As Sigmund Freud once said,“Traduttore, traditore”. A joke confirmed by Benedetto Croce. In contrast, and to the better, Italo Calvino thought that translation was the best way to read a text.

Pier Paolo Pasolini – who did not always have a good relationship with Calvino – wrote that bourgeois literature was incapable of identifying with others’ life experiences, and that such literature was a defense of privilege and a first step towards racism. To strive to live the words, thoughts and gestures of a character from another social world is to break with this bourgeois literature, and with colonial literature as well. For Gayatri Spivak literature is the imagining of other possible worlds, different from our own: literature must necessarily be about hybridity and dislocation. Pasolini observed that the author, when speaking of the other, may incur errors and mystifications. Even while giving life to the thoughts of this othered character, the author attributes to them his or her words, the words of his or her intellectual and bourgeois world, or Western world, or even attributes to this character his or her own morals,  insofar as he or she is attributing their language. Hence the need for the Free Indirect Monolog or Speech (Discorso Libero Indiretto) that must be written in a language that is different from that of the author. Pasolini abandons literary writing because cinema is much more able to be a language in act, through the “free indirect subjective” and because cinema’s language is that of reality, which is a shared ground for the author and character. Between the two, the only difference is stylistic, not linguistic. The Free Indirect Monolog averts that indecency that feminists called “speaking for others”.  Spivak, like Pasolini, stressed the strategic importance of the figure of the “Native Informant” whom colonial and post-colonial discourses alike pose as both necessary and foreclosed. The Native Informant, just like the character of that bourgeois literature, criticized by Pasolini, unable to imagine other worlds, is a representative of another world, is reduced to silence and put off, because its voice, its agency is either ignored or is reconstructed and staged through the Name of the Father of colonial and post-colonial discourse. This was Pasolini’s problem: the bourgeois author either does not speak of the worker or turns him into a kind of bourgeois with a blue collar. Workers, sub-proletarians, women, native informants were often figures without interest, inactive, without agency and nailed to victimage. Europe (the West) silences or interpellates the Other; bourgeois literature ignores or makes a caricature of the subaltern. As Spivak recalls, from Kant to Sartre the West did not want to understand the “idiot”, the “child”, the “primitive” or the “foreigner” or the “woman”. Pasolini moves on towards cinema because it involves a “seeing together” (that is, in other words, the “semi-subjective shot” discovered by Jean Mitry): author and character look together, because he does not want the Other to be a fiction or a caricature. That is what Homi Bhabha calls translation. Translation, argues Bhabha, is language in actu (enunciation, positioning) instead of language in situ (enunciate, proposition). If the politics of naming fixes, the translation or poetics of naming – as in Derek Walcott’s practice – makes different spaces and times resonate, it is movement. Bhabha is inspired by Benjamin and his concept of the “estrangement of languages”, so the task of translation is not to bring the different back to the identical but to keep communication open and even untranslatable. Once again knowledge is not conjunction but disjunction. Perhaps, to put it in Jullien’s words, a dia-logos, in sad and grim times when security narratives justify rearming and building walls and borders. The transfer of meaning can never be total, “translation wraps its content like a royal cloak in wide folds” (Benjamin). Bhabha develops the Benjaminian thesis into a theory of cultural difference, whereby every cultural system is inscribed in a position and cultural differences, even if they dialogue with each other, can be immeasurable. This “estrangedness” is not a weakness or a failure, but renders language a constantly open confrontation. To know is not a supposed-to know, to know-the-other, to make the other (the colonial subject, the woman, the worker…) speak in our language but, as in the Free Indirect, to slip the enunciation subject into my enunciate, whose subject is me: slipping from one enunciation to another. Mixture of subjects. Knowing, to say it with Pasolini, is heresy; moving from one heterogeneous system to another is what he has always sought in novels, poems and especially in films. The Free Indirect, which in cinema becomes the free indirect subjective is the mixture of these systems, the very mixture that Foucault archaeologically investigates, the thing that Deleuze – whose birth centenary also falls this year – calls “multiplicity and becoming”, knowledge as transforming power and not language that transmits commands or preserves traditions but language in an act that transforms. In a famous and influential talk Spivak was critical – perhaps a little too much – of certain positions of Deleuze and Foucault who, according to her judgement, in their battle for the emancipation of a desiring subject, would have ignored or trivialized the issue of workers’ struggle.  In On the Waterfront, Elia Kazan, the “traitor”, although not analytically or conceptually confronting the dynamics of capitalism – but it was not his job – instead depicts that world of work that in its wet and slippery spaces, weighs and crushes: an architecture of daily horror that had rarely been seen and heard, at least in American cinema – the everyday  horror described by Adorno in Minima moralia. Art, as Adorno warned, obviously cannot picture itself innocent, affirming its own subjectivity and therefore autonomy. In fact, that’s not what Kazan does. The film does not just claim that real and historical objectivity is guilty, perhaps even of Kazan’s “betrayal”. Will it not be Barthes himself – who criticized (too much) that film because it was not conflicted enough – in Le Plaisir du Texte in 1973 and in 1977-78, at the Collège de France, who suggested replacing conflict with difference? Difference that does not soften the conflict but is lateral, next to and perhaps beyond. Conflict is always regulated and worn out and, as Spivak would say, it always involves a certain essentialism and binarism. It’s time to get rid of it.

Toni D’Angela

Translated by Elisa Mancioli

Revision by Will Straw