“My battery is low and it’s getting dark.”
Those were the final utterances of the Mars Rover, the surprisingly relatable machine which recently shuffled its mortal coil all alone on the red planet. It’s hard to imagine better final words, maybe Oscar Wilde’s “Either those drapes go or I do,” or Groucho’s, “This is no way to live,” though both are in the “apocryphal” category, which is polite for probably not true.
When Rover uttered, “My battery is low and it’s getting dark,” millions of humans on this planet were reportedly moved to tears. Which is why scientists then did what scientists do: they got into full “Pluto is not a planet” mode and ruined it. A coterie of bespectacled nerds, all dressed like Clinique sales ladies, were quick to point out Rover didn’t really “say” it. Rover sent up a bunch of codes, a string of numbers, which had been translated.
But the humanities are here to rescue… humanity. Again. Because it turns out, a good translation can actually carry more weight than the original. Take the sentence, ‘I see the bear over there,’ something a white settler might have said 200 years ago. As Robert Moore points out in his book On Trails, certain Navajo languages would convey, the idea as, ‘The bear over there, I see.’ That makes the bear the focus of the sentiment. It’s the translation that lets us glimpse not just the differences in language, but a difference in philosophies about the natural world.
Without translations, many of us would never have experienced life altering work like the haikus of Basho, Italian cinema, French existentialism, or even Torah. Without Biblical translations we would be bereft of the inerrant word of the Creator, and the subject of at least a third of WNIJ’s Perspectives.
When your batteries get low, remember the Rover got there first and gave you an artistic rhetoric so you could process your emotions, even as the world around you goes dark.
I’m Dan Libman and that’s my perspective.
