CLAS 532
February 24, 2025
Philosophical Approaches to Translation, Translatability

*Exercise #1 due tonight (11:59pm) in D2L Assignments*

Examination #1 Study Guide (March 3)


1. Steiner’s “hermeneutic motion”: four psychological “moves” of translation

(1) initiative trust – “something in the ST”, otherly, but translatable
(2) aggression/penetration – translator's violent incursion into/extraction of meaning from ST & culture
(3) TT's incorporation of new material between extremes of “complete domestication” and “permanent strangeness”; imbalance before (4)
(4) compensation/restoration of balance – as translated ST received, harmony of “energy flow” between ST and TT altered; ST enhancement through translation (“gains” of ST in reception)

• translation a confrontation of self & other – tension (resistance/attraction) produces great translation occupying space between ST & TT (translator experiences text’s singularity & generality, foreignness & familiarity)
  
  

2. Benjamin, “The Translator’s Task”

• translation allows ST’s “pure language” (obscured by linguistic & cultural differences) to appear = essential, intended meaning across languages (pre-Tower of Babel?), “the totality of their mutually complementary intentions”
  
  
• pure language's potentiality released through word-for-word syntactical translation, harmonizing of languages via dynamic model of meaning that alters & continues ST (“translation ultimately has as its purpose the expression of the most intimate relationships among languages”, “all translation is merely a preliminary way of coming to terms with the foreignness of languages to each other”, pp. 91-2 in Venuti)
  
  Brot vs. pain:
  
  “It is because of the mode of meaning that the two words signify something different to a German and Frenchman, that they are not regarded as interchangeable and in fact ultimately seek to exclude one another; however, with respect to their intended object, taken absolutely, they signify one and the same thing. Thus whereas these two words’ modes of meaning are in conflict, they complement each other in the two languages from which they stem. And indeed in them the relation between the mode of intention and what is meant is complemented. In the individual, uncomplemented languages, the intended object never occurs in relative independence, for instance in individual words or sentences, but is rather caught up in constant transformation, until it is able to emerge as pure language from the harmony of all these modes of meaning. Until then it remains hidden in the various languages.” (p. 92 in Venuti)
  
  
• ideal/prototypic translation an interlinear version of Holy Scripture
  
  
  

3. Derrida & Deconstruction – “hermeneutics of suspicion”, exposure of a text’s contradictions & alternative/multiple/surplus meanings (paronomasia & polysemy)

• fundamental questioning of meaning's stability: contingent in context, meaning an effect of language, not present before/apart from language, always fluid & deferred (through relationships between signs & contrasted chains of signifiers, not static signs – “dictionary game”); meaning never absolute/complete in play of differences, always elusive & developing
  
  
• translation's impossibility if meaning not transferable between languages (no static “there” there to translate in ST)?
  
  
• Derrida's “double bind” of translation: both total translatability (“absolute relevance” only with endorsement of singular interpretation of ST) and total untranslatabilty (“opaque irrelevance” with “anything goes” approach) impossible; denotations, connotations, semantic complexities & contradictions can be teased out in competent translator's notes (rigorous reading in context, etc.)
  
  
• “What Is A ‘Relevant’ Translation?” & The Merchant of Venice: translation thematized in Shylock's pound of flesh > money (play features emblematic translation ideas of oath/fidelity, economy/debt, equivalence, conversion/convertere)
  
  
• “When mercy seasons justice”: English “relevant” (“pertinent”, “appropriate”, “adequate”, etc. vis-à-vis translation) migrating to French; relever includes ideas of seasoning/elevation/replacement (destruction); apropos of Portia's justice, quand le pardon relève la justice (ou le droit), i.e. “when mercy elevates and interiorizes, thereby preserving and negating justice (or the law)”); trs. “will not pay off its full debt” (equivalence) but produces a quasi-relevant translation by highlighting contradictions in Portia’s speech, i.e. “a discourse of mercy” enmeshed in power, sophistry, self-interest, political repression & racism (unresolvable oppositions between Christianity & Judaism, spirit and letter of law, etc.)
  
  “In expressing all the evil that can be thought of the Christian ruse as a discourse of mercy, I am not about to praise Shylock when he raises a hue and a cry for his pound of flesh and insists on the literalness of the bond. I analyze only the historical and allegorical cards that have been dealt in this situation and all the discursive, logical, theological, political, and economic resources of the concept of mercy, the legacy (our legacy) of this semantics of mercy–precisely inasmuch as it is indissociable from a certain European interpretation of translation.” (p. 392 in Venuti)
  
  
  Bernard Safran, Medea (1966)