I do not feel compelled to deal now with such a tremendous question because I did it in Kant and the Platypus. But as far as the more modest problem of translation is concerned, we can simply and prudently remark that a comparison between two linguistic systems allows us to solve many conundrums when we are concerned with terms and sentences that concern physical events or actions depending on the structure of our body (since in every culture it either rains or it’s a sunny day, and people eat, sleep, stumble or hop). But we have seen that one finds more difficulties in comparing the German Sehnsucht with an English equivalent, that gemütlich can be only imperfectly translated as cosy, and more vaguely as the Italian accogliente, and that even a common English expression such as I love you is used in contexts in which Italians would not use ti amo. We can say the same apropos concepts such as freedom, justice, friendship, dignity, God, death, crime and so on.
Semiotics, philosophy and cultural anthropology can discuss such discrepancies for years but a translator has continually to face them, here and now and every day. In doing so translators avoid ontological problems (unless they are translating a philosophical text): they simply compare languages and negotiate solutions that do not offend common sense (and if there are subtle connections between common sense and ontology, this is a subject for further philosophical debate). Translators simply behave like polyglots, because in some way they already know that in the target language a given thing is expressed so and so. They follow their instinct, as does every fluent bilingual person.
Thus, in order to stick to my purpose of not theorising too much, I would like to conclude by dealing with certain cases in which we do not speak of trees, ways of jumping, death, love or life, but rather of something that we are convinced we know very well: colours.
Colours
There is a text which had me puzzled for a long time. It’s the discussion on colours that takes place in chapter 26 of the second book of Noctes Acticae by Aulus Gellius.6 To deal with colours in the context of a text from the second century ad is a very difficult endeavour.
We are facing linguistic terms for colours, but we do not know to what chromatic effects these words refer. We know much about Roman sculpture and architecture, but very little about Roman painting. The colours we see today in Pompeii are not the colours the Pompeians saw; even if the pigments are the same, the chromatic responses are not. In the nineteenth century, Gladstone suggested that Greeks were unable to distinguish blue from yellow. Goetz and many others assumed that Latin-speakers did not distinguish blue from green. I have also found somewhere that Egyptians used blue in their paintings but had no linguistic term to designate it.
Gellius is reporting a conversation he had with Fronto, a poet and grammarian, and Favorinus, a philosopher. Favorinus remarked that eyes are able to isolate more colours than words can name. Red (rufus) and green (viridis), he said, have only two names but many species. Rufus is a name, but what a difference between the red of blood, the red of purple, the red of saffron, and the red of gold! They are all variants of red but, in order to define them, Latin can only make recourse to adjectives derived from the names of objects, thus calling the red of fire flammeus, the red of blood sanguineus, the red of saffron croceus, the red of gold aureus.
Greek has more names, Favorinus says, but Fronto replies that Latin, too, has many colour terms and that, in order to designate russus and ruber (red), one can also use fulvus, flavus, rubidus, poeniceus, rutilus, luteus and spadix, all definitions of red aut acuentes eum quasi incendentes aut cum colore viridi miscentes aut nigro infuscantes aut virenti sensim albo illuminantes.
Now if one looks at the whole history of Latin literature, one notices that Virgil and other authors associated fulvus not only with the lion’s mane, with sand, wolves, gold and eagles, but also with jasper. Flavae, in Virgil, is the hair of the blonde Dido, as well as olive leaves; and the Tiber river, because of the yellow-grey mud polluting its waters, was commonly called flavus. The other terms all refer to various gradations of red, from pale rose to dark red: notice, for instance, that luteus, which Fronto defines as ‘diluted red’, is used to refer to egg-yolk by Pliny and to poppies by Catullus.
In order to add more precision, Fronto says that fulvus is a mixture of red and green, while flavus is a mixture of green, red and white. Fronto then quotes another example from Virgil (Georgica, iii, 82) where a horse (commonly interpreted by philologists as a dapple-grey horse) is glaucus. Now glaucus in Latin tradition stands for greenish, light green, blue-green and grey-blue; Virgil uses this adjective also for willow trees and for sea lettuce, as well as for waters. Fronto says that Virgil could also have used for the same purpose (his grey horse) caeruleus. This term is usually associated with the sea, skies, the eyes of Minerva, watermelons and cucumbers (Propertius), while Juvenal employs it to describe some sort of rye bread.
Things get no better with viridis (from which comes the Italian verde, green), since in Latin one can find viridis associated with grass, skies, parrots, sea, trees.
I have suggested that Latin did not clearly distinguish blue from green, but Favorinus gives us the impression that Latin-users did not even distinguish blue-green from red, since he quotes Ennius (Annales, xiv, 372–3), who describes the sea as caeruleus and marble as flavus. Favorinus agrees with this, since – he says – Fronto had previously described flavus as a mixture of green and white. But one should remember that, as a matter of fact, Fronto had said that flavus was green, white and red, and a few lines before he had classified flavus among various gradations of red!
Let me exclude any explanation in terms of colour-blindness. Too easy. Gellius and his friends were erudite; they were not describing their own perceptions, they were elaborating upon literary texts coming from different centuries. Can one say that they were considering cases of poetic invention where, by a provocative use of language, fresh and uncommon impressions are vividly depicted? If that were the case, we would expect from them more excitation, more marvel, and more appreciation for these stylistic tours de force. On the contrary, they propose all these cases as examples of ordinary language. Unable as they were to tell literature from daily life (or uninterested in daily life, that they only knew through literature) they proposed these cases as though they were examples of ordinary language.
The way of distinguishing, segmenting, organising colours varies from culture to culture. Even though some transcultural constants have been isolated, it seems rather difficult to translate colour terms from languages which are distant in terms of centuries or of space. If one uses the term colour to mean the pigmentation of substances in the environment, one has not said anything about chromatic perception: there is a difference between pigments as chromatic reality and our perceptual response as chromatic effect. The chromatic effect, it seems, depends on many factors: the nature of surfaces, light, contrast between objects, previous knowledge, and so on.
Daltonism represents a social enigma, difficult to solve, purely for linguistic reasons. To think that colour terms are simply denoting differences suggested by the visible spectrum is like thinking that genealogical relationships presuppose a unique kinship structure which is the same for every culture. Instead, in colours as in parenthood, terms are defined by their oppositions to and differences from other terms, and all of them are defined by a system. Daltonists have perceptive experiences different from those of normal people, but they refer to the same linguistic system.
Hence, the cultural facility of color blinds; functioning on differences in brightness – in a world that everyone else sees as differentiated by hue. Red-and-green color-blind people talk of reds and greens and all shades of it using the same words most of us assign to objects of a certain color. They think and talk and act in terms of ‘object color’ and ‘color constancy’ as do the rest of us. They call leaves green, roses red. Variations in saturation and brilliance of their yellow give them an amazing variety of impressions. While we learn to rely on differences of hue, their minds get trained in evaluating brilliance. Most of the red-and-green blind do not know of their defect and think we see things in the same shades they do. They have no reason for sensing any conflict. If there is an argument, they find us fussy, not themselves defective. They heard us call the leaves green and whatever shade leaves have for them they call green.7
Commenting on this passage, Marshall Sahlins8 not only insists on the theory that colour is a cultural matter, but remarks that in every test of colour discrimination one assumes that classification of colours and utterance of colour names are linked to the representation of an actual experience. On the contrary, when one utters a colour term one is not directly pointing to a state of the world, but is rather connecting or correlating that term with a cultural unit, a concept due
