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  • Introduction to Prynne’s Poems in Chinese
  • J.H. Prynne (bio) and Keston Sutherland
JHP

This somewhat improvised talk is going to be rather a brief gallop, because of course we are all urgently in need of lunch, and so I will not prolong the proceedings unduly. I also have to make at least two apologies to start with: the first is this is not at all a formal paper, more like a kind of chat (xiantan), I might say, quite informal, and it doesn’t have a written script. Secondly, it’s somewhat unashamedly autobiographical, which is not my usual practice; but since the story that we have been reconstructing over the period of this colloquium has a certain biographical momentum of its own, in order to fit part of the story into this final phase I have with apologies to speak about myself. Not being Wordsworth I don’t exactly relish this project, but none the less I think it’s made necessary by the inner momentum of our proceedings. So, what I will speak about is chiefly the work of translation, about the experience of more than one language in various kinds of interactive relationship. And for me the earliest biography of this question goes back indeed to my school days, and I will describe to you a recurrent situation which I vividly remember from my schooldays because, in common with many other school boys and girls of that era, we were subject to a series of intensive disciplines involving literary and linguistic studies and translation work. As a teenager and even earlier I was put to learn Latin, to learn French and to learn German, and to make endless homework translations in both directions, from Latin into English, from French into English, from English into French and Latin, and the rest. It was the most ardent and intricate point of my serious encounter with the nature of language.

In my English language studies, as part of the school English course, language work was basically very rudimentary, not much more than [End Page 197] old-style grammar. But the experience of translation was to my own mentality profoundly formative, and one of the reasons for this–and I remember the sensation very vividly–was the construction of an inner world-space mediating between separate and different languages. I’d be assigned a difficult translation from, say, German into English, or English into Latin, and I’d hunt up all the necessary vocabulary in the dictionaries around me, I’d hunt up all the syntax and grammar constructions, in my reference grammar and all the rest of it, and there’d come a point in doing this work when I’d have all this linguistic information in my head somewhere, or at my fingertips. And at that point the text I was working on was not in German or Latin and not in English, it was in some kind of phantasmal intermediary language which I couldn’t describe, and the linguistic rules for which I couldn’t recognise; it was a kind of meta-language experience, like being in an area of language as a theoretical structure or mental state that didn’t actually have a specific vocabulary. If it’s a modern European language like French or German, or Italian which I learned later, then of course it’s a kind of European phantasm that presides as the linguistic structure of consciousness. If it’s an ancient language like Latin that’s still basically European, but nonetheless it’s a heavily inflected language with a very different kind of structural integrity; and being somewhere in the experience-space between English and Latin was one of the most amazingly exhilarating experiences I had as a schoolboy. It made me feel what it was like to be in the zone of language as itself a place, indeed almost as a place of awareness, almost in a sense as a place to be: se trouver, sich befinden; ‘mi ritrovai’, as Dante wrote at the start of the Inferno. So that’s a very early form of my encounter with language through the experience of the acts and operation of translation...

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