LANGUAGE
The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote that "if a lion could speak our language, we could not understand it." In other words, because we do not have a shared experience and worldview, its words would lack any context allowing us to interpret them¹.
We need an insight into the cultural milieu of the speaker so as to properly catch the meaning.
To which a translator might uncharitably reply "Dude, it took you thirty years at Cambridge Uni to realise that? Slow learner, huh?"
I prefer to illustrate the leonine interaction in this form:
If a lion offered you a nice cup of tea, what would you expect?
As Wittgenstein would rightly insist, we need some background to work out where our shared points of reference lie. Let's imagine this lion is from the British Isles. Geographically and zoologically implausible, I know. But it's a talking lion, after all — we can stretch our boundaries a little to indulge the fantasy, right?
So when our British or Irish lion offers a 'nice cup of tea', I know exactly what it means. A shared cultural setting gives me all the context I need to form an accurate mental image before the promised tea arrives.
I know the cup, its approximate form, handle, material and likely colour schemes. I know the tea: dark amber in colour², poured from a teapot, since if it were using teabags the lion would have made it in a mug, not a cup. I know that it will be served with a little milk by default.
If I want it black (not in fact 'black', obviously, but 'dark amber'), I'd best let the server know in advance. It is a lion after all — we want to avoid any awkward misunderstandings and punitive clawses. I'm aware that 'no milk' would be seen as slightly odd, but 'no sugar' is quite normal.
Most importantly, perhaps, I know what 'nice' means here, the adjective that English teachers abhor and abjure.
"It means nothing!" they scream at their students. They are wrong.
Here it means "let's just take a bit of a break, sit down and regroup, get our strength up. Take stock of the situation, which might be less than ideal — it's started drizzling again, or your house has just burnt down — but a cup of tea will comfort us, centre us, tie us in to our familiar heritage. Give us the strength to deal with the present and future, by drawing on the past."
Phew! Quite something for a despised 'nothing adjective' to signify, eh?
Unless the lion isn't from Britain or Ireland at all, in which case it probably means something completely different. It might even literally refer to the quality of the tea, like Agent Cooper's 'damn fine cup of coffee' in David Lynch's Twin Peaks.
And the cup might instead be a thin glass beaker, served on a pewter platter. The tea made with mint. Or it could be green, and prepared in an elaborate ceremony. There may be particular rules as to how it is served or sipped. To whom first, how many cups. What social niceties are expected before, during and after.
Wherever tea is the national drink, it will mean something. A lot. Little short of everything in certain cultural situations.
How the hell do you translate that in five words, two of which are purely grammatical fillers?
In Spain, where I now live, it's far easier in a way. Sometimes, as Freud might have said, a cup of tea is just a cup of tea. Here it is infused with no real cultural meaning, steeped in no generational heritage.
So much so, that I seldom drink it these days (whisper it softly, lest I have my UK passport rescinded by the authorities). I've got out of the habit. I've transplanted myself from the native soil where drinking — and, crucially, sharing — tea made sense to me.
Contrary to Sting's Englishman in New York, I don't take tea; I drink coffee, my dear.
But again, 'un café' is not 'a coffee'. In Spain, if unadorned by any modifier, it is what would in international English be typically understood as an 'espresso'. Short, strong, black. In a dinky little cup with a miniature handle that must be plucked between thumb and first finger.
If you feel the need to specify, you could call it a 'café solo'. But the 'solo' is largely redundant. Just as my British lion knows that nine out of ten of its guests will want milk, its Spanish counterpart assumes that at least the same proportion will want their 'café' black. But almost certainly with plenty of sugar.
If they wanted it with milk, they would have asked for a 'cortado' (small, more or less half and half) or a 'café con leche' (much longer, far heavier on the milk).
A 'café con leche' is not conceptually a coffee drink at all, but a hot milk drink, in this case flavoured with coffee, just as it might have been flavoured with cocoa. Its physiological and psychological function is for the milk to fill your belly, not for the caffeine to jump-start your brain.
But the default setting, the 'cigarette break' option in a non-smoking world, is un café. Its form could hardly be more different from 'a cup of tea'. Yet its function is almost exactly the same. A communal moment, a break in the routine, a psychological pick-me-up.
There is a whole depth of meaning in these commonplace everyday situations, without even thinking of any imagery and symbolism that might be poured into the cup by an author.
When it comes to such literary translation, there are three instances that immediately spring to mind.
The most famous cup of tea in literature is perhaps the one into which The Narrator dips his biscuit in Remembrance of Things Past. That, at least, is how we tend to conceptualise the scene in the English-speaking world.
Except the biscuit that triggers three thousand pages of memories and gives birth to the term 'Proustian', isn't a biscuit at all, but a madeleine. Kind of half-biscuit, half-cake? And the tea isn't tea, but tisane, an infusion of lime blossom. Not from the citrus tree, but the completely unrelated linden, to complicate matters further.
Not to mention that 'Remembrance of Things Past' is a phrase borrowed from Shakespeare's Sonnet XXX, rather than a direct rendering of Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu.
C. K. Scott Moncrieff's original translation actually refers to a madeleine and 'lime-leaf tea'. But does that really mean anything to an English reader? And if it does, then does it mean the same in terms of contextual implication as it does to a French reader of the original French? Though a Québécois or Senegalese might form quite a different mental image.
In any event, the cultural interpreter of our mind's eye instinctively does the job for itself. The madeleine dipped in tisane becomes a digestive dunked in tea, or whatever our own local equivalent might be.
From Proust my brain makes an infinitely improbable leap to Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The comically pseudoscientific explanation of the physics behind the Heart of Gold spaceship calls for a 'strong Brownian motion producer (say a nice hot cup of tea)' as the spark plug to trigger random motion across star systems.
The whole book is, despite its gargle-blastingly pan-galactic scope, quintessentially English and middle-class in tone. Douglas Adams' nice hot cup of tea is a genteel English cup of tea. Familiar, recognisable, slotted neatly into a surrounding cultural jigsaw. Which is what makes its association with bizarre space-time anomalies humorous, through the device of incongruity.
But if the reader doesn't perceive 'cups of tea' that way, as a fundamental part of daily, social routine, does the image work? Should a Spanish translation not refer to it as a 'café'?
Except that wouldn't be right either, because a 'nice hot cup of tea' sits there being hot and relatively voluminous. It's large enough to stick probes and sensors into in a science lab setting. So it would have to be a 'café con leche', which would be not the translation of 'cup of tea', but another form of cultural equivalent. A homely, unthreatening source of liquid heat.
Exactly not the kind of thing you would expect suddenly to transport you to Alpha Centauri or Betelgeuse.
So maybe a cup of tea is a café con leche after all.
For the last stop on this tour of Anglo-Franco-Spanish tea and coffee terms, we head to Colombia, and García Márquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude. When the town of Macondo is struck by a plague of amnesia, they resort to making labels to attach to everything in the settlement — just as language learners often do with Post-it notes — so as not to forget what each item is.
But in an echo of Wittgenstein's principle that words mean nothing without experiential context, they feel forced to create increasingly elaborate labels to explain what to do with those things. What the 'rules of the language game' are, as Wittgenstein would have said.
One example given for these explanatory labels is attached to the cow:
"This is the cow. She must be milked every morning to produce milk, which must be boiled to mix with coffee to make café con leche."
Except the standard published translation doesn't say 'café con leche'. It says 'coffee with milk', which is meaningless and absurd. Obviously, if you mix 'coffee' with 'milk', you will get 'coffee with milk'. But that isn't a valid lexical unit, or syntagma, in English, the way that it is in Spanish.
We might say 'milky coffee', or 'white coffee'. But even that wouldn't really work. It doesn't convey the sense of 'the warming drink you have to start the day'.
For an English translation, maybe the 'café con leche' should be a 'nice cup of tea', taking us neatly full circle to our brunch date with Ludwig and the Lion³.
So what's it to be, dear Lion? Tea, coffee or me? On second thoughts, don't answer that.
Footnotes
- There is a fun cartoon version of Wittgenstein's lion here.
- Assam, if you please. Milk, no sugar. Thanks.
- Jerome, the patron saint of translators, also had a pet lion. Coincidence? Or hidden meaning?