Rethinking Translation

Discourse, Subjectivity, Ideology

Lawrence Venuti

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429778827
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Originally published in 1992 Rethinking Translation makes the translator's activity more visible by using critical theory. It examines the selection of the foreign text and the implementation of translation strategies; the reception of the translated text, and the theories of translation offered by philosophers, critics and translators themselves. The book constitutes a rethinking that is both philosophical and political, taking into account social and ideological dimensions, as well as questions of language and subjectivity. Covering a number of genres and national literatures, this collection of essays demonstrates the power wielded by translators in the formation of literary canons and cultural identities, and recognises the appropriative and imperialist movements in every act of translation.

1

TRANSLATING ORIGINS: PSYCHOANALYSIS AND PHILOSOPHY

Andrew Benjamin

If translation does not start as the original question then it is, at the very least, a start in the questioning of the origin.¹ The origin as that which is put into question brings psychoanalysis and translation into contact since both are marked by the inevitability and necessity within their origins – including their own conception of the origin – of the process named within psychoanalysis as Nachträglichkeit; a term which at this stage can be translated as ‘deferred action,’ or ‘action at a distance.’² The tentative nature of these translations does not gesture to the provisional as opposed to the final, it is rather that it attests to the difficulty of the task projected by having to think the stakes of this term. Moreover, an important part of any subsequent attempt to undertake this task will have to include specifying the ‘action’ envisaged and tracing the effect of the ‘distance’ involved. Despite the inherently complex nature of this project, an integral component of the translation problem presented by Nachträglichkeit will have already been provided by the process that it, in some sense, names. Identifying this component brings about, within the shift of tenses, a shift to naming. With this reworking the origin itself comes to be reworked. And yet it should also be remembered that there is more involved here than a simple connection or interrelation since translation figures from the start within psychoanalysis. Rather than trace the multitude of references, the repetition of the word ‘Übersetzung’ and its many correlates (e.g. ‘Umsetzung’), one will have to introduce, and thus prop, the discussion to come; i.e., the letter written by Freud to Wilhelm Fleiss on 6 December 1896.

Prior to tracing the work of this specific reference, the perdurance of the origin should be indicated. The origin here is the origin of convention; tradition’s origin. It yields to, if only because it yields, a fascination, as much sedulous as discursive, for that moment marking the beginning. A start which is the point where something will have begun. (The point or moment will always involve both ontological as well as temporal considerations.) Following the convention, the demands of tradition, any return to the start will generate it again – the start again – where the ‘again’ is intended to avoid degeneration because of its incorporation or reincorporation into that construal of repetition in which the process of repetition is structured and governed by the Same. The Same sustains a conception of repetition in which what is repeated remains, despite the work of time, self-identical. The possibility of the inscription of difference is excluded. The viability, let alone the durability, of this exclusion remains an open question.

Many commentators have referred to the importance of the letters written by Freud to Fleiss, and in particular the letter of 6 December 1896. Of the different permutations that translation acquires within it perhaps the most significant in this instance is the following: ‘Die Versagung der Übersetzung, das ist das, was klinisch “Verdrängung” heisst.’³ In passing, the unavoidability of translation should be stated in advance. Repression, within the frame of the letter, is then the clinical meaning fheisst’) of what elsewhere is a ‘Versagung der Übersetzung.’ It is essential to note that repression is, in the move from the non-clinical to the clinical, already a translation; a carrying over from one domain to the other. In other words, ‘Die Versagung der Übersetzung’ is, even within the confines of one language, already a translation; namely of ‘Verdrängung.’ The presence of the already present translation is of considerable significance, since it opens up as a translation the problematic nature of translation, i.e., within the confines of this sentence, it is translation that puts into play the problem of translation. The question that must be asked therefore is, of what is it a translation? In other words, what has come to be translated? These questions gesture towards the translated event and thus to the event of translation. They mark out that which is already taking place. The event is not outside. Indeed, the problem of the ‘event’ is already at work within translation. (This ‘within’ does not designate a space as such, rather it brings into play a series of relationships as much contingent as symbiotic.) Any attempt to give greater clarity or specificity to the event will have to involve a reconsideration of its ontologico-temporal nature. The event cannot be merely posited as though it were given within the exclusive singularity of a specific mode of being. Moreover, there is a connection of considerable importance between the event and the origin. Once the origin is no longer the arché – the beginning within the Same, the same beginning – but an origin whose repetition involves the logic of the again and the anew, such that its re-presentation will always take place again and for the first time, then this reworking of the origin establishes a point of intersection between the event and the origin since both are now articulated within, as well as articulating, the movement and temporal spacing which is designated by the term Nachträglichkeit. How this designation is to be understood is a question that will be addressed throughout the proceeding.

Freud’s letter opens by specifying the question of translation. Even if repression translates ‘die Versagung der Übersetzung’ what is left open or unanswered is the following question: what is its translation? While holding the general question of translation open, a way ahead will have already been provided by other translations of this line. Masson, in his edition of the letters, taking up the lead set by the Strachey translation, translates the whole sentence as: ‘A failure of translation – this is what is known clinically as “repression.” ‘⁴ ‘Versagung’ is now ‘failure.’ Prior to pursuing the consequences of this failure there is a preliminary problem. Even if it has to be assumed that the problem of the translation of ‘heisst’ as ‘known’ can, at this stage, only be noted, it is nonetheless worth recognizing this intrusion of knowledge into semantics; of knowing into meaning. It will be essential to return to this discursive substitution in order to begin an attempted clarification of the relationship between epistemology and judgment within psychoanalysis. The problematic nature of this relationship figures in Masson’s translation.

Jean Laplanche, in a recent article, ‘Spécificité des problèmes terminologiques dans la traduction de Freud,’⁵ translates the opening segment of the sentence as ‘un refusement de traduction.’ (The neologism of ‘un refusement’ must also be noted.⁶) As a point of departure it is clear that the two possibilities, ‘a failure of translation,’ ‘un refusement de traduction,’ do not straightforwardly, at least in the straightforward and hence problematic sense of translation, translate each other. There is therefore an apparent failure of translation. There would seem to be only one alternative if the inevitability of such an outcome is to be avoided; recourse must be made to the source, to the origin. What then, here, is the original? The response is unproblematic, ‘Die Versagung der Übersetzung.’ An expression which is itself a term that comes, within the clinical context, to be translated by ‘Verdrängung.’ The difficulties are compounded. The problematic element is not the presence of the difficulty of translation within psychoanalysis, nor is it a regional difficulty, since the question – what is the original? – depends for its force, both heuristic and ontological, upon an answer to a more fundamental philosophical question; i.e., what is an origin? This is the question from the start. Here, however, it will be pursued concretely: what is an origin within psychoanalysis?

As a prelude to any consideration of the origin, what needs to be brought into consideration are two elements whose ineliminable presence – a presence always at work – traverses the psychoanalytic as well as the philosophical. The first is time and the second is style. In relation to the second of these points François Rous tang, in Psychoanalysis Never Lets Go, introduces an important connection between translation and style. Style here refers to the text’s self-presentation. It is a connection that bears upon the origin since it involves the status of what comes to be translated.

Freud’s writing loses all of its vigour and even its meaning in the majority of French translations and even in the English translation of the Standard Edition, because the translators are only interested in rendering the overall meaning of a sentence defined by its syntax without concerning themselves with word placement and repetitions. If parataxis is to be respected in Freud’s text, it is because his writing is itself the machine that he puts together: in other words, this machine is his discourse and one cannot displace its parts without disrupting its function.⁷

Despite the timely nature of Roustang’s warning, it still leaves open the question of what exactly is involved in respecting parataxis. Since style opens the question of its own significance rather than answering and thereby closing off the question of signification, it follows that just posing the question of style is on its own far from sufficient. Is it, for example, a different state of affairs in regard to Freud’s texts than it would be in reading C. F. Meyer’s novella Die Richterin or his short story ‘Gustav Adolphs Page,’ the latter being the text in which Freud, in another letter to Fleiss, 9 June 1898, noted two examples of Nach-träglichkeiu⁸ (The specific formulation is ‘den Gedanken der Nachträglichkeit.’ It will be necessary to return to this formulation and thus to the ‘thought’ or ‘idea’ of Nachträglichkeit.) Style is inevitability linked to genre and therefore to the specific expectations of reading. In regard to the question of style it may be, at this stage, sufficient to indicate that the analyst as translator is only ever interested, even if only as a prelude, in parataxis. (It will be seen that the prelude in question posits translation both as an origin, as well as at the origin.) In order to dwell upon these questions it is essential to turn to time because it is within time that the question of the origin and its translation, even its existence as the always already translated, comes to be posed. This does not mean that style is displaced, it is rather that the dis-placement that, in part, is style is the enactment of the process of translation, one with rather than without the other.

Any approach to time that eschews reducing it to the recitation of dates and the establishing of a chronology – while of course including them as determinations that can never be either absolute or exhaustive – overcomes simplicity by forming a complex. Part of that complex will be the date, however no longer as the absolute singular point, but as the pragma.⁹ This complex will both form and inform its own expression. While it will remain the case that time brings with it the centrality of ontology and experience within philosophy, the difficulty with such claims will always reside in the sense that is to be given to the ‘with.’ Posing time within a framework established by connectives and conjunctions – e.g. ‘with,’ ‘and’ – seems to suggest that it is possible to posit the other elements or components to which time is connected independently of time itself. The independence suggested by the positioning of such terms means, moreover, that what eludes consideration is the possibility of either existence or time working to delimit the other in an original sense. Any subsequent delimitation or mediation is premised upon an initial singular and isolated positing.¹⁰ Indeed, the contrary is the case, for it must be recognised that in spite of the disjunctive (as well as the conjunctive) force of terms such as ‘with,’ ‘and,’ etc., time and existence, rather than being brought together and therefore involving a relation to come, are always already interarticulated. (Part of the argument for this interarticulation is that thinking the conditions of possibility of a given mode of being or mode of temporality will bring with it as an inelimin-able component the temporality or existence entailed by that mode. Within this revision of the transcendental argument entailment does not entail a temporal sequence, but on the contrary it marks the complex simultaneity of the present.) The relation therefore will have already been established. In order to avoid the risk of reducing this relation to a unity and thus of essentializing it, it will be necessary to articulate, perhaps re-articulate, the relation – and thus relations – in terms of specific ontologico-temporal concatenations, as opposed to an undifferentiated and thus an as-yet-to-be-determined, though necessarily singular, being and time.¹¹ It would follow from this rearticulation that posing the question of time is, at the same time, to pose the question of existence. It is here that a digression is essential. One of the ways of this digression will bring into play elements of a philosophical stance that gives centrality to what will henceforth be described as a differential ontology.¹² It goes without saying that it is the sense of ontology that needs to be clarified.

The traditional problems posed by the location of the centrality of ontology are, firstly, that time comes to be excluded, and, secondly, that the ontological is thought either in terms of singularity or at the very least as a limit concept such that events could be posited independently of ontologico-temporal concerns. It is not the case that these problems are to be overcome either by an act of sublation or even one of transgression. It is rather that they both mark an inadequate conception or understanding of ontology. It is one bounded by the necessary presence of a necessary unity within conceptions of Being, i.e., where Being itself is unified such that it does not admit of either internal diversity or diremption. Furthermore, not only must Being involve an internal unity, it must, in order that it be thought, be itself a unity, i.e., exist without external relations and determinations. This latter conception will be the case even in those instances in which this presence – Being as unity – is not presented as such. This twofold necessity demands not just an origin that comprises being at the origin, it also involves an ontology that is always already a unity. The possibility of a plurality, including the possibility of overdetermination will, as a consequence, always be parasitic upon the original unity of the event; the event as original unity. Plurality and difference emerge, therefore, as no more than tropes always dependent upon a pre-existent unity.

The event presented in this way will be complete unto itself. The reason for this completion is that the event ‘is’ in its being – being by forming – its own completion. While it is not a universal in the sense that it is opposed to particulars, the event, thus construed, is nonetheless a self-referring universal in that it excludes difference from within itself and generates a philosophical task in which it must be thought in its unity as a singular event. (Heidegger’s formulation in Zeit und Sein of thinking Being ‘ohne Rücksicht’ [‘without relation’] to either beings or metaphysics is an example of such a philosophical strategy.¹³) Within it difference is an after-effect, even if it is deemed to have occurred ‘prior’ to thinking Being as such. Difference in this sense would obscure the thinking of Being. If, in contradistinction to this presentation of both the event and the event of difference, difference is taken as original and not as the after-work of unity, then despite the radical nature of this move, it will not give rise to either the abandoning of ontology or the relativizing...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Translating Origins: Psychoanalysis and Philosophy
• 2 Translation as Simulacrum
• 3 Gender and the Metaphorics of Translation
• 4 Translation as (Sub)Version: On Translating Infante’s Inferno
• 5 Merrill’s Valèry: An Erotics of Translation
• 6 Mistranslation, Missed Translation: Hélène Cixous’ Vivre L’orange
• 7 Translation and the Postcolonial Experience: The Francophone North African Text
• 8 Translation and Cultural Hegemony: The Case of French-Arabic Translation
• 9 The Language of Cultural Difference: Figures of Alterity in Canadian Translation
• 10 Colors in Translation: Baudelaire and Rimbaud
• 11 I. U. Tarchetti’s Politics of Translation; or, A Plagiarism of Mary Shelley
• Index