A 'Bicameral' Translation Story

[hakano]

Gatekeeping Gone Wrong: A “Bicameral” Translation Story
Al Ain, United Arab Emirates, 2012. I was reading The God Delusion by the renowned evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. In Chapter 10, Dawkins caught me off guard by mentioning a book I I had never heard of before: The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. He described Jaynes’s work as “One of those books that is [as published] either complete rubbish or a work of consummate genius; nothing in between! Probably the former, but I’m hedging my bets.” As I would find out later on, Dawkins’s words reflected the astonishment provoked by Jaynes’s meticulously documented and revolutionary thesis: human consciousness is an ongoing learned process that reaches back only three thousand years and language has been the chief catalyst for its emergence.
Dawkins did not seem particularly impressed by the book. I, for my part, was intrigued by what seemed to be the book’s potential as a treasure trove of things hard to translate. Without further ado, I ordered a copy through Kinokuniya in Dubai. The moment it arrived, I read it in a single breath and immediately began translating it. Once I became convinced that I would be able to complete the entire translation, I contacted Houghton Mifflin and informed them that I wished to acquire the Turkish translation and publication rights. I was told that copyright matters were being handled by a lawyer named Frederick Cammerzell, based in New Jersey. I explained to Mr Cammerzell what I wanted. He asked me to submit an offer. To make a long story short, I offered eight percent of the translation’s revenues. I had not pulled this figure out of thin air. Earlier, I had consulted Akcali Agency — which specializes in copyright matters — asking what I should offer Simon & Schuster for the Turkish translation rights to Will and Ariel Durant’s eleven-volume The Story of Civilization. Their answer was: eight percent.
Although I repeatedly told Cammerzell that I would accept whatever terms he chose to impose, he never responded. But by then I had already been swept away by the subject matter and cadence of the book. Thinking that the details would somehow work themselves out along the way, I continued the translation and eventually completed it. The process took seven to eight — perhaps even eight to nine — years, on and off. Despite involving countless publishing houses and repeatedly instructing them not to mention my name so as not to rattle Mr Cammerzell, the New Jersey lawyer remained utterly immovable. I tried explaining to him that safeguarding Jaynes’s intellectual legacy could hardly mean depriving Turkish readers of a groundbreaking work already translated into seven languages. We even had one telephone conversation. It lasted ten seconds. “I’m not interested. There is nothing you can do,” he said. I eventually resigned myself to the belief that Cammerzell would henceforth assume that every Julian Jaynes translation project originated with me and that he would deny permission to anyone.
That was roughly until ten days ago, when I casually searched the book’s title on Google and discovered that a Turkish translation had finally been published. I was excited. So someone had at last managed to persuade Cammerzell: Otuken Publishing and Akcali Agency.
Before ordering the book, I examined some PDF excerpts online. There are minor errors in translations of most worthwhile books but what I saw here raised serious doubts about the work as a whole. Worse still, these were precisely the sort of mistakes that should never occur in a translation of such intellectual magnitude. I ordered a copy online, and my disappointment deepened instantly as I browsed through the book.
Let us begin with the Turkish rendering of the title itself: İki Odalı Zihnin Çöküşünde Bilincin Kökeni (“The Origin of Consciousness in the Collapse of the Two-Chambered Mind”). It fails because “bicameral” is a concept that Julian Jaynes himself contributed to the literature on consciousness. Just as nobody translates “bicycle” as “two-wheeler,” one cannot simply reduce “bicameral” to “two-chambered,” “two-compartmental,” or “two-part.” There is a concept called naming rights. Jaynes coined the term “bicameral” to highlight a mentality consisting of two distinct halves of the brain: one generating thoughts and commands, the other passively obeying them. Make no mistake, though. Jaynes intended “bicameral” more as a technical-conceptual term than a descriptive adjective. And the naming right belongs to him. Moreover, throughout the book the word “bicameral” does not merely qualify the mind or mentality. We encounter expressions such as bicameral man, bicameral civilization, bicameral god, and so forth. Are you really going to translate the last one as “two-chambered god”? Yes — that is precisely what the translator has done.
The Turkish structure of the title is also problematic. Not only does it fail to convey clearly that the origin of consciousness is located in the breakdown of the bicameral mind, but it also relegates “the origin of consciousness” — the dominant element in the English title — to the very end of the Turkish version. The correct rendering should have been: Bilincin Kökeni: Bikameral Zihnin Çöküşü (“The Origin of Consciousness: The Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind”). Let us have a look at some of the other mistranslations:
The very first sentence of the book reads: “O, what a world of unseen visions and heard silences, this insubstantial country of the mind.”
It has been translated as: “Oh, a world composed of unseen visions and heard silences, what, this imaginary land of the mind”
whereas a correct rendering would be: “That realm of invisible visions and audible silences, this intangible country called the mind.” (Here, “That” is used in favor of “Oh” in Turkish in a compromise between sound and sense, with “That” serving as a pronoun – O – rather than as an interjection.)
Another sentence: “This is something of a caricature of a very subtly worked out position …”
Translated as: “This is something like a caricature of a very cunningly woven situation …”
whereas the correct meaning is: “Here we have, in a sense, caricatured a very subtly developed position …”
Another example: The school of psychology known as Associationism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had been so attractively presented and so peopled with prestigious champions that its basic error had become imbedded in common thought …”
Here the word “champions” has been translated literally as “champions,” whereas it should clearly mean “advocates” or “supporters.”
Another mistake: “And most people would protest emphatically that the chief function of consciousness is to store up experience, to copy it as a camera does, so that it can be reflected upon at some future time.”
Translated as: “Yet many people would vehemently oppose the idea that the chief function of consciousness is to record experience, to copy it as a camera would, and thus preserve it in order to reflect upon it later.”
Whereas the actual meaning is: “Many people would emphatically insist that the chief function of consciousness is to store experience and copy it, as a camera does, so that it may later be reflected upon.”
And finally, the most striking example — one I also sent to Cammerzell:
“To make consciousness coextensive with protoplasm leads, of course, to a discussion of the criterion by which consciousness can be inferred.”
Translated as: “To make consciousness simultaneous with a process guided by unicellular organisms naturally opens the way to a discussion concerning the criteria under which consciousness emerges”
whereas the correct translation is: “To make consciousness coextensive with protoplasm naturally leads to a discussion of the criteria by which consciousness may be inferred.”
I could continue. If one were to keep statistics on the number of errors per page, the resulting figure might well be astonishing.
There is also another issue. Granted, this part is rather subjective, but I cannot refrain from mentioning it. The prose simply does not flow, because the translator lacks the emotional relationship with the text that a book of this nature demands. Instead, the translation is dominated by a mechanical, “let’s just get this over with” style. Although the translator claims in his preface that the language of the book was extremely difficult and that he employed every resource Turkish has to offer, when faced with passages such as the following he simply abandons the effort and retreats into footnotes:
“One of England’s well-known physicists once said to Wolfgang Köhler: ‘We often speak of the three B’s: Bus, Bath, and Bed, because the greatest discoveries of our science are usually made there.’”
Yes, as the footnote dutifully explains, the three B’s stand for bus, bath, and bed. But if one truly wishes to do justice to the spirit of the text, there is an elegant solution available in Turkish as well: simply replace the letter B with D and write dolmuş, duş ve divan (“minibus, shower, and divan”). No footnote required.
While discussing these matters with ChatGPT, it summarized the broader issues raised by the translation controversy as follows:
• the absence in Turkey of a reliable translation of a major intellectual work;
• the fact that translation rights can become the subject of a struggle lasting many years;
• the irony that a book about language and consciousness has itself been mishandled linguistically;
• the question of who assumes the role of “gatekeeper” over important philosophical works;
• the deterioration of translation standards;
• the tension between copyright control and cultural access.
But those matters belong in another essay. Suffice it to say here that a reliable Turkish translation of The Origin will become available when the copyright expires about 40 years from now. The one published by Otuken in Istanbul, Turkey can only make Julian Jaynes turn in his grave. Mr Cammerzell, you had one job and you know what you have done with it!