Translation
Plants as Tropes for Translation
In his seminal treatise Über die verschiedenen Methoden des Übersetzens (On the Different Methods of Translating) from 1813, the German philologist Friedrich Schleiermacher alludes to human activities with plants six times. Thinking about translation between different languages, Schleiermacher equates plants with words, and soil with language: “Just as our soil may have become richer and more fertile [ . . . ] through the repeated introduction of foreign plants, so do we feel that our language [ . . . ] can only flourish vigorously and fully develop its own potential through repeated exposure to the foreign.”[1]
Schleiermacher considers plants and words as objects that are being moved from one geographical or linguistic milieu to another. Both are potentially mobile and able to thrive in new places, improving the new surroundings and leading to more diversity and richness.
Schleiermacher’s essay partakes of a tradition that employs vegetal terms in thinking about translation, stretching from his contemporary Friedrich Schlegel[2] to Walter Benjamin.[3]
The vegetal imagery of this Romantic tradition has become so commonplace that it is usually disregarded as being purely rhetorical (in the sense of “accidental”).[4] But what happens if we take the linkage between plants and translation literally, following David R. Gruber’s call for “materialist metaphor studies”?[5]
Plants offer themselves for such a rethinking because they are constantly in processes of being translated and of translating in the broader sense. Plants are transported to and from places, translocated into habitats they need to adapt to; their communicative faculties are transcoded into human language, while they themselves perform a transformation necessary for animal life (photosynthesis) and ensure their own survival by sending out both biochemical and electrical signals and seeds, pollen, and spores, thereby engaging in an exchange through parts of themselves as well as through animal messengers. Plants thus need to be considered as objects, agents, and tropes of translation; as doing translation and as being translated; as well as providing powerful figures for such processes of translation.[6]
Plants as Objects in Translation
The rich semantic field of terms deriving from the Latin verb transferre, meaning “to carry” or “to bring over,” highlights the manifold ways of translating that plants are engaged in. In this vein, spatial transfer—the concrete practice of moving plants between places—can be considered a first kind of vegetal translation.
As recurring media coverage of so-called invasive plants shows, the introduction of plants from regions in which they are endemic to a new place is an ongoing and highly charged process with concrete political implications. Major historical events (such as Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the Americas[7]or the Meiji Restoration[8]) propel vegetal transports into hitherto unknown dimensions, recalibrating the composition of plant life in a given space and serving as markers for the dividing line between native and foreign.[9]Schleiermacher’s metaphorical use of plants for his theory of translation is thus founded in concrete practices of plant transferal.
Besides the spatial dimension, “transfer” calls up questions of ownership, since the term also refers to the “conveyance of property.”[10] Until the twentieth century, plants as commodities were often procured through unrestricted collecting, also called “hunting.” Since 1973, the international plant trade has been regulated by CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora) in order to prevent the poaching of vegetal matter from regions of the Global South. But the ensuing ethical questions are still valid: Who owns the plants (and their medicinal or nutritional properties) in a certain space? Can humans “own” other species at all, or do plants have inherent rights?[11] And how are these questions relevant for broader issues of belonging? These are important venues for future thoughts about plant translation as transfer.
Gardens as Sites of Vegetal Translation
As alluded to in Schleiermacher’s quote above, fields and gardens are privileged sites of vegetal translation. Following this thought, the figure of the gardener, a protagonist at the center of many contemporary novels and nonfiction accounts,[12] can be considered a human translator of plants. Gardeners need to understand where plants come from (the “source language,” in a traditional view of translation), what they need (their “grammar”), and how to accommodate them (semantics of both source and target languages). In their concrete work, gardeners closely observe living plants in order to create the most welcoming conditions, improvising and changing their approach as they see fit. Gardening is thus akin to translation work, as it combines theoretical, pragmatic, and artistic aspects.[13]
In his memoir-cum-manual The Passionate Gardener,[14] the German poet, translator, and gardener Rudolf Borchardt advocates for a humanist understanding of the garden, culminating in the so-called Weltgarten(“world garden”),[15] best exemplified by the baroque gardens of Italy and southern Germany. These gardens are for Borchardt true sites of translation, where the formerly foreign is welcomed to form a new whole with the local, thereby transforming both into something new.
Borchardt’s concept of gardening as translation still adheres to the Romantic tradition, in that it is “concerned with the allocation of the foreign,” as Naoki Sakai puts it in a different context.[16]Thinking critically through translation with plants and vice versa, however, shows that what is local or foreign is not pregiven but is defined in the moment of translation itself. Language can thus no longer be considered as a fixed place into which mobile entities—words, plants—are introduced, then acclimatized, and, as a result, deemed “natural.” Rather, it is the plants-as-words that remain stable, undermining what we thought we knew both a language and a place to be.
Plants Doing Translation
By now, it has become clear that what Marder calls “the superficiality of [the plants’] symbolic dimension”[17] is intrinsically linked to the plants’ ways of being-in-the-world. Or, in Gruber’s words, vegetal “materiality manifests the metaphor.”[18]Plants provide powerful images for translation because they are themselves agents of transformation.
In order to reconfigure the relation between plants and translation, we thus need to consider plants doing translation themselves. This requires us to go beyond current practices of decoding plant communication from biochemical and electronic signaling into human language.[19]Proceeding from a broad definition of translation, we have to expand the notion of translation to the transformation of matter itself. This may be what the philosopher Emanuele Coccia has in mind when he calls for accepting “the reality of a universal transmissibility and translatability of forms.”[20] And yet Coccia’s fundamentally Romantic notion of a continuous metamorphosis of life inevitably calls for counterpoints: Is there something that cannot be translated in this rethinking of plants? How exactly do “plant translators” operate, and what differentiates them from other species? A critical rethinking of translation through and with plants will need to engage with these questions.
Plant Names as Sites of Translation
Broadening our scope should, however, not deter us from reevaluating more strictly linguistic kinds of translation with and through plants. The spatial transferal of plants, their acclimatization in new surroundings, as well as their ongoing reevaluation on the basis of scientific findings go along with the need for new languages about and with the vegetal. Plant studies writ large are invested in establishing new vocabularies but tend to do away all too easily with the existing ones. Botanical nomenclature in particular, i.e., the scientific procedures regulating the correct use of a plant’s designation, is being devalued as a practice deadening the plants’ “true”—that is, living—being.[21] But rather than dispose with the nomenclatorial practices of Carl Linnaeus and those following in his vein, we could consider nomenclature as well as plant naming (understood more broadly as the ways in which laypeople have referred to plants) as particularly rich realms for an investigation into plants and translation. Names are central sites of (vegetal) translation: on the interlingual (between languages, e.g., the Latinization of formerly Greek designations) and the intralingual level (the coinage of vernacular plant names based on their botanical, i.e., Latin binomials, and vice versa), but also on the cultural level (medicinal, historical, or mythological knowledge encoded in names). Instead of depositories of dead knowledge, plant names are sites of possible invigoration and as such an integral part of rethinking the question of translation through the vegetal.
Questions, Possibilities
Reevaluating the concept of translation via the vegetal thus complicates any all-too-simple notion we have of either of the two terms. Translation can no longer be thought of in terms of adequacy (finding “the right words,” conveying “all the meaning”) but must be considered a generative practice verging on poetics. It is in this vein that metaphors, all too often thought of as purely rhetorical and thus dispensable, come once again to the fore as organizing knowledge on a fundamental level.[22]
Ecologically minded translation studies[23] could benefit from such a rethinking of a possible vegetality of translation. Considering plants as translating beings would allow us to reconsider vegetal entanglements among plants, with animals, but also in broader contexts of world building. Finding a language in which to write and think about plants, be it in an academic or an artistic context, would thus imply paying attention to the processes of translating we, as well as nonhuman agents, are all always already engaging in.
Notes
[1] Friedrich Schleiermacher, On the Different Methods of Translating, trans. Douglas Robinson, in Western Translation Theory from Herodotus to Nietzsche, ed. by Douglas Robinson ([1813] Routledge, 2002), 238.
[2] For Schlegel, “each translation is either a transplantation or a transformation, or both at the same time” (“Jede Uebersetzung ist Verpflanzung oder Verwandlung oder beides”). Cf. Friedrich Schlegel, “Philosophische Fragmente, 1798–1799,” Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe 18, Philosophische Lehrjahre: 1796–1806; nebst philosophischen Manuskripten aus den Jahren 1796–1828 I. ed. Ernst Behler (Schöningh, 1963), 204.
[3] In his essay “The Task of the Translator” from 1923, Benjamin talks “of a Nachreife, that is to say, a ripening of words past the point of their usefulness”; cf. entry “To Translate,” in Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon, ed. Barbara Cassin, Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra, and Michael Wood (Princeton University Press, 2016), 1150.
[4] Thus, once again, plants are overlooked: The Dictionary of Untranslatables (from which these examples are taken) contains an entry on “animal” but none on “plant,” although the composite verbs “to transplant” and “to supplant” echo all throughout the volume.
[5] David R. Gruber, “Material Foundations of Scientific Metaphors: A New Materialist Metaphor Studies,” Configurations 31, no. 1 (Winter 2023), 1–34.
[6] These areas overlap with the four possible modalities of plant translation that Michael Marder investigates in his essay “To Hear Plants Speak”: (1) the symbolic “language of flowers,” (2) the figures of “talking trees,” (3) biochemical and electronic signaling between plants (and animals), and (4) the plants’ participation in a language of things; cf. Michael Marder, “To Hear Plants Speak,” in The Language of Plants: Science, Philosophy, Literature, ed. Monica Gagliano, John C. Ryan and Patrícia Vieira (University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 103–125. See also my article “Les plantes comme agents et tropes de la traduction,” trans. Jean-Pascal Bilodeau, in La mobilité des plantes à travers le récit, ed. Rachel Bouvet, Noémie Dubé and Stéphanie Posthumus (Les Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 2024): 297–320.
[7] As examined in Alfred W. Crosby Jr., The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 ([1972] Pranger, 2003).
[8] Cf. Peter Barnes, “Japan’s Botanical Sunrise: Plant Exploration around the Meiji Restoraration,” Curtis’s Botanical Magazine, 18, no. 2 (2001): 117–31.
[9] In Europe, any plant that has arrived after 1492 with or without human help is considered a neophyte, literally a “newly planted one.” Cf. Franz Essl and Wolfgang Rabitsch, “Neobiota in Österreich” (Umweltbundesamt, 2002), 2.
[10] Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “Transfer (n.), Sense 1,” September 2023, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/8472325117.
[11] See e.g., Florianne Koechlin, “The Dignity of Plants,” Plant Signaling & Behavior 4, no. 1 (2009): 78–79.
[12] See, e.g., the wave of autobiographical gardening memoirs from the 1990s until today, such as Michael Pollan’s Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education (Grove Press, 1991), Jamaica Kincaid’s My Garden (Book) (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991), or Lulah Ellender’s Grounding: Finding Home in a Garden (Granta Books, 2023).
[13] Robert Pogue Harrison thinks of the gardener in this respect as a modern-day incarnation of Cura, the Roman goddess of care; cf. Robert Pogue Harrison, Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition (University of Chicago Press, 2008), ch. 4.
[14] Rudolf Borchardt, The Passionate Gardener, trans. Henry Martin ([1951] McPherson & Company, 2006).
[15] A concept recalling Goethe’s idea of Weltliteratur, or “world literature.” Cf. the afterword by editor Franck Hofmann in Der Deutsche in der Landschaft, ed. Rudolf Borchardt ([1925] Matthes & Seitz, 2018), 517.
[16] Naoki Sakai, “Translation,” Theory, Culture & Society 23 (2006): 73. Sakai refers to Antoine Berman’s insight that this clear-cut divide between the local and the foreign was crucial in the establishment of national languages in the Romantic period; cf. Antoine Berman, The Experience of the Foreign: Culture and Translation in Romantic Germany, trans. S. Heyvaert (SUNY Press, 1992).
[17] Marder, “To Hear Plants Speak,” 111.
[18] Gruber, “Material Foundations,” 12.
[19] As, e.g., Robert A. Raguso and André Kessler propose in “Speaking in Chemical Tongues: Decoding the Language of Plant Volatiles,” in The Language of Plants, ed. Monica Gagliano, John C. Ryan, and Patrícia Vieira (University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 27–61.
[20] Emanuele Coccia: The Life of Plants A Metaphysics of Mixture, trans. Dylan J. Montanari, (Polity Press, 2019), 137.
[21] This anti-Linnaean tendency is prevalent in current plant studies: “Nominalist classifications and conceptual mediations” refer to “a plant already dead and dry [ . . . ], deprived of its distinctiveness, and turned into a museum artifact in the labyrinths of thought.” Michael Marder, Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life (Columbia University Press, 2013), 5.
[22] In the by now classical sense of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (University of Chicago Press, 1980).
[23] See e.g., Michael Cronin, Eco-Translation: Translation and Ecology in the Age of the Anthropocene (Routledge, 2017), who devotes a whole chapter to animals but scarcely references plants.