I’d like to begin by saying that this is the first time I have lectured in a foreign language (and who knows, it may be the last). I also think this is the first time you have listened to someone who wants to lecture for the first time in a foreign language, and as they say in English, “we don’t speak the same language”, perhaps this is a new experience for both the lecturer and audience; for as Lacan said, every understanding is inevitably a misunderstanding. I want to appreciate this striking situation.

I’d like to begin by drawing your attention to two familiar sentences in English and will attempt to take them literally and in a way translate them word for word to understand them as exactly as I possibly can.

I don’t feel at home in English.

I don’t feel at home with English.

To be or feel at home means “to be comfortable” and to not feel at home means “to feel worried”. When I say I don’t feel at home in English I mean I don’t have the right skills or adequate experience to communicate or express what I want to express, or to express what I have in mind in the manner I would wish. It is as if I cannot catch hold of my expression, my sentences, and as if every minute I should come to grips with myself. At any moment, it could be possible that some rupture or inner interruption takes place within my speech which causes me to lose control and even lose my way…

And when I say I don’t feel at home with English, I would consider English, a foreign language, as a man with whom I’m not comfortable, I treat English as the Other whom I cannot take in – a stranger who could induce some split in the form of silence – who could induce the inability to express myself, within myself, within my existence in that the existence is to stand outside, to stand under the gaze of the Other; and the Other in the guise of a foreign language stares at me, stares me into silence, stares me down, stares me out…

So, in a certain way, I don’t feel at home both in and with English, and this makes my attempt to express myself in English a disturbing and at the same time intriguing experience. But, as I said before, now I want to take these two sentences exactly as they are and, so to speak, take them literally; when I say I don’t feel at home in English, I exactly mean I feel I lose my way, I miss, I think of my home, I feel a certain kind of nostalgia, I mean I feel truly homeless, a lonely man without a home who sometimes is forced to sleep without shelter in streets or parks, someone wandering in the streets of a foreign language, sometimes surprised by the old buildings of an ancient city and always surrounded by a multitude of regular streets and uniform houses, forming a maze, in a labyrinth of words, proverbs, idioms and so on.

And as a translator, of course an unskilled or inexpert translator, I always live in texts, within and between texts. I often encounter the world as a matter of the unfamiliar text, an encoded text, and often lose my way, or perhaps I should say lose myself, in the maze of streets on the page of a book or even within a phrase, and interestingly sometimes I feel that I am inviting, no, creating a stranger within myself, I even sometimes make myself a stranger whom I don’t properly know, someone I should tolerate but cannot fully understand. As a translator, sometimes I think that I am the Other, that my desire is in fact the Other’s desire, that I must follow the path the Other desires, commands me or asks me to follow, and in this way I induce within myself a very special kind of homelessness…

However, this is, I think, a necessary condition for living a wrong life, as Adorno put it in reference to the morality of thinking: thinking can be seen as an attempt to develop a way of thinking which might negotiate with what must remain thought’s own blind spots.

And I think the act of translating is an attempt to not only find, or as Adorno put it, negotiate with some blind spots of language, both of original text and of destination, but also to create blind spots necessary for thinking, for opening the new ways of being, living, and existing. Translation as an experience of homelessness can be described as a necessary condition of thinking. When I am forced to express something that has happened before, that is, to transfer from some place to another, I must transform it in one or another way and this results in some fissures in my language as well as in the original text. This kind of homelessness turns us back to a well-known Biblical situation. As you know, in the Book of Exodus, the Lord asks his people: “Do not ill-treat or abuse foreigners who live among you. Remember, you were foreigners in Egypt.” And again in the Book of Deuteronomy we read “The Lord defends the right of orphans and widows. He cares for foreigners and gives them food and clothing. And you should also care for them, because you were foreigners in Egypt.”

I think translation is an experience, especially in the context of the contemporary new order of world, that requires such a Biblical morality. The translators are those who must care for foreigners, because every translator was once a foreigner, a stranger, homeless. And the foreigners in the texts are some foreign names, some unfamiliar syntax, some strange combinations, who in Adorno’s term always evoke the blind spots of the thought.

Now I suggest that the experience of translation can be considered as the “April” in the sense T. S. Eliot uses the word in the beginning of his masterpiece The Waste Land:

April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead Land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

Winter kept us warm, covering

Earth in forgetful snow, feeding

A little life with dried tubers.

That Eliot attributes cruelty to April is so revealing. He describes the beginning of Spring as a cruel time causing pain and suffering. But why? Because April breeds Lilacs out of the dead land? Because it gives life, reproduces, engenders, raises? Yes, because giving life always causes pain. As Jean-Luc Nancy put it, “Pain and suffering begin with existence and end when it ends, and this end gives pain and suffering to those who survive”.

However the main reason that April is the cruellest month is that it mixes memory and desire. Memory always points to something belonging to the past, something that is lost, something experienced in the form of loss, a past that has not yet been past, something we experience as presence in terms of its absence.

On the other hand, desire, in Lacanian theory of human subjectivity, is neither appetite for satisfaction, nor the demand for love, but the difference resulting from the subtraction of the first (i.e. need) from the second (i.e. demand), the very phenomenon of their splitting.

Lacan believes that every subject is split by the operations of language and the unconscious. And in these terms, I think that the operations of translation as an Eliotian April splits the subject of translation, mixing memory and desire in him or her, and stirs up the dull roots of a tradition with spring rain, the tradition that up until now has slept in the calmness and coolness of the winter of the past that in a sense keeps the subject of a tradition ‘warm’, warmth of forgetfulness, so any translation must breed lilacs of desire out of a dead land that still has a little life thanks to its memories.

I call this complex feeling – the feeling that combines both pleasure and displeasure, or rather memory (and often pleasurable memories) and desire (in the sense of experiencing a lack in oneself), and in other words this unique mixture of loss and lack – melancholy; melancholy not as mere sadness, or even pensive reflection, nor as depression in any clinical sense, but melancholy as an aesthetic emotion which has both negative and positive aspects alternating each other unpredictably, as that experience Kant points to when explaining how sublime objects can invite melancholy meditation. Kant writes “Any spectator who beholds massive mountains, deep gorges with raging streams in them, and wastelands lying in deep shadow and inviting melancholy meditation, is seized by amusement bordering on terror.”

If being seized by a sense of awe (not the mere fear) when one beholds the mountain or deep gorges, points respectively to scientific surprise (because of the infinite vastness of outer rapture) and to ethical feeling (because of the power of the moral law in the inner self), beholding the wastelands can induce melancholy and this melancholy can be the beginning of thinking, of the reflection, and in particular in translation entails the self-reflection, and as Slavoj Zizek once wrote, every philosophy begins with some melancholia, or as I put it in this lecture with some kind of homelessness.

Every translation seeks a home in the sphere of homelessness, as an impossible demand, but out of a certain need caused by an encounter with something new, and after recognizing himself as a stranger, as a refugee, as homeless, as the subject of lack, of desire mixed with nostalgic memories of one’s own home, as the comfortable and painless life of Adam in the lost paradise of Eden, and because we all live and endure and find ourselves in the condition of descent (ontologically, historically and theologically), the genuine mode of thinking is translation, and every act of translating points to the beginning, to an April, to an initial Word, as Saint John said, “In the beginning was the one who is called the Word.”

* This text was delivered as a lecture during the workshop Instances of Translation, held and organised by Pages in the summer of 2008 in Tehran.