Understanding silences in cultures, all is not lost in translation

Translation is an act of rendering a thought, a dialogue, an essay, a poem or a book into another vocabulary so that readers or viewers from another location, speaking another language and in another socio-cultural context can make connections with the original — all while remaining as faithful to it as possible. Translators can then be seen as creators of sorts, and their task sometimes surpasses the effort involved in creating the original for it is a challenge to forge connections for others even when doing so for oneself might not be easy. 

When Ferdinand de Saussure wrote his revolutionary Course in General Linguistics (1916), he changed the way language is perceived and understood when he postulated that the relationship between a signifier and a signified is arbitrary and that meaning is actually achieved by the dynamic relationship of parts in sentences. A translator thereby has a tremendous task — to achieve the same meaning and nuance by converting the ideas into another vocabulary so that nearly the same dynamic is achieved. This is not easy, and the doyenne of contemporary literary theory, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, calls the whole act of translation necessary as well as impossible in her treatise Culture as Translation ( 2007). This is because, in the course of translation, there is every chance some part of the original might be lost forever.  

The solution, according to Spivak, lies in making a foray into another linguistic and cultural world beyond English, which is a global tongue, but with its imperfections that can be strangely limited at times. Translation makes the cross-cultural contact so desperately sought by the spirit of globalisation possible, opening tongues, minds, cultures, and worlds. While translation has historically been a political exercise meant to make cultures comprehensible to rulers or for rulers to establish the cultural essentials of their precarious rules, globalisation has made it more apolitical and taken it closer to its etymological meaning of taking across or rendering.

While scholars like Spivak learn new languages, I have recently developed a new fascination for picking up cultural nuances through world cinema. It cannot be negated that the world of literature, art, theatre, and cinema organically merge into each other and are also mutually rendered from one to the other, the most common being from books to films. Today, I look at an English film whose locale was set in a different cultural milieu, but it was able to relate the inner world of the characters and extrapolate it to the outer situations.

Last weekend, while rummaging through Netflix, I found myself ‘lost in translation’ as I accidentally picked up the iconic film of the same name. Directed by Sophia Coppola (2003), Lost in Translation led its director to her first Oscar for a creative masterpiece that remains one of the most authentic portrayals of the 21st-century angst of alienation and confusion, together with feelings of loss and being stuck. 

LIT is a deeply personal portrait of love, relationships and isolation set in the backdrop of Tokyo’s incredible scenery.  Bob Harris, played by Bill Murray, gives one of the best dramatic turns of his career. As an aged Hollywood star in his twilight, Bob leads a deeply unhappy life full of disconnection from his wife and children. His life changes when he meets an equally lost young Yale graduate, Charlotte, played by Scarlett Johansson (only 18 at the time). The two form an unusual bond as they learn to live their lives fully, ultimately letting go of things that make them unhappy. It is a love story with no sweeping romance, a comedy without overt laughs, a drama of small stakes. The film could well be seen as an exploration of what love means in the modern world. 

Extending the motif of silence, LIT is a movie about what is unsaid — a film where characters spend the whole time communicating via technology (with phones, fax and notes) or by proxy through interpreters. Almost all of the direct conversation in the film is between Bob and Charlotte, as they are the only two people who understand one another. At one point, she asks him: “I’m stuck. Does it get easier?” He responds, “Yes, it gets easier” and then adds, “The more you know what you want, the less things upset you”. The movie is full of such sparkling moments.

The setting of Lost In Translation adds to our character’s reflection. Tokyo, a metropolis of millions of people, is relegated to a view through a hotel window. The hotel itself (The Grand Hyatt) is a contained microcosm of artificial life. It’s filled with oddities of Japanese culture,  jazz music and people who are there to experience Japan without actually experiencing anything. The hotel suffocates Bob and Charlotte and it becomes a luxurious prison that keeps them from enjoying their lives. 

In the final scene, Bob says goodbye to Charlotte, knowing that they could never truly be together. The last words they share are left intentionally silent. As we mentally translate the silences in our minds, all is not lost in translation.

The author is a poet, editor and a translator