On Translation

Paul Ricoeur, Eileen Brennan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134325672
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría filosóficas

Paul Ricoeur was one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century. In this short and accessible book, he turns to a topic at the heart of much of his work: What is translation and why is it so important?

Reminding us that The Bible, the Koran, the Torah and the works of the great philosophers are often only ever read in translation, Ricoeur reminds us that translation not only spreads knowledge but can change its very meaning. In spite of these risk, he argues that in a climate of ethnic and religious conflict, the art and ethics of translation are invaluable.

Drawing on interesting examples such as the translation of early Greek philosophy during the Renaissance, the poetry of Paul Celan and the work of Hannah Arendt, he reflects not only on the challenges of translating one language into another but how one community speaks to another. Throughout, Ricoeur shows how to move through life is to navigate a world that requires translation itself.

Paul Ricoeur died in 2005. He was one of the great contemporary French philosophers and a leading figure in hermeneutics, psychoanalytic thought, literary theory and religion. His many books include Freud and Philosophy and Time and Narrative.

The paradigm of translation

Two

There are two access routes to the problem posed by the act of translating: either take the term ‘translation’ in the strict sense of the transfer of a spoken message from one language to another or take it in the broad sense as synonymous with the interpretation of any meaningful whole within the same speech community.

Both approaches are legitimate: the first, chosen by Antoine Berman in The Test of the Foreign, takes account of the solid fact of the plurality and the diversity of languages; the second, followed by George Steiner in After Babel,¹ is directed at the combining phenomenon, which the author summarizes in this way: ‘To understand is to translate.’ I have chosen to start from the first, which allows the relationship of the peculiar to the foreign to pass into the foreground, and in this way I will lead you to the second under the direction of the difficulties and the paradoxes created by translation from one language to another.

So let us start out from the plurality and the diversity of languages, and let us note down a first fact: it is because men speak different languages that there is translation. This fact is that of the diversity of languages, to go back to Wilhelm von Humboldt’s title. Now, this fact is simultaneously an enigma: why not a single language, and above all why so many languages, five or six thousand according to the ethnologists? Every Darwinian measure of usefulness and adaptation in the struggle for survival is routed out; this multiplicity, impossible to count, is not only useless, but is also harmful. Indeed, if the intracommunity exchange is ensured by each language’s power of integration taken separately, the exchange with what is outside the linguistic community is ultimately rendered impracticable owing to what Steiner calls ‘a harmful prodigality’. But what makes it enigmatic is not only the jamming of communication (the myth of Babel, which we are going to say more about, calls it ‘scattering’ on the geographic plane and ‘confounding’ on the communication plane); it is also the contrast with some other features which also have to do with language. First, the well-known fact of the universality of language: ‘All men speak’; that is a measure of humanity alongside the tool, the institution, burial; by language, let us understand the use of signs, which are not things, but concern things² – the exchange of signs in interlocution: the main role of a common language at the level of community identification. This is a universal competence contradicted by its scattered achievements, a universal ability contradicted by its fragmented, scattered and disorganized execution. Hence, the speculations at the level of myth to begin with, then at the level of the philosophy of language when it ponders the origin of the scattering-confounding. In this respect, the myth of Babel, too short and too confused in its literary construction, lets us imagine, in a regressive movement, a supposed lost paradisiacal language; it does not include a guide to behaving in this labyrinth. The scattering-confounding is then perceived as an irremediable linguistic catastrophe. In a moment, I will suggest a more benign reading with regard to the normal condition of human beings.

But to begin with, I want to say that there is a second fact which must not obscure the first, that of the diversity of languages: the equally well-known fact that people have always translated; before the professional interpreters, there were the travellers, the merchants, the ambassadors, the spies, and that makes for a lot of bilinguals and polyglots! Here we are broaching a feature as remarkable as the lamented incommunicability, namely, the very fact of translation, which presupposes that every speaker has the ability to learn and to use languages other than his own: this capacity appears firmly attached to other more hidden features concerning the practical experience of language, features that will lead us at the end of our journey into the vicinity of intralinguistic translation processes, namely and to anticipate, the reflexive capacity of language, that possibility, always on hand, of speaking on the subject of language, of placing it at a distance, and in this way of treating our own language as one language among others. I shall keep this analysis of the reflexivity of language for later and concentrate on the simple fact of translation. Men speak different languages, but they can learn others besides their native language.

This simple fact has given rise to huge speculation, which has let itself become locked into ruinous alternatives from which it must extricate itself. These paralysing alternatives are the following: either the diversity of languages gives expression to a radical heterogeneity – and in that case translation is theoretically impossible; one language is untranslatable a priori into another. Or else, taken as a fact, translation is explained by a common fund that renders the fact of translation possible; but then we must be able either to find this common fund, and this is the original language track, or to reconstruct it logically, and this is the universal language track; original or universal, this absolute language has to be such that it can be shown, with its phonological, lexical, syntactic and rhetorical inventories. I repeat the theoretical alternatives: either the diversity of languages is radical, and then translation is impossible by right, or else translation is a fact, and we must establish its rightful possibility through an inquiry into the origin or through a reconstruction of the a priori conditions of the noted fact.

I suggest that we need to get beyond these theoretical alternatives, translatable versus untranslatable, and to replace them with new practical alternatives, stemming from the very exercise of translation, the faithfulness versus betrayal alternatives, even if it means admitting that the practice of translation remains a risky operation which is always in search of its theory. At the end, we will see that the difficulties of intralinguistic translation confirm this embarrassing admission: I recently took part in an international colloquium on interpretation where I heard the talk given by the analytic philosopher Donald Davidson, entitled: ‘Theoretically Difficult, Hard and Practically Simple, Easy’.

This is also my thesis as regards the two sides of translation, extra- and intralinguistic: theoretically incomprehensible, but actually practicable, for the huge price that we are about to name; the practical alternatives of faithfulness versus betrayal.

Before getting onto the path of this practical dialectic, faithfulness versus betrayal, I should like to state very succinctly the reasons for the speculative impasse where the untranslatable and the translatable jostle together.

The thesis of the untranslatable is the necessary conclusion of a certain ethnolinguistics – B. Lee Whorf, E. Sapir – which endeavoured to underline the non-superimposable character of the different divisions on which the numerous linguistic systems rest: the phonetic and articulatory division at the root of the phonological systems (vowels, consonants, etc.), the conceptual division commanding the lexical systems (dictionaries, encyclopaedias, etc.), the syntactic division at the root of the various grammars. The examples abound: if you say ‘wood’ [bois] in French, you put ligneous materials and the idea of a little forest together; but in another language, these two meanings will not be connected and will be reassembled in two different semantic systems; on the grammatical plane, it is easy to see that the systems of verb tenses (present, past, future) differ from one language to another; you have languages where the position in time is not marked, but rather the performed or non-performed character of the action: and you have languages without verb tenses where the position in time is marked only by adverbs equivalent to ‘yesterday’, ‘tomorrow’, etc. If you add the idea that each linguistic division imposes a worldview, an idea that to my way of thinking is untenable, saying for example that the Greeks constructed ontologies because they have a verb ‘to be’ which functions both as a copula and as an affirmation of existence, then it is the set of human relationships of the speakers of a given language that turns out to be non-superimposable on the set of such relationships through which the speaker of another language is himself understood as he understands his relationship to the world. So we must conclude that misunderstanding is a right, that translation is theoretically impossible and that bilinguals have to be schizophrenics.

In that case, we are thrown back onto the other bank: since there is such a thing as translation, it certainly has to be possible. And if it is possible, it means that, beneath the diversity of languages, there are hidden structures that either bear the trace of a lost original language that we must rediscover or consist of a priori codes, of universal structures or, as we say, transcendentals that we must manage to reconstruct. The first version – that of the original language – was professed by various Gnostics, by the Kabbala, by hermetisms of all kinds, even yielding some poisonous fruit like the plea for a supposed Aryan language, declared historically fecund, which they contrast with the supposed infertile Hebrew; in his book The Languages of Paradise, with the disquieting subtitle, ‘Aryans and Semites: a providential pair’, Olender denounces the perfidious linguistic anti-Semitism in what he terms, this ‘clever yarn’; but, to be fair, we must say that the nostalgia for the original language has also produced the powerful meditation of a Walter Benjamin writing The Translator’s Task where the ‘perfect language’, the ‘pure language’ – these are the author’s expressions – appears a...