Untranslating Machines

A Genealogy for the Ends of Global Thought

Jacques Lezra

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781786605092
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Filosofía política

On what basis can we establish an alternative to the unifying of cultures brought about by economic globalization? When ideas, like objects and words, can be translated and marketed everywhere, what forms of critique are available? Straddling the fields of political philosophy, comparative literature, animal studies, global studies, and political economy, Untranslating Machines proposes to this end a weakened, defective concept of “untranslatability.” The analytic frame of Jacques Lezra’s argument is rooted in Marx, Derrida and Wittgenstein. He moves historically from the moment when “translation” becomes firmly wed to mercantilism and to the consolidation of proto-national state forms, in European early modernity; to the current moment, in which the flow of information, commodities and value-creation protocols among international markets produces the regulative fantasy of a global, coherent market of markets. In a world in which translation and translatability have become a means and a model for the consolidation of a global cultural system, this book proposes an understanding of untranslatability that serves to limit the articulation between a globalized capitalist value-system and the figure and techniques of translation.

Chapter 1

Two Dogmas of Translation

‘How am I able to obey a rule?’ – if this is not a question about causes [nach der Ursachen], then it is about the justification for my following the rule in the way I do. If I have exhausted the justifications I have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned [so bin ich nun auf dem harten Felsen angelangt, und mein Spaten biegt sich zurück]. Then I am inclined to say: ‘This is simply what I do’.

(Remember that we sometimes demand definitions for the sake not of their content, but of their form. Our requirement is an architectural one; the definition a kind of ornamental coping that supports nothing.) (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations I. 217)

When I was a child in Madrid, my friends and I took our literary pleasures where we could find them, and we found them very often in translation.¹ René Goscinny’s and Albert Uderzo’s great ‘Astérix et Obélix’ series came to us in Castilian furnished with occasional footnotes: ‘Juego de palabras intraducible’, it would say at the bottom of the page: ‘untranslatable word-game’ or ‘untranslatable pun’, referring to a word spoken by a Gaul, Roman, Belgian and so on. At the time, we understood these footnotes to be deliberate characterizations of the Spanish words we had before us, rather than of a French original – and I suspect, in fact, that it never crossed our mind that there might be a French original, no doubt because the notorious national rivalry between Spain and France made the possibility unthinkable. For us, it was the Spanish that was ‘intraducible’, the language into which the comic could not be translated remaining unspecified; it struck us as particularly hilarious that the Spanish words footnoted for us were commonplace and should thus be utterly obvious in their translation, an indictment of that other, misty language as much as it was proof of Castilian’s nuance and particularity. Years later, when I read the works in French and in English, I realized to my shock that these footnotes were not deliberate parabases but marks of melancholia or exasperation, a sort of throwing-up-of-the hands left diacritically by a nameless translator who was unable if not unwilling to render into Spanish the French jeux de mots.² ‘Juego de palabras intraducible’, he or she wrote when the going got sticky, closing off to Spanish readers of the books the avenue of the linguistically unfaithful but culturally correlative pun – something on the order of turning the name of Obélix’s minute dog ‘Idéfix’ into ‘Dogmatix’, as the brilliant English rendering does, rather than conveying it, as did the tired Spaniard I imagine, merely as ‘Idefix’.³

One does not go unscarred through experiences like this. A host of retrospective reorderings, retranslations and recathectings of primal relations can ensue when the ideas one formed in childhood about this or that important expression become unfixed – with often perilous consequences for one’s professional or psychic health. And my choice of topic, translation’s ‘indecisive muse’, must surely count as one of the long psychic after-effects of this early shock, the discovery that my fixed, dogmatic ideas about the translatability or untranslatability of names like ‘Idéfix’ or of referential expressions like ‘Juego de palabras intraducible’ were not merely marks of linguistic ignorance and chauvinism but incorrect to boot. Imagine again my notional, exasperated Spanish translator. The confession of a term’s untranslatability speaks to his or her exhaustion, or to a literalistic turn of mind bound to conflict with the subtle extravagance of Goscinny’s script (one could reasonably argue, for instance, that ‘Idefix’ is not a bad, but rather a particularly good translation of ‘Idéfix’, which like all proper names is untranslatable as a description of what it names) – unless, of course, the hilarity that these footnotes and bad juegos de palabras provoked among one group of pre-adolescents itself served as a sly correlative for the humour of Uderzo’s and Goscinny’s jeux de mots.⁴ On this improbably Straussian reading the marks of the translator’s seeming failure themselves succeeded in conveying some of the ‘untranslatable’ wit of the original, as unfaithfully but just as companionably as the more conventionally successful Englishing does. Improbable – but how would one know? On what grounds would one make such a decision? What might be at stake in deciding one way or another whether the imagined, unimaginative Spanish translator did or did not mask an acute, dialectically inclined linguistic druid?

Something more, surely, than the comparative linguistic innocence of one young group of Spanish readers. Say one wanted to argue that the Spanish translation of Goscinny’s and Uderzo’s bandes dessinées was poor (because flatfooted or unimaginative, and hence inadequate to the original) or that it was in a way too good (characters’ proper names were left rigidly untranslated, as if their descriptive function in the original had been shorn at the border), but that it did a certain ideological work (the work of soliciting adolescent assent that Spanish was indeed ‘different’, in being untranslatable) with pernicious consequences (to promote Spanish exceptionalism at a time when Spain’s exceptionality with respect to Europe was largely political, was to bolster that ‘exceptional’ political model). A reader self-involved enough to examine the source and possible consequence of his literary pleasures might well find himself or herself making this sort of observation; any translator contemplating different ways of rendering this or that juego de palabras, or indeed contemplating any translation whatsoever, might just as well. In both cases, the mechanisms, habits, discursive contexts or rules that we, readers and translators, employ when we make judgements concerning the effect or the felicity of a translation take into account the historical circumstances of a translation’s production and reception: we need history to tell us whether this or that translation ‘works’, and how, and to what ends, to help us to evaluate it. Clio watches over the translator’s task and it is to that muse that the translator’s interpreters turn as well.

And yet this banal observation is beset with problems. Consider. Goscinny’s and Uderzo’s little Gaulish village, under siege by Roman forces, is devised and first published in the shadow of sieges that France felt much more proximately indeed – the Battle of Algiers, whose double siege – the French population in its quarter, the FLN and its supporters largely confined to the casbah and older parts of the city – so firmly gripped the French imaginary in the years from 1954 to 1960; and the terrible siege of the French expeditionary forces in the valley of Dien Bien Phu, in the course of 1954, which led to France’s withdrawal from Indochina. Consider, too, that the besieged but invincible Gauls may well have expressed a compensatory French nostalgia for the movable stockades of ‘resisteurs’ who fought against Vichy and against German, rather than Roman, occupation – with considerably less success than their cartoon counterparts. (René Goscinny’s family were Polish Jews. Born in France, he lived through the war in Buenos Aires and the United States; all his European relatives died in the camps.) Note also that Goscinny’s and Uderzo’s Spanish translator worked still, in 1970, under the careful eyes of the last of Europe’s fascisms, a regime for which the figure of the siege served quite different purposes: recall most notably the official and widespread assimilation of the Roman siege of the Spanish town of Numantia, in the second century BCE, to various Republican sieges of Nationalist fortifications during the 1936–1939 Spanish Civil War and, from the Republican side, the similar characterization of the sieges of Madrid and Barcelona by Franco’s forces and of the entire exiled population as a ‘Numancia errante’, in the marvellously evocative words of the socialist leader Luis Araquistáin. To succeed in making Franco’s Spanish truly ‘different’ from republican French (or from any other language) – to make the languages mutually untranslatable – and to make a new generation of Spanish readers enjoy their difference was to raise and level Pyrenees of the mind between Spain and Europe, between the little village or fortified alcázar of Spanish falangismo and a liberalizing continent intent on invading Spain every August. ‘Spain is different’, ran the campaign that the Spanish Ministerio de Información y Turismo opened in 1963, marketing Spanish tourism in the exceptionalist tropes used since the eighteenth century to marginalize the Peninsula: Spanish, this wily translator seems to have been showing us, is different as well. How might a translation negotiate this peculiar set of overdeterminations? What shape might we expect judgments concerning its effects or felicities to take? What work might we expect the claim of ‘untranslatability’ to do, at the time and under the circumstances?

Other, less clearly ‘historical’ determinations are at work as well. For our judgements concerning the effect or the felicity of a translation also depend upon assertoric statements like ‘Idefix and Dogmatix are translations of Idéfix’ or ‘Idéfix, Idefix and Dogmatix refer to the same thing’, statements which are true rigidly and independently of historical circumstance. We would not be able to say that ‘Idefix’ is a translation of ‘Idéfix’, good, bad or indifferent; and with this or that consequence; without knowing that ‘Idéfix’ and ‘Idefix’ refer to the same thing. How this circumstance came about, whether it may change, what might be the different descriptive charges of the names ‘Idéfix’ and ‘Dogmatix’ – these questions are of another order entirely. The notion that a translation should be ‘faithful to the original’ founders just here: ‘faithfulness’ is a predicate with two aspects, a concept with two domains, unfaithful in a way to either one. It is drawn, on the one hand, from a structural or grammatical account of reference, which admits, that indeed requires the possibility of synonymy: assertoric statements like ‘Idefix and Dogmatix are translations of Idéfix’ can be rephrased as ‘Idefix is synonymous with Idéfix and Dogmatix is synonymous with Idéfix’. It is also drawn, on the other hand, from a practical, historical account of reference, one which will always understand synonymy to arise as a matter of happenstance. Here on this side we say: ‘Idefix and Dogmatix are translations of Idéfix now, under these circumstances, for these reasons, with these consequences: it could have been otherwise, it may not last; what one name describes about its referent coincides now and to some extent, but not necessarily completely, with what the other describes about its referent’. Each side of this couple is wobbly on its own. For instance, the distinction between a proper name and a description is not always, and perhaps never a priori, a clear one: ‘Idéfix’ and ‘Dogmatix’ look like proper names that work also as descriptions, but ‘Idefix’, the Castilian version of both, only works remotely (if at all) as a description, the Spanish version of idée fixe being something like ‘idea fija’, two terms that don’t readily yield a portmanteau. And the second, practico-historical way of approaching a translation’s ‘faithfulness’ proves as unfaithful on its own to its founding terms and rules as it proves when wed to the structural account of reference that its assertoric shape suggests. For when we judge the felicity and effects of a translation, do we not also need to know, as it were, a history of the translation (and the work’s) effects yet to come? How might these be reckoned? What temporal and imaginative ‘translation’ is required of us in order to inscribe upon the translation that we are evaluating the history of its effects to come?

These scattershot questions, addressed to the form that ‘decisions’ take when we make judgements about translation, flow from the incompatible registers in which the determining notion of a translation’s ‘faithfulness’ operates. Each of these registers furnishes us, too, with answers to the questions that their mutual interference provokes: answers to translation’s indecisions, on the one side, reflecting a roughly ‘Idealist’ approach to linguistic usage and, on the other, answers reflecting a roughly ‘materialist’ approach to linguistic usage – the two dogmas of my subtitle. My goal in casting Quinean doubts on this tired distinction is not, however, a sceptical one. Rather, I want to argue that grounds for establishing judgements concerning translation today find a compelling weakness in both the surprise of their emergence (they are not determined) and in the dividedness of their conceptual domain (the notion of faithfulness, the notion that the translated word is similar to a proper name – though this name isn’t solidly either a designator or a description). The examples I have chosen – taken from the work of Jorge Luis Borges and of Ludwig Wittgenstein – are drawn from terrible years: the period between 1937 and 1940, when both writers observed from abroad the rise, consolidation and aggressions of European fascism, one from Dublin and Cambridge, the other from the basement of the Biblioteca Municipal Miguel Cané in Buenos Aires. Neither could know the outcome of the historical ‘darkness’ into which they looked, from different sides of the ocean. For both, an ethical disposition towards that great darkness – der Finsternis dieser Zeit, as Wittgenstein wrote some years later – passed through the problem and the question of translation. Between them – in a dialogue one can only wish had actually taken place, in public, and well attended, somewhere between Buenos Aires and Cambridge – there develops a determining account of the need for articulating the field of ethics – where responses to the crisis of their times could be evaluated – with the problem of translation.⁵

UNCERTAIN TRANSLATION

A felicitous translation, we might first agree, wearing provisionally an Idealist cap, should be a form of transport, as the characteristic humanist etymology would stress: ‘del verbo latino traduco, -is, por llevar de un lugar a otro alguna cosa’, writes Sebastián de Covarrubias in a 1611 definition of ‘traduzir’: ‘from the Latin word traduco,- is, meaning to take something from one place to another’.⁶ The thing remains untouched; topology, rather than interpretation, is at issue; of the translator or the displacement ‘from one place to another’, no trace remains upon the thing or anywhere else. As to what this ‘thing’ or ‘alguna cosa’ might be, it plainly need not be a thing at all – at least not in any ordinary sense of the term ‘thing’ (after all, a word’s ‘sense’ has no material consistency). And of course this ‘thing’ need not be an ‘idea’ either, or not at any rate the sort of ‘idea’ whose numinous form we associate with the various avatars of Platonism, any more than the ‘place’ or ‘lugar’ to which this ‘thing’ is moved need be a physical space – though both ‘thing’ and ‘place’ must minimally be coherent and perspicuously regulated entities. The topology of Idealist translation need not remain quite so plodding – indeed, it cannot. The minimal principle of coherence and perspicuity applies a fortiori to the rules according to which the ‘transport’ from linguistic ‘place’ to ‘place’ occurs, rules whose ‘place’ within each language designates the totality of ‘places’ and ‘things’ of another (of every other) language. Because another language (because every other language) also has a place for the rules of its ‘transport’ or translation into another language (into every other language), the place occupied by the rules of translation in this or that natural language includes hypothetically both every other language and in and through these others the ‘primitive’ language as well.

As I have described it, the Idealist argument for the minimal coherence and perspicuous regulation of the field of language comes closest to the atomic position most commonly ascribed to Russell – even the paradoxical topology smacks of what will become Russell’s theory of types. Wittgenstein, who comes to be among Russell’s sharpest critics, maintains these principles well through the Tractatus and perhaps up to the Philosophical Investigations. Though never, it should be said, without certain qualms – especially when it comes to translating to natural language principles derived from formal ones. ‘If I know the meaning of an English and a synonymous German word’, he writes in the ‘fours’ of the Tractatus, then ‘it is impossible for me not to know that they are synonymous, it is impossible for me not to be able to translate them into one another’ (4.243) – and this ‘impossibility’, unmöglichkeit, chimes clearly with the companion stress on necessity and continuity typical of the earliest work.⁷ But is Wittgenstein right? For me to know (or judge) that two words I know, one English, the other German, are synonymous, I must judge that what I call (in English) ‘synony...