Asja Lācis and Walter Benjamin: Translating Different Cities

Where there is no love, not only the life of the people becomes sterile, but the life of cities.

Elena Ferrante, L'amica geniale (My Brilliant Friend) (160)

What can we do with this sentence written by Curzio Malaparte if we do not know the Italian language: "Quella folla di donne, sedute sulla scalinata simile alla scala degli Angeli nel sogno di Giacobbe, parevano adunate lì per qualche festa, o per un qualche spettacolo di cui fossero attrici e spettatrici insieme" (59)? Maybe we can recognize a proper name ("the ladder of the Angels in Jacob's dream")?¹ Of course, the level of our partial understanding or complete incomprehension depends on us, but similar use of a foreign and unknown language, or at least reference to an imaginary situation of its use, can be found in literature.

Let us next consider the following sentence from a novel: "She might have been speaking Russian for all he knew." This sentence does not appear to be paradoxical if we know the source-the penultimate sentence of the seventh chapter of Vladimir Nabokov's novel Laughter in the Dark-because the chief protagonists chosen by Nabokov are Germans, the conversation in the novel was held in Berlin, and the work itself is in English. But the first version of the novel was published under a different title-Камера обскура (Camera Obscura)-in Berlin and Paris, and it was written in Russian for Russian émigrés. In this version, the corresponding sentence at the end of the sixth chapter is: "Он, впрочем, не понимал ни слова, точно она говорила по-русски или по-испански" (Набоков, Камера обскура 336). It was translated into English in 1936, and Nabokov heavily reworked the original text and created a new translation under the title Laughter in the Dark in 1938. A translation-reconstruction appeared in Russian only in 1994 (using the first Russian version of the novel), which was published as Смех в темноте. It has the same sentence as in the first Russian version, but a bit shorter (Spanish is not mentioned: "Он, впрочем, не понимал ни слова, точно она говорила по-русски" (Набоков, Смех в темноте 435), which literally means, "He, by the way, did not understand a word, as if she spoke Russian." The locations of these various publications mark a transatlantic route from Western Europe to America to Russia, and a time span from the beginning of the 1930s to the 1990s, approximately sixty years.

To understand this sentence in Nabokov's novel, paradoxical to Russian readers and with a metaphorical reference to an unacceptable and incomprehensible situation in Russia for Russian émigrés, we must involve geographical places, historical events and people, including Nabokov himself. The above quotation from Malaparte's La pelle (The Skin) has been translated into English and many other languages, as was the above quotation from Nabokov's novel. But there is some asymmetry between translation and understanding. We can understand a sentence in a particular situation -that is, we can correctly react in that situation-without being able to translate it; nevertheless, the translation can be made by somebody else. Yet, the correct translation can be insufficient to understand the sentence quoted from Nabokov's Laughter in the Dark, as it demands some contextual knowledge. "Translation" here means not only translation proper, but also something like the writing of a commentary.

"Translating cities" is a metaphor whose cognitive value consists of different aspects of translation and understanding included in that process. These aspects must reveal themselves when we are trying to describe the experience of the different languages and urban realities that Asja Lācis and Walter Benjamin had during their short period of acquaintance and love. To enumerate briefly: there are particular situations that can be characterized as incomprehension of particular sentences or language as such, descriptions of situations and places in different languages and understanding of particular realities-forms of life²-in particular texts. "Translation" is the proper term here if we compare it with conceptual art praxis as described by art theoretician Birgit Pelzer. Interpreting the work of conceptual artist Lawrence Weiner, she writes: "To elaborate reality is to translate. For Weiner, all communication takes the form of translation, of a transfer from one place to another, from one language to another" (87). If, for...