• Objectius
• Membres del Comitè
• Redacció de la revista VISAT
• Trobada del T&LRC (Juny 2010)

The right to be different versus the need to be understood

Several myths attempt to interpret the multiplicity and diversity of human languages. In Genesis, the Tower of Babel, which men wanted to build in order to continue to speak the same language, was destroyed by divine punishment.

The pit of Babel, image based on Kafka's aphorism , in the depth of which it would be possible to find the similarities among languages, enables the attempts of reconciliation. However, there are only some language families with a common origin. The primary archetype, that would have chaired the common origin of all languages, does not exist at all.

Through the heavenly spiral, you can not ascend to the language of angels, or accede to the memory of the world and of the gods. When you excavate the earth, you never reach the edenic root.

In the biblical metaphor, when expelled from paradise, man was confronted with his own loneliness.
John Milton’s last verses of the poem Paradise Lost showed the path of man living by his own:

The world was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide:
They hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way .

Loneliness is the space in which the primordial couple moves, where everything has to be created with their effort. It is from this origin that the primary social nucleus with a common language is formed, as reflected in behaviours, gestures, emotions.

It is in that couple’s midst that are founded all the standards of individuality, similarity and difference, diversity and equality. There is also, at this primordial core, a repository of accumulated experience.

Empedocles of Agrigento synthesized, already in the VI / V century B. C, a common matrix that governs the human race:

The human essence

Everyone is given the way of knowing himself and of learning the way to think .
(Fragment 118 Diels)

The need to become an unique and unrepeatable whole presupposes the need to understand the self, the other, the world, the universe. The being, made himself a key, carries, in the ambiguous baggage of his dream, night’s own semen, where myths are inscribed.

The opening to the world comes by intuition or musical gesture or by learning the various communicative discourses.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau viewed equally natural the body language and the vocal language, being the first easier and less dependent on conventions. He considered the visual arts as privileged and that love, according to an earlier tradition, would have been the inventor of drawing, and perhaps of speeching, but with less luck for the last .

Despite the fragmentation of Babel, language was configured as open, structured in itself, rooted in its own community.

It is in language that man’s identity is founded and radiates. We chose language and language chooses us.

Jürgen Habermas defined the projection of community and unlimited communication in its encounter with the structure of language itself .

Or in other words, to Martin Heidegger, there is no gap when language does not come, just like in the stone, plant or animal .

In the luggage of the individuality, difference covers the individual experience, printed in the language society. All individualized traces of each community are brought together. Dialects and regionalisms are an integral part of them, often bringing ancient traces of archaic words, used since immemorial times.

We have examples in all languages. In the Iberian Peninsula, there are words that existed before the Roman occupation and that the Basque language still carries from its origin. This trace is the most valuable trait that preserves the history of an entire ancient community that has its equivalent in folklore, cuisine, music and traditional arts.

It's a difference that we need to show and let grow. According to Gilles Deleuze:

We need to show the difference differing (italics in original) .

It is this mosaic of differences that consolidates the cultural richness of a nation. The reverse of this situation in terms of language, is the difficulty that difference causes. When there are several languages, it is necessary to translate.
But, as per Paul Ricoer, the translator's task will not mean the word for the phrase and the text, but for the whole culture.
The translation must be imbued with wide reading of the spirit of a culture and come back down the text for the phrase and the word. The translation must be understood and to understand, opening doors that otherwise would be hopelessly closed.

Maria do Sameiro Barroso, Portuguese Pen Clube