1 Paul Ricoeur, Sur la traduction (Paris: Bayard, 2004); translated here by Eileen Brennan as On Translation.
2 I am indebted to Dominico Jervolino for this reference to Dolar and to several other sources on the history of translation cited below. See his illuminating paper, ‘The hermeneutics of the self and the paradigm of translation’, presented at the Rome International Conference on Translation (April 2004) and his Introduction to La traduzione: una sfida etuca (Brescia: Morcelliana, 2001), pp. 7–35. See also his pioneering essay, ‘Herméneutique et traduction. L’autre, l’étranger, l’hôte’, Archives de Philosophie 63 (2000), pp. 79–93.
3 Antoine Berman, L’épreuve de l’étranger (Paris: Gallimard, 1984).
4 Jervolino, ‘The hermeneutics of the self ’. See also Paul Zumthor, Babel ou l’inachèvement (Paris: Seuil, 1997).
5 Émile Benveniste, Le vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes (Paris: Minuit, 1969).
6 Ricoeur, Sur la traduction, pp. 19–20.
7 Jervolino, ‘The hermeneutics of the self ’; see also Jervolino, ‘Translation as paradigm for hermeneutics and its implications for an ethics of hospitality’, Ars Interpretandi 5 (2000), pp. 57–69.
8 Jervolino, ‘The hermeneutics of the self ’ and ‘La question de l’unité de l’oeuvre de Ricoeur: la paradigme de la traduction’, Archives de Philosophie 4 (2004), pp. 659–68.
9 Ricoeur, La Mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli (Paris: Seuil, 2001), p. 657; English translation by David Pellauer, Memory, History and Forgetting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
1 Deutsches Verlagsanstalt. It is both a branch of the Bosch Foundation and a publishing house.
2 Antoine Berman, L’épreuve de l’étranger (Paris: Gallimard, 1984, 1995). [S. Heyvaert translated this book into English under the title, The Experience of the Foreign: Culture and Translation in Romantic Germany (New York: SUNY Press, 1992). However, for reasons to do with Ricoeur’s subsequent reflections on the meaning of the word épreuve, I am unable to fully adopt Heyvaert’s rendition of Berman’s title. EB.]
1 George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (Oxford: Oxford Paperbacks, 1998).
2 The words, ‘signs which . . . concern things’ render the French signes qui . . . valent pour des choses, but the English verb ‘concern’ does not capture a possible connotation of the French verb valoir. In this context, valoir also carries the associated sense of ‘being worth something’, an association that Ricoeur draws upon when he goes on to talk about ‘the exchange of signs in interlocution’. EB
3 This is certainly one of those occasions when, reading Ricoeur in English, we have to accept that something has been lost in translation. Thus, losing all sense of the roughness of Chouraki’s French rendition of the Hebrew Bible, we hear instead the lyrical cadences of the King James version. EB
4 This again is the King James version.
5 The original French text reads as follows: si on veut commencer, voyager, négocier, voire espionner il faut bien disposer de messagers qui parlent la langue des autres. As the word commencer, meaning ‘to begin’, makes little sense in this context, I assume that this is a typesetting error and that the correct word is commercer, meaning ‘to trade’. EB