Textbox 3.6: Translating Talk of Self-love and ‘Jihad’
When I was working in sales at Lucky Brand Jeans, one of my colleagues had a fascination with language. ‘Teach me something in Arabic,’ he’d say, ‘and I’ll teach you something in Portuguese.’
After a while of this, he asked me for help with a tattoo he wanted to get. He was going through a process of self-discovery and had found a perfect Buddhist saying to express it: ‘You, yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.’
At the same time, he wanted a tattoo that would have an element of mystique, and that would express the saying in a way both visible and private. So, he asked me to translate it to Arabic. In one way I could do it. I could produce a word-for-word faithful translation.
But, I had to say to this colleague, this doesn’t convey the same meaning. To talk of self-love is not a dominant discourse in Arabic-speaking countries as I’ve experienced them. To speak in that way would convey a level of narcissism and individualism that would not pay heed to the collective. The expectation in these countries is that love and affection comes from those around us, not from ourselves. A faithful translation of this phrase could not be a transparent one.
A different challenge comes from the Arabic word jihad, which has entered the English vocabulary. Reading and writing ‘jihad’ in the West, many take for granted what it transparently means: a holy war. However, among Arabic speakers, the essence of jihad is struggle. Among us, it is a word that can be used in many contexts – for example, without any exaggeration at all, I could say to a friend, ‘I jihaded to write my essay!’
Thus, ‘jihad’ may seem transparent, but its use is unfaithful. What Samuel P. Huntington (1993) has called the Clash of Civilizations, the theory that post-Cold War conflict will be driven by religious and cultural identities, is shaping jihad’s dominant meaning in the West.
Source: Rawan Abdelbaki, in Abdelbaki et al., 2014
Textbox 3.7: A Summary of Strategies for Observing Imagery and Figurative Language
Consider whether detailed imagery has been provided, and what its effects are.
Test the relations of a storyteller’s imagery to what you know about the story’s plot.
Attend to narrators’ uses of metaphors.
Identify the challenges of translation and explain how they affect narrators’ apparent meanings.
Listening to the Sounds of Stories
The sound must seem an echo to the sense.
Alexander Pope (1711)
Because we have been well schooled in reading silently, we may not be attuned to such echoes of the stories’ original sounds as our transcripts retain, or know how to express their resonance to others (Lanham, 2003). In this section, we offer strategies for doing so that are drawn from literary and linguistic analyses alike. Let’s begin with a statement made by LeeAnn, a member of the same first-year undergraduate focus group in which Kamal, of the ants metaphor, had participated. ‘I come here, I study, and I leave,’ said LeeAnn, expressing a sentiment of disengagement from the social life of the university that several respondents in the group shared. What is it that makes her sentence stick in the mind? On a technical level, an answer can be teased out by observing how the sentence involves repetitions of four kinds:
Assonance is the repetition of nearby vowel sounds. Omitting LeeAnn’s consonants, her sentence reads ‘I uh ee, I uh ee, a I ee,’ or, in the phonetics notation used by linguists, ‘aɪ ʌ ɪ, aɪ ʌ ɪ, ə aɪ ɪ.’ Repetition of nearby consonants would be called alliteration.
Rhythm is created in English when stressed (i.e., emphasized) syllables alternate with unstressed ones in a repeated pattern, or meter. Marking LeeAnn’s stressed syllables with italics, we see that she starts off with a pattern of ‘I come here’ that is repeated in ‘I study,’ though ‘and I leave’ departs from this pattern.
Parallel structure occurs when clauses, sentences, paragraphs, or larger units have related organizations. Here, each of LeeAnn’s clauses begins with the subject ‘I,’ followed by a verb: come, study, leave.
Intertextuality refers to how a text takes a different meaning when it moves into a different context. Whether LeeAnn intends it or not, the form of her ‘I come here, I study, and I leave’ is nearly identical to that of Julius Caesar’s ‘I came, I saw, I conquered,’ inviting their contrast. LeeAnn’s anti-climactic and detached experience of university becomes more striking through the contrast with Caesar’s triumphant ownership with the lands he surveyed.
The overarching analytic strategy deriving from these points is one of observing the effects of repetitions. Linguist Deborah Tannen (1987, 1998, 2007) explains that repetitions influence audience, first, by drawing them into the narrator’s perspective. When a pattern of sounds, syllables, clauses, or larger units is repeated, its logic takes on a satisfying familiarity, coherence, and ease – the same pleasure we feel when we sing the chorus of a song. Second, repetitions highlight what matters to a narrator, for instance, by mimicking the passage of time, as in ‘potatoes, potatoes, always potatoes’ (Stoler and Strassler, 2006: 34). Third, even the number of items in a repeated structure can communicate meaning. LeeAnn’s trinity of clauses feels complete, whereas a four-clause sentence would have begun to feel like a list that could go on endlessly (Clark, 2006; Jefferson, 1990). However, Kratz’s (2001) analysis of life history interviews that she conducted among Okiek in Kenya adds a grain of salt to this conclusion. Kratz hypothesized that her narrators chose to organize their stories into four parts because four is an auspicious number that Okiek use in rituals and poetic structures; how numbers are read can thus be culturally specific.
Importantly, once a pattern of repetitions has been established, breaking from it can seize the audience’s attention and mark a shift in meaning. Sociolinguist Jan Blommaert (2008) illustrates this with his analysis of the testimony of Mrs Maureen Cupido, a ‘colored’ woman telling the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission about the night that her son, Clive, had been murdered in a political riot. In Textbox 3.8, a key passage, with Blommaert’s system of highlighting repetitions preserved, shows how Mrs Cupido’s parallel structure of ‘and (then)’ phrases propels her narrative forward – until the structural break and wobble in time that marks her son’s demise. Poetics is the name sometimes given to such methods, which parse a transcript into what resembles a poem on the page, using line breaks to separate clauses, pauses, or perhaps breaths, and stanza breaks to separate topics (Gee, 1991; Woodley, 2001; though see Lanham, 2003 for an alternative format), all in order to facilitate analysis of how the structure of sound amplifies its meaning.
Textbox 3.8: And then
Clive came home early –
eleven o’clock the morning
and then he told me
this march is going to have a lot of trouble.
Little knowing that he is going to be killed
and then he went to this friend
and he sat –
he