“Traduttore, traditore”
- Italian proverb
How many colours in a rainbow? Since I write in English, you are highly likely to respond ‘seven’. Yet it is only by convention that English-speakers identify seven different distinct colours in the spectrum. If we wish to pretend to be scientific, we might say there are infinite colours in the spectrum, since each colour corresponds to a particular wavelength of light. Yet this would be a pompous obfuscation, since no creature can distinguish infinite colours, and measuring wavelengths electromagnetically is categorically not what it means to perceive colour.
When I say that we live in different worlds but share the same planet, I am drawing attention to how our ways of living constitute our world. It is our practices that establish the nature and uniqueness of each world, and of all our habits it is language that most exposes this truth that crosses between all worlds. Words are labels for categories of thinking, and colours are about as clear an example as we have. Our languages have between two and eleven basic colour words - there are twenty one languages that use solely those terms that in English we might call black, red, and white.
As an example, ancient Japanese had only four colour terms - shiro, kuro, aka, and ao. I can translate these into English as ‘white’, ‘black’, ‘red’, and ‘blue’... but will we destroy some of the essential meaning of these ideas when we do so? Most Japanese speakers use aoi (blue) to describe colours English speakers would call green - and it is not that there is no specific word for green, since a century ago midori was adopted. But midori is a shade of ao, whereas few English speakers would say that green is a shade of blue.
Looking at how our practices for seeing have led to different terms for colours thus allows us to understand the traditional Italian proverb quoted above. ‘Traduttore’ means roughly ‘translator’, a person who translates, while ‘traditore’ means ‘traitor’, so the phrase could be literally translated as ‘translator, traitor’. But to get to what the adage means to whomever might speak it would require going beyond substituting one word for another. As Wittgenstein realised, the meaning of a word is how it is used: words are like tools with a role in language - every colour word is more than a name, it is a tool for distinguishing colour.
In English, I prefer to translate ‘traduttore, traditore’ as ‘all translation is betrayal’, and this is a truth that cuts between all our worlds. While we can approximate the concepts of one practice for living in the words of another, to do so is to match the points of closest interception rather than to accurately convey the real, lived meaning of a term. We therefore run into serious difficulties when our practices for life do not quite match up. Does anyone who speaks a European language honestly believe they could make use of sixty five different words for describing fishing nets, something Hawaiian children apparently take in their stride...?
Similarly, when I talk of ‘virtue’ as the positive habits of a person, I am mindful that anyone who has adopted the grotesque principle of substituting calculation for moral reflection, ‘virtue’ has no meaning - or worse, seems entirely false. Two centuries ago, no European philosopher could have conceived of this concept losing its meaning... yet in our hopeless idle chatter about ‘virtue signalling’ today, the truths of virtuous living have become obscured. Translation is betrayal, even within a single language, in part because our worlds are more than just our languages.
We should not be discouraged by the knowledge that translation is betrayal. This does not mean ‘do not try to understand the worlds of others’. It would be fairer to say ‘do not presume to understand the worlds of others’ - since there is a connectivity between the wisdom of this proverb, and that of ‘walking a mile in my shoes’. What’s more, the lesson of the rainbow is that while we all learn different ways of seeing colour, we can also learn to see new colours. Whenever a culture has acquired an additional word for a colour, they never lose it. For all that our languages and worlds are ever-changing, colour reminds us that there is a planet we all share. It is just that our worlds offer us different ways of living here.