2011
Traduttore, Traditore: The Translation of Theory
by Irene Scicluna
The word ‘translation’ comes, etymologically, from the Latin for ‘bearing across’. Having been borne across the world, we are translated men. It is normally supposed that something always gets lost in translation; I cling, obstinately to the notion that something can also be gained.1
- Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands
Critical theory has established itself as capable of briskly covering great national, temporal and situational distances. By virtue of its translations and its conceptual and universal scope, it has transpired as a quintessential traveller, being so dynamically successful in arriving at its destinations. In taking account of this voyage of ‘transplantation, transference, circulation, and commerce of theories and ideas2’, the focus habitually lies on the poles of departure and arrival – the original source text in relation to the translated target text. Yet rather than the poles of the journey, it would perhaps be of more relevance to consider the indispensible vehicle that the journey is taken in; the course of translation that is instrumental in breaching linguistic borderlines that restrict widespread reception. Translation’s transformative function permeates deeper, it being more than sheer linguistic transformation, but a creative source of vitality and an image of ongoing unfolding. Regrettably nonetheless, translation is time and again held as a necessary evil, a mere means to more important ends. The translation of theory is especially most often dismissed as unsatisfactory; it may never reach up to the potential of the original. In this respect, Belloc’s 1931 thoughts on the subject are still relevant today:
The art of translation is a subsidiary art and derivative. On this account it has never been granted the dignity of original work and has suffered too much in the general judgement of letters. […] The corresponding misunderstanding of its character has added to its degradation: neither its importance nor its difficulty has been grasped.3
Its entrenched status as a perfunctory mechanic necessity is nevertheless diametrically controverted by Benjamin in his prominent essay ‘The Task of the Translator.’ The translation vehicle, he insists, implies certain dynamism essential for a work’s insurance of afterlife. It is through the translation that ‘the life of the originals attains in them to its ever-renewed latest and most abundant flowering.’4 Translation breathes life into theory thus, by ensuring the possibility of nourishment via displacement.
Theory’s rapid dissemination points to a cultural convergence which is especially significant in the contemporary age of late capitalism and globalisation. The increasingly widespread conceptualities draw attention to the commonality of concerns that receiving systems are confronted with and deem important and urgent. It is here that the translation of theory transpires as advantageous. Nonetheless, while universality is appealing in its straightforward rationalization of the issues at hand, its logical capacity must be questioned. To excessively focus on this universality would be to overlook the local, idiosyncratic nuances of the source text. Indeed, ‘translation is a mode,’ writes Benjamin. ‘To comprehend it as mode one must go back to the original, for that contains the law governing the translation: its translatability.’5 Yet paradoxically, theory is so inexorably tied to its contexts – linguistic and otherwise – that the connection between the two seems at times to problematise the very translatability of theory. This is surely evidenced by the Italian axiom ‘traduttore, traditore.’ The pun hinges on the syntactical act of changing the ‘u’ into an ‘i’ and removing one ‘t’, effectively transforming ‘translator’ to ‘traitor’. Whilst the meaning is translated easily enough, the fine intricacies of the pun are lost in having to explain the trivial syntactic structures at play. Following this ratiocination then, to translate theory is to betray it.
Theory, when it is translated or transported, when it crosses a border, comes bringing the culture of its originator with it. Quite extraordinary feats of translation are necessary to disentangle a given theoretical formulation from its linguistic and cultural roots, assuming anyone should wish to do that. In fact, it may be impossible to do it.6
The conceptual specificity of theory is to an extent in direct connection with language-specific terminology. On the most part, English lexicon underwent a smooth transposition of philosophical conceptualities from Latin. On the other hand, in the case of German, the process of that translation from Latin was followed by a conceptual transformation. Thus, in German words mean more than and different from the words they were meant to ‘accurately’ translate, inferring a sense of national identity. Heidegger is hence ‘deeply rooted in the character and history of the German language.’7 His works bear such richness that The Principle of Reason necessitates a translator’s introduction with a compendium of meanings of intricate words like vorstellung and the prefix er-. Theory thrives on such complex expressions which operate in the text as silent cogs that operate in machinery; nonetheless the difficulty in translatability remains unresolved. Benjamin comments on this:
Translatability is an essential quality of certain works, which is not to say that it is essential that they be translated [...] It is plausible that no translation, however good it may be, can have any significance as regards the original.8
Indeed, in such cases the translator would do better to let such heterogeneity shine through the translation. This is certainly the strategy that Alan Bass professes to employ as regards Derrida’s neologism of différance9, and the course that Derrida himself chooses in order to introduce his essay ‘Point de Foile’:
Maintenant, this French word will not be translated. Why? For reasons, a whole series of reasons, which may appear along the way or even at the end of the road. For here I am undertaking one road or, rather, one course among other possible and concurrent ones [...] Why maintenant? I put away or place in reserve, I set aside the reason to maintain the seal or stamp of this idiom.10
Accuracy in translation is thus forsaken in favour of an intricate and polyphonic web of meaning that the original infers. In Benjamin’s understanding of translation, the link between the source and target language transpires to be one of kinship wherein there is affiliation but not essentially mirroring.11 To perceive the veritable tie between the original and the translation, we must concurrently be conscious of the context out of which the original emerges, and assume a wholly acquiescent and indeterminate philosophy when it comes to the translation.
Theory, thus, being such a multifarious network of conceptualities, impels us to consider not only the impetus and workings of the original but also the unexpected outcome that the translation inevitably begets. Imported theory is thrust into an existing communal bed of knowledge, concerns and anticipations. The reception consequently revolves around that community’s circumstantial disposition. The critical response as regards French feminism in the Anglo-American feminist sphere is in this regard an invaluable paradigm. The theoretical, more abstract understanding of the universe that French feminists Irigaray and Cixous encompass were rejected by their Anglo-American counterparts as being unduly figurative to the point of convolution. Rather, feminists from the latter domain integrate a more proactive and pragmatic approach, predominantly valuing the weight of such issues as the canon. Yet even in full grasp of this dichotomy,
it is a mistake […] to overemphasize the distance separating French feminists from their more pragmatic American counterparts. […] Strength may be found in alliance. The lines of force bringing the cultures into dialogue are as diverse as the voice from either side, and if anything is felt as strongly as the so-called ‘dis-connection’ (emblamatised by the language barrier itself), is precisely the desire to connect12 [emphasis mine]
It is translation here that patently manifests itself as the antidote to the ‘dis-connection’ occasioned by the ‘language barrier.’ Through the translated text, intellectual dialogue is enabled between the two camps. Such channels of communication ‘allow the pure language to shine upon the original,13’ and consequently sustain that original. That sustenance then extends to the entire theoretical tradition in which the original participates, since theory is inherently dependant on the perennial flow and circulation of ideas. Hence, as Benjamin maintains in ‘The Task of the Translator,’ it is not just fidelity that makes translation, but freedom, and chiefly, the freedom implied by ‘borrowing and trading, by unconscious influence or wholesale appropriation.’14
Through this cultural transposition necessitated by translation, the imported theory takes an extensive and active part in the culture that receives it. In being linguistically transformed into the indigenous language, theory is also ontologically transformed into the idiom of that culture. Translated theory may in this sense be seen as a performative speech act15; it both shapes and creates context and is simultaneously shaped by the context in which it finds itself. Indeed, the contextual significance that weighs on the signified precludes any exclusive relationship between that signified and the original, ensuring the unfailing presence of societal framework. Thus the essence of Russian theory such as Bakhtin’s dialogic may be displaced and maneuvered, as Kristeva truly does in her ‘Word, Dialogue and Novel.16’ Still, the re-working is not as much a mere derivation of meaning as it is a transformation; an intellectual reprise, as it were. Routing Bakhtin’s theoretical semiotic work towards the French academic sphere of influence, Kristeva fulfills the task that Benjamin foreordains. Indeed, Kristeva’s essay
instead of imitating the sense of the original, [...] lovingly and in detail incorporate[s] the original’s way of meaning, thus making both the original and the translation recognisable as fragments of a greater language, just as fragments are part of a vessel17
That said, the translation of theory cannot be merely considered a neutral conversion from one language to another. Bearing in mind the aforementioned inexorable ties that the original has with its birthplace, the translation of that theory into another context cannot but be held a profound and monumental event, comparable perhaps (in extent of import at least) to expatriation. This analogy is taken to a greater extent in Miller’s case study of the biblical Ruth. As a Moabitess she is translated into an Israelite upon her relocation, and must as such transform herself from other to indigenous. In so doing, Ruth inadvertently becomes the great-grandmother of King David who would in generations beget the Messiah. Had she not crossed that faithful border of translation then, Miller suggests, the fate of the scriptures would have dangerously unfolded in a dramatically different way18. Like Ruth, in being thus open to transformation, theory in turn transforms the inheriting culture with equal vigour. Indeed, perhaps we could go so far as to say that ‘part of the job of theory is to partially undo itself by taking as part of its subject the historical reality of its different audiences, its institutionalizations, its oppositions.’19
In doing so, theory’s translatability is then affirmed. Yet it’s high conceptuality and subtleties of rhythm, as we have seen, resist full translation. These are the strong-willed remnants that remain when theory moves across stylistic and cultural boundaries. Even in the individual microcosm, when one reads and conceives of any theoretical text one translates that text into his own natural way of language usage, yet does not wholly do so in favour of ‘the echo of the original.20’ It is perhaps this concurrent manifestation of ‘fidelity and freedom in translation21’ that is translation’s greatest feat in theory. Through their alliance, theoretical acumen moves through local acts of language, while it is simultaneously left to fulfill its travelling potential in all of its distinctiveness and idiosyncrasies. In a nutshell, the merit of translation of theory lies precisely in that it ‘let[s] itself go, so that it gives voice to the intentio of the original not as reproduction but as harmony, as a supplement to the language in which it expresses itself, as its own kind of intentio.22’
Endnotes
[1] Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands (London: Granta Books, 1991) p. 17
2 Edward W. Said. ‘Travelling Theory’ in The World, The Text, and the Critic (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983) pp. 226-47 (p. 226)
3 Hilaire Belloc, On Translation (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1931) p. 1
4 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Task of the Translator’ trans by Harry Zohn in Theories of Translation: An Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derrida ed. Schulte and Biguenet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992 ) pp. 71-82
5 Benjamin, p. 72
6 J. Hillis Miller, ‘Border Crossings, Translating Theory: Ruth’ in Topographies (Stanford, California: California University Press, 1995) pp. 316-37(p. 320)
7 Reginald Lilly, ‘Translator’s Introduction’ in The Principle of Reason by Martin Heidegger (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1991) pp. vii-xxi (p. ix)
8 Benjamin, p. 72
9 Alan Bass, ‘Translator’s Introduction’ in Writing and Difference by Jacques Derrida (London: Routledge, 1978) pp. ix-xxiii (p.xvii)
10 Jacques Derrida, ‘Point de Foile –Maintenant l’Architecture’ in Architecture Theory Since 1968 ed. by K. Michael Hays (Columbia: MIT Press, 1998) pp. 566-81 (p.566)
11 Benjamin, p. 75
12 Gaudin et al, ‘Introduction’ in Yale French Studies, No. 62, Feminist Readings: French Texts/American Contexts (1981), pp. 2-18 (p.12)
13 Benjamin, p. 79-80
14 Jean-Louis Cohen, ‘The Italophiles at Work’ in Architecture Theory Since 1968 ed. by K. Michael Hays (Columbia: MIT Press, 1998) pp. 506-21 (p.506)
15 For more on Performative Speech Acts see Douglas Robinson, Introducing Performative Pragmatics (New York: Routledge, 2006)
16 Julia Kristeva, ‘Word, Dialogue and Novel’ in The Kristeva Reader ed. Toril Moi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986) pp. 34-61
17 Benjamin, p. 79
18 Miller, p. 330
19 Cohen, p.506
20 Benjamin, p. 77
21 Benjamin, p. 80
22 Benjamin, p. 79
References
Bass, A. ‘Translator’s Introduction’ in Writing and Difference by Jacques Derrida (London: Routledge, 1978) pp. ix-xxiii
Belloc, H. On Translation (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1931)
Benjamin,W. ‘The Task of the Translator’ trans by Harry Zohn in Theories of Translation: An Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derrida ed. Schulte and Biguenet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992 ) pp. 71-82
Cohen, J.L. ‘The Italophiles at Work’ in Architecture Theory Since 1968 ed. by K. Michael Hays (Columbia: MIT Press, 1998) pp. 506-21
Derrida, J. ‘Point de Foile –Maintenant l’Architecture’ in Architecture Theory Since 1968 ed. by K. Michael Hays (Columbia: MIT Press, 1998) pp. 566-81
Gaudin et al, ‘Introduction’ in Yale French Studies, No. 62, Feminist Readings: French Texts/American Contexts (1981), pp. 2-18
Hillis Miller, J. ‘Border Crossings, Translating Theory: Ruth’ in Topographies (Stanford, California: California University Press, 1995) pp. 316-37
Kristeva, J. ‘Word, Dialogue and Novel’ in The Kristeva Reader ed. Toril Moi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986) pp. 34-61
Lilly, R. ‘Translator’s Introduction’ in The Principle of Reason by Martin Heidegger (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1991) pp. vii-xxi
Robinson, D. Introducing Performative Pragmatics (New York: Routledge, 2006)
Rushdie, S. Imaginary Homelands (London: Granta Books, 1991)
Said, E. W. ‘Travelling Theory’ in The World, The Text, and the Critic (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983) pp. 226-47
Critical theory has established itself as capable of briskly covering great national, temporal and situational distances. By virtue of its translations and its conceptual and universal scope, it has transpired as a quintessential traveller, being so dynamically successful in arriving at its destinations. In taking account of this voyage of ‘transplantation, transference, circulation, and commerce of theories and ideas2’, the focus habitually lies on the poles of departure and arrival – the original source text in relation to the translated target text. Yet rather than the poles of the journey, it would perhaps be of more relevance to consider the indispensible vehicle that the journey is taken in; the course of translation that is instrumental in breaching linguistic borderlines that restrict widespread reception. Translation’s transformative function permeates deeper, it being more than sheer linguistic transformation, but a creative source of vitality and an image of ongoing unfolding. Regrettably nonetheless, translation is time and again held as a necessary evil, a mere means to more important ends. The translation of theory is especially most often dismissed as unsatisfactory; it may never reach up to the potential of the original. In this respect, Belloc’s 1931 thoughts on the subject are still relevant today:
The art of translation is a subsidiary art and derivative. On this account it has never been granted the dignity of original work and has suffered too much in the general judgement of letters. […] The corresponding misunderstanding of its character has added to its degradation: neither its importance nor its difficulty has been grasped.3
Its entrenched status as a perfunctory mechanic necessity is nevertheless diametrically controverted by Benjamin in his prominent essay ‘The Task of the Translator.’ The translation vehicle, he insists, implies certain dynamism essential for a work’s insurance of afterlife. It is through the translation that ‘the life of the originals attains in them to its ever-renewed latest and most abundant flowering.’4 Translation breathes life into theory thus, by ensuring the possibility of nourishment via displacement.
Theory’s rapid dissemination points to a cultural convergence which is especially significant in the contemporary age of late capitalism and globalisation. The increasingly widespread conceptualities draw attention to the commonality of concerns that receiving systems are confronted with and deem important and urgent. It is here that the translation of theory transpires as advantageous. Nonetheless, while universality is appealing in its straightforward rationalization of the issues at hand, its logical capacity must be questioned. To excessively focus on this universality would be to overlook the local, idiosyncratic nuances of the source text. Indeed, ‘translation is a mode,’ writes Benjamin. ‘To comprehend it as mode one must go back to the original, for that contains the law governing the translation: its translatability.’5 Yet paradoxically, theory is so inexorably tied to its contexts – linguistic and otherwise – that the connection between the two seems at times to problematise the very translatability of theory. This is surely evidenced by the Italian axiom ‘traduttore, traditore.’ The pun hinges on the syntactical act of changing the ‘u’ into an ‘i’ and removing one ‘t’, effectively transforming ‘translator’ to ‘traitor’. Whilst the meaning is translated easily enough, the fine intricacies of the pun are lost in having to explain the trivial syntactic structures at play. Following this ratiocination then, to translate theory is to betray it.
Theory, when it is translated or transported, when it crosses a border, comes bringing the culture of its originator with it. Quite extraordinary feats of translation are necessary to disentangle a given theoretical formulation from its linguistic and cultural roots, assuming anyone should wish to do that. In fact, it may be impossible to do it.6
The conceptual specificity of theory is to an extent in direct connection with language-specific terminology. On the most part, English lexicon underwent a smooth transposition of philosophical conceptualities from Latin. On the other hand, in the case of German, the process of that translation from Latin was followed by a conceptual transformation. Thus, in German words mean more than and different from the words they were meant to ‘accurately’ translate, inferring a sense of national identity. Heidegger is hence ‘deeply rooted in the character and history of the German language.’7 His works bear such richness that The Principle of Reason necessitates a translator’s introduction with a compendium of meanings of intricate words like vorstellung and the prefix er-. Theory thrives on such complex expressions which operate in the text as silent cogs that operate in machinery; nonetheless the difficulty in translatability remains unresolved. Benjamin comments on this:
Translatability is an essential quality of certain works, which is not to say that it is essential that they be translated [...] It is plausible that no translation, however good it may be, can have any significance as regards the original.8
Indeed, in such cases the translator would do better to let such heterogeneity shine through the translation. This is certainly the strategy that Alan Bass professes to employ as regards Derrida’s neologism of différance9, and the course that Derrida himself chooses in order to introduce his essay ‘Point de Foile’:
Maintenant, this French word will not be translated. Why? For reasons, a whole series of reasons, which may appear along the way or even at the end of the road. For here I am undertaking one road or, rather, one course among other possible and concurrent ones [...] Why maintenant? I put away or place in reserve, I set aside the reason to maintain the seal or stamp of this idiom.10
Accuracy in translation is thus forsaken in favour of an intricate and polyphonic web of meaning that the original infers. In Benjamin’s understanding of translation, the link between the source and target language transpires to be one of kinship wherein there is affiliation but not essentially mirroring.11 To perceive the veritable tie between the original and the translation, we must concurrently be conscious of the context out of which the original emerges, and assume a wholly acquiescent and indeterminate philosophy when it comes to the translation.
Theory, thus, being such a multifarious network of conceptualities, impels us to consider not only the impetus and workings of the original but also the unexpected outcome that the translation inevitably begets. Imported theory is thrust into an existing communal bed of knowledge, concerns and anticipations. The reception consequently revolves around that community’s circumstantial disposition. The critical response as regards French feminism in the Anglo-American feminist sphere is in this regard an invaluable paradigm. The theoretical, more abstract understanding of the universe that French feminists Irigaray and Cixous encompass were rejected by their Anglo-American counterparts as being unduly figurative to the point of convolution. Rather, feminists from the latter domain integrate a more proactive and pragmatic approach, predominantly valuing the weight of such issues as the canon. Yet even in full grasp of this dichotomy,
it is a mistake […] to overemphasize the distance separating French feminists from their more pragmatic American counterparts. […] Strength may be found in alliance. The lines of force bringing the cultures into dialogue are as diverse as the voice from either side, and if anything is felt as strongly as the so-called ‘dis-connection’ (emblamatised by the language barrier itself), is precisely the desire to connect12 [emphasis mine]
It is translation here that patently manifests itself as the antidote to the ‘dis-connection’ occasioned by the ‘language barrier.’ Through the translated text, intellectual dialogue is enabled between the two camps. Such channels of communication ‘allow the pure language to shine upon the original,13’ and consequently sustain that original. That sustenance then extends to the entire theoretical tradition in which the original participates, since theory is inherently dependant on the perennial flow and circulation of ideas. Hence, as Benjamin maintains in ‘The Task of the Translator,’ it is not just fidelity that makes translation, but freedom, and chiefly, the freedom implied by ‘borrowing and trading, by unconscious influence or wholesale appropriation.’14
Through this cultural transposition necessitated by translation, the imported theory takes an extensive and active part in the culture that receives it. In being linguistically transformed into the indigenous language, theory is also ontologically transformed into the idiom of that culture. Translated theory may in this sense be seen as a performative speech act15; it both shapes and creates context and is simultaneously shaped by the context in which it finds itself. Indeed, the contextual significance that weighs on the signified precludes any exclusive relationship between that signified and the original, ensuring the unfailing presence of societal framework. Thus the essence of Russian theory such as Bakhtin’s dialogic may be displaced and maneuvered, as Kristeva truly does in her ‘Word, Dialogue and Novel.16’ Still, the re-working is not as much a mere derivation of meaning as it is a transformation; an intellectual reprise, as it were. Routing Bakhtin’s theoretical semiotic work towards the French academic sphere of influence, Kristeva fulfills the task that Benjamin foreordains. Indeed, Kristeva’s essay
instead of imitating the sense of the original, [...] lovingly and in detail incorporate[s] the original’s way of meaning, thus making both the original and the translation recognisable as fragments of a greater language, just as fragments are part of a vessel17
That said, the translation of theory cannot be merely considered a neutral conversion from one language to another. Bearing in mind the aforementioned inexorable ties that the original has with its birthplace, the translation of that theory into another context cannot but be held a profound and monumental event, comparable perhaps (in extent of import at least) to expatriation. This analogy is taken to a greater extent in Miller’s case study of the biblical Ruth. As a Moabitess she is translated into an Israelite upon her relocation, and must as such transform herself from other to indigenous. In so doing, Ruth inadvertently becomes the great-grandmother of King David who would in generations beget the Messiah. Had she not crossed that faithful border of translation then, Miller suggests, the fate of the scriptures would have dangerously unfolded in a dramatically different way18. Like Ruth, in being thus open to transformation, theory in turn transforms the inheriting culture with equal vigour. Indeed, perhaps we could go so far as to say that ‘part of the job of theory is to partially undo itself by taking as part of its subject the historical reality of its different audiences, its institutionalizations, its oppositions.’19
In doing so, theory’s translatability is then affirmed. Yet it’s high conceptuality and subtleties of rhythm, as we have seen, resist full translation. These are the strong-willed remnants that remain when theory moves across stylistic and cultural boundaries. Even in the individual microcosm, when one reads and conceives of any theoretical text one translates that text into his own natural way of language usage, yet does not wholly do so in favour of ‘the echo of the original.20’ It is perhaps this concurrent manifestation of ‘fidelity and freedom in translation21’ that is translation’s greatest feat in theory. Through their alliance, theoretical acumen moves through local acts of language, while it is simultaneously left to fulfill its travelling potential in all of its distinctiveness and idiosyncrasies. In a nutshell, the merit of translation of theory lies precisely in that it ‘let[s] itself go, so that it gives voice to the intentio of the original not as reproduction but as harmony, as a supplement to the language in which it expresses itself, as its own kind of intentio.22’
