That Hamlet's famous dilemma of "to be or not to be" resists translation across languages is a result of linguistic, cultural and social differences, elements discussed by professors from the Asian and Middle Eastern languages and literatures department at Wednesday's colloquium, "To Be or Not To Be, That is the Question: The Problematics of Being' in Arabic, Chinese, Hebrew and Japanese."
The four languages represented in the lecture are characterized by contradicting conceptions of grammar, time, religion and philosophy that all diverge from those of English. The difficulty in translating the phrase lies not only in verbal conversion but also in fundamental differences between each culture's conceptualization of life, according to the panelists.
Professors Kamal Abu-Deeb, Sarah Allan, James Dorsey and Lewis Glinert represented the Arabic, Chinese, Japanese and Hebrew departments, respectively.
"The question of being is a Greek question," religion professor Gil Raz, who attended the colloquium, said. Framed in Greek grammar, the question is "completely irrelevant" to Asia, he said.
The most popular Chinese translation of "to be or not to be" is "cunzai," which most closely means "after you die is existence or not existence," creating a sense of artificial language, Allan said.
Japanese translators struggle under Buddhism's influence, in which individuals strive to remove the "essence" that Hamlet wants to uncover, Dorsey said.
The inconsistency of first and second person pronouns in Japanese exemplifies the cultural uncertainty of identity, in contrast with the Judeo-Christian "simple, assured, transcendent I,'" he said.
"To be" in English can be interpreted as "to exist" or "to come into being," Allan said. Each of these two definitions in turn has multiple meanings in Arabic, Chinese, Hebrew and Japanese, according to the panelists.
In the English language, for example, "being" and "living" do not have the same meaning, Dorsey said.
Japanese distinguishes the verb for "being" between animate and inanimate objects, while Chinese separates "to be" into verbs that assign categories and verbs that have descriptive functions. This linguistic division reflects the Chinese philosophical understanding of the chi, a united river or "constant way" composed of many specific ways, according to Allan.
"The sage, like a Confucius scholar, has the names to divide the world up into these many categories," Allan said. "The language shapes culture."
Japanese has a similar built-in hierarchy, according to Dorsey.
"The language I speak all depends on who I am speaking to," he explained.
Scholars disagree over the extent to which language influences the way members of a culture think.
Glinert said language should not be framed as controlling thought, though it does influence thought and gives people "certain propensities."
Like English, Arabic and Hebrew linguistically divide verbs into three tenses past, present and future. Arabic philosophy, however, dismisses the present and acknowledges the past and future only, according to Abu-Deeb.
"Within a split second, what we conceive of as being present is past," he said.
Chinese verbs do not have tense, but the language still has an awareness of differential time, Allan said.
Varying concepts of time affect the understanding of being across languages because "the crucial point is that we think in terms of how time is important," Abu-Deeb said.
In Arabic, a verb is an action in time attributed to an agency, he said. English's flexibility as a language is philosophically and logically inaccurate, and has no concrete definition of the word "is," Abu-Deeb said.
"That's why English is such a mess," Abu-Deeb said. "Perhaps English is evolving like Arabic did and will drop the is.' We already have, Where you at?' and, We at this talk!'"
Religion has also informed how different cultures interpret "to be," according to the professors.
"In the Koran, God wants something to be, he says be,' and it be,'" Abu-Deeb said.
Whereas Arabic has an irrefutable relationship between existence and time, Glinert said Hebrew struggles with the timelessness of the Old Testament God.
"The Bible says, Before the world, there was God,' and, After the world, there will be God,'" he said.
In contrast, Chinese culture does not have an "idea of a creator god or infinite time," resulting in a different concept of existence, Allan said.
Asian and Middle Eastern studies and comparative literature major Ezra Toback '14 said he appreciated the small-scale approach to linguistic analysis offered in the lecture, "even though it's not empirical or comprehensive."
The idea of isolating concepts in different cultures, rather than trying to integrate them, provided a new perspective on the topic, according to Christina Packer, a first-year student visiting from the University of Toronto.
"It made me think, How do I define being?'" she said. "It opened up a gate."
