallim
Meyers, Walter E. Aliens
U of Georgia P, 1980.
Nabokov, Vladimir, tran
Princeton: Princeton UP
-. Pale Fire. New York:
SubStan
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