OMNIA
Translation is an art that allows us to communicate across cultural difference. BY LAUREN REBECCA THACKER • ILLUSTRATIONS BY MARINA MUUN eci n’est pas une pipe. Or, in English: this is not a pipe. René Magritte caused a stir when he painted those words below a highly realistic oil rendering of a pipe in his 1929 painting, La Trahison des Images (The Treachery of Images). The words were meant to provoke. They pointed out a rift between a representation of a thing and the thing itself. But for speakers of multiple languages, the idea that an object and its verbal representation are distinct from one another is no provocation. To extend Magritte’s point: this is not a pipe, nor מקטרת, nor ቧንቧ, nor ﻏلﯿﻮن. These words for pipe, in Hebrew, Amharic, and Arabic, respectively, are verbal and written representations of the same thing, but they are different sounds with different cultural connotations and traditions of use. And of course, in cultures without traditions of smoking, like Ancient Greece, there is simply no such word and no such thing.
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Multilingual speakers and writers hold these representations, connotations, traditions, and absences in their heads at once. Nili Gold says this ability is a double-edged sword. “I think that for people who don’t know other languages, there is some sense of security. If a child only knows ‘table,’ they may think that the table was created as a table—that the word and the thing are the same,” Gold, Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, comments. “When you have more than one language, you know that the signified is disconnected from the signifier. And that it’s all arbitrary. Meaning is arbitrary. But at the same time, knowing multiple languages gives you some sense of empathy, because you know that there are other ways of saying things and of looking at things.” Because of the varied, culturally dependent ways of signifying meaning, people who want to translate a text from one language recognize that they cannot create an exact analog of the original. There can be a sense of loss in that recognition. Huda Fakhreddine, Associate Professor of Near Eastern Languages and
