The Wolfman [Found] in Translation

With Penguin’s ambitious initiative (under the editorial direction of Adam Phillips), to re-translate Freud with multiple translators, we become newly attuned to the theoretical implications of Freud’s German word-choice; its impact on the conceptual armature of psychoanalysis. Re-translating Freud must have been a daunting prospect, for it seems clear that despite its flaws, the James Strachey “Standard Edition” enjoys a monumental status, comparable to the King James Bible or the Scott Montcrieff/Terence Kilmartin Proust. Alongside Strachey’s Freud, I would place Jacques Derrida’s translation of Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry, and the gloss on this translation that became his doctoral thesis: The Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Philosophy. With examples like this, where theory is generated out of the work of translation, I would also include Paul de Man’s essay on Walter Benjamin’s “The Task of the Translator” in which he advances a theory of the “inhumanism of language as such” by “correcting” the mistranslations of Benjamin’s essay in its English and French versions by Harry Zohn, Maurice de Gandillac and even Derrida.1

To re-translate is to theorize: perhaps the most pertinent example of translation as theory is found in Jacques Lacan’s return to Freud. What we call Lacanian theory is, as many have alleged, an extended translation exercise. Of Freud’s celebrated “Wo es war soll Ich werden” Lacan says:

This does not mean, as some execrable translation would have it, Le moi doit déloger le ça (the ego must dislodge the id). See how Freud — and in a formula worthy in resonance of the pre-Socratics - is translated in French. It is not a question of the ego in this soll Ich werden; the fact is that throughout Freud’s work — one must, of course, recognize its proper place — the Ich is the complete, total locus of the network of signifiers, that is to say, the subject, where it was, where it has always been, the dream. […] Where it was, the Ich –the subject, not psychology — the subject must come into existence. And there is only one method of knowing that one is there, namely, to map the network. And how is the network mapped? One goes back and forth over one’s ground, one crosses one’s path, one cross-checks it always in the same way…”2

Here, as we see, the analytic method is deeply rooted in the kind of intellectual labor — back and forth, cross-checking — that forms the crux of translational praxis.

The convergence of translation and analytic technique — and the difficulty of disengaging one from the other — gave rise to some of Lacan’s most important theoretical insights, as did the particular case of the Wolfman. Lacan’s unpublished 1951 seminar, devoted to the Wolfman, preceded the Seminars of Jacques Lacan whose publication begin with the year 1953.3 One could say that the Wolfman was always already there in Lacan’s texts, exerting pressure even when not directly referenced; inspiring his focus on language as the cipher of the subject. In the Ecrits, to give an example to which we will return, Lacan took the Wolfman’s dropped W in Wespe (thus causing Freud to ask whether indeed he meant “Aspe, or asp rather than wasp), as a pre-eminent example of “phonemic censorship;” a “signifying ablation” indicative of primal negation and the pressure of the unsaid on linguistic symptoms.4 The diagnosis of the symptom depends in Lacanian analysis on the translation of the language of the unconscious, itself manifest as a grammatology of the signifier. In dissecting the Wolfman case, Lacan notes the “linguistic forms that can be grouped together in analytic experience, beginning with the elision of the first syllable of the family name, by which the noble bastardy in which a line originates is perpetuated in Russian — namely, in the socio-linguistic structures in force at the Wolf Man’s birth.” (BF 557) Elsewhere, Lacan homes in on Prägung (feeling, instinctual imprinting) and Nachträglichkeit (deferred action, postponed effects), that reveal the traumatic impersonal force of language breaking in on the subject; making its construction the product of a linguistic, impersonal otherness. The whole Lacanian notion of the symptom — semiotically referential and medically denaturalized — was thus especially indebted to Freud’s “History of an Infantile Neurosis.” In “La chose freudienne” (“The Freudian Thing”) Lacan would insist: “What a linguistic conception, which must shape the analytic worker in his basic initiation, will teach him is to expect the symptom to prove its signifying function, that by which it differs from the natural index commonly designated by the word ‘symptom’ in medicine.” (BF 348)

By contrast, Bruno Bettelheim’s1982 book, Freud and Man's Soul focused less on building a theory out of Freud’s untranslatables and more on cataloguing errors made by James Strachey and his équipe. For Bettelheim, mistranslation in the Standard Edition was accountable for an American Freud that was overly abstruse, technical and medicalized. If the Strachey rendered Freud’s language more consistent, allowing it to be systematically applied in clinical work, it sacrificed linguistic aliveness, the vitality of ordinary language. Bettelheim is brilliant on what is lost when Strachey translates das Es, das Ich and das Uber-Ich as the Holy Trinity of Id, Ego and Super-Ego.5 “The It,” the “I” and the “Above” or “Upper I” are truer to Freud’s German he points out; thus pointing us to a conceptual genealogy that goes back to Georg Walter Groddeck’s “itness” of the “I,” (elaborated in his 1923 Das Buch vom Es (translated as The Book of the It in 1949), and before that, to Nietzsche’s notion of “I” as “grammatical habit,” or sign of the of the neutral agency of thought, introduced in Beyond Good and Evil (1886).6 Both Bettleheim and Lacan share a fascination with the egoic impersonalism of language, but where Lacan devotes special attention to using Freud’s German to track the agency of the letter in French, Bettelheim is concerned with weaning English-language psychoanalysis from the specious philology of ego psychology. Where Lacan’s return to German Freud helps launch a school of symptomatic reading, Bettelheim’s return to German renews the focus on linguistic historicism, specifically the context of fin-de-siècle Euro-culture in which Freud’s lexicon germinated.7

Whether the stakes are as ambitious as a reinterpretation of the Freudian subject from the ground up, or as modest as renewed attention to Freudian locutions that resonate differently in translation, there is no question that Freud’s writings warrant examination through the lens of translation theory. I have argued in The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature, that translation theory is structured around principles posed at opposite extremes: At one end you have the idea that “everything is translatable” — digitally and informationally convertible according to a universal measure, and the linguistic laws of adequatio. At the other end you have the idea that “Nothing is translatable;” there will always exist an untranslatable remainder that eludes commensurability, an incontournable element of the foreign.8 Antoine Berman characterized this nub as “l’épreuve de l’étranger,” an experience, trial, or test of foreignness within language as such. For Berman, translation amounts to taskography; a labor of solution-finding. Mining the shared connotations of Aufgabe and Auflösung, the latter a favored term of German romanticism whose cognate is “solution,” Berman offers a rich rereading of the Benjaminian notion of “task” as:

• the logical solution (of a problem)
• the chemical (dis)solution (of a substance)
• the mathematical (re)solution (of an equation),
• the musical (re)solution (of a chord).
• and, finally, as a solvent of the foreign, as in Novalis’s: “Poetry dissolves (auflöst) the foreign in its native essence.”9

Berman’s theory of translation, elaborated in a posthumously published seminar dealing with Walter Benjamin’s failed translation of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, might also be extrapolated to the profoundly political way in which language can be used to test the limits of linguistic citizenship. Translation, or its lack, signals the places where a language says “keep out” to intrusions from other languages, or unhomes or exiles a mother-tongue.

More commonly, translation studies as a field has been dominated by a single major question: How faithful is the translation to the original? Though interesting arguments over what constitutes fidelity abound; the constancy of this question has sometimes made the field of translation studies a bit dull. The field has developed however, with renewed focus on cultural translation, language politics, and the impact of digital pantranslatability. Recently, I have experimented (using Eleanor Marx’s 1886 English translation of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary), with approaches to translation that emphasize the genre’s peculiar status as literary property. In what is perhaps a singular case of literature as authorized plagiarism or legalized appropriation, the translation is encouraged to reproduce the original with no risk of copyright infringement or allegations of forgery. According to this logic, the translation is granted this extraordinary license because it claims to be of the original, that is to say, possessed of no autonomous textual identity. De-authored, neutered, de-owned, the translation triumphs as a virtual text, most successful when invisible or assimilated to its master-modèle.

Where might these approaches help us in looking at Strachey’s Freud? I would be tempted, if time permitted, to think much more about the ethics of translation in psychoanalytic practice, specifically about issues of authorship, signature and textual copyright in the case history. Does the analyst who publishes a case have a copyright on the patient’s life or psychic disorder, something on the order of a gene patent? Was Freud the author of the Wolfman? Or was he more of a translator-intermediary, a model of the legitimized plagiarist? Or was the Wolfman a kind of co-translator with Freud of a founding text of psycho-analysis?

In attempting to answer these questions, I will confine myself to four critical points that relate to my central argument which is, quite simply: that what is “found in translation” is … translation. (1) I will first examine the significance of the play of different languages in the Wolfman’s case history, the extent to which his case is structured around a linguistic primal scene, the humiliation of the student by his language teacher. This relates (2) to the insufficient acknowledgment by Freud himself of the native language of the analysand, and the effect this might have had on the session conducted in German. (3) I will then assay the status of übersetzung (“translation”) as a metaphor, as itself interchangeable with technique or interpretation. (4) And finally I will consider what is recovered in Louise Adey Huish’s new translation of The Wolfman which, I will argue, allows for a reconsideration of the variable play of language in translation within the case, a revaluation of the agency of the letter.

Throughout the Wolfman case there is a definitive lack of clarity about which language is being used, when it is used, how it is translated, interpreted, or homonymically troped. What was the Wolfman’s Muttersprache?10 The Wolfman was born an aristocratic Russian. He had an English governess, a beloved German tutor, a Latin teacher who humiliated him, an analyst named Freud whom he revered and distrusted as a father figure, and who spoke to him in German. Add to this complex language layering the problem of Freud in English translation, and you soon feel that the task of translating Freud’s translations of the Wolfman’s key-words has become virtually undoable, especially when translation is taken in a metaphorical sense as synonym for psychoanalytic interpretation.

In the Wolfman’s own memoirs translation features early on. He describes how his “Nanya” introduces him to Russian translations of Snow White and Cinderella. The governess who succeeds Miss Oven (the alcoholic sadist), gives him a translation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, with immediate effect on the dreamwork: “some of the descriptions of the Negroes’ punishments even disturbed me in my sleep.”11 His German tutor imparts in him a great affection for the German language. As Freud wrote: “One after-effect of his attachment to his teacher, who left soon afterwards, was that in later life he preferred the German element (doctors, clinics, women) to the native one (representing the father), which was of great benefit for the therapeutic transference.” [H 269]. Which was to say, of course, the therapeutic transference to Freud himself. But such transference was to play two ways, as is seen in the Wolfman’s caution to Freud, referring to his failure in exams, that “in his mother tongue it is not possible to use the familiar word ‘Durchfall’ to designate a disturbance of the bowel.” [H. 273, 285] While as Huish notes, Durchfall can mean both failure and diarrhoea it is as if here the Wolfman were implicitly cautioning Freud against drawing the immediate connection between the bowel condition and fear of academic failure. Here he is both a translator of and for Freud, and a linguistic controller of his own analysis.

The Russian language erupts in section VIII: “One day he said that in his language the word for a butterfly was Babuschka, or little granny,” reminding him of women and girls, and recalling the uncanny feeling produced by the opening and closing of the butterfly’s wings. (H 288)

This motion is compared by Freud to a woman opening her legs, making the shape of the Roman V. The V-sign stands in for the lost maternal phallus, registered at the primal scene, but it also signals the time of the scene’s witnessing, — 5:00 p.m — “the hour of his darkening mood.” (H 289) “Uschka” — the ur-sign of the Muttersprache returns when the Wolfman recollects the taste of a pear with yellow-striped skin: The word for pear was ‘Gruscha,’ also the name of his nursery-maid, a figure he had confused with his mother. Gruscha is in turn connected

to his infatuation with a peasant girl named Matrona, a name with a “motherly ring to it.” (H 290) Finally, the Wolfman dreams “that a man was tearing off the wings of an asp [Espe] Freud asks:

“‘Asp’ ? [...] “‘What do you mean by that?’ — ‘Well, the insect with yellow stripes on its body, the one that can sting you. It must be a reference to Gruscha, the yellow-striped pear.’ — Now I was able to correct him: ‘You mean a wasp, then [Wespe].’ — ‘Is the word wasp? I really thought it was asp.’ (Like so many others, he used his unfamiliarity with German to conceal his symptomatic actions.) But an asp, that must be me, S.P. (his initials). An asp is of course a mutilated wasp.” (H 292-293)

This linguistic confusion is immediately related by Freud to the Wolfman “taking his revenge on Gruscha for having threatened to castrate him.” (H. 293) Joined to the “V” of the butterfly, the “M” of the “mother” Matrona, and the “V” of the gardener’s position during the supposed acts of Nanya, letters are here in full flight, transference, and multiple acts of translation. Lacan will later interpret such letters as fixing the limits of the Wolfman’s erotogenic zone. No letter, he argues, can be abstracted from the libidinal movement of the body that underlies it. For Anicka Lemaire, following Lacan and Serge Leclaire, “the letter is the positive index of an erotogenic difference, the trace in the ground of the gap of pleasure.”12 The subject is by this means introduced into the heart of the inscription of a letter, an analysis which does not necessarily take fully into account the intense fluidity of the letter in translation.

If we turn now to the other language of the analysis, Latin, The Wolfman case arguably warrants interpretation as a parable about translation fear. A key episode involves the fear of making a translation error in Latin class, and the fact that the Latin teacher’s name happens to be “Wolf.” Freud writes: “The occasion on which he came to grief in his translation is not without significance however. He had to translate the Latin word ‘filius’ and did so using the French word “fils” instead of the corresponding word in his own tongue. “The wolf whom he feared was undoubtedly the father.” [H 237] Freud’s German text reads: Er hatte das lateinische Wort filius zu übersetzen and tat es mit dem französischen fils anstatt mit dem entsprechenden Wort der Muttersprache. Der Wolf war eben noch immer der Vater.” (F 159) Languages are evoked here in a complex play. Latin, the Ursprache of education, is blocked by “French — “fils” — which in turn blocks off access to the “Mother” tongue (which is Russian). This triple linguistic obstruction of the son’s return to the mother is only further obscured by the English translation. Both Strachey/Solms (“own language”) and Huish (‘own tongue”) choose not to say “mother-tongue,” which has to be significant given that decipherment hinges on (mis)translation. (MS 37 and H 237 respectively) Here, you would think that Freud’s notation of the patient’s native tongue, languages of education, and degree of fluency in German would be meticulously transferred in translation. Mütte r– just described by Freud as being seen by her son while having sex from behind with her husband — is posed against Vater in the narrative preceding this episode of the Latin lesson, and thus echoed in the flow of German phrases within the anecdote: “anstatt mit dem entsprechenden Wort der Muttersprache. Der Wolf war eben noch immer der Vater.” (F 159)

Freud himself adds a complex filter to the language problem when he reverts to the euphemistic use of Latin to describe lewd sexual postures and acts: coitus a tergo [H 157, 35, 235] copulation from behind, Begattung von rückwärts qualified as more ferarum [“in the manner of animals” (MS, 38); “in the manner of beasts” (H 238)]. Add to the Latin intervention the problem of Freud in English translation, and you soon feel that the task of translating Freud’s translations of the Wolfman’s key-words has become surpassingly elusive, especially when “translation” is taken in a metaphorical sense as synonym for psychoanalytic interpretation. The process of interminably decoding letters and words, multilingual puns and homophonic slippages dubbed “cryptomania” by Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, and itself the signature technique of Freud’s decipherment of verbal parapraxes, makes it often impossible not to confuse translation and interpretation.

Freud compounds the confusion by using “Ubersetzung” rather loosely when transmitting the patient’s discursive information or the import of dream-data. In one place he says: “Es sheint also, dass er sich wärend des Traumvorganges mit der kasstrieren Mutter identifizierte und sich nun gegen dieses Ergebnis straäubte. In hoffentlich zutreffender Ubersetzung: Wenn du vom Vater befriedigt werden willst, musst du dir wie die Mutter die Kastration gefallen lassen; das will ich aber nicht. Also ein deutlicher Protest der Männlichkeit! (F 165) Interestingly enough, in the Strachey/Solms version, the word translation — übersetzung — isn’t there at all: “ “It seems therefore that he had identified himself with his castrated mother during the dream, and was now fighting against that fact. ‘If you want to be sexually satisfied by Father’, we may perhaps represent him as saying to himself, ‘you must allow yourself to be castrated like Mother; but I won’t have that.” In short, a clear protest on the part of his masculinity!” (MS 43) Huish, by contrast, makes the term translation active: “It would seem, then, that during the dreaming process he identified with his castrated mother and is now struggling to resist this outcome. Translated, I hope accurately, it is as if he is saying: if you want to be satisfied by your father you must accept castration as your mother has done; but I do not want that. A distinct protest in favor of masculinity!” (H 241) These micro-distinctions might strike one as slight were it not for the fact that so much potentially rests on each term. In this particular example, what is at stake is the analyst’s voice-over. When Huish’s Freud “translates” (in the sense of speaks for) the Wolfman, a transferential blurring of analyst and patient’s first person subject pronoun seems to have occurred, emphasizing the crucial place of translation in the transference.

All this might lead us to descry a distinct fetishization of language in the text of this analysis. An observation that would not be out of line with the conclusions of my previous work on the Wolf-man case history in Feminizing the Fetish in the context of an examination of Freud’s servants.13 There, I was struck by Freud’s simultaneous recognition and occlusion of servants in his interpretation of the bourgeois family romance. In the Wolfman case, whose setting is a very rich Russian household, the presence of family retainers is everywhere: Nanya, Miss Oven, Miss Elisabeth, Grusha, Matrona, and many others who are never even named. The famous “mutilated wasp” (Wespe), which homophonically encrypts the initials of the Wolf-man’s name, Sergei Pankejeff, and forms a “V” of female seduction and maternal castration, traces back to a sadistic governess who gathers up her skirts into a phallic tail, that is later coded through serial transformations of wings and tails, as butterfly, wasp, snake, fox or wolf. Maids in The ‘Wolfman’ are not just targets of youthful sexual conquest, their buttocks erotically prepped as they bend over to scrub floors, they are also invoked as expert purveyors of carnal knowledge who stand in for father, mother, and sister at pivotal points in the analysis. Even the analyst, as I argued in my book could be placed in the position of the maid: eroticized, resisted, mistreated, dismissed or feared.

Looking at the Wolfman case now I am struck by the hypothesis advanced by Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, that Freud’s nose fetishist and the Wolfman were one and the same patient. The “Fetishism” essay begins, you will recall, with a man who has a fetish for the “shine on the Nose” (Glanz auf der Nase). The Glanz is taken in the dual sense of blow and gaze as Freud begins pedagogically with an act of translation: “The surprising explanation of this was that the patient had been brought up in an English nursery but had later come to Germany, where he forgot his mother-tongue almost completely. The fetish, which originated from his earliest childhood, had to be understood in English not German.” 14 (SE XXI, 152) This language lesson takes on more allure when we realize that it provides a match-up with the Wolfman, who apparently suffered from a nose fixation in 1926. In her “ Supplement to Freud’s History of an Infantile Neurosis” (published in 1928) Ruth Mack Brunswick describes her patient’s electrolysis treatment for blocked nasal glands. After this minor operation, the patient began checking himself obsessively in a pocket mirror. Brunswick traces the fetish to the Wolfman’s ambivalent feelings towards Freud, identified with the stereotype of “the Jewish nose.” Freud is an object of transference and cure, but he is also blamed by the Wolfman for the loss of his family fortune. (This interpretation derives from a dream in which a man is standing at the prow of a ship carrying a bag containing jewelry — his wife’s earrings and her silver mirror. In Russian the ship’s prow is called the nose. He leans against the rail, breaks the mirror, and realizes that, as a result he will have seven years of bad luck.”15 Brunswick also posits a possible connection between the nasal trauma and a tooth extraction in 1924 by a dentist named Dr. Wolf, the very same name as the adored Latin teacher! The fateful double coincidence of the name Wolf in the Wolfman’s life forms a double V: a formula of 2 x Wespe. = Wolf. The over-coding of the proper name makes it a kind of inevitable moniker for the case, and points to the inevitability of the Wolfman’s identification with his name.

Finally, the work accomplished by translation in this case raises the issue of how broadly we might care to apply the term translation. Should we, for example, given the Wolfman’s insistence on his profession as a painter, and his well-known rendering of the wolves in the tree, extend the translation analogy to visual signifiers? Should we treat as an error in translation the question of whether the Wolfman drew five wolves in the walnut tree, when he should have drawn seven, presuming that is, that the drawing may have been taken from a photograph hanging in Freud’s office that showed him with the “Secret Committee” of his six closest disciples (as Otto Rank surmised). Or would this be Freud’s own error of translation transcription as he sought to bring his case study into line with his theoretical apparatus, as Whitney Davis has hazarded?16 Maybe, I would propose, adding to the confusion of visual (mis)translations, the five wolves should be traced to five women, including his mother, aunt, the governess, the servant girl, and the scary-looking Nanya,? To what extent was the Wolfman, whose savvy about psychoanalysis was astonishing, a self-translator, rewriting his own case history with fresh memories, corrections or resistances to Freud’s narrative? In some sense, he acted as a technical adjutant or translator’s assistant in routing out errors in his own canonical case study. In awe of Freud’s text about himself, he became a kind of docent of his own case, tending to its textual flame, yet also resisting Freud’s authoritative grip on his pathography when he fed “corrective” material to Ruth Mack Brunswick. Maybe, stretching the point a little, (but not too much) we could see the whole case resting on the Wolfman’s insistent translation of his childhood self from baby sheep (an image suggested by an early photograph of him cosseted in a sheepskin coat and wooly bonnet) into a wolf. A wolf in sheep’s clothing indeed!