Deconstruction and Translation

Kathleen Davis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317642213
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Deconstruction and Translation explains ways in which many practical and theoretical problems of translation can be rethought in the light of insights from the French philosopher Jacques Derrida. If there is no one origin, no transcendent meaning, and thus no stable source text, we can no longer talk of translation as meaning transfer or as passive reproduction. Kathleen Davis instead refers to the translator's freedom and individual responsibility. Her survey of this complex field begins from an analysis of the proper name as a model for the problem of signification and explains revised concepts of limits, singularity, generality, definitions of text, writing, iterability, meaning and intention. The implications for translation theory are then elaborated, complicating the desire for translatability and incorporating sharp critique of linguistic and communicative approaches to translation. The practical import of this approach is shown in analyses of the ways Derrida has been translated into English. In all, the text offers orientation and guidance through some of the most conceptually demanding and rewarding fields of contemporary translation theory.

Section II
Implications for Translation Theory

Introduction

The previous section was designed to provide the reader with a basis for understanding some of Derrida’s most important points regarding language and meaning, particularly as they pertain to translation. Hopefully, that discussion will also serve as a basis for reading this section, which addresses some of the intersections between deconstruction and other approaches to language and translation. Chapter 4 takes up the concepts of decision, intention, and communication, each of which has played a significant role in recent thinking about translation. Through close examination of these concepts and their implications, I attempt to show how their deconstruction opens onto a much expanded significance for translation.

Chapter 5 provides extensive, minutely detailed examples of Derrida’s translators at work. The purpose of this chapter is not to demonstrate what a deconstructive translation process is. As will quickly become apparent, Derrida’s translators adopt a variety of methods that are not always compatible with each other. These examples provide forceful proof that deconstruction is not a method. As will also become apparent, however, these translators are consistent in the way they think about language, the problem and the process of translation, and the implications of their own performances as they manoeuvre in the paradoxical non-space between the ‘critical’ and the deconstructive. In the course of discussing these translators, I will take up topics, such as Derrida’s work with ‘restricted’ and ‘general’ economy, that are of particular importance to translation theory.

Finally, chapter 6 addresses the pressing issues of responsibility and ethics. Building upon the earlier discussions of singularity/generality in chapter 2, ‘decision’ in chapter 4, and ‘economy’ in chapter 5, this chapter examines the aporia of responsibility in translation: the need, and yet the impossibility, of an ethical approach to translation. To say that there is an impossible aspect to ethics is not to suggest that translation cannot be ethical. Rather, it suggests that ethical translation cannot follow a pre-formulated code of ethics, which – I hope to persuade the reader – would ultimately be unethical.

4.
Unloading Terms

Because deconstruction challenges and reworks traditional ways of thinking, it has reworked traditional language use as well. This reworking is as inevitable as it is necessary: if meaning is an effect of language, then a challenge to prevailing conceptualizations of meaning must perform its differences through language. The differences enacted by deconstruction take various forms, such as neologism (we have already covered différance and arche-writing, for instance) or the specialized use of an available word (trace, iterability) in a way that exploits and develops its history. Often, however, terms whose meaning has long been taken for granted are ‘shaken up’ by deconstruction, which questions their assumptions and pursues their implications. (For this ‘shaking up’, Derrida uses the word ‘solicit’ in its radical sense.) These ‘terms’ may seem ‘loaded’ in confusing ways to those unaccustomed to this sort of theoretical discussion, and to make matters worse, they are often the most ordinary of words and concepts. We may take, for example, the word ‘concept’ itself, which may seem simple enough, but which, throughout Western history, has referred to an idea or scheme based on a grounding premise and ultimately entailing a logic of opposition.

‘Translatability’, for example, is a concept, which is based on the assumption of meaning as a presence (as discussed in the previous section) and which has been locked for centuries in a theoretical duel with ‘untranslatability’. Within the system of logic based on such concepts, it does not work to suggest ‘relative translatability’ and ‘relative untranslatability’, any more than it works to suggest ‘relative presence’ or ‘relative absence’, ‘relative good’ or ‘relative evil’ – all of which leave the conceptual poles, as well as their assumptions and problems, intact. We cannot simply jettison concepts, since they have produced our histories and structure our languages, but we can deconstruct them in order to access the potential of the difference excluded or repressed by them. That is why deconstruction tries to think translation differently, not based on meaning as presence but through différance (which is not a concept or a presence). Derrida speaks of concepts all the time, but always to question them.

Deconstruction, then, does not ‘load’ words with new and strange meanings. Rather, it ‘unloads’ – or deconstructs – them through an analysis that shows what they have been doing all along. The title of this chapter, therefore, is not a promise to reveal occult vocabulary concocted by deconstruction. Rather, this chapter will work through deconstruction’s ‘unloading’ of some of the terms most important to translation.

Decision

In an essay in Writing and Difference, Derrida comments that différance “must be conceived of in other terms than those of a calculus or mechanics of decision” (1967/1978: 203). In a translator’s note Alan Bass explains: “Decision in Greek is krinein, whence comes our ‘critic.’ The critic always decides on a meaning, which can be conceived only in terms of presence. Since différance subverts meaning and presence, it does not decide” (Bass 1978: 329 n.6). Now, if your impulse is to say, ‘oh, terrific – no decisions, so nothing will ever get done!’ then you are thinking in terms of the opposition decidable/undecidable. Derrida pursues the implications of the concept ‘decision’ to show that it depends upon ‘undecidability’ – which does not mean that there is only undecidability, but that the opposition does not hold up. John Caputo, addressing the confusion surrounding Derrida’s work with ‘undecidability’, puts it well:

Undecidability is taken, or mistaken, to mean a pathetic state of apathy, the inability to act, paralyzed by the play of signifiers that dance before our eyes, like a deer caught in a headlight. But rather than an inability to act, undecidability is the condition of possibility of acting and deciding. For whenever a decision is really a decision, whenever it is more than a programmable, deducible, calculable, computable result of a logarithm, that is because it has passed through ‘the ordeal of undecidability.’ One way to keep this straight is to see that the opposite of ‘undecidability’ is not ‘decisiveness’ but programmability, calculability, computerizability, or formalizability. Decision-making, judgment, on the other hand, positively depends upon undecidability, which gives us something to decide. (Caputo 1997: 137)

A decision in this sense is never simply an attempt to make the ‘right’ (and therefore already decided) choice from predetermined or ‘presented’ options. It necessarily entails responsibility because it “can only come into being in a space that exceeds the calculable program that would destroy all responsibility by transforming it into a programmable effect of determinate causes” (Derrida 1988: 116). Only when faced with an impossible decision – one for which a pre-existing ‘right’ choice is not ‘presented’ – do we decide.

For translation studies, which has for some time been focusing on the decision-making process of the translator, the implications are enormous. The meaning of any text is undecidable, since it is an effect of language and not something that can be extracted and reconstituted. Translators must therefore make decisions in this strong sense. The decision-making process is one of the reasons that translations are performative events, rather than replays of events that have already happened. These implications cut two ways: they support the arguments, advanced by Venuti, for instance, that translators should receive treatment and recognition comparable to that of authors; on the other hand, they destroy the ruse that one can ever ‘simply’ translate – translations are ethical-political acts.

Treating translation decision-making as a ‘Hobson’s choice’ (i.e. a situation when one must select between equally unsatisfactory choices), inevitably brings translation scholars into self-contradiction. I will take an example from James Holmes, not because I do not respect his work, but because his stimulating, revisionary thinking on translation brought him into sharp conflict with the oppositional model upon which he relied. In his ‘On Matching and Making Maps: From a Translator’s Notebook’ (in Holmes 1998), Holmes begins by invalidating the concept of ‘equivalence’ in translation. He uses a mathematical example to demonstrate that a true equivalence relationship is only possible in cases of pure calculation, but for translation, “[t]he languages and cultures to be bridged […] are too far apart and too disparately structured for true equivalence to be possible” (Holmes 1988: 53-54). The translator, he suggests, is not searching for a calculable answer that pre-exists, and does not even strive to do so. Rather, the translator works through the text, seeking ‘counterparts’ or ‘matchings’, and is “constantly faced by choices, choices he can make only on the basis of his individual grasp (knowledge, sensibility, experience…) of the two languages and cultures involved, and with the aid of his personal tastes and preferences” (ibid: 54; ellipsis in Holmes). Even though Holmes describes this process in terms of ‘choices’ that apparently pre-exist, it seems that his translator is making decisions by facing ‘undecidables’.

The example Holmes gives of his own translation process confirms this performativity. In translating the 1943 sonnet ‘De grot’ by Martinus Nijhoff, whose verse he admired, he was unable to produce a satisfactory iambic pentameter version. He then decided that by dropping the metrical matching and concentrating on other aspects, he “could produce a poem that might be effective in a quite different manner” (ibid: 57). The result (‘The Cave’, 1965), he says, is in a way “not Nijhoff – he would have been taken aback by it” (ibid: 57). But:

in another, very real way it is him: a kind of younger, latter-generation Nijhoff liberated from the shackles of received forms, paradoxically applying the free-verse techniques of the post-war Dutch poets to give expression to the dark predicament of caged and fettered man in the midst of the war. (ibid: 57)

This latter-generation Nijhoff is a different Nijhoff, produced in a post-war context by Holmes, who has been doing a lot of deciding. His ‘The Cave’ is an excellent example of the ‘survival’ of the original in Benjamin’s sense, and he is clearly pleased with it. Even when a poem contains a ‘mistake’ based on a transcription error (as we saw in the previous chapter), Holmes stands by its validity and value. Nonetheless, he feels compelled, paradoxically, to disparage and qualify his work. If another translator succeeds in producing a version of ‘De grot’ that does justice to its formal structure without “inflicting greater damage” to its other aspects, he suggests, then that version should “supplant” his. Later he states that “translating poetry is largely a matter of making choices between less-than-perfect possibilities” (ibid: 60) – a description that falls back on the idea of pre-existing choices, and is certainly not a fair assessment of his own work as he has described it.

The contradictions in Holmes’s discussion of translation can be traced to the central metaphor of his essay: the map. In another essay, Holmes explains his idea of a translation ‘map’ as the translator’s ‘mental conception’. Translation involves two maps, he suggests, one abstracted from the source text, and the other projected for the target text (ibid: 83-84). In ‘On Matching and Making Maps’, Holmes makes explicit the assumption behind this metaphor: “all translations are maps, the territories are the originals” (ibid: 58). The concept of the original as ‘territory’ or ‘ground’ – the ideal signified that is really there as a unified self-presence if we could only re-present it – is logocentrism par excellence. Holmes describes his decisions as Hobson’s choices because he understands translation as an always flawed attempt to reproduce a territory that paradoxically “remains, though it must not remain terra incognita” (ibid: 64). Holmes is surely right in observing a paradox, but this paradox results not from the inaccessibility of some ‘real’ existent in the original, but from its originary non-identity, and hence from the double bind of translation. Holmes’s formulation that what is inaccessible in the original is that which ‘remains’ comes quite close to Derrida’s point that the unassimilability of différance always remains – and that this remainder resists all attempts at absolute knowledge. If we consider that “all reality has the structure of a differential trace, and that one cannot refer to this ‘real’ except in an interpretive experience” (Derrida 1988: 148), then Holmes’s choices must be decisions, and his translations poems. There are only maps.

Intention

Deconstruction – as you probably expect by now – problematizes the concept of intention, for several reasons. First, if we say that a person intends to convey a certain meaning and then formulates this meaning in speech or writing, we have presumed that the meaning precedes the language event. In this model, language merely provides the vehicle for a transferred thought content. But meaning, as we have seen time and again, is the effect of language, and therefore cannot precede it any more than it can be extracted from it. Writing – in the general sense – is inaugural; its meaning presences forth even as it differs from itself through the play of traces in context, or ‘text’ in the broadest sense. This is not to say that we do not have thoughts and intentions, of course, but that meaning “must await being said or written in order to inhabit itself, and in order to become, by differing from itself, what it is: meaning” (Derrida 1967/1978: 11). Analyzing its structure as a concept, Derrida points out that intention assumes the telos (end or goal) of ‘plenitude’: that is, intention is understood as aiming toward (whether successful or not) the accurate and complete deliverance of a meaning to a receiver.

Derrida’s most extended discussion of intention comes in ‘Signature Event Context’ (in Derrida 1972c/1982), an essay that engages J. L. Austin’s speech act theory. Derrida much admires Austin’s bold revisioning of traditional assumptions about language, particularly his suggestion that language is performative and that its meaning is context-dependent. In How to Do Things with Words (1975), Austin first distinguishes two types of utterances: constative, which describe or report, and performative, which do something as they are spoken, such as marrying, promising, betting and so forth. Whereas a constative utterance (traditionally considered the norm in language) is assessed according to its truth value as a proposition, a performative is felicitous or infelicitous – its success in performing depends upon the correct convergence of contextual elements and conventions. For the ‘I do’ of a marriage ceremony to perform felicitously, for example, the bride and groom must be legally eligible to marry, the minister must be eligible to perform the ceremony, appropriate witnesses must be present, etc. As Austin pursued his study of constative and performative utterances, however, he came to the conclusion that the distinction breaks down, and that all utterances are actually performances: “Once we realize that what we have to study is not the sentence but the issuing of an utterance in a speech situation, there can hardly be any longer a possibility of not seeing that stating is performing an act” (Austin 1975: 139). The statement ‘The cat is on the mat’, for instance, has the force of ‘I declare that the cat is on the mat’. Austin’s speech act theory, then, provides a valuable deconstruction of a truth-value system that had supported a traditional metaphysics of presence. As Culler puts it, “Austin’s investigation of the qualities of the marginal case leads to a deconstruction and inversion of the hierarchy: the performative is not a flawed constative; rather, the constative is a special case of the performative” (Culler 1982: 113). So far, then, Austin’s theory locates me...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Section I: Translatability and Untranslatability
• Section II: Implications for Translation Theory
• References
• Index