Untranslatability

Interdisciplinary Perspectives

Duncan Large, Motoko Akashi, Wanda Józwikowska, Emily Rose, Duncan Large, Motoko Akashi, Wanda Józwikowska, Emily Rose

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351622042
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This volume is the first of its kind to explore the notion of untranslatability from a wide variety of interdisciplinary perspectives and its implications within the broader context of translation studies. Featuring contributions from both leading authorities and emerging scholars in the field, the book looks to go beyond traditional comparisons of target texts and their sources to more rigorously investigate the myriad ways in which the term untranslatability is both conceptualized and applied. The first half of the volume focuses on untranslatability as a theoretical or philosophical construct, both to ground and extend the term's conceptual remit, while the second half is composed of case studies in which the term is applied and contextualized in a diverse set of literary text types and genres, including poetry, philosophical works, song lyrics, memoir, and scripture. A final chapter examines untranslatability in the real world and the challenges it brings in practical contexts. Extending the conversation in this burgeoning contemporary debate, this volume is key reading for graduate students and researchers in translation studies, comparative literature, gender studies, and philosophy of language.

The editors are grateful to the University of East Anglia Faculty of Arts and Humanities, who supported the book with a publication grant.

Part I

Theory and Philosophy

1 Humboldt, Translation and the Dictionary of Untranslatables

Barbara Cassin

Ich habe […] ein Widerstreben des intellektuellen Wollens das Subjective vom Objectiven, das Einzelne vom Allgemeinen rein abzuscheiden.

—(GS XV: 454)¹

[I have […] an aversion in my intellectual volition against making a strict separation between subjective and objective, individual and general.

—(Humboldt 1981: 47, trans. modified)]

Ich habe viel zu selten die eigentliche Sicherheit der Wahrheit, und schwanke sehr leicht zwischen zwei Reihen von Ideen, so dass ich immer die andre für vorzüglicher halte, wenn ich im Begriff bin, die eine anzunehmen.

—(GS XV: 459)

[Much too rarely do I have the certainty of knowing the truth, and I easily waver between two sets of ideas, so that I invariably feel that the one I am on the verge of deciding against is the better one.

—(Humboldt 1981: 47, trans. modified)]

We have here what Jürgen Trabant calls “un des fameux immer zugleich” [one of those famous always at the same time] (Trabant 1995: 55), which here amounts to calling into question the principle of non-contradiction, the oukh hama by which Aristotle, in book Gamma of the Metaphysics, prohibits every “at the same time”: not simply those of logical contradiction between propositions, but even, and primarily, those of simultaneous meanings of the same word, equivocation or homonymy, and of the amphibology, grammatical or syntactical, of a sentence (see Cassin and Narcy 1989: 23–7).

What becomes immediately apparent is how this diverges from the status of “philosophical” truth. This difference is threefold. Firstly, there is no “certainty of truth.” But then how can one define and recognise the truth? Is there still such a thing as truth?—“too rarely”? The reason for this is (and here we come to the second aspect) that everything is caught in the movement of time: “I waver,” “when I am on the verge of …” And so, thirdly, we find ourselves under the sign of the comparative and of modalisation: “I invariably feel that the one I am on the verge of deciding against is the better one.”

Now, I believe that what is at stake, under these three headings, is the very experience of the translator themselves, insofar as this is a matter of what I would wish to call a relativism, properly understood. I will characterise it thus: translations, like languages, are energeiai rather than erga; with respect to their results they are always relative, but in pragmatic terms they are absolute.

As far as translation is concerned, the “Introduction to the Agamemnon of Aeschylus” (GS VIII: 119–46) states this explicitly: “Denn Uebersetzungen sind doch mehr Arbeiten […] als dauernde Werke” (GS VIII: 136) [Translations are works-in-progress […] rather than lasting works]. It is also the case for language: “Sie selbst ist kein Werk (Ergon), sondern eine Thätigkeit (Energeia)” (GS VII: 46) [In itself, language is no product (Ergon), but an activity (Energeia) (Humboldt 1988: 49)]. And strictly speaking, this applies first and foremost to the singular act of the word currently [actuellement] being spoken, since language is ultimately nothing other than “die Totalität dieses Sprechens” [the totality of this speaking], as Humboldt writes (GS VII: 45–6). The performance-energeia is thus linguistic with regard to the act of speaking [parole], language-bound [langagière] with regard to the act of language [langue], and interpretive with regard to the act of translation. Energeia, which allows us to understand these three levels together, functions—and this is what I wish to hold on to as potentially most productive—as the non-dialectical articulation of the singular and particular within the general and universal: it is the very operator of relativism, which allows us to complicate the universal. The “reticence” that Humboldt feels in “splitting up subjective and objective, individual and general” (GS XV: 454) makes him in my view, but in a very different way to St Jerome, patron saint of translators.

On this basis, I would like to evoke, in a manner that is itself also necessarily subjective, the way in which I made use of Humboldt in the Dictionary of Untranslatables (Cassin 2004, 2014a), in order to think, to construct, and to put the Dictionary into practice. Certain phrases from Humboldt served as a secret code to unlock the work.

Benveniste provided a model for me to follow in working through a modality of comparison which does not get confused with a comparatism that is rightly considered suspect, and which, like the Vocabulary of Indo-European Institutions itself (Benveniste 1969), proceeds by a non-original and non-originary [originant] use of etymology. But it is Humboldt who provides the best paradigm for thinking the diversity of languages and the passage from one language to another—translation, that is—when one does not want to be, or rather, wants not to be Heideggerian.

The phrases from Humboldt which in my view provided a template for the Dictionary are found in the central section of the 1816 introduction to his translation of Aeschylus’s Agamemnon. What follows will simply be a free [libre] commentary. Humboldt writes:

Ein solches Gedicht ist, seiner eigenthümlichen Natur nach, und in einem noch viel andrem Sinne, als es sich überhaupt von allen Werken grosser Originalitaet sagen lässt, unübersetzbar.

(GS VIII: 129)

[Such a poem is, according to its particular nature, and in a manner quite different to what is generally said about all works of great originality, untranslatable.]

Humboldt begins, then, by qualifying this tragedy as “untranslatable,” and then straight away goes and translates it. It is untranslatable, so be it, but everything can be said in every language; therefore, we can also translate it, only it always remains to be (re)translated.

From this stems the definition of the untranslatable that I proposed in the Dictionary: not what one does not translate, but what one never ceases to (not) translate. From which point would arise the need to be able to convince professors, inspectors, ministers and publishers that translation lies at the heart of the humanities, that translation is tested out with the help of bilingual editions, and that there is not one but a plurality of translations. Humboldt is careful to underline that one learns more about a work with several translations than with only one, just as one learns more with several languages than with one: more about a language, and more about one’s own language—one must know several languages in order to understand that one is speaking a language, one language amongst others, even if you find this one more of a “mother tongue,” individual or national, than the others.

At stake in translation are, in fact, three levels of culture or Bildung bunched together. The culture which transmits forms of art that would remain unknown without it: paideia at the level of individuals. A culture which enlarges the capacities of its own language: paideia at the level of the language. And finally, a culture at the level of something like the people or a nation, the very thing which made Humboldt feel an “obligation” to translate the Agamemnon: “Das Uebersetzen und gerade der Dichter ist vielmehr eine der nothwendigsten Arbeiten in einer Literatur” (GS VII: 130) [Translation, in particular that of poets, is […] one of the most necessary tasks in any literature]. It is this whole network which determines the task of the translator, and which Benjamin would revisit.

There are, Humboldt further specifies, several ways for a work to be “untranslatable.” It can, like “all works of great originality,” which by virtue of this originality become constitutive of a language and a culture, be difficult to transplant into a different language or culture: how can one conserve and render the force of a work when it is taken from its own terrain? But it can also be untranslatable “in a very different sense.” Which? Quite simply: insofar as it is this work and not another, Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, a particular Greek tragedy, singular.

Humboldt describes this a little later on:

Die Dunkelheit, die man in den Schriften der Alten manchmal findet, und die gerade der Agamemnon vorzüglich an sich trägt, entsteht aus der Kürze und der Kühnheit, mit der, mit Verschmähung vermittelnder Bindesätze, Gedanken, Bilder, Gefühle, Erinnerungen und Ahndungen, wie sie aus dem tief bewegten Gemüthe entstehen, an einander gereiht werden.

(GS VIII: 133)

[The obscurity which one finds sometimes in the writings of the ancients, and which characterises the Agamemnon in particular, is a result of the brevity and audacity with which thoughts, images, sensations/feelings, memories and presentiments/intuitions, all issuing from a deeply shaken soul, are aligned one after the other, with a disregard for intermediate conjunctions.]

I see here an analogy for Antiquity with what René Char said of Rimbaud for modernity: “sa découverte, sa date incendiaire, c’est la rapidité” (Char 1983: 733). How does one translate this untranslatable? The answer, which Henri Meschonnic never ceased to reiterate: one translates a text and not a language. Or more precisely: one translates a text in a language, and not a language. In other words, it is philology that saves us.

Pierre Judet de la Combe’s article “Un dire indirecte: Traductions allemandes et françaises d’une phrase d’Eschyle” (Judet de la Combe 2012) constitutes in my eyes a kind of manifesto on this subject. One learns how, in order to translate the Agamemnon, one’s attention must be placed on syntax even more than on semantics, and must render each ambiguity into ambiguity. If I insist on ambiguity in the translations proposed by Humboldt, it is to highlight an essential a posteriori character of the Dictionary of Untranslatables: probing the symptoms of differences between languages, we have dealt with terms which become, when seen from another language, bearers of multiple meanings [sens]: for instance, the word “sens” in French, which in English could be rendered as “meaning,” but also as “sense” or “sensation,” or as “direction.” Moreover, in most cases one finds, in a standard French dictionary such as the Larousse, two or sometimes even three entries for “sens,” as though it was a case of homonyms. And yet, as soon as one takes into account the history of the word, the semantic flux which, in translations of the Bible, sees the Greek nous (“intuition,” whence the sense of “sensation”) transmute into sensus in Latin (“sense” in the sense of “common sense,” but also sense in the sense of the sense/meaning of a word, and the “direction” in which one should interpret it), these different entries are by no means heterogeneous: one can be understood only in terms of the other, and they must even be considered as one. Without a doubt, these “homonyms” are nothing of the sort, and point to the scansions of history. “One language, amongst others, is nothing other than the totality of the equivocations its history has allowed to persist” (Lacan 1973: 47): these are motivated homonymies (not to be confused with those accidental homophonies for which Aristotle himself only with difficulty finds examples), which with great regularity we took on as our task to explore in our dictionary.

Since we are concerned with translating a text and not a language, rhythm is decisive. In Aeschylos Agamemnon, metrisch übersetzt, it is metrisch übersetzt that I wish to underline, metrically translated:

Auf den metrischen Theil meiner Arbeit, vorzüglich auf die Reinheit und Richtigkeit des Versmasses, da diese die Grundlage jeder andern Schönheit ist, habe ich soviel Sorgfalt, als möglich, gewandt, und ich glaube, dass hierin kein Uebersetzer zu weit gehen kann.

(GS VIII: 135)

[I applied as much care as possible to the metrical aspect of my work, particularly with regard to the purity and precision of the prosody, as this constitutes the foundation of all other beauties, and I believe that in this regard no translator can go too far.]

This is true of the Agamemnon in particular, but it is already true to the highest degree of no matter which Greek text:

Die Griechen sind das einzige Volk, von dem wir Kunde haben, dem ein solcher Rhythmus eigen war, und dies ist, meines Erachtens, das, was sie am meisten charakterisirt und bezeichnet.

(GS VIII: 135)

[The Greeks are the only people we know of to have possessed this rhythm, and it is this more than anything else that in my opinion characterises them and sets them apart.]

This issues from their view on the general organisation of language, which I will characterise as an atomism, properly understood: it is a veritable physics of discourse, analogous to the one which Gorgias develops in his Encomium of Helen when, with those same words used to describe the Democritan atom, he celebrates a logos which “by the finest and most invisible bodies performs the most divine of acts” (Gorgias 2003: 79). Humboldt traces the link between this rhythmic discursivity and the intellectual destiny of Greece:

mir hat es immer geschienen, dass vorzüglich der Umstand, wie sich in der Sprache Buchstaben zu Silben, und Silben zu Worten verbinden, und wie diese Worte sich wieder in der Rede nach Weile und Ton zu einander verhalten, das intellektuelle, ja sogar nicht wenig das moralische und politische Schicksal der Nationen bestimmt oder bezeichnet.

(GS VIII: 136)

[it has always appeared to me that it is first and foremost the way in which, in a language, letters are bound into syllables and syllables into words, and the way in which these words in their turn interact with one another in discourse according to duration and sonority, which determines and sets apart the intellectual destiny, not to mention the moral and political destiny, of nations.]

Attentive to ambiguities and to rhythm (that which, to save time, one can file under the notion of “signifier”), linked to what Jacques Derrida has sometimes called the untranslatable body of languages, translation has as its condition the love of the work. Humboldt says: “so wie überhaupt jede gute Uebersetzung von einfacher und anspruchloser Liebe zum Original, und daraus entspringendem Studium ausgehen, und in sie zurückkehren muss” (GS VIII: 132) [as generally every good translation must arise out of a simple, unpretentious love for the original]. The question is then: how far, and indeed how, are we to be “faithful” in love? The answer that comes here is a strikingly precise model of the relation to the other:

Mit dieser Ansicht ist freilich nothwendig verbunden, dass die Uebersetzung eine gewisse Farbe der Fremdheit an sich trägt, aber die Gränze, wo dies ein nicht abzuläugnender Fehler wird, ist hier sehr leicht zu ziehen. So lange nicht die Fremdheit, sondern das Fremde gefühlt wird, hat die Uebersetzung ihre höchsten Zwecke erreicht.

(GS VIII: 132)

[In truth we need to hold on to the idea that translation bears within itself a particular colouring of foreignness, but the boundary after which this becomes an undeniable defect is very easy to identify. So long as one does not feel the foreignness but merely the foreign, translation has attained its supreme purpose.]

There is, then, a metron, an appropriate and very exact measure of love. Love in translation, and this is surely true for all love, is situated between two flaws: not foreign enough, and too foreign. Not foreign enough, and even not foreign at all: one asks the translator to write “wie der Originalverfasser in der Sprache des Uebersetzers geschrieben haben würde” (GS VIII: 132) [as the author would have written it in the translator’s language]. However, Humboldt notes, “so zerstört man alles Uebersetzen, und allen Nutzen desselben für Sprache und Nation” (ibid.) [there one destroys all translation and every use for the language and for the nation]—the standard French translations, for example of Paul Mazon, are often flawed in this way. They aim to “communicate,” to “make accessible” a work, but not a language nor a work in language.

There is a second flaw: too foreign, and it is “foreignness;” now, foreignness kills the foreign. Humboldt continues: “wo aber die Fremdheit an sich erscheint, und vielleicht gar das Fremde verdunkelt, d...