Literary and nonliterary

The greatest difference among the arts is between the literary and the nonliterary. Literature consists of a system of symbols with assigned meanings. A word is not simply a noise (or a mark on a printed page); a word is a noise or a printed mark with an assigned meaning. In different languages, different noises have been assigned meanings, and the language must be learned in order to understand what is being said. To appreciate the work of the 11th-century novelist Murasaki Shikibu, one must learn Japanese; to fully appreciate Molière, the 17th-century playwright, one must learn French. No other art has this problem: the English can appreciate German music as well as the Germans—or, if they do not, it is not for lack of learning a language.

Shapes, colours, and tones do not have assigned meanings. That is not to say that these elements when present in art cannot be said to have some sense of the term meaning. There are many meanings of the word meaning, and a colour, for example, can have meaning in that it may symbolize something, as red symbolizes courage in some cultures, or it may have strong emotional or other effects upon the viewer, evoking all manner of strong associations. But a colour or a tone has no assigned meaning. If the question were asked, “What does middle C mean?”, the answer would be, “It has no assigned meaning at all; in that sense, it means nothing—it just has certain effects.” But if the meaning of a certain word in a poem is not known, the reader is to that extent prevented from appreciating the poem, for the medium of poetry is not noises, not printed marks, but words, and the difference between a noise and a word lies in the fact that a word is a noise with a meaning.

This fact makes for an enormous difference between literature and the other arts. A colour in a painting may be the colour of an object represented. A colour may even “mean” something; for example, the white of a white flag that a person depicted in a battle painting is holding up as a sign of surrender. But a colour, as a colour, has no meaning at all, and the same is true of musical tones. A pattern of musical tones may occasionally acquire a meaning (the first four tones of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony were used to symbolize victory in World War II), but when this happens it really has very little to do with the music, and in any case most music is appreciated without any such symbolism being present. But a noise, however pleasing to the ear, is only a noise and not a word unless it has an assigned meaning, and one must know what that meaning is in order to appreciate a poem or any other work of literature.

The translation problem

Because literature consists of conventional symbols, there exists in literature the problem of translation, which does not exist in the other arts. When one seeks to make a work of literature available to a wider audience than that composed of only the native speakers of the language in which the work was written, the process of translation must be resorted to, and, in this process, a great deal of the work’s original character is lost.

In a poem there are (1) the sounds, (2) the dictionary meanings of the words, and (3) the connotations of the words—the manifold associations that they evoke (sensory, intellectual, and emotional) in the minds of readers. The sounds are the least important of the three, and many a great poem as sheer sound is hardly even pleasing. The finding of like dictionary meanings is usually a simple matter, and when there is a word that has no rough equivalent in the other language, it may be simply retained in the original language (for example, the German word Weltanschauung, meaning something like “world outlook,” is often retained in English translations of German works). As for the associations that hover about a word, they may vary from language to language, so that if a work is translated rather literally, the associative values of the words are lost. Thus, “My God!” is a much stronger expletive in English than “Mon Dieu” is in French, so that if the French expression is translated into the English one, it is, though literally correct, quite unfaithful to the weaker emotive force of the French expression. Words can often be found in the second language that have a roughly equivalent associative value to the original one, but these will usually not provide a literal translation; thus, the translator is faced with the dilemma of being able to provide a literal-meaning translation or a translation that renders the spirit or “feel” of the original but not both.