What does it mean to say that something is untranslatable? Certainly anyone who speaks more than one language has used this term to describe either a pun or a word that is like a baggage-claim ticket to the history of a specific culture. Or, as Suzanne Jill Levine has noted, the most difficult untranslatables are simply “words themselves.”1 Along a parallel line, Octavio Paz situates translation as an act that begins with the act of speech itself—with “translation within the same language.”2 If this is true then untranslatability, if it exists, actually begins in the source language.
What might need further discussion in the discourse on this topic, indeed what is both fascinating and perhaps unsaid about the word “untranslatable,” is that it is used less as an admission of failure than as a badge of pride: “I know this word so well that I can vouch for its untranslatability. It can’t be done; trust me!” Puns, for example, are the result of homophonic or homographic confusion—that’s why certain puns are funny (because confusion or contradiction can be a source of comedy), and why bad puns are not funny (because excessively obvious confusions are no longer confusing, unless you are a five year old). So the notion of untranslatability could actually represent a defensive attitude, in that it sanctifies the internal quirks and confusions of a language—quirks and confusions that may indeed be wonderful in the hands of a skilled speaker or writer, but hardly sacred. There’s a similar emotional charge with respect to allophones, which are related phonetic units between which only native speakers can distinguish: for instance, the difference between sheet and shit. Non-native speakers are easy to tease, but really, what is more silly, the non-native speaker or the sheety-shitty language itself?
The idea of untranslatability may also be understood in the expanded context of the history of translation. Before the 18th century, according to Schulte and Biguenet, untranslatability wasn’t an issue, for the simple reason that translation was openly understood as exploitation of the source language to enrich the target language. In the view of Cicero, and later St. Jerome, who translated the Greek Bible into Latin, “the translator conquers the concepts of another language without necessarily transferring the words that expressed these concepts in the original language,” the goal being “to supersede the original text, since the translator had the ability and freedom” to do so.3 Fidelity to the original was not really relevant until the age of Diderot and d’Alembert, during which “respect for the foreign in the original source-language text emerges as a guiding principle, and with that change of perspective, a desire to adjust and adapt to the foreign.”4 The results of this have been mixed for the English language, which owes many of its counter-phonetic spellings and burdensome grammar to the efforts of its Latinate lexicographers.
David Bellos has defined the untranslatable simply as what has not yet been translated.5 In this view, untranslatability is purely contingent and not essential. There is something at once very practical and thoroughly messianic about this observation, almost a profession of faith which brought to mind something Bellos told me and my wife and co-translator Rose Réjouis in 1998. When he learned that we had translated Patrick Chamoiseau’s Texaco and Solibo Magnifique for Pantheon Books, he admitted that, in a report commissioned several years earlier by the French Publishers Agency, he concluded that Texaco was untranslatable. All of this suggests that untranslat-ability is always a social claim, or rather a claim or prognosis for possible or impossible dialogue. In other words, the aesthetics, craft, hermeneutics, and scholarship that comprise acts of literary translation are functions of the ethics and pragmatics of translation.
I called the contingent nature of the untranslatable “messianic.” But I don’t mean to reduce translation to mysticism, to a futile quest for the grail of the primordial word or Ursprache. After all, messianism also has a starkly ethical aspect: It addresses human need. So does translation, which only happens if you want it or need it badly enough. Translation is both faith and imperative. Because a British translator hired by Pantheon Books had produced nothing useable, Rose and I were given only six months to translate the “untranslatable” Texaco—and we did it because we felt we that we had to, because otherwise Solibo would never be published. Texaco was Leah and Solibo our Rachel, our favorite of Chamoiseau’s novels, which Rose began translating in college partly so that I could read it. In this case, translation was much like any conversation: People will likely never fully understand each other, will never become transparent to each other, although this is what dialogue reaches for when we need or want to make each other understood. And the most important part of what gets understood is the fact that there are realms that will never be understood in their original form, which must be replaced by new understandings and by the feeling of loss.
Clare Cavanagh has written eloquently about translation as loss and mourning: “Losing things is what translators do best.”6 According to Cavanagh, the translator wants something impossible, and just like a child—and this reminds me of Donald Winnicot’s developmental psychology—wants to destroy it to see if it endures or reemerges.7 Suzanne Jill Levine has questioned the censure of such substitutions as “abusive.”8
In Veillées pour les mots, Rose Réjouis’ book on the motif of the funerary wake in Césaire, Chamoiseau, and Condé, she discusses the mourning for the loss of oral culture that infuses so much of the work we have translated. Chamoiseau’s involvement in la créolité— perceived either as a form of willful opacité or, according to Emily Apter, as a “tautology [designating] multiple layers of cultural translation and linguistic mixage, […] a translation of translatability itself”9—mirrors this idea that an acknowledgment of meaning and culture lost can generate new meanings, new cultures with traces and intonations of the old.
It is telling, however, that Apter’s focus on the politics (rather than the ethics or pragmatics) of translation leads her to misread Rose Réjouis’ after-word to Texaco, in which Apter claims that we as translators “basically plead guilty to ‘overtranslating’ and ‘correcting’ Chamoiseau’s use of Creole, [speaking] volumes about the normative values of translators as applied to poetically inflected creolizations.”10 Instead, by suggesting that on some level, any literary translation of an experimental text—and all classics are, arguably, experiments—is an “overtranslation,” Réjouis is framing the project of translation as at once modest towards the source text and generous towards the reader. Moreover, Réjouis reminds me that Apter’s claim implies that cultural compromise begins only when literary translators arrive on the scene (as opposed to, say, when young would-be Antillean authors go to postcolonial schools). One should also note that Apter’s argument significantly distorts the text under discussion. In the afterword, Réjouis writes:
There’s a well-known novelty button pin with the following gag written in tiny letters: “If you can read this & maybe you’re standing too close.” Some would say, in a similar vein, that if you can read Patrick Chamoiseau’s Texaco, maybe we overtranslated it. […] We of course don’t think so. Not only because any translated text is already a processed text, that is, a text necessarily digested by an intermediary reader who in turn becomes a writer, but also because despite the Babelian ambitions of Texaco, Chamoiseau meant for his book to be readable. This is why he provides contexts, explanations, definitions and translations (especially of any passage or term in […] Martinican Creole) in his chronology, text, and footnotes. […] For all its multivoicedness, collage, and foreign smatterings, Patrick Chamoiseau’s Texaco remains grounded in French […] So with an English bursting at a few seams, but English nonetheless, our text tries to remain faithful to Chamoiseau’s, to the rapport between Martinican Creole and French in a Creole text with a French matrix.11
By disapproving of the possibility that we would consider “correcting”
Chamoiseau, Apter would appear to be voicing either a careless or perhaps earnestly literal-minded suspicion of all translation. In any case, such “correction” is found neither in our translation nor in the afterword that situates our work as a continuation of Chamoiseau’s attempt to bring different languages into “rapport.”
Of course, theorists can often (if not always) be unforgiving of practitioners, who must constantly imbricate the ethics of translation and its pragmatics. As Levine, whose theory is a gloss in the margins of her practice, particularly the collaborative dimension of practice, writes, “the translator’s fate dramatizes that of the writer caught between the language of writing and the Real, or the elusive past.”12 Working together means that Rose and I are forced to articulate and convey to one another the fine-grained mechanics of two different languages and their different modes of intention—that is, why you can say something this way in one language but not in another. When I translate from Russian on my own, I acutely feel the absence of this kind of dialogue. On the other hand, in our work together, our pragmatics reflect a belief that the “product” of translation should be its properly literary intonation, which is to say, the “feeling” it evokes in its dialogue with a reader. To arrive at such a feeling, we first ask, what resources are in the source text?—sometimes the baldly literal translation best conveys the literary idiosyncrasy of the original—and second, what resources are in the target language? English, after all, is incredibly flexible with respect to tone, idiom, neologism, and rhythm. Instead of viewing the differences between languages exclusively as a problem, we can look to both languages for solutions. Often, this sort of translation aikido—a blending with and redirection of the chauvinist claims of any one language—is at times more easily available in co-translation (or other forms of collaboration), in which different people with different relationships to the source and target languages must assume, negotiate, and reconcile their roles. Or, as Rose wrote in her note about our process translating Marie Vieux-Chauvet’s Love, Anger, Madness from the French: “We take turns. When I defend the original, he defends the translation. When he defends the original, I defend the translation.”13 In other words, these are roles, roles are reversible, and you learn more about the roles when you reverse them.
“La trouvaille est sauvage…”14
Pierre Schaeffer
At first glance, literary translation seems like an ideal interface for theories about language and communication. But there is a gap, often unacknowledged, between the myths described in every translation theory and the creative, improvisational, and heterogeneous nature of the bricolage that characterizes most translations. Ironically, the most iconic translation theorists—Henri Meschonnic, Walter Benjamin, and Antoine Berman— describe a task focused on realizing an imagined perfect relationship with the original text. In such a narrative, translation should, ritually, re-enact all of the etymological, semantic, and syntactical gestures of the original text and produce either an identical text (to refer to Borges’ satire of translation, and particularly of the ideology of fidelity, in his short story “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”) or a near-literal or at least strongly “foreignized” text that is not idiomatic—a text, as Berman suggests, that keeps the traces of its translatedness. One example of a literal translation that makes the target text strange could be Meschonnic’s use of the Hebrew Adonai instead of Dieu [God] in his French translation of the Bible.15 As I
have discussed elsewhere, translation for Benjamin and his followers is ultimately an impossible task.16 Although an ethical approach to the other’s otherness is what is at stake for these translators, there is something else going on here. For these European men, Benjamin, Berman, Meschonnic, there is a necessarily tragic dichotomy between a sacred original text— for Meschonnic, the Bible—and a fallen contemporary culture that is only worthy of facile ethnographies and that can only redeem itself through a kind of linguistic martyrdom and submission. The restoration of a canonical text, that is, a big text, the text of a Big Man,17 is essential to this project. In other words, the original text is fetishized and an elusive ethics displaces communication as the new icon. Stories and theories describing untranslatability are, like the story of the tower of Babel itself, often beautiful intellectual performances in their own right. They are often not, however, translations done for the general reader.
Jean-René Ladmiral—a philosopher of language and a translator of German thought (Habermas and the Frankfurt School) into French— strenuously objects to this enshrined translation theory. A teacher of both oral [ interprétation ] and literary translation [ traduction ], he demonstrates his own focus on interpersonal communication and distances himself from literal translation with a signature teaching assignment: he asks his students to translate within the same language.18 He does so in order to teach what he calls “unwording,” that is, a rewording of ideas and semantic effects that eschews a constraining word-for-word translation.19 One example Ladmiral gives of translation via rewording is a rendering of Hamlet’s famous phrase, “to be or not to be, that is the question,” into a French version that does not use the word "question": “être ou ne pas être, tout est là!”20 Ladmiral dramatizes the traditional dichotomy of “foreignizing vs. domesticating” modes of translation, when he describes two kinds of translators: those who believe in the sanctity of the original source-texts, the sourciers [originalists]; and those who believe in the overriding importance of the target text, in rewriting the original text, the ciblistes [rewriters].21 While he labels himself and others as ciblistes, Ladmiral classifies Meschonnic, Benjamin, and Berman as sourciers who put an onerous burden on the target-text by demanding that it allow the source-text to distort it.22 Ladmiral goes so far as to characterize this “foreignization” as an unnecessary violence:
Je suis tenté de dire que la logique des sourciers, c’est la logique du viol. On connaît le fameux principe de Pannwitz. Que Benjamin reprend à son compte: “l’erreur fondamentale de celui qui traduit est de conserver l’état contingent de sa propre langue au lieu de la soumettre à la motion violente de la langue étrangère.23
I am tempted to declare that the logic of the advocates of the source-text is the logic of rape! We are all aware of Pannwitz’s principle, explicitly adopted by Benjamin: “the fundamental error of the translator is that he holds fast to the incidental state of his own language instead of letting it be violently moved by the foreign.
(My translation)24
Ladmiral objects to the problematic trope of (sexual) violence he sees in the discourse of the sourciers, although he himself initially displaces it with a discourse that is still problematically gendered.25 Political incorrectness aside, Pannwitz’s choice of words does reveal a certain theoretical excess. His dis-cursive economy is consistent with Benjamin’s dismissal of any translation that is contemporary with the original text and his focus on a hypothetical perfection that is never even fully articulated: the production of some kind of ur-language via translation. Nestled within Benjamin’s 1921 essay, “The Task of the Translator,” Pannwitz’s statement stands as a theory within a theory. Upon closer examination, one sees that behind the simplicity of Pannwitz’s argument, there is a denunciation of the translator, faulted for not displacing the arbitrariness of his own language with the arbitrariness of another. It is an opaque and idiosyncratic statement, and it frames Benjamin’s discussion of Hölderlin’s inconclusive translation of Sophocles as exemplary. In a way, the difference between sourciers and ciblistes lies in their interpretation of cultural incommensurability. Sourciers value the incommensurability between a source-text and its target language, as if it were a precious material, the way buyers of medieval art felt that the monetary value of the gold and lapis lazuli pigments used to paint icons were a kind of insurance against the potential devaluation of the works themselves. It is this precious and semi-precious incommensurability they wish to impress, violently and materialistically, upon the translation, through a kind of literalness that hampers communication. While ciblistes mourn the default incommensurability between cultures, especially those that are not within each other’s contact zone, they ultimately view literary texts as a kind of transcendent object that creates overlapping cultural communities. Ciblistes might ask: Are we not better off having a “French Freud,” a “French Poe,” and a “French Jerry Lewis,” instead of concluding that the French should stop translating others’ cultures since it leaves a mark on the source texts?
Historically, violence and cultural incommensurability often go together, as Anthony Pagden’s study of European encounters with the “new world” reminds us.26 And yet, sometimes incommensurability is not merely a contingency attendant upon an unlikely meeting but rather a consciously chosen political strategy in the maneuvering of two opposing factions—one party instrumentally refuses to learn another’s language in order to assert and maintain its power. In a discussion of Galileo’s career, Mario Biagioli notes that the tenured Aristotelian philosophers refused to learn mathematics in order to refute Galileo’s claim that mathematics describe the world.27 And again, sometimes the misunderstanding is located between theory and practice. Here I am particularly drawn to Elizabeth Povinelli’s discussion of incommensurability between theory and practice in liberal ideology. In her study of the political closure of liberal ideology—a closure so efficacious, according to her, that it excludes its own imperfections, its own miscarriages of justice, from the story it tells itself about itself—she writes:
What seems to be at stake then is how we come to characterize moments of social repression and social violence directed at left and right radical worlds as moving forward a nonviolent shared horizon, as the peaceful proceduralism of communicative reason, rather than as violent intolerance, i.e., the pragmatic aspects of communication. To do this we have to shift our perspective. We do not ask how a multicultural or plural nation (or world) is sutured at the end of some horizon of liberal, institutionally embedded, communication. We ask instead how the incommensurateness of liberal ideology and practice is made to appear commensurate. The temporalizing function of the horizon of successful self-correction seems an essential part of the means by which the practice of social violence is made to appear and to be experienced as the unfurling of the peaceful public use of reason. Characterizations of liberal governmentality as always-already stretching to the future horizon of apologetic self-correction figure contemporary real-time contradictions, gaps, and incommensurabilities in liberal democratic discourses and institutions as in the process of closure and commensuration. Any analysis of real-time violence is deflected to the horizon of good intentions, and more immediately, as a welcomed part of the very process of liberal self-correction itself.28
Povinelli’s inquiry seems to be inscribed in a psychoanalytic critique that juxtaposes an explicit narrative of good intentions and “self-correction” with underground intolerance. She calls for an encounter between surface and underground political encounters, between big “trompe-l’oeil” national narratives and local acts of violence. Acknowledging incommensurability without giving up on the project of communication is essential to translation and collaboration.
I would like to use what Richard Rorty sees as a reversal of the aims of philosophy and literature to offer a new paradigm for translation. Rorty writes:
Within an ironist culture, […] it is the disciplines which specialize in thick description of the private and idiosyncratic which are assigned this job [to bind humans together, and thus help eliminate cruelty]. In particular, novels and ethnographies which sensitize one to the pain of those who do not speak our language must do the job which the demonstration of a common human nature were supposed to do. Solidarity has to be constructed out of little pieces, rather than found already waiting, in the form of an ur-language which all of us recognize when we hear it. Conversely, within our increasingly ironist culture, philosophy has become more important for the pursuit of private perfection rather than for any social task.29
The hypothetical reversal of the tasks of philosophy and literature are worth pondering here, especially since it seems to me that Maurice Blanchot would have probably described “the space of literature” as synonymous with “the pursuit” of an ever-elusive “private perfection” rather than as cultural out-reach. In such a hypothetical reversal, translation does gain pride of place. It is an inherently social task: crucial in reaching “those who do not speak our language” as well as to “the demonstration of a common human nature.” Practically speaking, as a space for interpersonal communication between imperfect beings, translation is just not an ideal space for the “pursuit of perfection.”
This brings me to the task of articulating a more dynamic paradigm of translation. It seems to me that, at the end of the day, both ciblistes and sourciers define translation in too rigid a manner. Translation is the translator’s poetry—the means by which they offer the world, again and again, new “final vocabularies,” to use Rorty’s phrase. What Elizabeth Bishop says of poetry’s attempt to be congruent with “the contemporary fact” is also true of translation:
One of the causes of poetry must be the feeling that the contemporary language is not equivalent to the contemporary fact; there is something out of proportion between them and what is being said in words is not at all what is being said in “things.” To connect this disproportion a pretense is at first necessary. By “pretending” the existence of a language appropriate and comparable to the “things” it must deal with, the language is forced into being. It is learned by one person, by a few, by all who can become interested in that poet’s poetry.30
Translators turn to the original works of other writers to “force into being”—to (re)word—what they think has not yet been said in their own language. This attempt at pooling together the creative resources of writers from all over the world in order to face “things,” makes the practice of translation always and already a creative act of what I would paradoxically call wild solidarity or wild collaboration. As the musician Pierre Schaeffer reminds us, la trouvaille est sauvage …: a find is a wild thing. Translation is about discovery, about making new matches between words and things, and about creating new meetings between literary communities. The aim of such a project is the radical acceptance of contemporary facts as we re-imagine our identities.
1. Suzanne Jill Levine, The Subversive Scribe (Minneapolis: Graywolf, 1991), 9.
2. Octavio Paz, “Translation: Literature and Letters,” in Theories of Translation: An Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derrida, trans. Irene del Corral and ed. Rainer Schulte and John Biguenet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 152.
3. Rainer Schulte and John Biguenet, eds., Theories of Translation: An Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 2.
4. Ibid., 3.
5. Bellos made this claim as an oral remark during a panel discussion on the Dictionary of Untranslatables at the Institute for Public Culture at New York University on October 20, 2014.
6. Claire Cavanagh, “The Art of Losing: Polish Poetry and Translation,” in In Translation: Translators on Their Work and What It Means, ed. Esther Allen and Susan Bernofsky (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 234. On the same page, Cavanagh echoes John Felstiner’s words about “the art of loss” involved in translation.
7. Ibid., 244.
8. Levine, Subversive Scribe, 16.
9. Emily Apter, “Crossover Texts/Creole Tongues: A Conversation with MaryseCondé,” Public Culture 13, no. 1 (2001): 93.
10. Ibid., 95.
11. Rose-Myriam Réjouis, afterword to Texaco, by Patrick Chamoiseau, trans. Rose-Myriam Réjouis and Val Vinokurov (New York: Pantheon Books, 1997), 393–395.
12. Levine, Subversive Scribe, 2.
13. Rose-Myriam Réjouis, translator’s note to Love, Anger, Madness: A Haitian Tryptych, by Marie Vieux-Chauvet, trans. Rose Réjouis and Val Vinokur (New York: Modern Library, 2010), xxiii.
14. A find is a wild thing [my translation].
15. Henri Meschonnic, Gloires. Traduction des psaumes (Paris: Desclée deBrouwer,2001).
16. Benjamin writes: “This problem of ripening the seed of pure language in translation seems never to be solvable, to be definable in no solution. For isn’t the ground pulled out from under such a language if the restitution of meaning ceases to be decisive? And indeed nothing else—to turn the phrase negatively—is the significance of all the foregoing.” “The Task of the Translator” was written in 1921 and published in 1923 in Charles Baudelaire, “Tableaux parisiens”: Deutsche Übertragung mit einem Vorword über die Aufgabe des Übersetzers, von Walter Benjamin [Charles Baudelaire, “Tableaux Parisiens”: German Translation, with a Foreword on the Task of the Translator, by Walter Benjamin.] I am using Carol Jacobs’ translation. Carol Jacobs, “The Monstrosity of Translation,” MLN 90, no. 6 (1975): 758.] I am indebted to Susan Bernofsky for sharing Carol Jacobs’ essay with me. For a discussion of the impossibility of the work of translation in Benjamin, see Rose Réjouis, “Tasks without Solutions: Why Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams Matters to Translation Culture,” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, no. 45 (November 2014): 83.
17. Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols (London: Barrie & Rockliff, 1970), 129.
18. Ladmiral discussed this assignment in a conversation with Adèle Van Reth entitled “Splendeur et Misère de la traduction,” on the radio show, Les Nouveaux Chemins de la Connaissance, on France Culture in 2014. See www.franceculture.fr/oeuvre-sourcier-ou-cibliste-de-jean-rene-ladmiral.
19. Ladmiral alternatively uses “déverbalisation” or “dissimilation” in his text. See René Ladmiral, Cibliste ou Sourcier (Paris: Belles Lettres, 2014), 95.
20. Ibid., 210–211.
21. My translations of Ladmiral’s terms (originalists vs. rewriters) are clearly biased in his favor. Ladmiral’s terms are neologisms so I could have created the terms “sourcers” for sourciers and “textists” for ciblistes, but I wanted words that conveyed the spirit of his neologisms. Like Ladmiral, I think literal translations are usually not very useful for the general reader, though they sometimes may have a place in a footnote. I was also tempted to translate sourciers as “archivists.” At the translation conference at which I presented a much earlier version of this paper, someone suggested that “sourciers” was a pun because in French sourcier is associated with a quack, someone who tricks a community into paying him for locating water tables. I don’t believe this was Ladmiral’s intention: he has repeatedly expressed his respect for the translators with whom he is in disagreement. For a pun with the word “sourcier,” see the next note.
22. Ladmiral also labels the following translators as ciblistes: Georges Mounin, Eugene Nida, Charles Taber and Efim Etkind. Although sourcier in French does mean “water diviner” and may suggests that he questions the integrity of the translators with he whom he disagrees quacks, Ladmiral goes out of his way to say that “sourcier” is a neologism that puns with the word “sourcilleuse”(21) or supercilious to describe the attitude of the “sourciers” towards translation. Elsewhere in the radio broadcast cited above, he has declared that he suspects that translation is a metaphor for some translation theorists and thus “translation” in their texts actually refers to something else.
23. Antoine Berman, La Traduction et la Lettre. Ou l’Auberge du lointain (Paris: Seuil, 1999), 23–24.
24. See Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. Harry Zohn and ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Harcourt, 1968), 81–82. Here I use Carol Jacobs’s translation of Pannwitz’s words. See Jacobs, “The Monstrosity of Translation,” 758.
25. Ladmiral’s own language can be problematic: “It isn’t true that one need submit the target language to the demands of the foreign language of the source text. To return to the metaphor we were just using, I would say that there are some encounters that begin with rape and end with mutual bliss” (2014: 26. My translation).
26. See Anthony Pagden, European Encounters with the New World (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994). I am also indebted to Sanjay Surahmanyam’s discussion on incommensurability: see Courtly Encounters: Translating Courtliness and Violence in Modern Early Asia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012).
27. See Mario Biagioli, “The Anthropology of Incommensurability,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 21, no. 2 (1990).
28. Elizabeth Povinelli, “Radical Worlds: The Anthropology of Incommensurability and Inconceivability,” Annual Review of Anthropology 30 (2001): 328–329.
29. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 94.
30. See Elizabeth Bishop, “Mechanics of Pretense,” in Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006), 183.
Apter, Emily. “Crossover Texts/Creole Tongues: A Conversation with MaryseCondé.” Public Culture 13, no. 4 (2001): 89–96.
Benjamin, Walter. “The Task of the Translator.” In Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, translated by Harry Zohn and edited by Hannah Arendt, 69–82.New York: Harcourt, 1968.
Berman, Antoine. La Traduction et la Lettre. Ou l’Auberge du lointain. Paris: Seuil,1999.
Biagioli, Mario. “The Anthropology of Incommensurability.” Studies in History andPhilosophy of Science 21, no. 2 (1990): 183–209.
Bishop, Elizabeth. “Mechanics of Pretense.” In Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments, edited by Alice Quinn. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006.
Cavanagh, Clare. “The Art of Losing: Polish Poetry and Translation.” In In Translation: Translators on Their Work and What It Means, edited by Esther Allen and Susan Bernofsky, 234–244.New York: Columbia University Press, 2013.
Douglas, Mary. Natural Symbols. London: Barrie & Rockliff (Cresset), 1970.
Jacobs, Carol. “The Monstrosity of Translation.” MLN 90, no. 6 (1975): 758.
Ladmiral, René. Cibliste ou Sourcier. Paris: Belles Lettres, 2014.
Levine, Suzanne Jill. The Subversive Scribe: Translating Latin American Fiction.Minneapolis: Graywolf, 1991.
Meschonnic, Henri. Poétique du Traduire. Paris: Verdier. 1999.
———. Gloires. Traduction des psaumes. Paris: Desclée deBrouwer, 2001.
Pagden, Anthony. European Encounters with the New World. Durham: Duke University Press, 1994.
Paz, Octavio. “Translation: Literature and Letters.” In Theories of Translation: An Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derrida, translated by Irene del Corral and edited by Rainer Schulte and John Biguenet, 152–162.Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992.
Povinelli, Elizabeth. “Radical Worlds: The Anthropology of Incommensurability and Inconceivability.” Annual Review of Anthropology 30 (2001): 319–334.
Réjouis, Rose-Myriam. “A Word about Bringing Chamoiseau’s Word into English,” afterword to Texaco, by Patrick Chamoiseau, 393–396, translated by Rose-Myriam Réjouis and Val Vinokurov. New York: Pantheon Books, 1997.
———. Veillées pour les mots. Paris: Karthala, 2005.
———. “Sharp Minds, Raw Hearts,” translator’s note to Love, Anger, Madness: A Haitian Tryptych, by Marie Vieux-Chauvet, xxiii, translated by Rose Réjouis and Val Vinokur. New York: Modern Library, 2010.
———. “Tasks without Solutions: Why Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams Matters to Translation Culture.” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism vol. 18 no. 3 45 (November 2014): 83.
Rorty, Richard. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Schulte, Rainer, and Biguenet, John, eds. Theories of Translation: An Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derrida. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992.
Subrahmanyam, Sanjay. Courtly Encounters: Translating Courtliness and Violence in Modern Early Asia. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012.