The limits to representing the past offer aesthetic and ethical challenges. To discuss these,
alongside the metaphor of the pamlimpsest, I resort to translation theory and use translation in a metaphoric sense to discuss Carlyle’s, Scott’s, Hogg’s, and Eliot’s attempts at bridging gaps
between the past and the historical and the aesthetic and ethical. My own translation theory derives from Benjamin’s mostly because of Benjamin’s own ambivalent historical materialist and
idealist strain, which intellectually makes him suitable for a discussion of these writers. It would be useful to look into recent translation theories, but the scope of my project in its current state
and requirements does not allow for such an investigation.
Excepting Hogg, all of the writers I deal with have at one point been translators. Scott
began his literary career by translating the founder of the German Romantic ballad literature, Gottfried August Bürger, as well as Goethe. Carlyle’s earliest published texts are translations of
Goethe. Eliot translated Ludwig Feurbach and Benedict de Spinoza. While Hogg did not produce any works of translation, his historical narratives are conscious of the everpresent need to
translate between dialects, and his texts are interspersed with Border Scots, Gaelic, and English. My concern here is with how translation can be used as a trope for history writing. All of the
writers, whether literally or figuratively, turn to the act of translation in their histories and use this moment to aesthetically express their response to the past. I turn to a passage in one of the
Peter was determined one day all of a sudden that he would step into this highland
reaver's den and expostulate with him on the baseness and impropriety of his conduct and try to convince him of these and perswade [sic] to keep his own
laird's bounds. Expostulate indeed! Never was there a man less likely to succeed in expostulation than Mr. Constable Anston for he was violently passionate when
he conceived himself wronged and though himself swayed by principles of the most perfect justice and integrity had no patience with any one whom he deemed
in the wrong. Moreover having been brought up at Alloa Castle on the Forth he understood the Gaelic so imperfectly that he frequently took it up in a sense the
very reverse of what it was which ruined all chance of expostulation. (101) Hogg subtly introduces two important issues that stream through my examination into
nineteenth-century historical prose: the spatial boundaries between the past and present and the issue of historical representation through language, which is in turn a linguistic boundary. While
Peter will “conceive himself wronged,” he does not grant such a right to anyone else. There is only one way of expostulation in Peter’s world, and it is Peter’s way. We can read this via the
rhetoric of the Enlightenment’s empiricist history: there is a way to expostulate a correct version of a historical moment. However, we are told that Peter does not understand Gaelic, and that he
will frequently misunderstand it in “the very reverse.” While Hogg deals with the obvious matter of what happens when one encounters another of a foreign tongue and the inherent problems of
faithful translation, I am extending my reading of incomprehensibility to the question of the historian’s attempt to read the past and the issues that arise from representation in historical
present need to respect each other’s borders. Each historical period, each past, speaks in its own
language. The historian residing in the present, encountering what Thomas Carlyle consistently alludes to a foreign country in the past, enters a face to face relation with a past that sometimes
speaks a foreign language literally and, more often than not, metaphorically. If the historian resembles Hogg’s Peter, then he will attempt to read the past through the register of what means
“right” to him, or to put in more appropriate to my concern, of what right means to his historical period, and will understand the past “in the very reverse” (101). This type of reading of the past
also suggests the subjectivist experience of the past, and ultimately denies the past’s alterity as it seeks it to subsume it within its own paremeters. Thus, the past must be subject to an act of
Benjaminian translation that is always at once aware of the original language’s trace and the violent usurpation of the new language. Such an act operates on a similar level as Ankersmit’s
sublime historical experience, where we need to disconnect “truth and experience” (12).
Translation is palimpsestic in structure since translations inherently gesture toward the text in the
original language, thus embodying at once both the underwriting and the overwriting.