The language of animals: Towards a translational sociology of human–animal relations

Abstract

Sociology has recently started to challenge the exclusion of nonhuman animals from its object of study. Language, which traditionally served to assert human domination over nature and the other animals, emerges in this context as a key medium through which previously silenced voices can be heard, contributing to devise more respectful ways of coexisting. This article deploys the conceptual and methodological framework of a translational sociology to investigate how the human-animal linguistic divide is presently being reexamined in this light, inquiring into how nonhuman animals are translated into the language of science, the language of justice and the language of literature, as well as pursuing relevant connexions between them. By putting language at the centre of an exploration of human–animal relations, it relates different cognitive, ethical and aesthetic dimensions to gain unique perspectives on complex social phenomena which straddle across the natural sciences, the social sciences and the humanities.

Introduction

In a context marked by the accumulating catastrophic effects of climate change, an unprecedented ecological crisis and the looming prospect of a sixth mass extinction, our relationships with nonhuman animals have come under renewed attention. Victims of the modern drive for human control, animals also represent a living memory of the possibility of a different, more harmonious relationship to the world and to ourselves. Language, which traditionally served to assert human exceptionalism and domination over nature and nonhuman animals, emerges in this context as a key medium through which previously silenced voices can be heard, contributing to devise more respectful ways of coexisting.

This article examines how issues of translation across the human–animal linguistic divide are presently being framed in this light, inquiring into how nonhuman animals are translated into the language of science, the language of justice and the language of literature, as well as pursuing relevant connexions between them. It argues that the apparently marginal standpoint of a translational sociology can help to illuminate very relevant general features that have not yet received the attention that they deserve. This approach puts linguistic multiplicity and translation at the centre as basic features of contemporary societies that sociology can no longer afford to ignore. It critiques simplistic views of translation as a mechanic exercise of word substitution that are still prevalent in the sociological literature, illuminating translation's transformative nature and its key intervention in widespread social, political and cultural processes, as well as in people's ordinary lives. ¹ A serious consideration of translation, it is argued, transforms the sociological outlook in substantive ways, enabling reflexivity on the linguistic materials of social life that we usually take for granted. It also responds to the need for interdisciplinary perspectives on relevant phenomena of our times that are currently challenging traditional divisions between the natural sciences and the social and human sciences.

This article puts the conceptual framework of translational sociology to the test, seeking to refine and nuance it through a consideration of human–animal relations. This involves relating translation to the human–animal linguistic divide, which will be undertaken in the next section. It also requires a radical rethinking of the figure of the translator, who can no longer be approached solely in terms of their linguistic intervention, however transformative this might be, but must also necessarily be conceived as adopting significant supplementary roles. This more demanding task is addressed in the three central sections of the article through a detailed discussion of three remarkable individual projects to translate animals into scientific knowledge (Konrad Lorenz), proposals for justice (Martha Nussbaum) and literary works (Yoko Tawada). A final section reflects on the politics of friendship which underlie the three approaches, as well as on the interrelations between different cognitive, normative and aesthetic dimensions in ways that relate to what is currently conceptualised as knowledge translation, or the translation of research-based knowledge into practice (Odemark et al., 2021), but also significantly go beyond it, positing the often forgotten role of the senses and the literary imagination as central to rethink our relations with the other animals.

Translating animals across the linguistic divide

Language has traditionally been conceived as a key distinctive attribute of what it means to be human. The western tradition is fundamentally marked by the domination of animals and nature through rationality and language. As Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno observed, ‘the lack of reason has no words. Its possession, which dominates manifest history, is eloquent’ (2002: 204). In this history, ‘the unreasoning creature has always suffered at the hands of reason’, a ‘visible course of events’ which ‘conceals from the executioners the invisible one: existence without reason, the actual life of animals’ (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002). However, our present is marked by a growing concern to reveal, by means of language, precisely the latter. If only a few decades ago there were heated scientific debates on the ability of animals like chimpanzees or grey parrots to learn simplified forms of human language, today the accent is predominantly placed on trying to understand what animals voice in their own species-specific ways as a necessary precondition to recognise their needs and to articulate them in blueprints for more respectful ways of coexisting, both in scientific and in lay circles. ² This makes vast new demands on translation, which can potentially become a key form of mediation between humans and other kinds of animals.

Both sociology and translation studies can be characterised by the exclusion of animals from their object of study. Sociology emerged as an independent discipline in the context of industrialisation and urbanisation, defining itself as the study of modern society, mainly understood in terms of binary distinctions from both traditional society and nature. It has only recently started to consider how nonhuman animals are a constitutive element of modern capitalist societies (Irvine, 2008; Koop-Monteiro, 2023; Peggs, 2012; Wilkie, 2015; York and Longo, 2017). This ‘animal challenge’ (Carter and Charles, 2018) requires not just a recognition of the multiple entanglements of animals and humans, but also a reexamination of traditional perspectives on intersubjectivity and sociality that can more adequately accommodate interspecies relations (Wilkie and McKinnon, 2013). Translation studies, which emerged from applied linguistics in the second half of the twentieth century, defined its object in terms of interlinguistic translation, thus excluding in principle forms of translation across the human–animal language divide. Today, an expanded concept of translation that brings into focus more-than-human connections in the context of the climate emergency is being sought, while interspecies translation has become a significant area of reflection that foregrounds previously silenced forms of communication and exchanges (Barcz and Cronin, 2023; Beattie et al., 2023; Cronin, 2017, 2021).

The perspective pursued in this article firmly adheres to the significance and singularity of human language, that is, to what Charles Taylor has approached as the unique expressive and creative capacities of the language animal (2016), which are unmatched by any other existing system of communication. Language has typically been used to affirm human exceptionalism in detriment of other animals, but it is the only medium that makes possible social and political change in a direction that acknowledges human responsibilities as the dominant species, as well as alternative views of stewardship and companionship in a multispecies world. This methodological focus on the uniqueness of human language distinguishes my point of view from two different positions that seemingly overcome the human–animal linguistic divide. On the one hand, biosemiotic approaches centred on the translatability between different systems of signs used by humans and other organisms (Kull and Torop, 2011; Marais, 2019; Sealey, 2019; van Vuuren, 2023). On the other hand, accounts that foreground animal languages to put forward that nonhuman animals are able to articulate a point of view on political matters of their concern, that they are political actors on their own right (see, for instance, Meijer (2019)). Whereas the first of these positions reduces human language and translation to its communicative aspects, the second relies on a problematic transposition of animal communication to the patterns of human language, thus falling into an anthropomorphism which it vehemently seeks to deny.

By contrast, here the work of translation is primarily conceived as an endeavour to put the animal point of view into human words, productively confronting the human–animal linguistic divide, an enduring rift which cannot be bridged or resolved. From this perspective, translation involves articulating in human language what animals express about their ways of life, their worlds and their needs, thus opening it to their different modes of existing. This radically transforms the role of language, from its traditional association with reason as a vehicle of human exceptionalism, to a non-instrumental medium of relating with different others, a key aspect of language that has tended to remain more obscure. Conceived in this way, translation mobilises ‘the relational possibilities found at the core of language’ (Suen, 2015: 2); it instantiates forms of ‘becoming with’ or of ‘getting on together’ that can ‘make each other capable of something new in the world of multispecies relationships’ (Haraway, 2016: 19).

In what follows I deploy the conceptual and methodological framework of a translational sociology to approach human–animal relationships, an area it was not initially developed for but to which it seems particularly well suited at least for the following three reasons. First, its broad definition of translation as a social relation across linguistic difference, which includes human–animal relationships across the linguistic divide. Here, translation is precisely conceived in terms of the rendition of non-linguistic animal worlds or Umwelten (a concept that will be discussed in some detail in the next section) into human language. Second, its reconceptualisation of the politics of translation and of the role of the translator, which values forms of reflexive translation as an experimental laboratory and a more visible role of the translator as collaborator. The challenges of translating animals into human language specifically call for a more active role on the part of the translator, who can no longer be conceived as just a rewriter of previously existing texts. Third, a translational sociology also offers a transdisciplinary framework through which different knowledges and practices can be related and productively confronted to gain unique perspectives on complex social phenomena which straddle across the natural sciences, the social sciences and the humanities, a framework that has already been applied in relation to the science, politics and culture of the climate emergency (Bielsa, 2026). More generally, a translational sociology calls attention to the socially transformative potential of translation, in the hope that this can foster a renewed perception of the significance of language in human–animal relationships, an aspect that has remained relatively underexplored in the sociological literature. It is my belief that sociology is particularly well placed to do the kind of work that this requires by means of both an exercise in reflexive self-critique and a productive engagement with relevant scholarship in other fields.

Animal worlds and science

Only a wholistic focus on animals across the linguistic divide could provide a methodologically appropriate ground for the establishment of a science of animal behaviour. In the middle of the twentieth century, the new discipline of ethology was built on the basis of observational facts, on the one hand, and the principle of comparison between different but related species, on the other. The work of Konrad Lorenz, one of the founders of the young discipline, contains valuable insights from a translational standpoint. ³ The following assessment of Lorenz's significance is thus not so much focused on his detailed accounts of animal behaviour for what they disclose in evolutionary terms, as on how language and translation relate to the observational basis of his approach. However, before I can undertake such interpretation, I need to explain how Lorenz's relations with non-human animals underpin and condition his scientific outlook.

The empirical basis of Lorenz's science is built up from the systematic observation of animal behaviour from tame animals he raises in conditions that approximate wildness as much as possible. As he points out, the breath and solidity of the observational basis of ethology ‘derive from the fact that lovers of animals observed for the joy of observing’, in contrast with the mechanistic approaches enforced by behaviourists in laboratories, which reveal ‘a complete ignorance of animal behaviour’ (Lorenz, 1970: xv, xix). However, in distinction to a long tradition of field naturalists, his work is made possible by the close relationship that he develops with his research subjects, for whom he often becomes a leading figure. Lorenz is a keeper and companion of animals: he builds appropriate dwelling spaces for them in the family house, feeds them by hand to seek their attachment to him, and even adopts the role of mother to his baby goslings through the instinctual mechanism that he would later call ‘imprinting’. Such intense animal connections rely not only on his remarkable observation skills, but also on his participation in joint social activities at a pace dictated by the nature of the particular species involved, a peculiar and in many ways radical form of participant observation in which he relishes and which he associates with his prodigal laziness. ⁴

This form of participant observation enables the scientist to get a rare glimpse into what the world looks like from the point of view of his animals. Jakob von Uexküll's concept of Umwelt, which can be translated as surrounding world, is central to understand what such a perspective involves. The notion of surrounding world puts the perceiving and acting subject at the centre, reconfiguring the larger environment by what can be taken in and reacted upon by every living thing. Von Uexküll provocatively starts off with the tick as an example, a ‘blind and deaf bandit’ who only becomes aware of the approach of its prey through the sense of smell (the odour of butyric acid produced by the skin glands of mammals) and who can survive without any nourishment for eighteen years as if time stood still (2010: 45, 52). The tick's waiting time can help us relativise a human sense of time, made up of a series of moments that last only one-eighteenth of a second (2010: 52), but animals who are capable of more flexible and sophisticated behaviour can offer us far more interesting insights into more complex worlds. Precisely, von Uexküll uses Lorenz's early work on jackdaws to illustrate how their attacks can be triggered by confusing perceptions and equally directed to a cat carrying a jackdaw in its mouth or a man holding a black bathing suit in his hand. The significance of Lorenz's contribution, which also sheds light on how different human and non-human characters acquire an individual significance in the conduct of different social activities, is echoed in the chapter's title (‘The Companion’) and the reproduction of a figure illustrating Lorenz's jackdaw Tschok and its four companions.

According to von Uexküll, (non-human) animal worlds are not only unknown, but also invisible. The scientific methods of behaviourism deny the existence of such worlds by reducing animals to automatons who learn to respond to administered stimuli. By contrast, it is precisely the task of a scientist like Lorenz to translate these worlds into human language, something which is made possible not only by observation, but also by the sharing of social worlds. Lorenz did not consciously seek to work with jackdaws, a highly social species, but rather attributed this fact to ‘beginner's luck’, and it is not until a few years later that his interest appears explicitly ‘centred in the social behaviour of animals and men’ (1970: xviii). For George Herbert Mead, joint social activity precedes symbolic forms as the basis of the process of socialisation, as is made clear by his emphasis on the conversation of gestures, which can take place between human and nonhuman animals. Language has a constitutive presence in a human world that is fundamentally changed by it, making possible entirely new relations, meanings and behaviour. However, as a system of arbitrary signs, language remains necessarily tied to an experience that emerges from social activity, which it expresses and through which it can only be acquired in the first place. ⁵

Lorenz's work is aimed at showing a glimpse of the animal worlds he has learnt to know and understand, as well as at illuminating the deep animal roots of human social behaviour, which we tend to forget, a sort of evolutionary psychoanalysis. But the need remains to explain why this task should be characterised as one of translation. In this context, it is useful to refer to the distinction Charles Taylor makes between what he calls ‘metabiological meanings’, which are exclusively human, and ‘life meanings’, which we share with other animals. According to Taylor, ‘life meanings are defined by objectively recognizable patterns of need and action’, which can be attributed to animals independent of their self-understanding (2002a: 35–37). By contrast, human or metabiological meanings ‘concern goals, purposes and discriminations of better or worse, which can’t be defined in terms of objectively recognizable states or patterns’: ‘what I’m after can’t be captured in some objectively identifiable pattern. In order to see what's at stake here, one has to get inside the language of self-description, catch on to what a meaningful life is for me (or my culture in general)’ (2016: 91–92).

Objectivist science operates through the description and explanation of independent objects that have been purged of human meanings, and can easily lead to treating animals as automatons. Translating animals, as opposed to describing animals from the outside, involves acting as if animal self-understanding is involved. The as if stands not only for the wish to avoid heated and ongoing discussions about the existence of animal selves, but chiefly as a reminder of the profound difference – or, indeed, incommensurability – between human worlds and other animal worlds, which are not linguistically constituted. The as if is thus an important token of nonhuman animals’ lack of language, which forces us to arrive at human meanings through our connections with them; to think, like Derrida, from the animal that silently looks at us (2008). ⁶ In this sense, in translating animals we speak for animals, who do not themselves speak.

Hence, the notion of translation that I seek to articulate, by remaining tied to social interaction with animals, to ongoing conversations of gestures, departs from Taylor's view that the close connection between language and social activity, the shared emotional bonding that he calls ‘communion’, fundamentally separates humans from other species (2016: 63). As has recently been argued from the perspective of interspecies pragmatics, ‘the role of language in the interactional and conceptual organization of interspecies activities and encounters is Janus-faced: language can divide, but it is also a means for humans to reach beyond human perceptual and semiotic world’ (Peltola and Simonen, 2024: 17). Humans habitually speak with and for animals, particularly domesticated animals, in all kinds of everyday situations involving individuals of different species. Whereas a form of baby talk has been described in many interactions of this kind (Csanyi, 2006: ch. 10; Peltola and Simonen, 2024: 16), more adult or demanding conversations can also be embarked upon (Smuts, 1999: 115). In all these cases, humans can feel that their words are understood by the animals to whom they are directed, especially in the case of dogs, a feeling that is less related to animals’ linguistic abilities than to what Vilmos Csányi calls their ‘social understanding’, which leads the dog to behave in such a manner as to make humans believe that it has understood the situation (2006). Speaking for animals is also a widespread practice in many interactions where humans seek to articulate the point of view of speechless others they feel they intimately know and understand, such as for instance in veterinary practices, where owners verbalise their animals’ feelings and symptoms (Arluke et al., 2022: ch. 3). However, translating animals is distinct from speaking with or for animals in that it not only entails addressing others through words which we think nonhuman animals can understand or would themselves want to express, but also requires reflexively transforming human languages in relevant ways to allow to appear in their midst something which they did not originally register.

Especially in his more popular books, addressed to non-academic audiences, Lorenz thematises the issue of language in illuminating ways, often presenting himself in the act of translating what animals would say if they had linguistic means. He even claims that he, like King Solomon, can really talk the language of animals but without the aid of a magic ring (2002a: xv). As he notes, wonderful stories are revealed to those that are prepared to listen to an expressive language that we humans have largely forgotten but which social animals like jackdaws or dogs, but also insects, are much better equipped to receive and transmit. This is not a language of words but of minute movements and mimetic signals which are innate, not learnt, and express the animal's state of mind rather than any conscious communicative intention (2002a: 73–75). This language of gestures that Lorenz can read like an open book is what he translates to the human language of science.

Lorenz's work led to the founding of a new science that illuminates a multitude of previously invisible animal worlds, worlds that revolve around animals’ subjective perceptions and actions. Thus, ethology brought to the study of nonhuman animals what was previously the exclusive province of the human sciences, that is, an understanding of the complex social relationships that are established between particular individuals and the distinctive emotions that accompany them: relations of love and indifference, of aggression and care, of domination and submissiveness, of enmity and friendship, of jealousy and admiration, and even puzzling life and death dilemmas that not only humans but also fish can encounter, as is described in the story entitled ‘Poor fish’ (2002a: 35–37). It would be impossible to account for these behaviours without a deep understanding of the animal's subjective point of view, whether or not a linguistically defined sense of self-understanding is involved. ⁷ Indeed, Lorenz's translations provide us with a means of doing so.

Animal capabilities and justice

If the notion of animal worlds provides a good starting point for a natural science that does not obliterate animals’ social relationships and subjective points of view, the concept of animal capabilities holds a similar value for articulating an ethical and political approach to justice that includes non-human animals. In fact, both concepts can be shown to be intimately related, as will be argued in this section. In her book Justice for Animals (2023), Martha Nussbaum questions the traditional line that has been drawn to distinguish our species from what was previously conceived in terms of ‘brute beasts’ regarding intelligence, emotion and sentience. Precisely, the notion of capabilities alerts us to the multiple and fascinating forms that intelligence can take in relation to animals’ particular surrounding worlds, while preventing us to recognise just the intelligence of those animals who are more ‘like us’. Thus, Nussbaum's capabilities approach puts the animals’ own form of life at the heart of a concept of justice, emphasising each sentient creature's ability to flourish and thrive in the form characteristic for that creature, rather than more universalist notions centred on pain and suffering, as in the views of the Utilitarians, today most notably represented by Peter Singer (2023 [1975]).

Nussbaum's more positive approach, which puts an emphasis on movement, communication, social bonding and play, cannot be specified according to such a general principle (avoidance of pain), and requires the elaboration of a list of opportunities for choice and activity which is different for each species. Central capabilities are defined as substantial freedoms, core entitlements which are closely comparable to a list of fundamental rights. On the other hand, Nussbaum remarks that

injustice centrally involves significant striving blocked by not just harm but also wrongful thwarting, whether negligent or deliberate. Often, thwarting includes the infliction of pain, which impedes almost every ordinary activity of an organism (perceiving, eating, moving, loving). (Nussbaum, 2023: 7)

The distinction between negligent and deliberate wrong is particularly relevant in the case of the many wild animals that are threatened and killed by air pollution or plastic garbage accumulating in seas, but what constitutes negligence and who is responsible can be difficult to pin down. In any case, crucially, in this model ‘injustice depends on the action taken against a sentient being, not on the type of being’ (Nussbaum, 2023: 6).

Here, the human form of life is deemed irrelevant to think about what each type of animal needs and deserves, and it is precisely from this underlying principle that a rethinking of cosmopolitanism in a more-than-human direction can be proposed. Of course, Nussbaum's approach to justice for animals already involves a cosmopolitan dimension, because national constitutions are insufficient to protect the many animals that move across human borders, which are meaningless in their surrounding worlds, and because all the nations of the world should ideally agree to a legally enforceable constitution that recognises and protects the different capabilities of the various species. But here I am arguing for a more ambitious attempt to accommodate multispecies relationships and the issues they pose for a re-examination of a cosmopolitan approach to living with difference. Such rethinking involves adopting the principles that Nussbaum herself has helped to specify in her earlier work (Nussbaum, 2002) and relating the significance of cosmopolitan learning (or what she there refers to as cosmopolitan education) to the capabilities approach.

Acknowledging the astounding diversity of animal worlds leads us to redefine cosmopolitan openness as openness to the other animals. In this context, von Uexküll's constatation that there is no space independent of subjects, as opposed to the fiction of an all-encompassing world-space, appears charged with cosmopolitan intent:

The birds that flutter about, the squirrels hopping from branch to branch, or the cows grazing in the meadow, all remain permanently enclosed in the bubble that encloses their space.

Only when we can vividly imagine this fact will we recognize in our own world the bubble that encloses each and every one of us on all sides. (2010: 69–70)

Translation can provide a way of reaching out beyond the bubble that encloses our space. ⁸ It is not a coincidence that Nussbaum explicitly approaches the epistemic problem posed by the need to consider issues of justice from the animal's point of view in such terms:

Of course, any linguistic account is a distortion. But we’re familiar with that problem from our own studies of infant cognition, or our attempts to talk verbally about a pictorial or musical experience. But for better or worse, language is the medium for philosophical and scientific inquiry, so the ‘stammering translation' (words used by composer Gustav Mahler of his own attempts to describe his music in words) must be made. It's not clear why it can’t be made across the whole animal world, if we are careful, humble, and resourceful. (2023: 39)

In the previous section, I have argued for the need of translating animals as if animal self-understanding is involved. Nussbaum's invocation of a ‘stammering translation’ works in a similar way, reminding us that the perspectives of other animals are not linguistically formulated in the first place, while also insisting that the only form we have of acknowledging and acting upon them is through their translation into human words. In this view, humans are seen as responsible for translating the ways in which other animals actively express themselves into political action, as in the case of human beings who have disabilities that prevent them from participating in political life in the usual way (Nussbaum, 2023: 97–98; see also Donaldson and Kymlicka, 2011: 59–60, 98–99, 104–108). However, they must remain attentive to what Nussbaum calls the ‘false lure of language’ (2023: 123) that would lead us to consider all perceptual and emotional experience to be intimately related to the linguistic form, also in the case of human animals.

At this point, it might be instructive to compare this perspective to Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka's alternative approach to animal rights. In their book Zoopolis (2011), it is not the animals’ own forms of life but rather the human polis as a political community, and the ways in which animals relate to that community, that provide the basis of a theory of animal rights. Like Nussbaum, the authors insist on the positive obligations that we have towards the other animals, and not just on their universal negative rights, which have remained the main focus in the literature on animal rights. However, in their account, the emphasis is on relational duties which arise from the historically specific relationships that have developed between humans and other animals. Donaldson and Kymlicka distinguish between three types of groups or communities: wild animals are seen as forming separate sovereign communities, liminal opportunistic animals are those who (like migrants or denizens) reside in areas of human habitation, and domesticated animals, considered like full citizens because of their historical interdependence with humans.

However, significant difficulties appear even in the apparently least problematic of such categories: that of domesticated animals. Cats cannot really be seen as fully belonging to this group because they are both domesticated and wild at the same time, nor can they be considered to be ‘liminal’ animals (except for feral cats), a category precisely devised to counter the limitations of the domesticated/wild dichotomy. ⁹ Donaldson and Kymlicka's ‘cat problem’ is not, as they believe, that cats – true carnivores – cannot easily fit into their vision of fellow citizens who learn to live on vegan diets (2011: 149–153), but rather that they reveal an inherent weakness in their classification. Difficulties are compounded in the case of wild animals. The authors recognise that our duties cannot simply be met by designating no-go zones where these sovereign communities are left alone, because of our inevitable entanglements with them on a planetary scale. However, they are left without any means to develop the stammering translations that Nussbaum envisages, which can only be based on the social interactions and conversations that are established with these animals as subjects, either by inviting them into our homes (Lorenz) or by living as guests in theirs. This is why their theory of justice, although explicitly relying on a relational approach that emphasises human–animal interactions, is conceived in terms of the exclusively human meanings of citizenship, sovereignty and autonomy.

Nussbaum does not mention Lorenz's idiosyncratic approach to wild animals. She does however consider of great importance the work of experts (she refers mostly to ethologists) who have lived closely with certain types of animals over long periods of time, regarding them as ‘people who can be trusted to record the unheard voices of animals’ (2023: 101). In this way, the capabilities approach, which puts our increasing knowledge regarding species-specific capabilities and needs at the centre, incorporates practices of cosmopolitan learning in its midst (in the form that I have referred to as knowledge translation at the beginning of this piece). However, significantly absent from Nussbaum's work are the contributions of experts in the social sciences, particularly sociologists, who have produced relevant knowledge about the social patterns of human–animal relations, especially regarding domesticated animals (see, for instance, Alger and Alger, 2003; Arluke et al., 2022; Hamilton and Taylor, 2013; Jerolmack, 2013; Sanders, 1999; Wilkie, 2010), as well as any references to the role of an aesthetic education, to which I now turn.

Animal autobiographical writing

When polar bears are facing the danger of drowning at sea because the mass of ice on which they move is literally disappearing from the earth, what is the value of a book like Yoko Tawada's Memoirs of a Polar Bear (2016)? Sociology might initially appear to be ill-equipped to elaborate on the aesthetic dimension (Adorno, 1991; Bourdieu, 1993), yet it is indispensable that it does so, not only because the latter provides a different type of approximation to human–animal relations where truth is not asserted but portrayed (Taylor, 2016: 78), but also because of the way in which it relates to the other two main dimensions – the cognitive and the ethical – that are explored in this article. The growing social significance of genres like animal autobiography (DeMello, 2013) and nature writing (Abberley et al., 2022; Smith, 2017) reveal the role of the literary imagination in addressing contemporary concerns about more harmonious ways of coexisting with others in a fragile planet. And even though such aesthetic pursuits cannot be claimed to possess the urgency of scientific research and ethical considerations on justice for animals, they seem to more easily connect with the invisible animal worlds that give them their substance. Because, as Theodor Adorno has acutely expressed:

In its clownishness, art consolingly recollects prehistory in the primordial world of animals. Apes in the zoo together perform what resembles clown routines. The collusion of children with clowns is a collusion with art, which adults drive out of them just as they drive out their collusion with animals. Human beings have not succeeded in so thoroughly repressing their likeness to animals that they are unable in an instant to recapture it and be flooded with joy; the language of little children and animals seems to be the same. (1997: 119)

Tawada's novel delves into the linguistic entanglements between animals and humans in the circus and zoos evoked in this quote, while also belonging to a rich literary tradition that preserves a memory of metamorphosis or bodily transformation, where the essential fluidity of nature and the relative ease with which human beings can transform themselves (or others) into anything are explored. It tells the story of three individuals of different generations of polar bears: an unnamed grandmother who writes her autobiography, seeking to remember her past as a circus performer; her daughter Tosca, whose life story is narrated by her trainer and friend Barbara; and Knut, son of Tosca, a character based on the world-famous polar bear of the same name who was born and lived in Berlin zoo (2006–2011), becoming a popular figure and an environmental icon, but also the source of ethical controversy.

Tawada's metamorphic novel does not just offer a portrayal of the intermingling of human and animal lives in and through language. It also explicitly addresses translation as the metamorphosis of words, relying on a materialist view that challenges dominant perspectives on translation as the transmission of contents or signifieds by insisting on the transformation of words or signifiers, in which social relations are sedimented (Bielsa, 2023: 39–40). Such a view finds a direct expression in the various essays that Tawada has written on this topic, as well as in the translation-related experimental writing techniques that she employs in her fiction, in what has consistently been described as a translational poetics (Brandt, 2014). Tawada produces literary works in both Japanese and German, the language of her adopted country, and engages in a variety of translational practices, thematising translation and translating or adapting her own work and the work of others across languages (most notably, she has translated Kafka's Metamorphosis into Japanese). These activities have become a productive laboratory for the writing of her literary texts, which can also be approached as translations without an original. ¹⁰

In a short piece entitled ‘From mother tongue to linguistic mother’, she recounts how the strangeness of German gave her a new linguistic consciousness: ‘Prior to this, I had not been aware that the relationship between me and my pencil was a linguistic one’ (2006: 139). This radical distancing from the naturalness of the mother tongue brings with it the possibility of a second childhood, in which dulled mimetic powers are regained and can be used for experimenting with (2006: 142–143). Indeed, language is a prodigious garden for cultivating what Alfred Schutz once memorably described as ‘the magic fruit of strangeness’ (1976). The novel's original title is significant but has been eclipsed in translation: Etüden im Schnee (Studies in the snow). In a sort of iteration which explicitly puts writing and translation at the centre, Tawada's bearish linguistic children enact different forms of play with human words to reimagine their lives in a human entertainment industry that exploits them.

The grandmother bear seeks to regain her past, which has been erased from her memory through reflex conditioning and exploitation, through the writing of an autobiography. The mother tongue is of no significance to this bear who has no memory of her mother. Against the advice of her human collaborators, she insists on learning to write in German, the language of her country of installation after she is forced into exile from the Soviet Union:

‘No, that's out of the question! You have to write in your own mother tongue. You’re supposed to be pouring out your heart, and that needs to happen in a natural way.'

‘What's my mother tongue?'

‘The language your mother speaks.'

‘I’ve never spoken with my mother.'

‘A mother is a mother, even if you never speak with her.'

‘I don’t think my mother spoke Russian.'

‘Ivan was your mother. Have you forgotten? The age of female mothers is over.'

This is an ironic comment on the unmotherly figure of the circus trainer who taught her to stand and walk like a human by literally putting fire under her two front legs. The studies around Tosca and Knut penetrate deeper into strong positive human–animal attachments across the linguistic divide. In contrast to her mother and the other nine polar bears who also participate in her circus show and deliver political speeches in fluent German, Tosca does not speak in human language. But Tosca and Barbara, her trainer, have started meeting in a place where ‘the grammars of many languages lost their color, they melted and combined’. There, Barbara ‘sat on the same iceberg as Tosca and understood every word’ she said to her. Together they enter a North Pole of dreams, ‘a sphere situated halfway between the animal and human worlds’, and it is from this communion that the writing of Tosca's biography in the first person emerges, as well as the performance that will make them international circus stars: the kiss of death, in which Tosca elegantly bends over Barbara to take a sugar cube from inside her mouth with a rapid but cautious movement of the tongue. When Barbara is old and ill, Tosca takes over the task of writing down the life of her human friend. As she recounts:

In the time since our first kiss, her human soul had passed bit by bit into my bear body. A human soul turned out to be less romantic than I’d imagined. It was made up primarily of languages – not just ordinary, comprehensible languages, but also many broken shards of language, the shadows of languages, and images that couldn’t turn into words.

It takes a bear to remind us humans of the value of these broken shards of language, of what cannot be put into words. This contrasts with Murr's scratchy autobiographical approach, the cat in Hoffmann's novel who reduces with his claws a human biography to shreds before writing his own over the remaining pieces. ¹¹ Abandoned by his mother Tosca shortly after his birth, Knut, like Murr, teaches himself to read from the newspapers that Matthias, his human carer, brings him. Their play acts are soon turned into a show that attracts and delights large human audiences. Knut has no trouble understanding human language or conversing with the other inhabitants of the zoo during his early morning walks with Matthias, which are compared to an academic education. However, this routine comes to a sudden end when he becomes too big and is moved into a solitary cell.

It is not clear that Knut's lovely baby looks can make his viewers and fans think more about climate change, as his veterinary doctor and the zoo's director hope, and in any case they soon fade away. ¹² However, something rather different is taking place. The snow of the North Pole lies infinitely distant from these three polar bears but is powerfully evoked by the white surface of the page on which the grandmother writes, the sugar cube that shines in the cave of Barbara's mouth, and the milk that flows from Matthias’ long fingers, filling them with longing. Only a linguistically constituted world can give form to these longings, through which the animals that have been thrown into it can imagine and pursue their own ends. Tawada's novel is not an exercise in world literature (which is mockingly mentioned in it) but rather an experiment into the merging of animal worlds. The best-known literary works of the metamorphic tradition have been narrating exhilarating stories of becoming animal for millennia, showing us a glimpse of our forgotten links with the other animals in unexpected forms. Instead, this book portrays how animals can play, through language, at the game of becoming human. It remains to be seen what this new game can awaken in our senses, languages and imagination, and in the search for new ways to envision and care for unknown animal worlds which intersect with a human world that has established its dominion over them.

It is necessary to insist on the need for a sociological – and not just philosophical – interpretation of the truth content of works where art's ever broken promise of happiness can fleetingly be discerned (Adorno, 1997: 136). Because only in this way can the value of what is preserved in art in enigmatic form, denied and affirmed at the same time, be related to its social truth, to what is social in art and to the social consequences of what art can show but not in itself realise.

A politics of friendship

What animates the different types of translators that I have approached in the previous sections is a politics of friendship (Derrida, 1997), which distinguishes the translating animal from other animals while also making possible deep intimate links with members of different species. Each of the authors discussed above has produced substantial reflections and portrayals of animal friendships, which appear key to the opening of animal worlds, the bubbles that enclose each and every one of us on all sides.

Lorenz tellingly denounces the sentimental anthropomorphisation of animals in staged scenes of animal friendship which capture different types of animals together, maintaining that friendships between members of different species can only really exist between humans and other animals:

My raven, Roah, who used to fly miles to find me on some Danube sand-bank, my grey-lag goose Martina who, the longer I had been away, the more enthusiastically she greeted me, my wild ganders Peter and Victor who would defend me valiantly against the attacks of a wicked old gander of whom they themselves were mortally afraid, all these animals were really my friends, that is to say our love was mutual. The fact that corresponding feelings seldom occur in animals of different species is largely due to the ‘language difficulty’. I have already mentioned the difficulties that arise between dogs and cats, because neither has an innate understanding of even the most significant expressive movement of threat or anger made by the other; much less can they apprehend all the finer lights and shades of the emotion of friendship which both are capable of feeling and showing. (2002b: 107)

In this view, the language difficulty is the main obstacle to real friendship between members of different species, which can only be achieved through acts of translation that both presuppose it and realise it concretely. And the ‘freely invented’ behaviour patterns introduced by experience and learning, which break with the rigidity of innate expressive movements, are infinitely extended in a language of words, in which close nonhuman animal friends can participate even if they do not themselves have the power of speech. This is why, according to Lorenz, the most highly domesticated dogs are generally the most free and adaptable in their behaviour, as well as adept at understanding human gestures and language (2002b: 128–129).

Nussbaum similarly insists on the possibility and value of friendship (to which she dedicates a chapter of her book), even with wild animals. Friendship appears as an imperative and as a correction for human exploitative ways, because friends treat one another as ends and not simply as means, which involves respect for that person's form of life. Ideals of human friendship must be invoked in a humble and open-ended way and require real curiosity and being prepared to learn. But, as Nussbaum remarks, friendship also involves shared activities and pleasures, delight in one another's company, and depends on language and other forms of communication. In this respect, it is important to try to overcome the difficulty of understanding, to potentially translate the sounds made by whales and elephants into something humans can hear (Nussbaum, 2023 260), for instance, but also to remember the opaqueness of forms of life that do not inhabit in linguistic worlds.

In Tawada's novel, the highest form of friendship between a human and a polar bear is expressed in metamorphosis, which takes place both at the level of physical bodies and in the linguistic body of words:

‘I promised to write down your life story. But so far I’ve only been talking about my own. I’m terribly sorry.'

‘That's all right. First you should translate your own story into written characters. Then your soul will be tidy enough to make room for a bear.'

‘Are you planning to come inside me?'

‘Yes.'

‘I’m scared.'

We laughed with one voice.

Because of its non-instrumental nature, which is not of this human world, and the fact that it does not obey any laws outside itself, art is the most serious form of play. It has paid for this with a loss of social relevance. However, play is one of the best forms of awakening us to our profound relations with the other animals. It is in fact a classic children's book, Selma Lagerlöf's The Wonderful Adventures of Nils, relating the story of a boy who flies off on the back of a gander with a flock of wild geese, that first stirred in Lorenz the irresistible desire to befriend wild animals when he was a child (Burkhardt, 2005: 130). The many stories of animal lives that he and other experts like him have written, point us in turn to the right direction on the matter of animal capabilities and human designs for animal justice. This is a form of knowledge translation whose social significance is becoming increasingly recognised. However, we must also accept that knowledge is not always the source and content of the translations we make if we do not want to forget the value of that which originates in sensory experiences and concerns. We may have a lot to say and to learn from other animals, particularly other social animals like ourselves. Yet it is only by opening up human language through cognitive, ethical and aesthetic means that we, the translating animal, will be able to achieve friendship and mutual understanding with the other animals. Such translations are becoming increasingly urgent in the present context, when we need to devise new forms of living together in a world in danger.

Conclusion

This article has explored the significance of translating animal worlds into the language of science, the language of justice and the language of literature, thus allowing nonhuman animals to penetrate into our world, the world of the language animal, in more equal terms. This demands a necessary rethinking of the figure of the translator, who is obliged to take on supplementary roles to articulate the points of view of languageless subjects through linguistic means. I propose to approach these different types of animal translators with reference to the role of the expert, the collaborator and the playmate. It is Lorenz himself who remarks on the significance of the expert in relation to the great pioneers of ethology, whom he describes as individuals of large experience who are thoroughly familiar with their subject (1970: xv). Nussbaum, in turn, refers to the collaborators who can be charged with making policy on the animals’ behalf and bringing challenges to unjust arrangements in the courts, thus treating animals as having a political say and as full subjects of justice. Tawada's novel is the work of a devoted playmate in a purportedly inconsequential domain where everything is allowed. Whether in the case of the expert, of the collaborator or of the playmate, these figures attend to animals’ subjective goods and translate their expressions to different specialised human languages. The fundamental and often misunderstood role of translation is precisely to transform these languages by opening them up to something they did not previously register. Because it is only in this way that the world of human meanings can be extended to include the other animals.