On Translating Ahmadinejad

On translating Ahmadinejad
http://archive.gulfnews.com/opinion/columns/world/10156742.html

09/29/2007 07:12 PM | By Fawaz Turki, Special to Gulf News

Two cultures collided in New York early this week. Happily, the collision was not of the violent kind that we associate with bloodletting. But it was nasty nevertheless, involving as it did a nightmare of untranslatability between two disparate views of the world, two value systems, two historical experiences and two semantic fashions of perception.

On a three-day visit to the United States to address the United Nations General Assembly, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was invited to deliver a speech at Columbia University. That made him a guest speaker, and thus he was entitled to be treated with respect by his academic hosts.

Introducing him at the podium, however, the university's president, Lee Bollinger, deemed it necessary to identify the Iranian leader as a man who lacked "intellectual courage", had a "fanatical mind-set" and was "astonishingly undereducated". Turning towards Ahmadinejad, Bollinger hollered theatrically: "Mr President, you exhibit all the signs of a petty and cruel dictator". And on and on. And that was just for starters.

Bollinger, who did not appear quite "overeducated" himself, clearly did not seem to understand the sacrosanct place that a guest, whether invited to one's campus or one's home, occupied in Middle Eastern society.

Seeming visibly shaken and chastising his host for lambasting him before he uttered a single word, Ahmadinijad still soldiered on, delivering his speech and later answering questions from the audience. He did not disappoint the predominantly hostile attendees who had come to the lecture hall predisposed to laugh him off the stage.

"Our people are the freest people in the world," he said. On the issue of women's rights, he claimed that "the freest women in the world are women in Iran". Addressing himself to a question about the press, he asserted, none too convincingly, that "in our country freedom is flowing at its highest level". Then came this: "In Iran, we don't have homosexuals as you do in your country". To the audience that was a howler. And so it went.

Currency of rational exchange

What is going on here? What is going on here is the question of two cultures that meet at an academic venue, to exchange ideas, only to discover that their respective experience of each other (each others' language habit and assumed social reference) has set them apart.

The language world of Middle Easterners is different from that of North Americans. Language, of course, is more than a mere currency of rational exchange among people, for it stands in vital, close-knit reciprocity with culture, felt reality and consciousness. The ornamental irrelevancies and elided references that we insinuate into our speech act in the Middle East, our capacity to use the same word to mean different things (to psycho-linguists known as "polysemy") will totally escape people in the Euro-American world but be recognised instantly by a Middle Easterner as signals of mutual understanding.

When Ahmadinejad, for example, claimed that there were no homosexuals in Iran, he did not expect his audience to take him literally. He may be "undereducated", and he may not have taken the trouble to read half a dozen decent books about what makes American society tick, but he is not insane. The remark's ferocious innocence came across to his audience as simply duplicitous. Then, passing equally misunderstood, came that strain of ultimatum, that separatist stance, that masculine use of the third person plural, in his references to "we in Iran".

Different cultures define the objective world around them differently, though they may seem to use the same vocabulary. During the heyday of the Soviet Union, as a case in point, Communist leaders employed the same idiom as their counterparts in the West to refer to, say, "freedom", "progress" and "human rights", but the terms in both locales had fiercely disparate meanings.

Try to search for the right words to explain to someone in a country that has known, or been allowed, only a "mobilising press" (whose sole role in society is to mobilise support for the government) the victory scored by the American media to win the right to publish the Pentagon Papers in 1971 against the strenuous objections of the White House. Conversely, try to explain to an English-speaking person how absurd, how improbable, the character of Lady Macbeth, committed to killing Duncan "under my battlements", appears to an Arab being introduced to Shakespear's play. Duncan, he will exclaim, is her guest. Who harms a guest? Unimaginable!

Different cultures speak differently indeed, at times even in body language incomprehensible to non-native speakers. To Yasser Arafat, packing a .45 at his hip while addressing the UN General Assembly in November 1974 was, as it were, a normal fashion statement for him as it was for several other political leaders in his part of the world. For New Yorkers, and other Americans, however, it was gross, unbecoming and scandalous. A Korean who smiles at a stranger means to insult him. A Japanese fan beating before a speaker's face in ceremonious motion will convey impatience. And the rest of it.

Ahmadinejad did not appear to understand American culture one bit. Neither did Americans appear to understand Ahmadinejad one bit. They talked at not to each other. It was as if Iranians and Americans heard each other for the first time and discovered, with sickening conviction, that they shared no common language, that their previous encounter, before 1979, had been hollow, leaving the heart of meaning in both cultures untouched. All the pity.

Fawaz Turki is a veteran journalist, lecturer and author of several books, including The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile. He lives in Washington D.C.