Daniel Bell published his well-known book The End ofIdeology in 1960. In 1989, the Berlin Wall came down, and in 1992, the Soviet Union disintegrated into the phantom Commonwealth of Independent States. It could be maintained that discus
sion of ideology, not to mention the multiple senses of the concept, admirably illus
trated in Raymond William’s Keywords (1990) and in Alan Bullock’s Fontana Dictio nary of Modern Thought (1991), reached its peak in the thirty years after Daniel Bell published his book, but with those two symbolical events in 1989 and 1992, the major ideological key words in the sociological and political spheres - say imperial
ism,the free world, socialism, communism, late capitalist society, post-colonialism,marxism, liberation, democracy, - appeared to shatter semantically, and to profoundly affect the recorded form of international communication which is translation.
It is common knowledge that the term ‘ideology’, like so many others, was cob
bled together as yet another grecolatinism in the late 18th century by the rationalist philosopher Destutt de Tracy to mean ‘the science of ideas’: it was attacked first by Napoleon Bonaparte as democratic and revolutionary, a subverted form of morality and patriotism, and later by both Marx and Engels as an abstraction from the real events of history, as a mere process of thought remote from the material life-condi
tions of the people who propound the ideology. Yet ideology has gone on to become both a value-free and a value-laden word, representing the dominant web of ideas about the preferred social arrangements within a society of a particular class or party or profession, often of the ruling class and particularly of the intellectuals/intelli
gentsia who buttress it: alternatively, it is ‘the prevailing beliefs and interests of a nation or a particular social group, underlying their political action or their style of thought’. (Karl Mannheim)
The term is usually related to the concept of power (political predominance, Gramsci’s hegemony) usually with implications of a hidden agenda and a conspiracy theory: it is the somewhat covert key to the understanding of a historical period. The term appears now to have penetrated at least all European languages, which includes the international lingua franca which is English, to be itself an intertranslatable inter
nationalism, always bearing in mind that whilst its meaning is now fairly consistent, it is used for different purposes by those who accept it and those who do not believe in its existence. It resembles ‘bureaucracy’ in being either neutral or negative.
‘Ideologists’, Bell wrote with some justification, ‘are terrible simplifiers. Ideology makes it unnecessary to confront individual issues on their individual merits’.Thus a typical modern ‘ideologue/gist’, such as Norman Fairclough, dazzled and blinded by the whole ‘conspiracy’ of post-structuralists, Barthes, Bourdieu, Derrida, Foucault, Kristeva, de Man, will turn the simplest interview or statement, say a doctor’s inter
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view with her patient, into an instance of the nefarious exercise of total class power, finding a grain of truth to turn the now rather stale tale of ‘late capitalist society’ (it looks as though this late phase is going to last a long time) into a heavy social accusation.
Ironically, the term ‘ideology’, though it is often used pejoratively, has lost the partic
ular pejorative meaning assigned to it by Marx and Engels, and is normally associated with Marxist interpretations of sociology and intellectual history (Geistesgeschichte).
Given that there is some element of ideology in all writing, since a writer (or a translator), by preferring one construction (after leaving) to another (after his depar
ture) - or one word (.Stube, Zimmer,Saal, Gemach) to another - in both cases, she has to make a choice, if she is translating, - the question is to determine to what extent the translator is exercising her sense of accuracy or submitting to her feelings, or is apparently merely the mouthpiece of the ideology of her time.
Possibly one of the earliest examples of ideological translation (or mistranslation) occurs in the King James translation of the Bible (Exodus 3,14), where the Hebrew Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh, meaning ‘I will be what I will be’ is translated as ‘I am what I am’, since theologians then and now would be reluctant to accept that God is a future rather than a present reality. (See Physics of Reality, FrankTipler p.4)
And again in the late 18th century, Alexander Tytler (Essay on the Principles of Translation 1790), who wrote the first notable book in English on translation, was denouncing Voltaire for ‘transmuting the pious and superstitious Hamlet into a mod
ern philosophy and esprit fort’, making him into a ‘thorough skeptic and freethinker’.
Tytler documented his attack on Voltaire’s inventions and suppressions with perti
nent quotations from the original and the translation, as any good critic does; never
theless his own principles, insisting that improprieties, however frequent in the origi
nal, must be removed from any translation, showed that he too was in part a prisoner of the ideology of his time, though in other respects its opponent.
The classical source for the exercise of ideology in translation is I think Nietzsche’s description of ‘imperialist /imperial’ translation in Diefröhliche Wissenschaft (1882- 1887), (Section 83), a title which is rightly still translated as The GayScience:
One can evaluate the degree of historical sense that a period possesses by the way it makes translations and attempts to incorporate past periods and books within itself. The French in Corneille’s time, and indeed even the French in the Revolution, seized hold of Roman antiquity in a way we would no longer have the courage to do - owing to our more advanced historical sense. And as for Roman antiquity itself: how violently and at the same time how naively it laid its hand on everything that was good and sublime in early Greek antiquity.
How people translated straight into Roman present...
Man kann den Graddes historischen Sinns, welchen eine Zeit besitzt, daran abschatzen, wie dieseZeitÜbersetzungen macht undvergangene Zeiten und Bücher sich einzuVerleiben versucht. Die Franzosen Corneilles, und auch noch die dérRevolution, bemüchtigten sich des römischen Altertums in einer Weise, zu dér wir nicht den Műt mehr haltén -dank unserem höheren historischen Sinne. Und das römische Altertum selbst:wiegewaltsam und naiv zu gleich legte es seineHandauf alles Guteund Hohedes griechischen Altertums!Wie übersetzten sie in die römischeGegenwart hinein! ...
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They knew nothing of the enjoyment of the historical sense; what was past and foreign was a painful embarrassment to them, and to them, as Romans, it was an incitement to a Roman conquest. In fact, at that time, one conquered what one translated... not only in such a way that one left out what was his
torical; indeed far from it, one added the allusion to what was contemporary - above all, one crossed out the name of the author and substituted one’s own - not with the feeling that this was a theft, but that it was with the very best conscience of the Imperium Romanum.” (my translation)
Thus Nietzsche makes a value-judgement by identifying such pillage with Roman imperialism, and he implies that ‘a more advanced historical sense’ would not distort - he says ‘have the courage to seize hold of’ the classical works in this way; I am assuming he is using the word courage ironically. It is as much a seeing criticism of ideology in translation as a record of its presence. However, it was not till the late 20th century that writers, sometimes influenced by Hans Robert Jauss’s essay Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory, the central text of Reception Theory, began to describe translation as a reflection of the culture and ideology of the translator’s environment, ignoring its relation to the original and the task of evaluating it as a rendering of its original. Andre Lefevere in Translation / History / Culture: a Source Book (1992), pays particular attention to the role of the patron or commissioner of the translation, as the enforcement of his (it would not be ‘her’) ideology. He repro
duces extracts from the translations of Horace, St Augustine, Luther (the famous circulatory letter, the Sendbrief), Schlegel and Madame de Stael to show, not partic
ularly convincingly, that a translation adopts the ideology of its new environment, but quotes Hugo, who stated that ‘a nation will always look at a translation as an act of violence against itself’, which has an equally ideological implication, but in the other direction. Authors such as Du Bellay and Dryden are brought in to illustrate the power of patronage, but there is as little evidence of the patron Karl August’s lit
erary influence over Goethe as there is of the patron Louis XIV ‘s over Racine.
Lefevere’s summary observation is sweeping and telltale: ‘Translation is, of course, a rewriting of an original text. All rewritings, whatever their intention, reflect a certain ideology and a poetics and as such manipulate literature to function in a given society in a given way.’ (Andre Lefevere: Rewriting and the Manipulation of Lit
eraryFame. Routledge 1992, p.vii.).
It is true that to a greater or a lesser degree, literature is ideologically tinged by translation; and usually, the more inaccurate the translation, the more extensive the manipulation.
However, I find the cynicism of Lefevere’s comment amazing and repellent. There is the typical misuse of the ‘of course’, designed to cajole the reader to side with the Sie kannten den Genuss des historischen Sinns nicht; das Vergangene undFremde waren ihnenpeinlich, und als Römern, ein Anreiz zu einerrömischen Eroberung. In der Tat, man eroberte damals, was man übersetztenicht nur so, daft man das Historische wegliefl: nein, man fiigte die Anspielung auf das Gegenwartige hinzu, man strich vor allém den Namen desDichters hinwegund setzteden eigenen alsseineStelle - nichtimGefiihl desDiebstahls, sondern mitdem allerbesten GewissendesImperiumRomanum.)
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author, the brazen ‘all rewritings’, the representative ‘manipulate’, a nasty and absurd word to use of say Scott Moncrieff or Michael Hamburger translating Paul Celan;
there is the deterministic use of ‘a given society’ and ‘a given way’ to denigrate any noble and idealistic concept of translation and literature, parallelled in my experi
ence only by Even-Zohar’s commercially oriented polysystem theory.
Both the Gottingen Literary Translation Group (Kittel) and the Manipulation School (Hermans) have produced studies describing the reception of translations at various historical periods, only in one case pointing out how a translation had dis
torted and undermined a Mark Twain story; Ivars Alknis on the other hand, in a notable series of articles in Paralléles (1980-1-2), has shown up the falsifications of propagandist translators in relation to nationalist militarism, sexism and racism in some works of 19th and 20th century literature.
There is a degree of ideology in all writing, and it is likely to be greater in litera
ture, since it is personal rather than factual, than in all other kinds of writing; in respect of translation, the ‘freer’ the translating, the more the ideology, since here
‘freedom’ is a euphemism for infidelity and personal intervention.
However, before taking a stand on ideology, let me consider its language. Ideol
ogy represents the texture of ideas of a particular interested group of people; in this or that instance, it is a voluntary or involuntary colouring of facts or thoughts. Colour
ing of facts is always a lie, whether expressed in false statistics or statements made to enhance the power of an organization. The whole Public Relations vocabulary, with its smooth mainly grecolatin catch-phrases, admirably enumerated by Richard Hoggart (1995) in The Way we live now - facilitators, company culture, community language, the control of adequate human resources, head-count reductions /slim
ming down, rationalize, leaner and robuster, revise downwards (all euphemisms for sacking), trawling, high-powered motivation, commitment to success, my concept, his perception, our strategy, take the fast track, can-do completion of performance criteria, range statements - often spawned from computer language, and infecting the educational system, the media and all forms of consumerist communication, this PR. vocabulary reeks of ideology - euphemisms, hold-all words, loose exaggerations.
The whole ideological vocabulary is moving towards a common international pseudo- English language which barely needs translation, which will soon be transferable into any industrializing developing language. Ideology appears as a special ‘reading’
or ‘translating’ (both verbs have similar figurative meanings) of a literal text. Unless dealing in factual falsehoods, it eschews concrete and particular nouns and verbs; it rests lexically on ‘the terms relating to morals, to the passions, to matters of senti
ment, or to the objects of the reflex and internal senses’ (George Campbell, quoted by Tytler), words like patience, temperance, economy, generosity, liberal, daring, shrewdness (my instances), which have such a wide tolerance of semantic range, - the positive, neutral, or negative nuances - ‘which but imperfectly correspond to any of the words of other languages’ yet appear to have universal moral semantic foundations and yet again which are so slippery when used ideologically, that is as the expression of a particular interested controlling group, for example in the term
‘radical’ an internationalism which may move to the extreme right or left, may be moderate right or left, or may be fundamental.
The main ‘grammatical’ (if one may call them so) indicators of ideology are modal verbs and modal particles, which indicate the attitude of the writer to what he is
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writing. The ten English modal verbs each have an exceptionally large number of meanings, viz can has 10; could 17; may 16; might 13; must 15; ought to 8; shall 7;
should 12; will 14; would 21. (Add: the ambiguous and vague are to, be about to, be due to,begoing to.)
Modal particles such as of course or naturally (other European languages have substantially more, eg. schon,ja, allerdings, doch,déjá, magarí) are often closely linked to modal verbs, but their usage differs and the nuances and latitudes of meaning are often lost in translation.
Ideology is itself sometimes at the mercy of irony. Prima facie one may assume that a sophisticated, or in Schiller’s words a ‘sentimental’ language which has had much contact with others, when in the hands of a cosmopolitan writer, makes con
siderable use of irony, whilst a ‘naive’ language, that has been less interfered with, says what it means. So it has been maintained that Arabic has no use for irony, and takes all language literally or at its face value. The paradox is that irony should be the weapon of the naive oppressed but is more often the language of the sophisticated oppressor. A further linguistic touchstone of an ‘ideological’ text is one that focusses on the power relationship of a dominant group with its attendant groups, centred on family kinship, age, class, gender, rank and employment; it is the ‘power semantic’
expressed in the pronominal T/V which may be alternated by titles, first and sur
names, and other standard or informal forms of address, notably, for British English, Mr (also for surgeons), guv’nor, guv, squire, mate etc. These are notoriously difficult to translate, since some languages have three or two pronominal forms of address, whilst English only has one, unless you add ‘one’, or the arrogant royal plural (we have sub verted, dethroned, underminedthe source text)4, further, fashions in such forms of address vary quickly, often influenced by the degree of formality of personal relationships.
The T/V contrast may be ‘translated’ into English by changed tone of voice in spoken language, or by the use of the appropriate terms of familiarity, affection or contempt.
The increasing interest in identifying ideology in literature is reflected in a paral
lel interest in the replication or the transformation of the ideology in translation, in particular when there is an evident gap in the political and economic status of the source and target languages. It remains to be seen whether such studies are descrip
tive and focus on the translations as new and important components of the target language literature, or whether they are evaluative and attempt to appreciate the suc
cess of the translations in conveying the ideas and the linguistic richness of their originals.
There is no reason why the two studies should not proceed as it were side by side.
The first type is mainly historical and sociological: in this perspective, virtually all literary works are intertextual ‘translations’, and the ‘continuation’ and transforma
tion of the ideology and formal expression of say Tacitus’s Annals XII (A.D. 110) in Racine’s Britannicus (1670) would be an interesting and rather ‘academic’ study, supported by full Roman and 17h century French backgrounds, with copious pedan
tic dates. In the second type, the analysis would be critical as well as descriptive: thus Junie, for me the greatest and apparently one of the least known characters in all lit
erature - in the intelligentsia’s eyes, quite overshadowed by all the Racinian sacred monsters, Hermione, Phedre, Agrippine, Roxane, Clytemnestre, Athalie - Junie, who
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is more moving, and greatly more intelligent, even than her spiritual sisters, Cordelia and Ophelia, states the essence of Britannicus when she says:
Combién tout ce qu’on dit est loin de ce qu’on pense.
Que la bouche et le coeur sont peu d’intelligence. (1523-4)
This couplet is translated by John Cairncross (1967), who was British as:
How distant thought is from the spoken word!
How little do the lips and heart agree!
and by the American Samuel Solomon (1967), as:
How far is what one says from what one thinks!
Between the mouth and heart how few the links.
In a critical and ideological analysis, one would first note that whilst both transla
tions are meritorious, the second one is closer and more forceful, particularly in the key first line, retains the main emphasis (peu, few) in the second line, and, like Racine, clinches the couplet with a resounding rhyme; that Cairncross’s ‘ideology’ is abstract, academic, intellectual compared with Racine’s and Solomon’s, which translates liter
ally and miraculously in monosyllables and the two plain verbs; and note, inciden
tally, that the couplet has no intertextual links, since Junie is entirely Racine’s cre
ation. The analyisis would stem from the serious and moving assumption that Racine is a great writer (a value-judgement indeed!), Racine our contemporary in 1996.
This then is a scrap example of what I hope is a more useful type of ideological criticism of two translations of a couplet that I consider to be universal, not cultural, and certainly not subject to relativism. The concept of ‘ideology’ is useful in both kinds of criticism; it is at the centre of the first; but in the second it gives way to the universal idealistic principle which Karl Mannheim described as Utopia, but which sometimes is only another word for common decency and fairness among persons and people.
The prevailing and conventional wisdom (Galbraith) is that translation is always at the mercy of the ideologies, the cultures, the norms, in a straight jacket of the trans
lator’s and/or her society, or otherwise the author and/or her society. But this is not
lator’s and/or her society, or otherwise the author and/or her society. But this is not