I'm very highly educated. I know words; I have the best words…
Faut-il traduire l'homme comme il parle, ou lisser sa syntaxe hachée et risquer de laisser penser qu'il s'exprime normalement ?
Should one translate the way the man speaks or smooth out his roughly chopped syntax and thus give the false impression that he expresses himself normally? (Editors’ translation)
Il est certains esprits dont les sombres pensées
Sont d'un nuage épais toujours embarrassées ;
Le jour de la raison ne le saurait percer.
Avant donc que d’écrire apprenez à penser.
Selon que notre idée est plus ou moins obscure,
L'expression la suit, ou moins nette ou plus pure.
Ce que l'on conçoit bien s’énonce clairement.
Et les mots pour le dire arrivent aisément
There are certain minds whose somber thoughts
Are by thick clouds always blocked;
The daylight of reason never could shine through.
Thus before learning to write, learn to think.
Depending on whether our idea is ore or less obscure
The expression following it is less neat or more pure.
That which is well conceived is set forth clearly,
And the words to say it come easily.
And so, now, Translating Trump. “Translating” writ large, that is. Encompassing the issues of power, language, interpretation, and, even, what constitutes reality. Power and language; power and reality; reality and language; language and interpretation; power and interpretation (the permutations are many): these are concepts that might be deemed to fall within the more “traditional” concerns of academics, but which have been circulating, with a vengeance and well beyond the proverbial Hallowed Halls of Academia in the past year or so by way of Donald Trump, businessman, reality show host, president, in short: Donald Trump public figure. Given the ubiquity and importance of the phenomenon, Donald Trump's language and the translation(s) of that language not only justify but demand thoughtful consideration in both the public sphere and in academia.
CF&FS being a scholarly journal in the field of French and Francophone studies, we were struck by the fact that one of the most accomplished stylists in the French literary tradition, Jean Racine, the seventeenth century playwright (his exact contemporary, Nicolas Boileau, the author of one of the fundamental texts on poetics and the French language, is quoted above) and Donald Trump have something in common: a restricted and often highly symbolic vocabulary that renders translation, in the most literal sense, particularly challenging. However, and there lies the rub, where the restricted vocabulary of the former results in the highly structured and formalized language that gives French classical theater its beauty and polish, the latter's reduced lexicon results in the conundrum which not only translators, but many others, from academics to the general public have had to contend with. We might even venture to propose, as does Marilynne Robinson in a recent article:
In the realm of contemporary politics, someone who has a certain awareness of history, the president, for example, is expected to speak as if he did not. He is expected to have mastery of an artificial language, a language made up arbitrarily of the terms and references of a nonexistent world that is conjured out of prejudice and nostalgia and mis- and disinformation, as well as of fashion and slovenliness among the opinion makers.
Robinson's comment is not restricted to a particular president and points, beyond any one person, to a trend that extends to the American republic, with or without Donald Trump as its leader. Perhaps less encompassing, but also more directly relevant to the point being made here about the restricted vocabulary of a seventeenth century French playwright and that of a contemporary American public figure is Philip Roth's own estimation of Donald Trump and his language:
…ignorant of government, of history, of science, of philosophy, of art, incapable of expressing or recognizing subtlety or nuance, destitute of all decency, and wielding a vocabulary of seventy-seven words that is better called Jerkish than English. (Thurman)
The categorical and bracing quality of Roth's statement reminds us that it is important to consider and question our own position—critically, philosophically, historically. This is not new to us as academics, especially in a field where questioning authority, from the author's to that of language itself, is par for the course (to use a particularly appropriate golf metaphor), but it seems especially important, given the controversial nature of this issue's theme, to perform that gesture of self-acknowledgement, of self-questioning, even as we engage in the debate. Perhaps no other contribution to the volume states as succinctly and clearly the need for us to perform this gesture than Liora Halperin's answer to the Questionnaire entitled “The Pedant Class,” in which she states:
In her 1995 book, Verbal Hygiene, Deborah Cameron argues, “Linguistic conventions are quite possibly the last repository of unquestioned authority for educated people in secular society.” Those with mastery of language see themselves as definitively better than those who lack it. But attitudes and discourse about language, in this case Trump's broken, contorted, opaque language, tell us something not only about Trump, but about those who critique him, their anxieties, fears, and concerns (infra).
While we do not endorse the apparent equivalency established here between “mastery of language” (which could be a stand-in for mastery of knowledge in general) and a feeling of “infinite superiority,” it is with the type of self-awareness the statement calls for that we write this introduction.
About “Translating Trump” then. Writ large. Compared to the “great sweep of suffering” (Viennot)Footnote1 that Trump's election has brought and will bring, his translators’ dilemma around the world “hardly amounts to a hill of beans” wrote Rob Zaretsky (channeling Humphrey Bogart's Rick in Casablanca) in The Los Angeles Times Review of Books (16 January 2016). Comparing Trump's style to Obama's, in the interview that follows, French translator Bérengère Viennot suggests that
Whatever field you work in, translation is never only a matter of words. The act of translating consists in carrying a meaning from one set of readers to another, and to make sure that the readers of your words will feel the same as the readers of the original text. For the translator is an author: if the thoughts are not hers, the words definitely are. (emphasis ours)
Can French readers “feel the same” as American readers of, say, these Tweets from Donald Trump?
Donald J. Trump (realDonaldTrump). “The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes, @NBCNews, @ABC, @CBS, @CNN) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!” 17 Feb. Citation2017, 21:48 UTC. Tweet.
Donald J. Trump (realDonaldTrump). “With all of its phony unnamed sources & highly slanted & even fraudulent reporting, #Fake News is DISTORTING DEMOCRACY in our country!” 16 July Citation2017, 11:15 UTC. Tweet.
Donald J. Trump (realDonaldTrump). “The W.H. is functioning perfectly, focused on HealthCare, Tax Cuts/Reform & many other things. I have very little time for watching T.V.” 12 July Citation2017, 13:39 UTC. Tweet.
Donald J. Trump (realDonaldTrump). “Sad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments. You.....” 17 Aug. Citation2017, 13:07 UTC. Tweet.
Donald J. Trump (realDonaldTrump). “...can't change history, but you can learn from it. Robert E Lee, Stonewall Jackson - who's next, Washington, Jefferson? So foolish! Also...” 17 Aug. Citation2017, 13:15 UTC. Tweet.
Outside of the United States, people are asking: “Has America gone crazy?”; a question that hounds many Americans when they travel or live abroad (see Amelia Harvey's interview of American students in Paris, infra). A question which U.S. citizens find increasingly hard to answer.
Polite people, normally reluctant to risk offending a guest, complain that America's trigger-happiness, cutthroat free-marketeering, and “exceptionality” have gone on for too long to be considered just an adolescent phase. Which means that we Americans abroad are regularly asked to account for the behavior of our rebranded “homeland,” now conspicuously in decline and increasingly out of step with the rest of the world. (Jones)
How can translators, but also foreign journalists, interpret, comment, or translate what their readers will treat simultaneously and paradoxically as inept, outrageous, and vitally important for the world? Since WWII, America has been regarded by Europeans as many things: a big brother, protective ally, or ideological enemy, depending on one's age and place on the political chessboard; but its president has unfailingly been deemed “the leader of the Free World.” Hence the importance of what comes out of his mouth:
One paradox of our current political moment—among too many to count, this might be the deepest—is that Donald Trump, almost certainly the least verbally deft President in America's history, has also written, on Twitter, or said aloud, from the podium, some of the most widely scrutinized sentences in recent memory… Nobody seems able to ignore him… It wasn't so with his predecessor. [Neither Republicans or Democrats] spent much time asking the question that seems so commonplace today: Did you hear what he just said?(Cunningham)
Not so much “a doer” nowadays as “a talker,”Footnote6 Trump's tangled syntax and confrontational rhetoric have indeed played on his listeners “feelings,” since his superlatives and hyperbole, his pronouncements on “fake news media” etc. might be seen as variations of what Jayson Harsin calls “emo-truths,” an “emotional performance of honesty/authenticity which supposedly is harder to fake (and may have nothing to do with the actual factual contents of one's statements)” (Harsin infra). This is the translator's and interpreter's challenge: to transpose Trump's performative speech acts and idioms, peculiar even in the American political and societal paradigm, to which Marilynne Robinson refers above, into universally understood utterances, making his enunciation, in the process, less idiomatic or idiosyncratic.
As Gary Nunn remarked in The Guardian,Footnote7 Trump uses “many rhetorical linguistic devices,” tosses, twists, and “trumps” every grammatical or semantic rule. Among the various tropes used by the candidate and the president, Nunn lists: braggadocio and divisive rhetoric, hyperbole or euphemisms, sexist and racist pejoratives.
Trump relied heavily on superlatives to ramp up an emotional response to his grandiose claims. Things weren't big, they were “yuuuuuge.” He wasn't just going to make things great again, they'd be “amazing,” “tremendous,” “the best.” He wasn't just going to win. He was going to “win so much, you're going to be sick and tired of winning.” It's the aspirational language of the American dream that has, superlative by superlative, slowly transformed into a nightmare. (Nunn)
What lies beyond what we are calling Trump's rhetoric, behind his language? “Who knows what's in the deepest part of my mind,” he declared to The Washington Post editorial board, on 21 March 2016. Of course, Boileau's famous commendation, used as an epigraph to this introduction, suggests itself here:
There are certain minds whose somber thoughts
Are by thick clouds always blocked;
The daylight of reason never could shine through.
Thus before learning to write, learn to think.
Depending on whether our idea is ore or less obscure
The expression following it is less neat or more pure.
That which is well conceived is set forth clearly,
And the words to say it come easily.
“That which is easily conceived is set forth clearly.” Perhaps, then, one should first know what one wants to express? And there, in that lack or impasse lies probably one of the keys to Trump's strange rhetoric, in what Richard A. Lowry, the conservative political pundit, editor of National Review recently called “The Cognitive Dissonance Presidency” (Lowry). “Trump is having trouble arriving at a coherent conception of his own presidency,” since “Trump can't decide who he wants to be” (Lowry). For Lowry, which of the different Trumps “predominates depends on which meeting the president happens to be in.”
This cognitive dissonance is sometimes reflected in words and expressions that stand out even in the incongruous landscape of Trumpian language (for there is such a thing). It is an intriguing and untranslatable word that Trump typed hurriedly just before midnight one day last May, a sort of cypher to be decoded, and which has become the symbol of his inscrutability, of that blank between conception and utterance:
Donald J. Trump (realDonaldTrump). “Despite the constant negative press covfefe.” 30 May Citation2017, 11:06:25 PM. Tweet.
American political scientists are indeed “imagining.” But their prophesies are more of a dystopian nature. When America's top political scientists gathered this fall at Yale University, what they “felt” was that even if Trump had become more of a “talker” than a “doer,” what he has done and is doing to language, politics, institutions—to which we should add philosophyFootnote10—, will have dire and unforeseen consequences.
Apparently, Americans are now “talking like Trump,”Footnote11 adopting his a-syntactical sentences and juvenile vocabulary. Anti-intellectualism has found its hero. However, in the same breath, the president has also “dispensed with one democratic norm after another” (Illing). Do these two facts coincide somehow? We are reminded by Sean Illing of the “sobering thesis” that was developed recently in Democracy for Realists by Achen and Bartels: in the United-States “most people pay little attention to politics; when they vote, if they vote at all, they do so irrationally and for contradictory reasons” (summarized by Illing): Rejecting the so-called “idealized folk theory of democracy,” the two political scientists state, unabashedly: “The political ‘belief systems’ of ordinary citizens are generally thin, disorganized, and ideologically incoherent” (Achen and Bartels 12). “Most [American] citizens,” they continue, “are uninterested in politics, poorly informed, and unwilling or unable to convey coherent policy preferences through issue voting” (Achen and Bartels 14).Footnote12 More importantly perhaps, Achen and Bartels propose to resuscitate the great achievement of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century social science—the explicit recognition as a foundational principle that “human beings everywhere live in groups and that human thought is deeply conditioned by culture, including group subcultures” (216). Voters vote as a member of a group. The world's complexity has led the citizens of democratic societies to look within the safety of a “tribe” for the defining traits of their identities.
Likening American voters who, according to Achen and Bartels lack informed, “clearly conceived” (as Boileau would say), and consistent ideological views, to their irrational president sounds cynical. Or does it? We are then entering the domain of political psychology and its related paradigm, group psychology, leaving the notion of the Enlightenment “individual” at the door. If Trumpspeak is not comprehensible to some of us, it probably means that we do not partake in the subculture which made him its mouthpiece. Trump, as we are now told, “is having trouble arriving at a coherent conception of his own presidency” because he “can't decide who he wants to be.” Maybe he is then perfectly attuned to the identity crisis of his “tribe.” It is important here to remember that Trump used to be a Democrat; some say he used the “Republican brand” only to sell himself, and get elected. His so-called “successes” pertain to “the Art of the Deal,” not to an ideologically coherent view (his lexicon would reflect this), his “values” feel more like what the Italians call combinazioni (see Doyle infra), the French petits arrangements entre amis. As a spokesperson for his country, Trump is looking to “make sense” even for himself, for what matters primarily and ultimately to him, it seems, is his own person.
The very fact that a scholarly journal such as this one is devoting an entire issue to the theme of “Translating Trump,” that is to his words, the very fact that not only translators but also academics, journalists, psychologists, poets, and novelists accepted to contribute a sentence, a paragraph, an article, or an interview reflects the sheer bewilderment in which we are livingFootnote13 and, consequently, the need to scramble for words in the maelstrom of what Robert Jay Lifton chillingly calls present day America's “malignant normality” (Lee 5). To pause and reflect circumvents cynicism, alleviates anguish, and enhances resilience, but above all constructs communities of the mind.
If most American voters base their political decisions on who they are rather than what they think, shouldn't translators and commentators keep this in mind when they try to make heads or tails of Trump's words and deeds? What “subculture” should they call forth in their own countries and societies to invent, transpose Trumpspeak? Does it mean borrowing someone else's persona, or rather a group's persona, that of the far right in their own country, the National Front's in France, for example? This will prove to be an impossible task for some: when the words translators and interpreters have to utter are at odds with “material and moral facts as known,”Footnote14 some translators will simply refuse “to be him,” to step into Trump's dystopian world, for “[i[f politics is an extension of ethics, then translation is both a political and a moral act” (Hubscher-Davidson).
If it is up to scholars, sociologists, psychologists, political scientists, and journalists to try to define the culture of the group that (still) supports Donald Trump, its language and codes, as objectively as possible, embarking on the project of this issue of Contemporary French and Francophone Studies to reason (with what sounds as) the unreasonable, is of utmost importance. We could then, perhaps, find meaning once again in this lapidary and absolutely fundamental statement from a German philosopher echoing Boileau two and a half centuries years later: “Everything that can be thought at all can be thought clearly. Everything that can be said can be said clearly” (Wittgenstein). Which is clearly not the case these days.
As we go to press, already over a year into this “presidency,” more than words from Boileau or Wittgenstein or from the academics, interpreters, journalists, translators, poets, psychologists, and novelists who have contributed to this issue, this “presidency,” poised as it is between farce and tragedy, calls for the words of a playwright who has covered the full range of words, from his Hamlet's “Words, words words,” to the words spoken about the rule of a Scottish king, with which we conclude:
Alas, our poor country! It's too frightened to look at itself. Scotland is no longer the land where we were born; it's the land where we'll die. Where no one ever smiles except for the fool who knows nothing. Where sighs, groans, and shrieks rip through the air but no one notices. Where violent sorrow is a common emotion. When the funeral bells ring, people no longer ask who died. Good men die before the flowers in their caps wilt. They die before they even fall sick. (Shakespeare 4.3)
Roger Célestin, Eliane DalMolin, and Anne-Marie Picard
Notes on contributors
Roger Célestin is a Professor of French and Comparative Literature and co-chair of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Connecticut. He has written on travel literature, detective fiction, film, and translation, among other topics. He is the author of From Cannibals to Radicals. Figures and Limits of Exoticism (U of Minnesota P, 1996), co-editor (with Isabelle de Courtivron and Eliane DalMolin) of Beyond French Feminisms: Debates on Women, Politics, and Culture in France, 1980–2001 (Palgrave/St. Martin's, 2002), and co-author (with Eliane DalMolin) of France From 1851 to the Present: Universalism in Crisis (Palgrave, 2007).
Eliane DalMolin is a Professor of French and co-chair of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Connecticut. She has published numerous articles on modern and contemporary poetry and on cinema and is the author of Cutting the Body: Representing Women in Baudelaire's Poetry, Truffaut's Cinema, and Freud's Psychoanalysis (U of Michigan P, 2000), co-editor (with Roger Célestin and Isabelle de Courtivron) of Beyond French Feminisms: Debates on Women, Politics, and Culture in France, 1980–2001 (Palgrave/St. Martin's, 2002), and co-author (with Roger Célestin) of France From 1851 to the Present: Universalism in Crisis (Palgrave, 2007).
Professor of Comparative Literature & English at the American University of Paris, where she teaches psychoanalysis, French literature, and linguistics, Anne-Marie Picard most recently authored From Illiteracy to Literature. Psychoanalysis and Reading (Routledge, 2016).
Notes
1. Anne-Marie Picard is indebted to Bérengère Viennot for the idea of this special issue which came to her after reading: “Pour les traducteurs, Trump est un casse-tête inédit et désolant,” Slate, 14 December 2016. www.slate.fr/story/131087/traduire-trump-mourir-un-peu (“Translate Trump, die a little”). Viennot's article was then cited in Le Monde's editors’ blog: Big Browser (quoted above). But it is Chikako Tsuruta (see also infra), whose interview in the Japan Times, reinforced the idea of the “clash of civilizations” at stake in the endeavor of translating Trump. Tomohiro Osaki, “Japan's interpreters struggle to make sense of ‘Trumpese’,” Japan Times, 17 February 2017. www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2017/02/17/national/japans-interpreters-struggle-to-make-sense-of-trump-speeches/#.WeS3fTBpw2w
2. For an analysis of Trump's Tweets, see data analyst David Robinson's “Text analysis of Trump's tweets confirms he writes only the (angrier) Android half,” Variance Explained. 7 August 2016. varianceexplained.org/r/trump-tweets/: “When Trump wishes the Olympic team good luck, he's tweeting from his iPhone. When he's insulting a rival, he's usually tweeting from an Android. Is this an artefact showing which tweets are Trump's own and which are by some handler?” The Trump Twitter archive project lists all of Trump's tweets: (www.trumptwitterarchive.com/).
3. Among others: Simon Kuper, “‘The Trump Show’ — reality TV at its most compelling.” The Financial Times. 10 August 2017. www.ft.com/content/a41f0638-7c89-11e7-ab01-a13271d1ee9c?mhq5j=e5
4. It is already on 10 Feb. 2017 that Megan McArdle asked: “We Are Already Struggling to Keep Outrage Alive in the Age of Trump: The sheer volume of his offenses against liberal democracy is already overloading the system meant to protect it.” Bloomberg.com. www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-02-10/we-are-already-struggling-to-keep-outrage-alive-in-the-age-of-trump
5. Parker, Kathleen. “Is Trump making America mentally ill?” The Washington Post. 14 June 2017.
6. Mike Pence had described him as a “doer in a game usually reserved for talkers.” CBSNews. 20 July 2016. www.facebook.com/CBSNews/videos/10153752789920950/
7. Nunn, Gary. “Winning words: the language that got Donald Trump elected.” The Guardian. 11 Nov 2016. Web. https://www.theguardian.com/media/mind-your-language/2016/nov/11/winning-words-the-language-that-got-donald-trump-elected
8. “‘We are also praying for the people of Puerto Rico,’ Mr Trump told the crowd, dragging out the vowels into a caricature of the Spanish pronunciation. ‘We love Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico.’” Emily Shugerman, “Donald Trump uses ‘Spanish’ accent to pronounce ‘Puerto Rico’ three times at Hispanic heritage event.” The Independent. 6 Oct. 2017. Web. 4 Feb. 2018. www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-puerto-rico-spanish-accent-video-white-house-hispanic-heritage-event-a7987446.html
9. “That's wrong. They were wrong. It's The New York Times, they're always wrong. They were wrong.” (quoted by Nunn). See also Peter W. Stevenson, “We noticed Donald Trump says a lot of things twice. He says a lot of things twice.” Washington Post. 15 Jan. 2016. Web. 4 Feb. 2018. www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/01/15/this-video-of-donald-trump-repeating-himself-is-pretty-great-video/?utm_term=.e20efccb6a9e
10. Casey Williams. “Has Trump Stolen Philosophy's Critical Tools?” THE STONE. 17 Apr. 2017. www.nytimes.com/2017/04/17/opinion/has-trump-stolen-philosophys-critical-tools.html
11. This involuntary mimicry of Trump's words was called “Trumpian linguistic train wreck” by Slate journalist Katy Waldman. “We All Talk Like Donald Trump Now. Sad!” Slate. 28 Feb. 2017. Web. 4 Feb. 2018. www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2017/02/we_all_talk_like_donald_trump_now_sad.html
12. “In fact, most do not know what ‘left’ and ‘right’ mean in politics. The authors argue further that voters first choose a candidate and only then the afferent issues. Rationalization of their choice comes after the fact. Hence the importance of persuasion… and chance: ‘[E]lection outcomes are mostly just erratic reflections of the current balance of partisan loyalties in a given political system. In a two-party system with competitive elections, that means the choice between the candidates is essentially a coin toss’” (Achen and Bartels 16).
13. A few samples: David Shook, “Latin American authors bewildered by Donald Trump: ‘I just can't believe it’: Some of Latin America's leading literary figures gathered at the Oaxaca International Book Fair and discussed the president-elect and what lies ahead.” The Guardian. 8 Dec. 2016. www.theguardian.com/books/2016/dec/08/latin-american-writers-donald-trump-oaxaca-book-festival; “German leaders dismayed and bewildered by Trump interview,” 16 January 2017. www.dw.com/en/german-leaders-dismayed-and-bewildered-by-trump-interview/a-37143608 Marc Semo, Simon Roger, and Gilles Paris (Washington, correspondant, see his contribution, infra), “Climat: après l'annonce du retrait américain, une onde de choc et des questions,” Le Monde, 2 June 2017. www.lemonde.fr/climat/article/2017/06/02/climat-apres-l-annonce-du-retrait-americain-une-onde-de-choc-et-des-questions_5137499_1652612.html
14. Peter Newmark qtd. in Hubscher-Davidson.
Works Cited
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- Trump, Donald J.. “...can't change history, but you can learn from it. Robert E Lee, Stonewall Jackson - who's next, Washington, Jefferson? So foolish! Also...” 17 Aug. 2017, 13:15 UTC. Tweet.
- Trump, Donald J.. “Despite the constant negative press covfefe.” 30 May 2017, 11:06:25 PM. Tweet.
- Trump, Donald J.. “The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes, @NBCNews, @ABC, @CBS, @CNN) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!” 17 Feb. 2017, 21:48 UTC. Tweet.
- Trump, Donald J.. “Sad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments. You.....” 17 Aug. 2017, 13:07 UTC. Tweet.
- Trump, Donald J.. “The W.H. is functioning perfectly, focused on HealthCare, Tax Cuts/Reform & many other things. I have very little time for watching T.V.” 12 July 2017, 13:39 UTC. Tweet.
- Trump, Donald J.. “With all of its phony unnamed sources & highly slanted & even fraudulent reporting, #Fake News is DISTORTING DEMOCRACY in our country!” 16 July 2017, 11:15 UTC. Tweet.
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