To see or not to see.

I see. This simple and quintessentially British way of indicating understanding isn’t easily translated – not least because, very often, to see is not necessarily to comprehend. There’s an old TV ad for the Guardian newspaper which encapsulates this very well. Three shots: 1) a man in a coat running as if from a car in pursuit, 2) the same man coming up quickly behind another man as if to assault him, 3) the coated man pouncing on and pushing the other aside just in time to save him from being crushed by a huge falling object. The ad’s strapline exhorts viewers to buy the Guardian in order to get ‘the whole picture’. How often do we see the whole picture, or anything close to it? The fact that the British regularly use the expression ‘I see’ doesn’t mean that they always get the full view or have particularly penetrative powers of perception. Rather, it’s more suggestive of the endearingly clipped and understated manner many British people have. Carried literally into other languages the expression might read: ich sehe, je regarde, meh dekhia, ik zie. All of these renditions would strike the native reader as odd. In order to convey the true meaning of the English, a translator needs to use the native equivalent: ich verstehe, je comprends, meh samaj-gia, ik begrijp het.

I wonder to what extent the language that we inhabit, its quirks and limitations, affects our ways of thinking and being. Perhaps only those who speak more than one language are really in a position to know this – and there are quite a few of them here in The Hague. More than 40% of the population is not of Dutch origin, and the microcosm of the world represented at the Crossing Border festival is even more multi-cultural and lingual. Khaled Mattawa, Libyan poet and translater from Arabic into English, commented that once you’ve translated something language never feels quite the same again. He said, ‘common things become fresher’.

Sasa Stanisic, Yugoslavian born and now writing in German, did a reading and discussion in English. He talked about scenes and characters from his novel, improvising charmingly and unhesitatingly wherever the exact English word would not come to him. So, ‘peace pauses’ was the lovely equivalent of ‘ceasefire’ and ‘peoples nationality count’ was enough to suggest ‘census’. And you can see here, in these creatively extemporized solutions, what Mattawa meant by the freshness translation bestows on language. Even if it isn’t necessarily ‘perfect’, it briefly illuminates things in a different hue, giving us another aspect of the picture – even if it’s an image we think we know.

Maybe there is no such thing as a ‘whole picture’. But what we can certainly aim for is a fuller one. And you can get close to that at the Crossing Border festival. Its synaesthetic aspect makes for a richly layered experience. Music, film, art, the written word – these form the cultural palette from which we can colour our world. The more we use them, the better we will see.