by Laura Lonsdale, The Queen’s College, Oxford Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls is highly innovative in incorporating the structures and idioms of Spanish into its English prose. His literal translations, puns and false cognates (false friends) have upset many critics, but they reveal that, in spite of his ‘shaky grammar,’ Hemingway had a fine ear for linguistic nuance. By exploiting the overlapping and diverging meanings of cognates in the two languages, Hemingway not only gave historical and cultural substance to his work, but exposed both the difficulty and the necessity of ‘keeping it accurate,’ and ultimately attended to the ethical dimension of translation. (871 KB) In The Translation Zone, Emily Apter argues that the events of 9/11 revealed – among other things – the linguistic deficiencies of an obstinately monolingual USA, and its naïve or arrogant failure to anticipate the hostility directed towards it from abroad. Her book is an attempt to consider translation, bothlinguistic and cultural, as the basis for a comparative literature that takes stock of the ‘complexity of language politics in a world at once more monolingual and more multilingual,’ as the blurb indicates. As a discipline, translation studies has itself paid increasingly close attention to the cultural, ethical and political dimension of its practice, as Antoine Berman’s L’épreuve de l’étranger (The Trials of the Foreign, 1985), Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s ‘The Politics of Translation’ (1992) and Lawrence Venuti’s The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Translation (1998) perhaps most famously attest. With their shared emphasis on preserving what is foreign in the foreign, of avoiding the ‘impoverishment’ that for Berman is typical of the ‘deforming tendencies’ of translation (2012: 244), the focus of translation has for some time now – at least in theory – been shifting away from a ‘domesticating’ tendency to erase the act of translation altogether, and towards a moreethically and politically aware act of ‘foreignisation:’ ‘Translations… inevitably perform a work of domestication. Those that work best, the most powerful in recreating cultural values and the most responsible in accounting for that power, usually engage readers in domestic terms that have been defamiliarised to some extent, made fascinating by a revisionary encounter with a foreign text’ (Venuti 1998: 5). Of course, there is a contrast to be drawn here between a translation prone to ‘rationalization,’ ‘clarification,’ ‘expansion’ or the various types of destruction that Berman includes in his list of ‘deforming tendencies,’ and a translation that just gets it plain wrong. Sometimes, after all, accuracy and clarity remain the order of the day, especially where the stakes are high. Apter reminds us, for example, of the famous ‘Ems dispatch’ that contributed in no small part to the tensions leading to the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war, thanks to the mistranslation of a key word(Apter 2006: 19-20). Most mistranslations are less catastrophic. In the age of machine translation and globalised business there are numerous very funny examples of it, from the shop front decked out with the name ‘Translate server error’ or the Welsh road sign reading ‘I am currently out of the office,’ to the jam that ‘tastes like grandma’ or the assurance that ‘we are in this construction for the inconvenience.’ This points not just to the difference between poor translation and mistranslation, but also to the difference between communicative language – which tries (and sometimes fails) to transfer meaning – and literary language, which tries (and sometimes fails) to say more than it appears to say, to expand meaning. There is no clear demarcation point between these two types and uses of language, and translation can sometimes blur the difference even further, contracting or expanding the communicative or poetic reach of a statement considerably, if accidentally. For example, in asubtitled Bollywood film the corny but clearly figurative ‘you are one in a million’ became the deflationary ‘I have selected you from among several other people,’ while the sign on the lawn presumably reading ‘Keep off the grass’ became the much nicer, ‘Do not disturb: Tiny grass is dreaming.’ But mistranslation can also, in the right context, be productive. This is the case, I want to argue, in Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, a novel whose unusual and innovative use of language has perhaps alienated more readers than it has won over. In this novel Hemingway brought to fruition a stylistic strategy that had appeared in earlier works, but which had not yet reached its full expression: the incorporation into English of the structures and idioms of another language, in this case Spanish. He does this largely through the literal translation and transposition into English of idioms and false cognates, or words that appear to be the same in two languages but which in fact havedifferent meanings, often referred to in language teaching as false friends. Expressions relying on such translations and transpositions, such as ‘Not even in a joke,’ ‘The blond one with the rare name,’ or ‘I besmirch the milk of thy duty,’ generate a style both jagged and aggravating, though often tersely beautiful. Since the novel’s publication in 1941 many critics have found fault with Hemingway’s Spanish, finding it inaccurate to the point of ‘chauvinism’ (Josephs 1983). Especially irritating to Hispanophone critics has been his sloppy spelling and accenting of Spanish words incorporated untranslated into the novel, regarded as symptomatic of a generally arrogant, and probably ignorant, manhandling of the Spanish language. But there is plenty in Hemingway’s translated Spanish to suggest that in fact he had a fine ear for language, especially linguistic nuance, and that though there might have been errors in his written Spanish, there was also great subtlety in his semantic andsyntactic incorporation of it into English. In what follows I will argue that the ‘mistranslations’ that have so upset critics are not surface errors pointing to ignorance, but are rather rich sources of alternative meaning. Equivocation In 1943, Edward Fenimore wrote that Hemingway used Spanish in For Whom the Bell Tolls as a pretext for bringing echoes of epic and Elizabethan language to the Anglophone reader’s ear. This is in keeping with the quote from John Donne – ‘No man is an Iland intire of it selfe […]’ – that forms the novel’s epigraph and provides the novel’s title, framing its concern with ethical community. For Fenimore, the Spanish idiom is used to defamiliarise English but also to make it resound with its own history, generating an epic quality in the prose through a sense of remoteness in time and space, which in turns grants universality to the novel’s themes. But Spanish is not only a pretext for bringing to bear archaic meanings and uses of English words; it alsooffers overlapping yet differing ranges of meaning to imply values that would not be immediately obvious to an Anglophone reader. Hemingway exploits the Spanish idiom in order to multiply meaning, to generate even at the level of single words the sense that ideas can contain their opposite, which is perhaps not as opposite as it seemed; to find in the ‘translation’ of a word a range of meaning that both overlaps with and extends its meaning in English. In many cases Hemingway uses cognates, often false ones, to open out and multiply the meaning and the expressive power of words. The word ‘illusion’ provides an interesting example of this, as a cognate both real and false depending on its context. It crops up on two occasions. Firstly, when Pilar says to Robert Jordan: I put great illusion in the Republic. I believe firmly in the Republic and I have faith. I believe it with fervour as those who have religious faith believe in the mysteries. (96) And secondly, when Pablo says to theband: I have thought you are a group of illusioned people […] Led by a woman with a brain between her thighs and a foreigner who comes to destroy you. (224) Pilar’s use of the word is unnatural in English; it draws its inferred meaning from the hope, excitement and anticipation that is proper to the Spanish ‘ilusión.’ But when Pablo uses it, it implies the fiction, fantasy or mirage that we would exclusively associate with it in English. The meaning of the word in Pablo’s mouth is impoverished, negative, lacking its wider remit; but Pilar is equally deaf to the word’s alternative meaning, which for an Anglophone reader bleeds through her use of it and taints her hope with the threat of a lost cause. In this way it adds to the novel’s strong sense of foreboding, combining both the promise and lost cause of the Republic in a single word. The literal translation of false cognates can of course lead to misinterpretation, and Hemingway – contrary to what has often been suggested – was nodoubt well aware that there were both risks and opportunities in playing on double meanings. There is one word in particular that suggests this is the case. As the band makes its preparations on the day of the attack, Pablo apologises to Robert Jordan for having stolen some of his equipment, saying: I am sorry for having taken thy material […] It was an equivocation. (421) This statement does not make sense in English, unless we correctly infer from the context that the Spanish ‘equivocación’ means ‘error’ or ‘mistake.’ In English to equivocate is to ‘use… words or expressions that are susceptible of a double signification, with a view to mislead; esp. the expression of a virtual falsehood in the form of a proposition which (in order to satisfy the speaker’s conscience) is verbally true.’ To equivocate is, ‘in bad sense: “To mean one thing and express another;” to prevaricate; to insinuate by equivocation; to evade (an oath, a promise) by equivocation’ (OED). The meanings of the verband the noun gravitate around ambiguity and falsehood, a reminder of all that Hemingway despises in literature: namely, the failure to ‘keep it accurate.’ But at the same time it seems to be a joke about his own linguistic technique in the novel. Obsolete meanings of ‘equivocation’ in English include ‘a word identical in form but not in meaning;’ to equivocate in the 17th century was ‘to have the same sound with; to resemble so closely as to occasion mistake; to use a word in more than one application or sense; to use words of double meaning; to deal in ambiguities; to misapprehend through ambiguity of language.’ To equivocate is quite a risk for a writer for whom ‘style was a moral act, a desperate struggle for moral probity amid the confusions of the world and the slippery complexities of one’s own nature. To set things down simple and right is to hold a standard of rightness against a deceiving world’ (Barrett 1972: 65). But the language of For Whom the Bell Tolls consistentlyacknowledges the slipperiness of language, and employs translation to generate both misleading and overlapping meanings. How does this function as a strategy of translation in a novel with such powerful ethical and political concerns? Is it rendered suspect by its linguistic ‘equivocations’? The vexed question of Robert Jordan’s use of the nickname ‘rabbit’ for his beloved Maria presents itself here, because it indicates a degree of both humour and trickery in linguistic equivocation which is nevertheless superseded by more significant interlingual resonances. The Spanish ‘conejo’ is not only the word for rabbit, but also the euphemistic slang term for female genitalia, a fact that has exercised and offended critics in equal measure. One critic argues that the love affair between Robert Jordan and Maria is too heartfelt for Hemingway to make such a crude joke at his character’s expense, and so concludes that the author, with his ‘poor Spanish,’ is the butt of his own ignorance (Josephs1983); while another is convinced that Hemingway not only knew what the word meant but made Robert Jordan the butt of the joke because, as a university instructor, he represented the literary critical establishment that Hemingway so disliked (Rudat 1990). This is incoherent in my view, given that Robert Jordan is so clearly a man of action and a writer in the making, rather than a pretentious intellectual. Though we cannot know whether or not Hemingway knew the Spanish meaning of the word, his colloquial knowledge of the language makes it highly unlikely that he did not; and so it seems more useful to ask how the novel exploits the word’s various associations in the two languages. As others have noted, Maria is clearly associated with the natural world, and the word ‘rabbit,’ even in English, suggests sexuality and fertility. She is also associated with Spain through the likeness of her tawny cropped hair to a field of grain in the ‘yellow and tawny’ Castile (Hemingway 2004: 81), in acause – and other cultural frames of reference, especially native American culture. The fact that these referents often rest on false cognates – to be a Republican in the USA is not the same as to be one in Spain, as Maria and Robert Jordan recognise – creates overlapping frames while pointing also to difference. There is, therefore, a value structure based on integration and ethical community that nevertheless rests on a persistent recognition of foreignness; and at the same time there is a denial of the total foreignness implied by the word ‘barbarian.’ The language of For Whom the Bell Tolls does two things at once. It brings English and Spanish into dialogue with one another, allowing each to resound in the other and enriching literary language in the process. It offers a creative interpretation of the spirit of a language and a culture that, though it may be marked by cultural assumptions of the age, does not simply attempt to assimilate the one into the other. The translationaltechnique that Hemingway develops is, to my mind, profoundly in keeping with Berman’s understanding of ethical translation in three notable respects. Firstly, it does not displace Spanish unconvincingly to a dialect of English, or simply pepper it with stereotypical exclamations or interjections, for ‘an exoticisation that turns the foreign from abroad into the foreign at home winds up merely ridiculing the original’ (Berman 2012: 250; emphasis in the original). Secondly, Hemingway does not destroy expressions and idioms by finding ‘equivalents’ in English, but rather taps into what Berman calls a ‘proverb consciousness’ that ‘detects, in a new proverb, the brother of an authentic one: the world of our proverbs is thus augmented and enriched’ (251). Finally, the language of the novel preserves in literalness the alternative mode of signification of the other language, avoiding the over-interpretation, clarification, or impoverishment typical of conventional modes of translation, andattending less to the ‘restitution of meaning’ than to the ‘signifying process’ itself (253). Far from negating, acclimatising or ‘naturalising’ the foreign (241), Hemingway’s use of language tends towards integration while ‘receiving the Foreign as Foreign,’ and in this way attends to the ‘properly ethical aim of the translating act’ (241). Even if he couldn’t spell. Works cited Apter, Emily. The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature. 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For Whom the Bell Tolls. London: Arrow, 2004. —. Death in the Afternoon. [1932]. London: Arrow, 2004. Josephs, Allen. ‘Hemingway’s Poor Spanish: Chauvinism and Loss of Credibility in For Whom the Bell Tolls.’ In Hemingway: A Revaluation. Ed. Donald Noble. Troy, N.Y: Whitston Pub. Co, 1983. 205-223. Link, Alex. ‘Rabbit at the Riverside: Names and Impossible Crossings in Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls.’ The Hemingway Review 29.1 (Fall 2009): 134-139. Rudat, Wolfgang E. H. “Hemingway’s Rabbit: Slips of the Tongue and Other Linguistic Gamesin For Whom the Bell Tolls.” The Hemingway Review 10.1 (Fall 1990): 34-51. Venuti, Lawrence, ed. The Translation Studies Reader. 3rd ed. London: Routledge, 2012. Venuti, Lawrence. The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference. London: Routledge, 1998.