After Babel postulates that translation is formally and pragmatically implicit in every act of communication, in the emission and reception of each and every mode of meaning, be it in the widest semiotic sense or in more specifically verbal exchanges. To understand is to decipher. To hear significance is to translate. Thus the essential structural and executive means and problems of the act of translation are fully present in acts of speech, of writing, of pictorial encoding inside any given language. Translation between different languages is a particular application of a configuration and model fundamental to human speech even where it is monoglot.

Each human language maps the world differently. There is life-giving compensation in the extreme grammatical complication of those languages (for example, among Australian Aboriginals or in the Kalahari) whose speakers dwell in material and social contexts of deprivation and barrenness. Each tongue—and there are no ‘small’ or lesser languages—construes a set of possible worlds and geographies of remembrance. It is the past tenses, in their bewildering variousness, which constitute history.

The axiom of universal deep structures, innate in the brain (though in ways never defined and, indeed, ruled as beyond rational investigation), entails inevitably a relegation to accident, to superficiality, of the facts of linguistic multiplicity and difference. The dissent from transformational generative claims throughout After Babel bears on the failure of such grammars to produce substantive examples of ‘universals’ in natural languages, and on the cardinal irrelevance of the Chomskyan project to poetics and hermeneutics. Today, generative grammars have retreated into almost total formality, into a degree of analytic and meta-mathematical algorithmic abstraction so great as to have hardly any bearing on the matter of actual ‘speech-worlds’ and of the creative differences between them.

Between this book and its adoption into the current academic and high-journalistic canon (where the two are often so damagingly identical) lies the matter of ‘theory.’ There are theories in the exact and in the applied sciences. They have predictive obligation, can be crucially tested, and are falsifiable. A theory with a higher demonstrable yield of insight and application will replace its predecessor. Not one of these criteria obtains in the humanities. No configuration or classification of philosophic or aesthetic materials has any predictive force. There is no conceivable experimental validation or refutation of an aesthetic or philosophic judgement. In the disciplines of intuition and energized responses of sensibility, in the craft of apprehension and answerability which make up the humanities, no paradigm or school of judgement cancels out any other. Winckelmann does not erase or replace Aristotle; Coleridge does not render Dr Johnson obsolete; T. S. Eliot on Shelley cannot invalidate Matthew Arnold. In consequence, I take the present-day, ubiquitous use of the term and rubric ‘theory’ in poetics, in hermeneutics, in aesthetics (also, I suspect in the social sciences) as spurious. It has no substantive status and radically obscures the subjective, imaginatively transcendental (in Kant’s sense) tenor of all arguments, proposals, and findings in literature and the arts (there are, unquestionably, authentic theoretical, which is to say ‘formalizable,’ elements in the analysis of music). There are no ‘theories of literature,’ there is no ‘theory of criticism.’ Such tags are arrogant bluff, or a borrowing, transparent in its pathos, from the enviable fortunes and forward motion of science and technology. There are, most assuredly, and pace our current masters in Byzantium, no ‘theories of translation.’ What we do have are reasoned descriptions of processes. At very best, we find and seek, in turn, to articulate, narrations of felt experience, heuristic or exemplary notations of work in progress. These have no ‘scientific’ status. Our instruments of perception are not theories or working hypotheses in any scientific, which means falsifiable, sense, but what I call ‘working metaphors.’ At its finest, translation has nothing to gain from the (mathematically) puerile diagrams and flow-charts put forward by would-be theoreticians. It is, it always will be, what Wittgenstein called ‘an exact art’.

a narrative of process.

the linguistic hegemony of ‘American’ speech. Throughout most of the underdeveloped world, this speech is the only foreseeable escalator to economic–social emancipation. What matters more, the ‘languages’ of computers, the meta-linguistic codes and algorithms of electronic communication which are revolutionizing almost every facet of knowledge and production, of information and projection, are founded on a sub-text, on a linguistic ‘pre-history,’ which is fundamentally Anglo-American (in the ways in which we may say that Catholicism and its history had a foundational Latinity). Computers and data-banks chatter in ‘dialects’ of an Anglo-American mother tongue.

A first step would deal with the meaning of salient words—with what that meaning may have been in 1611, the probable date of the play. Already this is a difficult step, because current meaning may not have been, or have been only in part, Shakespeare’s. In short how many of Shakespeare’s contemporaries fully understood his text? An individual and a historical context are both germane.

The meshing of adulteration with adultery would be characteristic of Shakespeare’s total responsiveness to the field of relevant force and intimation in which words conduct their complex lives.

Sustained grammatical analysis is necessary and cuts deep. But glossary and syntax are only instruments. The main task for the ‘complete reader’ is to establish, so far as he is able, the full intentional quality of Posthumus’s monologue, first within the play, secondly in what is known of Shakespearean and Elizabethan dramatic conventions, and, most difficult of all, within the large context of early seventeenth-century speech-habits. What is involved here is the heart of the interpretative process. In seeking to apprehend Posthumus’s meaning, and his own relations to such meaning, we attempt to determine the relevant ‘tone-values’ or ‘valuations.’ I use these terms for lack of a more rigorous designation of total operative context. I hope their definition will emerge in the course of this book.

We know little of internal history, of the changing proceedings of consciousness in a civilization. How do different cultures and historical epochs use language, how do they conventionalize or enact the manifold possible relations between word and object, between stated meaning and literal performance? What were the semantics of an Elizabethan discourse, and what evidence could we cite towards an answer? The distance between ‘speech signals’ and reality in, say, Biblical Hebrew or Japanese court poetry is not the same as in Jacobean English. But can we, with any confidence, chart these vital differences, or are our readings of Posthumus’s invective, however scrupulous our lexical studies and editorial discriminations, bound to remain creative conjecture?

at the surface, Jane Austen’s prose is habitually unresistant to close reading; it has a lucid ‘openness.’ Are we not making difficulties for ourselves? I think not, though the generation of obstacles may be one of the elements which keep a ‘classic’ vital.

The world of an Austen novel is radically linguistic: all reality is ‘encoded’ in a distinctive idiom. What lies outside the code lies outside Jane Austen’s criteria of admissible imaginings or, to be more precise, outside the legitimate bounds of what she regarded as ‘life in fiction.’ Hence the exclusive functions of her vocabulary and grammar. Entire spheres of human existence—political, social, erotic, subconscious—are absent. At the height of political and industrial revolution, in a decade of formidable philosophic activity, Miss Austen composes novels almost extraterritorial to history. Yet their inference of time and locale is beautifully established. The world of Sense and Sensibility and of Pride and Prejudice is an astute ‘version of pastoral,’ a mid-and late-eighteenth-century construct complicated, shifted slightly out of focus by a Regency point of view. No fictional landscape has ever been more strategic, more expressive, in a constant if undeclared mode, of a moral case. What is left out is, by that mere omission, acutely judged. From this derives the distinctive pressure on Jane Austen’s language of the unspoken.

The purpose of this grammatical opaqueness is evident. These gouty sentences seek to contain, to ravel up a rawness and disorder of feeling which Elinor herself would find inadmissible. She is endeavouring to give reasoned form to her turbulent, startled response.

The novelist’s stance towards this little flutter of bruised sentiments and vanities is unmistakably arch.

The crux lies in tonality, in the cumulative effect of key words and turns of phrase which may have behind them and, as it were, immediately beneath their own surface, a complex field of semantic and ethical values.

mean by ‘formulaic’ ready bits of loftiness and sonority whose focus is not internal to the poem but is underwritten by exterior, modish conventions—

At various points a portentous musicality is meant to fill empty space.

We are, in the main, ‘word-blind’ to Pre-Raphaelite and Decadent verse. This blindness results from a major change in habits of sensibility. Our contemporary sense of the poetic, our often unexamined presumptions about valid or spurious uses of figurative speech have developed from a conscious negation of fin de siècle ideals. It was precisely with the rejection, by the Modernist movement, of Victorian and post-Victorian aesthetics, that the new astringency and insistence on verifiable structure came into force.

It is, literally, as if a language had been lost or the key to a cipher mislaid.

The dialogue is a brittle wonder, as perfect within its trivial bounds as comparable scenes in Congreve and Marivaux. And as irretrievably ‘period.’ Not a touch but affirms 1930.

‘Damned moonlight’ is passé, though again it is difficult to say why. The term ‘particle’ has, since the late forties, acquired a more specialized, ominous intonation. ‘You’re making me cry so dreadfully’ has a faintly remote, lavender flavour; we would not, I think, use the adverb in quite this way or put on it Amanda’s stress.

the combination of words in regard to moonlight is, from the point of view of the 1990s slightly out of focus, like the blur in an old photograph.

Any thorough reading of a text out of the past of one’s own language and literature is a manifold act of interpretation.

When reading any piece of English prose after about 1800 and most verse, the general reader assumes that the words on the page, with a few ‘difficult’ or whimsical exceptions, mean what they would in his own idiom. In the case of ‘classics’ such as Defoe and Swift that assumption may be extended back to the early eighteenth century. It almost reaches Dryden, but it is, of course, a fiction.

Language is in perpetual change. Writing about Clough in 1869, Henry Sidgwick remarked: ‘His point of view and habit of mind are less singular in England in the year 1869 than they were in 1859, and much less than they were in 1849. We are growing year by year more introspective and self-conscious: the current philosophy leads us to a close, patient and impartial observation and analysis of our mental processes: we more and more say and write what we actually do think and feel, and not what we intend to think or should desire to feel.’ Generalized, Sidgwick’s comment applies to every decade of the history of English speech and consciousness of which we have adequate record. At many points a graph of linguistic change would have to plot points far closer in time than a decade. Language—and this is one of the crucial propositions in certain schools of modern semantics—is the most salient model of Heraclitean flux. It alters at every moment in perceived time. The sum of linguistic events is not only increased but qualified by each new event.

In short: so far as we experience and ‘realize’ them in linear progression, time and language are intimately related: they move and the arrow is never in the same place.

ordinary language is, literally at every moment, subject to mutation. This takes many forms. New words enter as old words lapse. Grammatical conventions are changed under pressure of idiomatic use or by cultural ordinance. The spectrum of permissible expression as against that which is taboo shifts perpetually. At a deeper level, the relative dimensions and intensities of the spoken and the unspoken alter. This is an absolutely central but little-understood topic.

So far as films, humour, journalistic style, and fiction allow one to judge, American English is, at the moment, in a state of acquisitive brilliance but also of instability whereas ‘English English’ may be losing resilience. Words and values shift at bewildering speed.

The grammar of the Prophets in Isaiah enacts a profound metaphysical scandal—the enforcement of the future tense, the extension of language over time. A reverse discovery animates Thucydides; his was the explicit realization that the past is a language-construct, that the past tense of the verb is the sole guarantor of history.

the discovery that words, stringently tested, allowed to clash as in combat or manoeuvre as in a dance, will produce new shapes of understanding. Who was the first man to tell a joke, to strike laughter out of speech?

It is difficult to suppose that the Oresteia was composed very long after the dramatist’s first awareness of the paradoxical relations between himself, his personages, and the fact of personal death. The classic is the only total revolutionary: he is the first to burst not into that silent sea—language being rigorously coterminous with man—but into the terra incognita of symbolic expression, of analogy, of allusion, of simile and ironic counterpoint. We have histories of massacre and deception, but none of metaphor. We cannot accurately conceive what it must have been like to be the first to compare the colour of the sea with the dark of wine or to see autumn in a man’s face. Such figures are new mappings of the world, they reorganize our habitation in reality.

every language-act has a temporal determinant. No semantic form is timeless. When using a word we wake into resonance, as it were, its entire previous history. A text is embedded in specific historical time; it has what linguists call a diachronic structure. To read fully is to restore all that one can of the immediacies of value and intent in which speech actually occurs.

A true reader is a dictionary addict. He knows that English is particularly well served, from Bosworth’s Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, through Kurath and Kuhn’s Middle English Dictionary to the almost incomparable resources of the O.E.D. (both Grimm’s Wörterbuch and the Littré are invaluable but neither French nor German have found their history and specific genius as completely argued and crystallized in a single lexicon). Rossetti’s geomaunt will lead to Shipley’s Dictionary of Early English and the reassurance that ‘the topic is capped with moromancy, foolish divination, a 17th century term that covers them all.’ Skeat’s Etymological Dictionary and Principles of English Etymology are an indispensable first step towards grasping the life of words. But each period has its specialized topography. Skeat and Mayhew’s Glossary of Tudor and Stuart Words necessarily accompanies one’s reading of English literature from Skelton to Marvell. No one will get to the heart of the Kipling world, or indeed clear up certain cruces in Gilbert and Sullivan without Sir H. Yule and A. C. Burnell’s Hobson-Jobson. Dictionaries of proverbs and place-names are essential. Behind the façade of public discourse extends the complex, shifting terrain of slang and taboo speech. Without such quarries as Champion’s L’Argot ancien and Eric Partridge’s lexica of underworld usage, important elements of Western literature, from Villon to Genet is only partly legible.

Several episodes in Jane Austen can only be made out if one has knowledge, not easily come by, of a Regency escritoire and of how letters were sent.

The complete penetrative grasp of a text, the complete discovery and recreative apprehension of its life-forms (prise de conscience), is an act whose realization can be precisely felt but is nearly impossible to paraphrase or systematize.

An informed, avid awareness of the history of the relevant language, of the transforming energies of feeling which make of syntax a record of social being, is indispensable. One must master the temporal and local setting of one’s text, the moorings which attach even the most idiosyncratic of poetic expressions to the surrounding idiom.

The more seemingly standardized the language—the outward cast of the modern comes in with great speed after Dryden—the more covert are indices of semantic dating. We read as if time has had a stop.

The process of diachronic translation inside one’s own native tongue is so constant, we perform it so unawares, that we rarely pause either to note its formal intricacy or the decisive part it plays in the very existence of civilization. By far the greatest mass of the past as we experience it is a verbal construct. History is a speech-act, a selective use of the past tense. Even substantive remains such as buildings and historical sites must be ‘read,’ i.e. located in a context of verbal recognition and placement, before they assume real presence.

We have no total history, no history which could be defined as objectively real because it contained the literal sum of past life. To remember everything is a condition of madness. We remember culturally, as we do individually, by conventions of emphasis, foreshortening, and omission. The landscape composed by the past tense, the semantic organization of remembrance, is stylized and differently coded by different cultures.

Successive constructs of the past form a many-stranded helix, with imaginary chronologies spiralling around the neutral stem of ‘actual’ biological time.

every generation uses language to build its own resonant past. At moments of historical stress, mythologies of the ‘true past’ follow on each other at such speed that entirely different perspectives coexist and blur at the edges. There is, today, a 1914–19 figura for those in their seventies; to a man of forty, 1914 is the vague forerunner of realities which only gather meaning in the crises of the late 1930s; to the ‘bomb-generation,’ history is an experience that dates to 1945; what lies before is an allegory of antique illusions.

Art dies when we lose or ignore the conventions by which it can be read, by which its semantic statement can be carried over into our own idiom—

Eighteenth-century Mongolia provides a famous case. The religious language was Tibetan; the language of government was Manchu; merchants spoke Chinese; classical Mongol was the literary idiom; and the vernacular was the Khalka dialect of Mongol.