If Knowledge Is a Splintering

In the beginning there must have been a word, though what it was I can’t recall. An introduction. Some pleasantry, banal. In the beginning was a word—and then another, and another. We talked and talked and talked. Like the graduate students we had just become, we gave each other authors, books—our form of courtship. We inched ever closer over the weeks of a seminar we shared; after workshops, we slipped away from the group gathered at one bar or another to smoke outside, alone, together. We talked Carver over a sticky table in a cash-only dive; at a house party for Halloween, we argued about The Marriage Plot. He was for it, I against—the book, that is, not marriage. (Though maybe marriage, too.) I hadn’t yet read Barthes. He hadn’t yet broken up with his girlfriend. Talking was what we could do. In the beginning was word after word after word. In the beginning, we used them to build.

~

“And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech,” begins Genesis 11, in the King James translation. “And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven.” This is what a shared language allows—architecture that summits the sky. “Behold,” God says, “the people is one, and they have all one language . . . and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.”

But God can’t let that happen: as in Plato’s Symposium, the power of a unified humanity poses a threat to the divine. Zeus splits a formerly four-legged people in two, in Aristophanes’ account; the God of Genesis sunders only their tongues. “Go to, let us go down,” the Lord says, “and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.” (Who’s us? Who understands the Lord’s speech?) The Bible doesn’t describe how this confounding is accomplished, only the result: “Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth.”

In The Tongue of Adam, translated by Robyn Creswell, Abdelfattah Kilito points out that God didn’t destroy the tower itself, mere symptom that it was. What might have happened, I wonder, to that unfinished structure, that ruin in reverse? I imagine it standing like a gravestone or a warning, an Ozymandian monument alone in a vast expanse. It was the people, not the stones, who were scattered like debris: according to the author of Genesis, this is how the many languages of the world came to be.

And it is how translation came to be, a previously unthinkable necessity. Translation is not quite as old as language, but it’s as old as one language becoming two: we need translation only because we don’t speak, can’t speak, the same language: an obvious statement and an epic one. We can’t speak the same language; it is forbidden; the Lord in his almighty rage for privacy has made it so. It is possible to understand the act of translation as attempting to undo what God has done, a heretical defiance. To translate is to take a step back toward that pre-Babelian world, every word a block in the tower whose top hasn’t yet been built. Nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. A utopia, and a danger. Who could live without restraint? In splitting language like an atom, God gave humanity the gift of incompleteness, of inevitable failure. “Creation is an act of separation,” Kilito writes—the heavens from the earth, Eve from Adam—and separation is an act of creation, too. The scattering at Babel meant the invention of translation, of grasping and misunderstanding, of gaps and fragmentation. The stones that might have made a tower are reconstituted: the many peoples of the Earth, their many tongues. Seeking to quell an insurrection, Zeus invented desire. Seeking to keep his heaven to himself, the God of Babel made us manifold and wanting, a lack always on our lips. What greater strength is there? We are elevated by our diminishment.

~

We didn’t know it, but those words were the first in a text we’ve spent ten years writing. It isn’t, yet, complete. At the time, I wouldn’t have guessed our relationship would last so long: in the beginning was simply a flirtation, a fling. In the beginning, we didn’t know a beginning was what it was.

When C. and I first began sleeping together, we read poems aloud: before, after. (I know, I know.) I was renting an apartment on the leafy outskirts of Ann Arbor, its rooms too huge for my few possessions, hauled from the Boston shoebox I’d been living in before. We sat on my bed as on a raft, adrift in the immense sea of that room, its scuffed wooden floors gleaming beneath my bedside lamp. We read lines from books or lifted from memory, bits of language that had infiltrated our bodies and taken up residence, forming our selves or our sense of ourselves. I felt then, and still feel, at times of the greatest difficulty or jubilation, the need to say something that he might understand completely. “Love and translation look alike in their grammar,” says Andrés Neuman, translated by George Henson. In each of these activities is an attempted meeting, a reaching out. Noli me tangere, the text to be translated might say, but it will be touched nonetheless: messed with, messed up, made other. “That was, I thought, the prospect offered by a new relationship, the opportunity to be someone other than yourself,” says the narrator— an interpreter—of Katie Kitamura’s Intimacies. A fresh start, a blank page—but how we rushed to fill it. How quickly the selves we wished to present became the selves we actually were.

“As soon as it is translated, poetry, which is before everything else a nazm—an order, an arrangement, a harmony—collapses and transforms into nathr, a word typically translated as ‘prose,’ but whose etymology suggests dispersion, separation, division, fragmentation,” writes Kilito of the theories of al-Jahiz. “To translate poetry is to compel a fall.” In The Tongue of Adam, Kilito aligns the scattering at Babel with the expulsion from Eden; each is a story of divine punishment incurred by inquisitive tongues: talking, tasting. In each, an arrangement—the harmonic architecture of tower or garden—is abandoned, its occupants or would-be occupants driven out into the world. Each of these exits is occasioned by the entry of something new into human consciousness: languages, knowledge.

We might think of knowledge as cumulative, a means of seeing every side of something and so making it whole—knowledge as constructed, like a tower—but Kilito says otherwise. “Note that what Adam learns is how to differentiate between two principles, to distinguish good from evil,” he writes. “To know is therefore to take apart, to segregate, separate, slice in half.” The better we know something, the more infinitesimal its divisions, gradations, nuances, and shades. (The better I know this language, the more it splinters into synonym.) Only in ignorance can we see anything—or anyone—as whole; in the beginning, the other seems complete as an edifice. But the longer we live in one another’s presence, the more we break into pieces: mortar, stones. To learn something is to see it shattered. To know someone is to take him apart.

~

It goes like this: to save her life, Shahrazad told a story. Then another, and another. Her stories are full of magic and mystery, but it’s the story surrounding them that I’ve found most enchanting. As she tells the murderous king Shahriyar of genies and sailors, of courtesans and thieves, Shahrazad tells us something else: if only you can string together enough words, the right words, night after night, you can stave off death itself. If your stories are good enough, you’ll be allowed to live.

(Though even Shahrazad can’t outrun death forever. The final sentence of Tales from the Thousand and One Nights, in N. J. Dawood’s translation, reads: “Shahriyar reigned over his subjects in all justice, and lived happily with Shahrazad until they were visited by the Destroyer of all earthly pleasures, the Annihilator of men.” It’s quite the alternative to happily ever after.)

“In Arabic culture, a text without an author is considered to be an aberration,” writes Kilito, translated by Mbarek Sryfi and Eric Sellin, in Arabs and the Art of Storytelling. I want to say the same is true elsewhere: think of Homer, that figment of a collective imagination. I once worked at a bookstore where the computer system wouldn’t permit a blank author field: we shelved the Bibles under God. The Nights is as authorless, as many-authored, as the Odyssey or the Bible, a collection of narratives gathered over many centuries, from many sources. There is no original. The text is written in prose—suggest[ing] dispersion, separation, division, fragmentation—and like anything composed of fragments, can be taken apart and put back together in many ways. The pieces can form a path, or they can form a maze. “The need to complete a thousand and one segments drove the work’s copyists to all sorts of digressions,” writes Jorge Luis Borges in “When Fiction Lives in Fiction,” translated by Esther Allen:

None of them is as disturbing as that of night 602, a bit of magic among the nights. On that strange night, the king hears his own story from the queen’s lips. He hears the beginning of the story, which includes all the others, and also—monstrously—itself. Does the reader have a clear sense of the vast possibility held out by this interpolation, its peculiar danger? Were the queen to persist, the immobile king would forever listen to the truncated story of the thousand and one nights, now infinite and circular . . .

The Nights becomes Borgesian, in Borges’s reading. In this version— which may or may not exist outside of the Argentine’s imagination— Shahrazad is like the sirens of the Odyssey, telling a story in which she takes part. Her words echo the world—or the world, perhaps, echoes her words. She talks herself into being, becomes both author and character. How could she ever let the story end? It has saved her life, made her life, in more ways than one.

~

Love and translation look alike in their grammar. There is the struggle to make something understood, and there is the pleasure of doing so—however slightly, however briefly. There is the satisfaction of saying the right thing and the constant threat of saying the wrong one. There is the desire to render the beloved on the page and the impossibility of that task; there is the desire to render yourself to him—equally impossible, but you do try. You keep trying. The words written and the words read, the words spoken and the words heard—they are never exactly the same, made up as they are of the people who write and read and speak and hear, hauling the whole of their lives along with them, freighting every sentence with that baggage. It’s amazing that we can grasp any part of each other, can understand each other at all. “Words do have edges,” writes Anne Carson. “So do you.”

But how C. and I sidled up to them, peering over.

~

The Nights is a translation itself—of Persian and Indian stories gathered in Arabic around the ninth century and amended, exaggerated, and bowdlerized in the centuries since—and translation is responsible for its fame. The work, Kilito says, is not nearly as vital to the Arabic canon as to the rest of Western literature, where it has influenced giants from Borges to Proust; the Arabic Nights is less important and influential than its equivalent in Spanish or French. “One might even suggest that the Nights begs to be translated,” writes Kilito. “Such is its transparency that it hardly loses any of its force when rendered into another language.”

Transparency here implies a style masquerading as no style, a text concerned with the sense of words and not the words themselves— as if the two might be separated. But the word makes me think of Walter Benjamin: “A real translation is transparent,” he writes, translated by Harry Zohn, in “The Task of the Translator.” “[I]t does not cover the original, does not block its light, but allows the pure language, as though reinforced by its own medium, to shine upon the original all the more fully.” Benjamin’s seminal essay returns us to the idea of a single, unshattered language: the pure language, he calls it, and “a greater language,” of which “both the original and the translation [are] recognizable as fragments.” Is this the language spoken by the builders at Babel, before God sundered their tongues? Is this the language known by Adam and Eve before the Fall?

Kilito writes of an ancient claim that Adam and Eve spoke Arabic in Eden but Syriac after their expulsion: “Adam, inconsolable, can only lament his lost paradise in a new tongue.” Language and place are intertwined, the loss of one necessitating the loss of the other—but sometimes the language gained offers a way back, in writing if not in life. I once heard the translator Jennifer Croft say she found herself writing about her Oklahoma childhood only when she began to write in Spanish; I first learned of Kilito’s work in a lecture by Hisham Matar, who has written in English of the Libya to which he could not, for many years, return. “I learned French, paradoxically, so that I could write in Arabic,” Kilito says—in a book written in French. I read his words in translation from both languages, for he writes some books in one and some in the other. “As for the bilingual,” Kilito says, winkingly, “he is in constant movement, always turning, and since he looks in two directions, he is two-faced.”

Here is another way in which knowledge is a splintering, a branching: the speaker of many languages knows many words for the same thing: tree is also arbor and δέντρο and ةرجش ; apple is also malum and μήλο and ةحافت . These words are not interchangeable, but neither are they irreplaceable. Learning another language tempers us against what David Bellos calls the “desire to believe (despite all evidence to the contrary) that words are at bottom the names of things.” We can trace this mistaken belief—nomenclaturism—back to the first chapter of Genesis, in which God calls the light “Day” and the darkness “Night.” Adam takes his turn in the second chapter, naming the animals from beast to bird to woman. (We can also trace the often-gendered metaphor of translation back to Eve being made from Adam: an altered copy, a faithless translation.)

The human languages of the Earth are, post-Babel, as multiple as the birds and beasts. There is no such thing as the singular. Benjamin quotes Stéphane Mallarmé: “The imperfection of languages consists in their plurality, the supreme one is lacking… the diversity of idioms on earth prevents everybody from uttering the words which otherwise, at one single stroke, would materialize as truth.” Babel is rebuilt in this imagining—truth as attainable as the heavens—but I find something horrifying in the notion of a shared, supreme, and single language. The idea of a thousand mouths speaking the same words is more dystopic than utopic, smacking of fascism. (“The tyrannical gesture is the one that’s not interested in your variants,” Matar said at that lecture.) And the idea that whatever language I speak might be the language, the only option: no words drifting in from other worlds; no phrases caught, half-heard, between the ear and the mind; no more longing, no more reaching, nothing left to grasp at and fall short of, to study without ever mastering, to speak without being certain, to speak nevertheless. Who wants the truth to materialize? Better that it stay half-hidden. Better to be ever learning, and never know.

Besides, I have a hunch that truth is no more singular than language. Doesn’t it lie in that very plurality, that imperfection? The truth of a tree is that it has no name or a hundred, none of which come close to seizing that towering verticality, that leafy expanse, that slow and then sudden shift from verdant to russet as the days narrow and the year dissolves into the past. By its rebuff of nomenclaturism, the existence of multiple languages—the existence of translation—becomes not a problem but a solution, ridding us of our wrong notions. It ensures that each word we use is just one option among many. Ferdinand de Saussure defines linguistic signs as inherited, shared, unchangeable, combinable, and arbitrary, and that last requirement stands out like a branch against the sky—arbitrary. Like marriage, I want to say, glibly. Like love. It might be otherwise. Everything might be otherwise.

~

In the beginning, we danced to Robyn’s “Call Your Girlfriend” on the popcorn-strewn floor of the dive bar, smiling in the light of the jukebox. He had—called, and flown, and broken up with her. An old story. Somebody new. A cliché, we knew, but that didn’t make it any less urgent: to talk and more than talk, to read those poems and spend those nights in the scuffed, warm rooms of his apartment, the sprawling ones of mine. In the beginning, we had our separate spaces, our solitude. I remember the layout of my too-big living room, the shining expanse of floor between bookshelves and futon and bookshelves again. My desk was tucked into a corner and when I sat at it, I felt the emptiness at my back like wind in the sails. I was going somewhere. I had three undimmed years ahead of me, in which to write and write and write. And I did write, but I also fell in love. I gave up that glorious apartment. I began to grapple with the ways in which chance becomes fate, a pair of eyes meeting mine at a party spinning out into months and years: our days slowly happening in tandem, our books suddenly sharing the shelves.

A cliché, but what isn’t? In The Author and His Doubles, translated by Michael Cooperson, Kilito discusses how, in the work of poets often thought of as originating a literary culture—Homer in Greek, ‘Antar in Arabic—there is an invocation of some still more distant origin: the muses, the poets of old. “At the beginning of the poem—or rather, at the very beginning of poetry itself—we find a concern for repetition and imitation,” he says. To speak a language is to speak the words of others: we are always saying things that have already been said. Every word I write has been written before. “In the beginning was repetition,” writes Kilito, a repetition itself, with a twist. In the beginning was an echo, a recurrence, a response—but how can it be the beginning, if some earlier beginning exists to be repeated? It’s a muddle, where the world (or the word) starts.

The Qur’an begins with an imperative. “Recite!” is the first pronouncement—the “first commandment,” Kilito says—made to Muhammed via Gabriel, God’s translator. Unlike the many-authored books of the Bible, the Qur’an is considered, in Islamic tradition, to have been dictated by God to a faithful scribe—the name of the book itself means recitation. “The sacred book of Islam is, from the perspective of the faithful, untranslatable because it is considered the literal Word of God,” writes Hassan. “[H]uman beings are incapable of exhausting its meaning, let alone transposing it into other languages.” But transposition is there from the start, onto another’s tongue if not into another tongue. Recite! That is, say something already said.

Are the stories of Shahrazad recitations or creations? (Translations or originals?) The two are hard to distinguish in her case, and in ours. We also forestalled the arrival of each morning, though it brought no threat of death. We simply wanted the evenings to go on, stories unspooling over a barroom table or under the golden light of my bedside lamp. We spoke poems aloud and, in speaking, authored them ever so slightly anew: perhaps a word was misremembered, perhaps a line. Given several centuries and several translators, who knows what those changes might become? What thousand and one variations might arise? In the repetitions of our relationship, too—its gestures and arguments and atonements the echoes of so many others—we found something irresistible, however unoriginal. In the beginning was repetition, yet it felt like the freshest green thing in the world.

~

Saussure’s demand that a linguistic sign be arbitrary is muddied by the existence of ideophones, words whose sonic quality offers some hint of their meaning. English is generally considered to have few such words—maybe glimmer, maybe twiddle, and the onomatopoeia of boom, peep, and crunch—but other languages have thousands. The existence of ideophones speaks to the embodied nature of language, the way our mouths move through the air, caressing or biting, relying sometimes on the softness of the lips, sometimes on the tautness of the cheeks. (A common exercise has introductory linguistics students consider two simple shapes, one with rounded protuberances and one with points like an irregular star, and decide which one should be called “bouba” and which one “kiki.”) This is iconicity, the opposite of arbitrariness, and it says that things can be otherwise, certainly—look at all the languages, with their different words for boom and peep and crunch!—but that some relationships are not random, born of a conversation between body and mind. There are connections, it says, between the shape the mouth makes and what it’s trying to convey.

~

“In all language and linguistic creations there remains in addition to what can be conveyed something that cannot be communicated,” Benjamin writes. If his pure and greater language lies forever out of reach, our post-Babelian babbling just so many fragments, what does that mean for these words with which I spend my days, arranging and rearranging them, trying to say what I cannot possibly say?

(Might another, in another language, be able to say it for me?)

Off the page, this futility frustrates: trying to articulate to C. why I’m thrilled or despondent or furious, the barren failure of language becomes most apparent. In the middle of a fight, we are as unable to understand each other as the builders of that doomed tower, in the instant their language was riven. Translators, when they speak aloud, are also called interpreters—but we don’t always want our own words so glossed, whether misinterpreted or interpreted all too well. “One of the chief purposes of language is to give us up,” says Matar, “to betray us.” We say what we don’t mean, or what we don’t mean to say. That’s not what I said, I say whenever we fight, and I never said that, he says, so that our arguments pivot from their original locus— chores or politics, family or work—to a replaying of the tape, a search through the transcripts. The argument becomes about the argument, new injustices inflicted over the course of its hasty sentences. But if he never said that, if that’s not what I said, then what are we fighting about? What was it that we meant to say? Meanness buried there, false cognate.

At other times—the half-blank page before me and my mind reaching for a word that may not exist in any language—I think I understand what Matar means when he writes in A Month in Siena of “the consolation that lies between intention and expression, between the concealed sentiment and its outward shape.” I ask him about this after his lecture and he says yes, a consolation, for wouldn’t it be unbearable otherwise? To be able to say what we wanted to say, always? “It’s a marvelous failure,” he tells me. “In those gaps is where we find ourselves.”

Marriage is another outward shape, an expression made in public and in paperwork of an intention—my intended—formed in the privacy of light-washed rooms, of wavering hearts. The concealed sentiment is so much more complex, more protean; a vast and uncertain undertaking lurks behind the word marriage, like the third dimension reduced to two, to one. Is there consolation in this, too? We know something that no one else does: how absurdly huge our love, how surprising and how steady, how fragile and how robust—and what luck, that the expression of that love in a legal status or a single word can do it no justice and therefore offers some protection. (Am I risking that protection in these pages? How to find a form that both exposes and conceals? A form like these parentheses, I want to say—I always want to say.)

In the beginning, marriage was merely a plot point in the books we read, a distant impossibility. We didn’t know that the words we laid like bricks before each other would gradually take this shape, this structure yet scaffolded, still under construction. This nameless thing. In the beginning, we gave each other authors and books; we gave each other dances and drinks and cigarettes and jokes and poems and notes and kisses and fights, and each of them, even the fights, meant something like, Will you? Each of them, even the fights, meant something like, Yes.

~

The Nights, like the Odyssey, is the story of a marriage; the tales of Shahrazad loop like a ring. In her introduction to Richard Burton’s translation, A. S. Byatt writes that the title, with its single night added on to the thousand, “suggests a way to mathematical infinity— you can always add one more to any number—and produces a circular, mirrorlike figure, 1001.” The six hundred and second night described by Borges might exist only in his imagination, but there is recursiveness embedded in the Nights. The book is structured by the repeating interchange of evening and morning, marked first by Shahriyar bedding a new bride each night and beheading her the next day—for three years he does this, more dead women than there are nights in the title—and then by Shahrazad’s nightly stories and daily salvation. That salvation isn’t hers alone: she is the daughter of Shahriyar’s vizier and offers herself to save her father, who, tasked with finding brides for the insatiable king, is running out of options, slaughtered as the young women of the kingdom have been.

Consider this a reminder of its brutish history, in case I’ve made marriage too lofty a thing. And if translation has also become too elevated, too unimpeachable, Kilito offers a cautionary word. “Translation is often presented as an act of love, a sign of openness, of tolerance,” he writes. “However, the reality is less idyllic, the translation taking place more often in a context of competition and rivalry. . . . To translate is to invade a foreign territory, expel the people who live there or subdue them, and expropriate their goods and treasures.” Throughout history, translation has been occasioned by military or cultural invasion. Like marriage, it has been a site of commerce, violence, and suppression. Translators often came from an enslaved populace, interpreting the language of their people for their captors, mistrusted by both sides—hence the Italian idiom “traduttore, traditore” (translator, traitor). Accusations of unfaithfulness had nothing to do with artistic license, and the risks incurred spilled off the page: the disloyalty of mistranslation was punishable by death in the early Ottoman Empire. In eighteenth-century China, Pamela Crossley writes, “[T]he interpreter was the person blamed when things went wrong. Chinese interpreters who helped British merchants pursue lawsuits were executed if the judge ruled against them.”

These dangers haven’t disappeared. Hitoshi Igarashi was murdered for his Japanese translation of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses; like Rushdie, the book’s Italian translator, Ettore Capriolo, survived a stabbing. Countless Iraqi and Afghan interpreters for the U.S. Army have been left behind in those countries, their visa applications delayed or denied while they endure threats and attacks, sometimes fatal, for their work. Bilingualism causes suspicion—he is two-faced— and the speaker of two languages finds in neither land a home.

Our occasional mistrust in literary translation is inherited from these oral roots, from translation’s earliest deployment in war and trade. We still think something’s being kept from us: traduttore, traditore. We go to the page as to a battlefield, armored with suspicion. Al-Jahiz considered readers and writers to be enemies, Kilito says, their relationship as fraught as that of the authorial Shahrazad and Shahriyar, her audience and would-be executioner. The reader can dispatch the writer in an instant: severing the head, closing the book. The writer tries to evade such a fate through a potent combination of suspense, enchantment, authority, seduction, and style. She must be aware of her reader, her enemy, and always stay one step—one story, one night—ahead.

I should say: I don’t believe this. Not that reader and writer can’t be opposed—what relationship doesn’t hold the threat of enmity?—but that the writer needs to keep in mind that relationship. I can get on with living only if death stays out of sight; I can get on with writing only if I never think of the writing being read. Is this impossible for the translator, who has to work with another’s voice in her head? Cozy, you could say. Or possessed. Her heart drums to the rhythm of the original, a beat she must recreate using none of the same instruments. Her world is doubly circumscribed: by the author’s limits and her own. Expectation weighs on her; the work to which hers will be compared is the very work to which she dedicates her days, a particularly perfect kind of torment. No wonder the barbed language of translation’s bloody past remains: serve and master, capture, betray. Faithfulness, that fraught and ancient thing.

Surely this could and can be otherwise; surely discussions about the nature of translation don’t need to use this language, adversarial and cruel. Al-Jahiz may be right, at times, but surely he is also wrong: reader and writer, writer and translator, translator and reader—they might just as readily be allies, friends. (Spouses? We’ll see.) Saint Jerome spoke of the translator who “carried the meaning as if captive into his own language”—but isn’t the goal of translation to set the meaning free?

The goal stated by Burton in 1885, on publishing his English translation of the Nights, was to “produce a full, complete, unvarnished, uncastrated copy of the great original.” The implied violence done by lesser translations is gendered here, Burton’s swaggering translation an attempt to restore the work’s missing virility. (Vladimir Nabokov, too, fretted about the feminizing horrors of poor translation, writing that he wanted “the absolutely literal sense, with no emasculation and no padding.”) Burton’s own virility was nearly as legendary as the book he translated: his adventures encompassed several years in the East India Company, a brief spell in the Crimean War, an attempt to find the source of the Nile, visits in disguise to the sacred sites of Mecca and Medina, and a journey, according to his book’s introduction, “through Ethiopia and Somaliland to the forbidden city of Harer, the citadel of Muslim learning; he was the first European to enter and leave the city without being executed.”

It is easy to read Burton’s incursions into Mecca, Medina, and Harer as literalizing Kilito’s sense of translation as an infiltration: “There is, in the very principle of translation, a polemical tendency . . . and even an imperialist design,” Kilito writes, “‘a translation being a conquest’ according to Nietzsche.” Who am I to argue with Nietzsche? Yet Burton calls his translation of the Nights “a labour of love,” that commonplace, and I believe him. His love may be as overbearing as his person, but I still find a gift, not a theft, at its center. His translation is lavish, full of new coinages and constructions, risky and slipshod on the reader’s lips: characters come “to a jetting fountain amiddlemost a great basin of water”; on hearing of Shahrazad’s plan, her father calls her words “so wide from wisdom and un-far from foolishness.” (Elsewhere, a lady’s eyes are “fraught with Babel’s gramarye.”) Burton’s translation is widely considered to be less than faithful to the Arabic, but the English he has made of it contains a certain strange pleasure. “The basic error of the translator is that he preserves the state in which his own language happens to be instead of allowing his language to be powerfully affected by the foreign tongue,” writes Benjamin, and Burton makes no such mistake: he writes, in his preface, that “the translator’s glory is to add something to his native tongue.”

Glory, in the context of translation? The idea runs counter to those old notions of servitude and subjugation, of that paradigm in which the translation can be right and dutiful or wrong and traitorous but never, no matter the words within, a force equal to the original, whether allied or opposed. Thinking of Burton, I want to say there’s a way in which grandiosity can also be humility, the visibility of the translator—so far from the effacement, the transparency, declaimed as ideal—enhancing the visibility of the work. (I say work instead of author, for the Nights has none. Perhaps this makes things easier.) I want to say this duality is present in devoting ourselves to a relationship, too: surely we might find ourselves magnified, rather than reduced, by splitting our days in two. Surely giving to another might give us more of ourselves.

But is it giving that we’re doing, or is it taking—a polemical tendency, an imperialist design? “To love someone implies transforming their words into ours,” Neuman says, a line that strikes me as something out of a horror movie, not a romance. That’s not what I said. I never said that. We catch ourselves in another’s gaze as in a mirror, seeing how they see us: a portrait sometimes flattering, sometimes not. The mirror of their attention distorts, perhaps, or perhaps it is all too accurate. Whatever it shows, we are blinded by the sight: seeing ourselves in them, we cease to see them. We preserve the state in which our own language happens to be, poor translators of each other. How to let ourselves, instead, be powerfully affected? How to make, of our two-facedness, two ways of seeing? “Of the writer’s solitary trade,” Borges writes of Burton, “he made something valiant and plural.”

~

In the beginning there must have been a word, though what it was I can’t recall. Among the linguist Roman Jakobson’s six functions of language is the phatic: “messages serving to establish, to prolong, or to discontinue communication, to check whether the channel works (‘Hello, do you hear me?’), to attract the attention of the interlocutor or to confirm his continued attention.” Even as those early bits of language spoken by C. and me fulfilled, ostensibly, other functions—referential, emotive, conative—every word had a phatic edge, designed to attract the other’s attention. To confirm that attention’s continuance. Hello. Do you hear me?

The phatic is often defined, now, as language that serves a purely social function—small talk—but this is just a generalized variation on Jakobson, I think: small talk as testing the channel, making sure we are heard and assuring the other that we hear them in turn. What talk doesn’t possess at least some element of this smallness, which isn’t, in the end, so small? Even as I spend my days on this writing, on all my writing, concerned with other of Jakobson’s functions— the poetic, the metalingual—it is the phatic that hums beneath my sentences, a bass note, a background radiation. That deep thrum of the language goes out like a signal to the reader I refuse to imagine but who must, I suppose, be there already, listening in, a breath at the other end of the line. Do you hear me? “Language lies on the borderland between oneself and the other,” says M. M. Bakhtin. “[T]he word in language is half someone else’s.”

I forget this. Playing with these sentences, puttering about in the rooms of them, I think the words all mine. But they belong to no one or to everyone—authorless, many-authored. “We work at this all our lives, and collectively we give it life, but we do not exert the least control over language,” writes Lewis Thomas. “[It] behaves like an active, motile organism.” Language moves—from mouth to ear, hand to eye, crossing borders that we might prefer to think of as impermeable: skin, mind. Words squirm from between our teeth, forked as the serpent’s tongue: they mean in so many ways. We pronounce them and we let them go, to be heard, misheard, misunderstood, misused, repeated, translated, mocked, and revered. We let them go and we forget about them, though they might live on: C. is always reminding me of things I’ve said and forgotten, things I’ve written and remember differently from him. The word in language is half someone else’s. In the frisson of our early flirtation, we inched out onto Bahktin’s borderland, step by step and word by word: presenting those words carefully, choosing the ones that showed us at our finest. We had long spent our days enmeshed in language—reading, writing, aspiring to make our lives, if not our living, by it—and yet here was another dimension to the medium we loved. A new use for this ubiquitous and mysterious thing.

A new use and, with it, a new way to fail. “Behind every articulation of language lies an inarticulate cry,” writes Kilito. Attempting to make ourselves understood—to translate ourselves to each other, the ordered harmonics of poetry collapsing into the beautiful mess of prose—we became freshly aware of what we ourselves hadn’t yet grasped. If knowledge is a splintering, there is no end to it—like the stories of Shahrazad, like the stones of Babel. We build piecemeal. We learn the parts and shards of another with our own parts and shards. What other option is there? I can’t access Benjamin’s greater language, can’t even imagine it: language exists in the particulars of words, as we exist in the particulars of bodies. When I talk about language, I’m talking about English. When I talk about love, I’m talking about him.

~

“God weeps over his name,” writes Jacques Derrida, translated by Joseph F. Graham, in Des Tours de Babel. “His text is the most sacred, the most poetic, the most originary, since he creates a name and gives it to himself, but he is left no less destitute in his force and even in his wealth; he pleads for a translator . . .” In the West, the name of God goes unspoken, unknown. The names by which he is called—Allah, Yahweh, the blunt syllable I use—are mere epithets. When Moses asks God for his name in Exodus 3:14, he receives the response: “I AM THAT I AM.” (The words are capitalized like this in the King James translation; the rest of God’s speech is not. The writer Raymond McDaniel reminds me that this phrase might be better translated as I will be what I will be, Hebrew having no present tense equivalent of to be. But does God speak Hebrew? What language does God in his lonely heaven use?) I am that I am is a tautology or a deflection or the best he can manage, given the limitations of language even for God: there is no simpler way to say his name; there is, perhaps, no way at all.

But God is not so unique in this respect. No matter how often we might forget the fact, words are not the names of things. Robin is not inherent to the bird bending to the mottled grass of my spring lawn; tulip has nothing to do with the plump fist of yellow along the fence line. We humans tend to cling to our names, to find something innately linked to our selves in their syllables, though they are as arbitrary as any other sign, chosen by our parents when they might have chosen otherwise. (This choosing doesn’t happen the other way around: children do not name their parents. No wonder no one knows the name of God.)

C. and I have names, but we rarely call each other by them. Instead, we speak nonsense; we speak in tongues. We use an invented word that over the years has accumulated its own grammar—noun and adjectival forms, descriptive and vocative, diminutive and more formal suffixes, tonal variations to convey different meanings— though we also fall back on English. Love, I call, years into the future, far from the city where we first met, the bars and apartments where we first sutured one story to another, one stone to the next, building and splintering, breaking apart as we came together. Every day and night a repetition, every day and night a variant—we’re long past a thousand and one. In the beginning—but no. Enough of that. The middle is where we live.

Love, I call when I hear him stirring in the next room, and Love comes padding through the doorway, feet bare and hair sleep-addled. Love says, Good morning. Love says, Yes?