Melville, Babel, and the Ethics of Translation

In “The South Seas,” a speech that Herman Melville delivered during a lecture tour between 9 December 1858 and 3 March 1859, the author introduced an article from the Honolulu Advertiser on Hawaii’s linguistic situation. After quoting from the article, which reported on a suggestion “to abolish the Hawaiian language in their schools and exclude those children who speak it,” Melville responded by saying: “I threw down the paper on reading this, exclaiming, ‘Are they to give up all that binds them together as a nation or race—their language? Then are they indeed blotted out as a people.’”¹ While the entire speech manifests Melville’s typical objection to US and European expansionism and his sympathy for an indigenous nation facing cultural assimilation and loss of sovereignty—which he had repeatedly expressed since his first novel, Typee (1846)—it also indicates his anxiety about his own nation’s language politics. If the Hawaiian language was, as he stressed in this statement, the mainstay of the Hawaiian people’s identity “as a nation or race,” the same could be said for the relationship of the American language to the United States. Were it not for a common language like English, his argument implies, how could the American people hold their identity as a nation or a race (if we could suppose such a thing as an American race)? Moreover, how would the United States as a nation accommodate those non-English and nonstandard American English speakers already within its borders?²

Questions about a nation and its language in an age of colonialism, imperialism, and globalism—when national boundaries incessantly shift, and a national language continually changes its form—arise frequently in Melville’s works. Many readers have noted the democratic multicultural ideals that Melville often presents. But we should also notice that, as Paul Lyons argues, although Melville “depicted an egalitarian multicultural mingling of the world’s peoples … their common language was English.”³ Given the hegemony of English over other languages today, it would not be unfair to say that Melville’s texts have had a hand in English linguistic imperialism that has developed since his time.

As translation studies have shown over the past few decades, any translation among languages of unequal power can potentially lead to the violence of translation, which “generally under the guise of transmissibility, carries out a systematic negation of the strangeness of the foreign work.”⁴ But, at the same time, the absence of translation between different languages can easily cause miscommunication between different peoples, another possible source for conflicts. Some translation theorists have explored what is termed the “ethics of translation” to try to prevent such violence. Emily Apter, among others, defines the ultimate goal of translation “as an act of love, and as an act of disruption,” which “becomes a means of repositioning the subject in the world and in history; a means of rendering self-knowledge foreign to itself; a way of denaturalizing citizens, taking them out of the comfort zone of national space, daily ritual, and pre-given domestic arrangements.”⁵ But the question of how to establish a code for ethical translation remains unsolved.

Melville repeatedly brings up the translation conundrum when he dramatizes cross-lingual communication. He must have had abundant opportunities to come into contact with diverse languages throughout his Pacific journeys.⁶ Back in the US, he must have seen, if not read, some foreign-language publications issued in German, Spanish, French, and so forth, as well as heard, if not spoken himself, other tongues in the hustle-bustle of the street.⁷ By the mid-1850s, New York City already had three daily German-language newspapers, including the Staats-Zeitung, which James M. Bergquist argues was the nineteenth century’s most influential German American newspaper.⁸ While Melville may not have been either a quick learner or a good translator of any foreign languages, I will show that many passages in his works that initially appear unrelated register his engagement with contemporary questions concerning language, nation, and translation. For reconsidering the linguistic situation in which Melville...