Broken Tongues in Dialogue: Translation and the Body in Slow Man

In "The Task of the Translator," Walter Benjamin claims that when understood as a mode, translation highlights kinship and disparity between different languages. Thus, without effacing linguistic and cultural differences, this "translationability" exposes innate alterity within each language. When this "mode" is conceived with cultural and individual particulars in mind, it can institute a more refined understanding of translation that is more sensitive toward the Other. Slow Man, the first novel published by J. M. Coetzee after he changed his nationality from South African to Australian, suggests a model of translation that explores this possibility. This essay will analyze two contrasting functions of translation that Slow Man stages and argue that Coetzee explores the ethical dimension of translation by examining the ways in which dialogic translation interrupts the gendered and nationalized discourses by which the body is constructed.

Thinking about the body is almost always inextricably connected to the problem of language, as Judith Butler reminds us in Bodies That Matter. A body is never a pure materiality—or there is no way to think and write about it that way. The body is always conceived through social discourse that is already in existence. Butler claims that this existence is always already troubled, and for Paul Rayment, the old protagonist of Slow Man, who has recently lost a leg in a car accident, this is painfully true. Frustrated by the new condition it is in, Paul initially attempts to denounce his body. Later, he strives to make his new body intelligible to himself by calling all the regulative norms to his aid. In his attempt to reconceive his newly handicapped, aging body, Paul displays the first kind of translation that Slow Man features: internal translation. Similar to mechanical translation, internal translation replaces original words with semantic equivalents, and this technique aggravates Paul's moral predicaments by concealing the friction within his own language—the language he mobilizes in his attempt to reimagine and represent his body as a fertile, masculine one. This futile undertaking, in turn, prevents Paul from developing an ethical relationship with others.

Toward the end of Slow Man, a different mode of translation appears. I call this mode dialogical, as it involves dialogue between two distinct individuals in a Bakhtinian fashion. In fact, Coetzee stages a blatantly failed example of translation, in which the target language never attempts to have any claim to the original meaning—an instance of contact between different languages that does not end in a seamless transfer of semantic content. The instance is dialogic in the sense that the endless production of self-serving words by a conscious self is radically interrupted by the Other's language. In the instance of dialogical translation, all languages appear fractured and limited; this, in turn, exposes the erasure by which Paul's self-image of the normative male body is made legible. In the last part of this essay, I will examine this significant moment in the narrative and suggest that Coetzee locates the beginning of compassion and understanding, regardless of how tenuous they may be, in this exposure. When Paul finally opens himself to be disrupted by the total alterity of the Other, he succeeds in accepting his own body as is—imperfect and mediated by language. Coetzee thus offers a glimpse of the possibility of ethical communication that is uncharted and unlimited by prevailing national and cultural discourses.

In order to understand the significant role translation plays in Slow Man properly, we first need to examine the figure of Elizabeth Costello in Elizabeth Costello. Elizabeth Costello, Coetzee's lecture/fiction published before Slow Man, is important not only because its eponymous main character reappears in the latter novel, but also because it illustrates the dead end that an author who positions herself in the realist tradition can face in the course of her literary career—the same dead end that Coetzee successfully breaks through with the help of translation in Slow Man.

Elizabeth Costello

In 1996, Coetzee delivered the Ben Belitt Lecture at Bennington College, entitled "What Is Realism?" Instead of a conventional lecture, however, he read...