One thing is not another.
We engage in translation.
Definition of translation
: an act, process, or instance of translating: such as
a
: a rendering from one language into another
also : the product of such a rendering
b
: a change to a different substance, form, or appearance : CONVERSION
c
(1) : a transformation of coordinates in which the new axes are parallel to the old ones
(2) : uniform motion of a body in a straight line (Merriam Webster)
We are constantly in the process of changing "to a different substance, form, or appearance."
Not only is form emptiness and emptiness form, but the more a thing changes the more it becomes itself.
This is a form of hospitality. We practice translation with languages, while navigating a more existential or ontological translation of not-self through no-self into self-itself.
We long to be home.
In On Translation, Ricoeur spells out the various implications of this paradigm of linguistic hospitality.
Translation sets us not only intellectual work .... but also an ethical prob- lem. Bringing the reader to the author, bringing the author to the reader, at the risk of serving and of betraying two masters: this is to practice what I like to call linguistic hospitality. It is this which serves as a model for other forms of hospitality that I think resemble it: confessions, religions, are they not like languages that are foreign to one another, with their lexicon, their grammar, their rhetoric, their stylistic which we must learn in order to make our way into them? And is Eucharistic hospitality not to be taken up with the same risks of translation-betrayal, but also with the same renunciation of the perfect translation.1
1 Paul Ricoeur, On Translation, trans. Eileen Brennan (New York: Routledge, 2006), p. 23.
A crucial step in resisting the lure of the Perfect Translation is to honor a dialectical balance between proximity (welcoming the stranger into our midst) and distance (acknowledging that something is always lost in translation: the other’s meanings can never be completely mine). A ‘hospitable’ translator is one who aims at approximate correspondences between two tongues without ever assuming these to be final or adequate. Which is why translation is always an endless task. It is work which is also a working through, in the psycho- analytic sense of Durcharbeitung—a difficult and demanding labor of mediation between one linguistic mind/culture/world and another. Such mediation involves a process of mourning and letting go—and in particular the renunciation of the egocentric or tribalist drive to reduce the alterities of the guest to one’s own will for total adequation. As if, in translation, there were only one true language: my own. Our own. But that is not so. As Ricoeur insists, there is no such thing as language, only languages. Traditore, tradutore: to translate is always in some sense to betray; for one can never do one’s guest true justice. And this means accepting that we all live east of Eden and after Babel—and that this is a good thing. Our linguistic fallenness is also our linguistic finitude: a reminder of human limits which saves us from the delusion of sufficiency, the fantasy of restoring some prelapsarian logos (where we play God speaking a single divine language with a perfect word for each perfect thing). We also need to abandon the illusion of a perfect logos of the future— such as the enlightenment dream of a caracteristica universalis or the more recent delusion of a pan-European Esperanto. Indeed the translation model of hospitality stands, politically, as an indictment of all historical attempts to impose a single language on diverse peoples—Greek, Latin, French, Spanish or today English (sometimes known as ‘Globish’). Imperial campaigns have always sought to impose a normative lingua franca on the multiplicity of vernaculars. But it is the right of every living tongue to speak itself and be translated into other tongues while retaining a certain reservoir of irreducible, untranslatable intimacies and secrets. Whence the legitimate double injunction of every guest language when faced with its host: ‘Translate me! Don’t translate me!’ Take me but not all of me. Take me in, incorporate me, but leave something of me to myself. Good translation is transfusion not fusion. It signals a mutual transaction between two worlds, never a subsuming of their differences into one.
(--Double Hospitality. Between Word and Touch, by Richard Kearney, Boston College, Journal for Continental Philosophy of Religion 1 (2019) 71–89, brill.com/jcpr)
We like the idea that we are on our way to some place that will be a form of translation from this physical place to that spiritual place.
And yet, we pause and ponder whether there is an untranslatable intimacy that dwells between these imagined concretions of our traveling.
At the end of meditation practice at meetingbrook, a part of our metta is: "May we come to dwell in our true home."
Our true home?
Perhaps we long to be what is lost in translation.
