Critics’ Forum
Literature
The Task of the Translator: Armenian Golgotha and the Conspiracy of
History
By Hovig Tchalian

A film about the Armenian Genocide, Ravished Armenia, was recently
screened in Pasadena’s Armenian Center. The film, directed by Eric
Nazarian, is thought to be the first about the Genocide made in the
United States.

The film is in part a retelling of the Genocide memoir of Aurora
Mardiganian, published soon after she came to the United States in
1918. Interestingly, the film is also a partial reconstruction of the
book’s original film version, made in 1919 and now lost. As the
announcement of the film suggests, paraphrasing the book’s editor, "it
would seem that history conspired to destroy Ravished Armenia, the
only personal filmed record of what took place between 1915 and 1918."

Unlike other films based on books, therefore, this one has an
unusually complex history that includes reconstructions of both print
and film versions, in the larger context of Genocide
reconstruction. And yet, the process of making even this complex a
film – about a film, about a memoir, about historical events –
relies fundamentally, like all others, on the reconstitutive act of
translation, across genres, cultures and historical periods. The act
of reconstituting the memoir and the story it tells is susceptible to
the historical "conspiracy" mentioned in the film announcement, it
seems, precisely because it is grounded in translation.*

The complexity of translation can be better demonstrated, perhaps,
with a seemingly simpler example, the translation of a Genocide memoir
from Armenian into English. The example in this case is the April 2009
publication, into English, of Armenian Golgotha (New York: Knopf,
2009), the Armenian-language memoir of a Genocide survivor, the priest
Grigoris Balakian, translated by his great-nephew, the poet, author
and scholar, Peter Balakian.

The memoir is lengthy – the English edition extends to over 500
pages. The process of translating it took the better part of ten
years, with several translators collaborating with its chief
translator, Peter Balakian, to complete it. Understandably, therefore,
completing a translation of this magnitude may encounter numerous
difficulties along the way, some mundane and others profound. As the
translator suggests, for instance, there is the difficulty of his
great uncle’s early 20th-century Armenian to contend with (xxix). But
even this seemingly mundane issue of translation encompasses two
distinct aspects – the historical and the cultural. Grigoris
Balakian’s Armenian has to be translated across the decades and, only
then, cross the cultural and linguistic threshold from Armenian into
English.

As the German-Jewish intellectual and critic Walter Benjamin suggests
in his essay "The Task of the Translator" about the German and French
versions of the word "pain," "In `Brof’ and `pain’ the intended object
is the same, but the mode of intention differs. It is because of their
modes of intention that the two words signify something different to a
German or a Frenchman, that they are not regarded as interchangeable,
and in fact ultimately seek to exclude one another." (Benjamin’s
choice of words, "pain," is not without irony here. As a Jew, he fled
Nazi persecution, only to commit suicide in 1940, on the brink of
capture on the Spanish border.) In this early statement in Benjamin’s
essay, the separation of the German and French languages embedded as a
fissure in the notion of pain itself, rent as it is between two
different "modes of intention," suggests a fundamental obstacle to
overcome, a determining mechanism of translation.

Since English is the modern lingua franca, translating words into
English places the translator at the cross-roads of many more than two
languages and cultures. In Armenian Golgotha, for instance, place
names act as a potentially divisive obstacle. While Peter Balakian’s
co-translator, Aris Sevag, only mentions them briefly, he nevertheless
hints that making the memoir accessible to the widest possible
readership entailed the apparently unthinkable, replacing Armenian
place names with their Turkish ones, which have, ironically, gained
much wider currency (xliii).

The act of translating a historical memoir such as Armenian Golgotha,
therefore, is fundamentally wedded to history. As Benjamin is acutely
aware, times change, and with them historically derived uses and
conventions: "For in its continuing life, which could not be so called
if it were not the transformation and renewal of a living thing, the
original is changed. Established words also have their
after-ripening. … What once sounded fresh may come to sound stale,
and what once sounded idiomatic may later sound archaic." The writer
of the memoir himself is caught in this historical flux. As Peter
Balakian admits, his great-uncle is susceptible to the conventions and
faults of his age: "sometimes he essentializes Turks in a racialist
way characteristic of the period" (xviii).

These at times more mundane considerations become, in Benjamin’s
rendering, characteristic of the separation of languages and, through
the attempt at uniting them, part of a larger struggle that yokes
history and language: "If the kinship of languages manifests itself in
translation, it does so otherwise than through the vague similarity of
original and copy. For it is clear that kinship does not necessarily
involve similarity. … Wherein can the kinship of two languages be
sought, apart from a historical kinship?"

It is perhaps not surprising, therefore, that the roles of historical
witness and originary writer are difficult to disentangle, even at the
memoir’s inception. In this regard, the struggle of translating
Armenian Golgotha ninety years after the fact first manifests itself
in the act of writing the memoir, itself caught in the mesh of
history. In his Author’s Preface, Grigoris Balakian clearly expresses
his feelings of inadequacy and uneasiness at depicting the events of
1915. In fact, he presents himself as a historian of sorts, one
desperately needed by the rapidly dwindling Armenian nation: "Although
you had many writers, poets, novelists, playwrights, and especially
journalists and editors, you never had a historian" (456).

The feeling of deep ambivalence that the act of committing his
observations to print precipitates for Grigoris Balakian has its
source in the historical events he is witnessing. The writer sounds as
unsure about the prospects of doing justice to what he sees as he is
adamant about his need to make the attempt: "I myself felt both weak
at heart and of pen, to write about the great annihilation that
surpasses even the bloodiest pages of human history" (454). But as his
confession suggests, this unambiguous profession of personal
inadequacy primarily reflects the "surpassing" magnitude of the events
he sees unfolding before him. Balakian makes this aspect of the
telling explicit only two pages later in the same preface: "Never
doubt my story of the great crime, and never think that what has been
written herein has been in any way exaggerated. On the contrary, I
have written the bare minimum, because it is not humanly possible to
describe the horrific and ineffable martyrdom of over one million dead
sons and daughters" (454).

As the author puts it, it is his gargantuan task of making "a critical
analysis of your [i.e., Armenia’s] real inner life hidden behind the
curtain" (456), what he calls a page later "veiled secret moments,"
that causes him considerable anxiety: "as you had no historian, it was
a thankless task to truthfully write this chapter of contemporary
Armenian history with its veiled secret moments and, in so doing, to
become everyone’s enemy" (457). Balakian’s "thankless task"
encompasses not only witnessing the genocidal events but having to
relive them in the retelling, coupled with the awesome burden of
conveying them to posterity, whole and intact.

Balakian’s attempt to reveal the "secrets" hidden behind the
historical curtain bears an uncanny resemblance to Benjamin’s
description of the translator’s encounter with a similar "secret," the
truth or "message" lodged in the language of the poet he seeks to
translate: "But what then is there in a poem – and even bad
translators concede this to be essential – besides a message? Isn’t
it generally acknowledged to be the incomprehensible, the secret, the
"poetic"? That which the translator can render only insofar as he –
also writes poetry?" The truth of the original memoir that Peter
Balakian, or any other translator, is concerned about `capturing’
corresponds in this particular memoir of Genocidal atrocities to what
Grigoris Balakian refers to as the "ineffable martyrdom" of the
victims, both in turn reflecting what Benjamin locates in the hard,
intractable "kernel" that resists any attempt to translate it, through
language and across history: "[translation] nevertheless at least
points, with wonderful penetration, toward the predetermined,
inaccessible domain where languages are reconciled and fulfilled. The
original does not attain this domain in every respect, but in it lies
that which, in a translation, is more than a message. This essential
kernel can be more precisely defined as what is not retranslatable
[sic] in a translation."

But as we saw in Grigoris Balakian’s own confession, while the
translator’s task is critical, it ultimately leads away from him and
toward what the writer calls the "thankless task" of recomposition, of
historical translation. The memoirist is a historian, because both
translate. They are linked in their attempt at being true to the
original, by what we might call their equally uneasy relationship to
history – the translator’s to the memoir and the memoir’s to its
own witness.

As such, the memoirist’s attempt at rendering the ineffable transcends
any subsequently simple attempt at fidelity on the translator’s
part. As Benjamin succinctly defines it, the "distinguishing mark of
bad translation" is the "inexact transmission of an inessential
content." The act of truthfully translating "content" takes the
translator far beyond a simple attempt at fidelity, the narrow effort
of being true to the original. It confronts him instead with the far
more daunting task of capturing its essence, of representing the
`whole’ truth. Benjamin mentions the ideal translator’s role as a poet
for a reason – not primarily because it makes him a better
wordsmith but because it implies that he has what we might call, for
lack of a better term, the `sensibility’ of a poet. As Peter Balakian
reminds us in his own preface, he is both a poet and a translator. But
Benjamin’s rendering of the act of translation, as well as the
circumstances of Grigoris Balakian’s memoir, suggest that we should
see the reminder as a fundamentally historical act – not a mention
of the translator’s appropriate skills or abilities so much as a
summoning of his correspondingly appropriate identity for taking on
his task.

Benjamin’s emphasis on this correspondence that transcends fidelity
points to the central question surrounding any witness account –
its value, beyond those of similar ones, in reinstating an otherwise
dim historical reality. There are, after all, countless other observer
accounts, including perhaps the best known, that of the Henry
Morgenthau, Jr., the American Ambassador to Turkey at the time. What
seems to distinguish Grigoris Balakian’s account is its status as
memoir. As both eyewitness and survivor of the atrocities, Balakian is
at once an `outsider’ and an `insider.’

Armenian Golgotha, therefore, bears a unique relationship to the
events it describes, one available to only a small handful of
eyewitness accounts. As Peter Balakian suggests, "many readers will
find that Armenian Golgotha, because of its intimacy with Turkish
culture and the Anatolian landscape, will be another important text
that tells the story of the eradication of the Armenians from inside
Turkey and reveals Turkish denial as a continued assault on truth"
(xx). Peter Balakian is referring in part to the physical, literal
landscape, the wilderness of Anatolia into which Grigoris Balakian
escaped and in which he survived for four long years. But beyond that,
the words evoke the larger milieu of Anatolian culture, politics and
history that the memoir evokes. It is entirely fitting, therefore,
that such a memoir is situated at the crossroads between two cultures,
embedded as it is in the Anatolian landscape, "intimate" with Turkish
as well as Armenian history and culture, its status as the ultimate
witness against denial in part a result of straddling the threshold
between them.

But can we, as a result, conjecture that the memoir’s intimacy with
its environment captures the writer’s deep understanding of the
victims’ plight better than, say, Morgenthau’s? While there is ample
reason to do so, claiming the memoirist’s status as an insider also
presents a difficult conundrum – the fact itself shields others
(that is, non-Armenians) from the truth. Keeping in mind Benjamin’s
rendering of the translator’s complex and multi-layered task, it is
worth considering that Armenians’ own historical distance from the
atrocities in their past is no more preferable to, say, Morgenthau’s
linguistic or cultural distance from the victims themselves. It is
here that Benjamin’s characterization of the translator’s task is
especially pertinent. By recognizing the inherent complexities of
translation, he also hints at their ultimate resolution: "Just as
fragments of a vessel, in order to be fitted together, must correspond
to each other in the tiniest details but need not resemble each other,
so translation, instead of making itself resemble the meaning of the
original, must lovingly, and in detail, fashion in its own language a
counterpart to the original’s mode of intention, in order to make both
of them recognizable as fragments of a vessel, as fragments of a
greater language." Armenian Golgotha is a perfect instance of
Benjamin’s fragment, its correspondence with the Anatolian context
suggesting their embedding in a "greater language."

But while Benjamin’s prophetic words place the reconstitution of the
primordial "vessel" in a supra-historical, messianic future, the task
of both Balakians is nonetheless resolutely historical. Peter
Balakian’s reference to Raphael Lemkin, the Polish Jewish legal
scholar who coined the term "genocide" in 1943, is telling in this
regard: "While it is likely that Lemkin never read Armenian Golgotha
because of the obstacle of translation, he had accrued a depth of
understanding of the events of 1915 such that his own knowledge of the
Armenian Genocide is vividly borne out by and embodied in Balakian’s
memoir" (xx). Balakian singles out "translation" as the primary
"obstacle" facing Lemkin but one that never prevented him from
"understanding" the victims’ plight. While separated from the events
of the Genocide by both historical and linguistic distance, Lemkin is
able to `translate’ the events depicted in Armenian Golgotha – the
memoir’s Benjaminian "secret" or "kernel" – across the
cultural-historical threshold by fashioning the same deep, visceral,
understanding that the memoir "embodies." In other words, as a reader,
Lemkin displays the kind of identity, the sensibility, required of the
ideal translator.

Such an act of rewriting is, of course, also fraught with a kind of
ambiguity at least as complex as the writer’s own. That ambiguity
represents in part, as we saw earlier, the uneasy moment of Grigoris
Balakian’s originary act of composing his memoir. But it is also the
subsequent act of rewriting, of translating, the memoir across the
cultural-historical divide that opens up the possibility of denial,
which purports to be simply another, or different, re-writing, like
the conflicting account in a historical trial, presented, in Peter
Balakian’s evocative phrasing, by a "testifier" (xxiii). Grigoris
Balakian mentions, for instance, an early and more localized rewriting
of history, a disturbingly subtle form of denial: German soldiers
Grigoris Balakian meets speak of Armenians as money-hungry "Christian
Jews," conflating Turkish rhetoric with German stereotypes,
reinterpreting history at the very moment of its making (xviii). In
moments such as these, what the sponsors of Ravished Armenia
justifiably characterize as the anonymous "conspiracy" of history
becomes a deliberate vehicle of betrayal.

As Walter Benjamin suggests, the attempt at reconstitution both
enables and complicates the task of the translator. It is here that
the burden – better, the responsibility – of translation takes
on a deeply historical character. The publication of Armenian Golgotha
in English brings to light the complex kernel, the "hidden secret," at
the center of Grigoris Balakian’s memoir. Its publication a year
before the screening of Ravished Armenia, a film based on a lost
original, also reminds us that, while no act of translation is immune
to the conspiracy of history, it is also far from irrevocably subject
to the betrayal of its agents.

*The Latin root of translation, translatio, means to "carry across."

All Rights Reserved: Critics’ Forum, 2010.

Hovig Tchalian holds a PhD in English literature from UCLA. He has
edited several journals and also published articles of his own.

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