For Jean Greisch
My contribution focuses on the paradox that is both at the origin of translation and an effect of translation, i.e. the characteristic of a spoken message that is in a sense untranslatable from one language to another.
1. There is a first untranslatable, an initial untranslatable, which is the multiplicity of languages. It would be better immediately to call it, as von Humboldt does, the diversity, the dissimilarity of languages, suggesting the idea of a radical heterogeneity that should render translation impossible a priori. This diversity affects all the operating levels of language: the phonetic and articulatory division at the root of phonetic systems; the lexical division that separates languages, not word for word, but from lexical system to lexical system, verbal meanings within a lexicon consisting in a network of differences and of synonyms; the syntactic division affecting, for example, the verbal systems and the position of an event in time or even the modes of linking and of consecution. That is not all; languages are different not only owing to the way they carve up reality but also owing to the way they put it together again at the level of discourse; in this respect Benveniste, replying to Saussure, observes that the basic unit of meaningful language is the sentence and not the word whose oppositive character we have recalled. Now the sentence organizes in a synthetic way a speaker, an interlocutor, a message that tries to signify something and a referent, i.e. that about which one speaks, that of which one speaks (someone says something to someone about something in accordance with the rules of significance [signifiance]). It is at this level that the untranslatable proves disquieting a second time; not only the carving up of reality, but the relationship of sense to referent; what one says in its relationship to that about which one says it; throughout the world sentences flutter between men like elusive butterflies. That is not all, nor is it even the most fearsome issue; sentences are short discourses taken from longer discourses known as texts. Translators know it perfectly well: it is texts, not sentences, not words, that our texts try to translate. And texts in turn are part of cultural groups through which different visions of the world are expressed, visions which moreover can confront each other within the same elementary system of phonological, lexical, syntactic division, to the extent of making what one calls the national or the community culture a network of visions of the world in secret or open competition. Let us think only about the West and its successive contributions, Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and about its periods of competitive selfunderstanding, from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance and the Reformation, to the Enlightenment, to Romanticism.
These considerations lead me to say that the work of the translator does not move from the word to the sentence, to the text, to the cultural group, but conversely: absorbing vast interpretations of the spirit of a culture, the translator comes down again from the text, to the sentence and to the word. The final act, if one can put it that way, the final decision is about making out a glossary at the level of words: the selection of the glossary is the final test where what should be impossible to translate is crystallized as it were in fine.
2. I have just spoken about the initial untranslatable. In order to reach the final untranslatable, the one translation produces, it is necessary to say how translation works, because there is translation. We have always translated: there always were the merchants, the travellers, the ambassadors, the spies to satisfy the need to extend human exchanges beyond the linguistic community, which is one of the essential components of social cohesion and of group identity. Men of one culture have always known that there were foreigners who had different customs and different languages. And the foreigner has always been disturbing: so there were other ways of life than our own were there? Translation always was a partial response to this ‘test of the foreign’. It presupposes a curiosity initially – how, asks the eighteenth-century rationalist, can one be Persian? We know Montesquieu’s paradoxes: imagine the Persian interpretation of the customs of Western, Greco-Latin, Christian, superstitious and rationalist man. What Antoine Berman, in The Test of the Foreign, calls the desire to translate is grafted onto this curiosity about the foreigner.
How does the translator do it? I am deliberately using the verb ‘to do’ because it is through a doing, in pursuit of its theory, that the translator gets over the obstacle – and even the theoretical objection – of the impossibility of mechanically reproducing something in another language. In an earlier essay, I recall the attempts to provide a theoretical solution to this dilemma of the mechanical impossibility and the practice of translation: either the recourse to an original language or the venture of constructing an artificial language, which Umberto Eco rediscovered in The Search for the Perfect Language (The Making of Europe). I am not going back to the arguments which consume the failure of these two attempts: the arbitrariness of the reconstruction of the original language, which ultimately seems nowhere to be found. Perhaps it is even a pure fantasy: the fantasy of the origin rendered historical, the desperate refusal of the real human condition, which is that of multiplicity at all the levels of existence, multiplicity, whose most disquieting expression is the diversity of languages: why so many languages? Answer: this is the way things are. We are, by constitution and not by chance, which would be a fault, ‘After Babel’, according to Steiner’s title. As regards the perfect language as artificial language, besides the fact that no one has succeeded in writing it down, the difference between the supposed artificial language and the natural languages with their idiosyncrasy, their peculiarities, proves to be insurmountable, as there is no fulfilment of the preliminary condition of an exhaustive enumeration of simple ideas and of a unique universal procedure of derivation. Let us add to this difference a further difference in the way the various languages deal with the relationship between sense and reference, in the relationship between expressing the real, expressing something other than the real, the possible, the unreal, the utopian idea, indeed even the secret, the inexpressible, in short the other of what can be communicated. Every language’s struggle with the secret, the hidden, the mystery, the inexpressible is above all else the most entrenched incommunicable, initial untranslatable.
So how do they do it? In my earlier essay, I tried a handy way out, substituting for the paralysing alternatives – translatable versus untranslatable – the alternatives faithfulness versus betrayal, even if it did mean admitting that the practice of translation remains a risky operation which is always in search of its theory.
I would like to go back over this admission, accentuating what I call the final untranslatable revealed, and even produced, by translation. The faithfulness/betrayal dilemma claims to be a practical dilemma because there is no absolute criterion of what would count as good translation. This absolute criterion would be the same meaning, written somewhere, on top of and between the original text and the target text. This third text would be the bearer of the identical meaning, supposed to move from the first to the second. Hence, the paradox, concealed behind the practical dilemma between faithfulness and betrayal: a good translation can aim only at a supposed equivalence, not founded on a demonstrable identity of meaning, equivalence without identity. We, then, can link this supposition of equivalence without identity with the work of translation, which shows itself most clearly in the phenomenon of retranslation which one observes at the level of humanity’s great texts, in particular those which get over the barrier of the disparity in the systems of division and of phrasal and word for word reconstruction mentioned above, for example between the Hebrew, the Greek and the Latin, or between Chinese and the languages of India. Nor do we stop retranslating within the same cultural zone, as we see with the Bible, Homer, Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky. This work is reassuring for the reader, because it allows him to access works of a foreign culture whose language he does not speak. But what about the translator and his faithfulness/betrayal dilemma? The great desirers of translation who were the German Romantics, whose venture Antoine Berman recounts in The Test of the Foreign, multiplied the versions of this practical dilemma that they dispelled in phrases like: ‘bringing the reader to the author’, ‘bringing the author to the reader’. What they dispelled was the anguish of serving two masters, the foreigner in his strangeness, the reader in his desire for appropriation. We would contribute towards this dispelling by suggesting the abandonment of the dream of the perfect translation and by admitting to the total difference between the peculiar and the foreign. I would like to renew this admission here.
Even so, what has been presupposed, under the seemingly unpretentious phrase of equivalence without identity, is the prior existence of this meaning that the translation is supposed to ‘render’, as we say, with the muddled idea of a ‘restitution’. This equivalence can only be sought, worked at, supposed.
It is this presupposition that must be challenged. It is relatively acceptable within a vast cultural area where the community identities, including linguistic, are themselves the product of long-lasting exchanges, as is the case in the Indo-European area, and all the more so in the affinity subgroups like the Romance languages, the Germanic languages and the Slavonic languages, and in dual relationships as between a Latin language and a Germanic language, say Anglo-Saxon. So the presupposition of equivalence seems acceptable. In actual fact, the cultural kinship hides the true nature of equivalence, which is produced by translation rather than presupposed by it. I am referring to a work that is not directly linked to translation, but which sheds light in a lateral way on the phenomenon that I am trying to describe: the production of equivalence through translation. The book is by Marcel Détienne (a Hellenic scholar) and is entitled Comparing the Incomparable [Comparer l’incomparable].1 It is levelled against the slogan: ‘We can only compare the comparable’ (pp. 45–6), so he talks about ‘constructive comparative studies’. Where Antoine Berman talked about ‘the test of the foreign’, Détienne talks about the ‘shock of the incomparable’. The incomparable, he observes, confronts us with ‘the strangeness of first words and first beginnings’ (p. 48).
Let us apply the following formula to translation: ‘constructing comparables’. I found an illustration of the application of this formula in the interpretation that a brilliant French sinologist, François Jullien, gives of the relationship between ancient China and ancient and classical Greece. His thesis, which I do not dispute, but which I take as a working hypothesis, is that Chinese is the absolute other of Greek – that knowledge of the inside of Chinese amounts to a deconstruction of what is outside, of what is exterior, i.e. thinking and speaking Greek. So the absolute strangeness is on our side, it belongs to we who think and speak Greek, whether it is in German or in a Latin language. Pushed to the extreme, the thesis is that Chinese and Greek can be distinguished by an initial ‘fold’ [pli] in what can be thought and what can be experienced, a ‘fold’ beyond which we cannot go. Thus, in his last book, entitled Du temps [Of Time],2 Jullien maintains that Chinese verbs do not have tenses because Chinese does not have the concept of time worked out by Aristotle in Physics IV, then reconstructed by Kant in ‘The Transcendental Aesthetic’, and finally universalized by Hegel through the ideas of the negative and the Aufhebung. Hegel’s whole book takes the form: ‘there is not . . . there is not . . . but there is’. So I raise the question: how do we speak (in French) about what there is in Chinese? Now Jullien does not utter a word of Chinese in his book (apart from yin-yang!); he speaks in French, in a beautiful language I may add, about what there is in place of time, i.e. the seasons, occasions, roots and leaves, springs and incoming tides. By doing this, he constructs comparables. And he constructs them downwards, as I mentioned above with reference to what one does while translating, i.e. from the general intuition concerning the difference in the ‘fold’, passing through the works, the Chinese classics, and then going down towards the words. In the end the construction of the comparable expresses itself in the construction of a glossary. And what do we find concerning the words of our ‘Greek’ languages? Ordinary words that have not had a philosophical destiny and which, owing to the effect of translation, are removed from contexts of use and promoted to the rank of equivalents, those great equivalents without identity, whose antecedent reality we had presupposed, believing that it was hidden somewhere so to speak, and the translator would discover it.
Grandeur of translation, risk of translation: creative betrayal of the original, equally creative appropriation by the reception language; construction of the comparable.
But is that not what happened in several periods of our own culture, when the Seventy translated the Hebrew Bible into Greek, into what we call the Septuagint, something that Hebrew specialists alone can criticize at their leisure? And St Jerome did it again with the Vulgate, construction of a Latin comparable. But before Jerome the Latins had created comparables, by deciding for all of us that arete¯ was translated by virtus, polis by urbs and polite¯s by civis. To remain in the biblical domain, we could say that Luther not only constructed a comparable in translating the Bible into German, in ‘germanizing’ it, as he dared to say, in the face of St Jerome’s Latin, but created the German language, as comparable to Latin, to the Greek of the Septuagint, and to the Hebrew of the Bible.
3. Have we followed the idea of the untranslatable through to its logical conclusion? No, since we solved the mystery of equivalence by constructing it. The construction of the comparable has even become the justification for a double betrayal insofar as the two incommensurable masters were rendered commensurable through the translationconstruction. So there remains a final untranslatable that we discover through the construction of the comparable. That construction is accomplished at the level of ‘meaning’, the only word that we have not commented on, because we took it for granted. Now the meaning is extracted from the unity it shares with the flesh of words, that flesh which we call the ‘letter’. Translators gladly removed it, so as not to be accused of ‘literal translation’; translating literally, is that not translating word for word? What shame! What disgrace! Now excellent translators, modelled on Hölderlin, on Paul Celan and, in the biblical domain, on Meschonnic, fought a campaign against the isolated meaning, the meaning without the letter, contrary to the letter. They gave up the comfortable shelter of the equivalence of meaning, and ventured into hazardous areas where there would be some talk of tone, of savour, of rhythm, of spacing, of silence between the words, of metrics and of rhyme. Undoubtedly, the vast majority of translators rush to oppose this, without recognizing that translating the isolated meaning means repudiating an achievement of contemporary semiotics, the unity of meaning and sound, of the signified and the signifier, in opposition to the prejudice one still finds in the early Husserl: that the meaning is complete in the act of ‘conferring meaning’, of Sinngebung. Husserl treats expression (Ausdruck) like an article of clothing external to the body, which really is the incorporeal soul of meaning, of the Bedeutung. The result is that only a poet can translate a poet. But I would reply to Berman, were he still alive – dear Berman who, sadly, has left us and whom we miss – I would reply that he has moved the construction of the comparable a stage further, to the level of the letter; on the basis of the disquieting success of a Hölderlin who speaks Greek in German and, perhaps, on the basis of that of a Meschonnic, who speaks Hebrew in French . . . So the ‘literal’ translation, which he chases relentlessly, is not a word for word translation, but a letter for letter one. Did he go as far as he believed he had, in his nearly hopeless criticism of the equivalence of meaning to meaning, of the construction of a comparable, of a literal comparable? Is not the continuity in the struggle against the constantly recurring untranslatable read in the closeness of two successive titles: The Test of the Foreign and Translation and the Letter or the Faraway Inn [La traduction et la lettre ou l’auberge du lointain3].