THE TASK OF THE TRANSLATOR: ARMENIAN GOLGOTHA AND THE CONSPIRACY OF HISTORY
By Hovig Tchalian

Asbarez
Apr 29th, 2010

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, 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 more 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 act 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
(i.e., 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 our own historical distance from events
of the 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 language places 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. 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.

You can reach him or any of the other contributors to Critics’ Forum
at comments@criticsforum.org. This and all other articles published
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