The Dark Side of Translation

Federico Italiano

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000028287
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sprachen & Linguistik
• Subtopic: Übersetzen & Dolmetschen

We tend to consider translation as something good, virtuous and bright, but it can also function as an instrument of concealment, silencing and misdirection—as something that darkens and obscures. Propaganda, misinformation, narratives of trauma and imagery of the enemy—to mention just a few of the negative phenomena that shape our lives—show patterns of communication in which translation either functions as a weapon or constitutes a space of conflict. But what does this dark side of translation look like? How does it work?

Ground-breaking in its theoretical conception and pioneering in its thematic approach, this book unites international scholars from a range of disciplines including philosophy, translation studies, literary theory, ecocriticism, game studies, history and political science. With examples that illustrate complex theoretical and philosophical issues, this book also has a major focus on the translational dimension of ecology and climate change.

Transdisciplinary and topical, this book is key reading for researchers, scholars and advanced students of translation studies, literature and related areas.

Chapter 8 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9780429321528

PART I

(Post-)colonial translations and hegemonic practices

1

Beyond a taste for the dark side

The apparatus of area and the modern regime of translation under Pax Americana

Jon Solomon

DOI: 10.4324/9780429321528-1

A different taste

In a series of lectures at Yale University in 1979–80 on the relation between the institution of comparative literature and the modern regime of translation, Jacques Derrida prefaces his lecture with an expression of prudent reserve:

Nor is it in my intentions, in my taste {or within my means}, to organize a general and radical problematic (as my title could nonetheless lead one to believe) in order to begin with a tabula rasa and establish the basis of a new foundation, of another legitimacy.

(Derrida, 2008: 23)

Endowed with far fewer means than Mr Derrida, I will admit that I count myself as one of many devoted to nothing other than a yearning for a different taste, a new foundation for a different kind of comparativism.

The term taste comes to Derrida via René Étiemble. ‘I would like’, intones Étiemble in a key passage cited by Derrida, ‘our [ideal] comparativist to be equally a man of taste and of pleasure’ (Derrida, 2008: 48). Hence, the meaning of the ‘new foundation’ to which Derrida refers must be understood in the context of his reading of a crucial inaugural moment in the historical trajectory of comparative literature, specifically the praise lavished in 1958 on René Wellek by Étiemble (whose identical given name, René, highlights Derrida’s reflections via the proper noun on translation¹). Étiemble’s devotion to aesthetic humanism and his juxtaposition with Wellek becomes the touchstone for Derrida’s critique of the essential ambivalence at the heart of the modern regime of translation and the institution of literature.

Ultimately indissociable from the rise of the modern bourgeoisie and its attempt to mediate the relation between capital and labour through the disciplines of national aesthetics, the category of taste is an invention of early modernity (Perullo, 2016: ix). Understood as the pinnacle of individualisation, taste is also, it must be remembered, a species-specific faculty. As a species faculty, it is subject to differences that go to the heart of subjectivity (a central concern for aesthetic humanism), not just in the sense of individualising experience, but also in the sense of specialisation and expertise—those elements that the bourgeoisie will utilise to legitimate new forms of class difference based on an emergent division of labour. For the modern era, the problem of subjectivity is always inextricably bound to the question of knowledge. Yet knowledge in the modern context is not associated only with the division of labour. It is also associated with the emerging discourse of species difference.

Hence, the transformation of a species trait, such as taste, into a distinguishing, or specialised, sign of intra-species difference, such as that between experts and laymen, brings us face-to-face with the two sides of the apparatus of anthropological difference. Externally, the face of this apparatus is characterised by the anthropological exception, the notion that homo sapiens is not only one species among many, but also an exceptional species able to intervene in its own speciation and that of other species through its unique command of tools and language. Internally, this apparatus appears under its other face, that of the colonial difference: the notion that certain populations or segments—or even gifted individuals—within the species approach more than others the heights of the anthropological exception by virtue of their superior knowledge of tools and language. These two faces of the apparatus of anthropological difference—which are fundamentally comparative—are invariably articulated to a nature that is supposed to be rooted in an area. Henceforth, area becomes the ground or basis of comparison. If the category of taste to which Étiemble refers is anthropological before being class-based, this is also a reflection of modern liberalism, which extrapolates from the apparatus of anthropological difference a series of anthropological invariants based on the bourgeoisie’s projection of its values into the beginning and end of history as the protagonist of evolution. Equal parts biological and cultural, the hero of the story of evolution will henceforth be known as human nature, a fiction that will increasingly come to be identified with homo economicus precisely through the active involvement of the colonial novel.

Étiemble’s pairing of pleasure with taste deepens the speciesist logic of imperial nationalist, class-based liberalism. Whereas taste is a species faculty appropriated by a class with universal pretensions, pleasure is a sign of the indifference of the individual to society, a proof of auto-affectivity. Adding the affect of pleasure to the sense of taste reminds us that liberalism wants us to understand homo naturans as a self-grounding, self-referential creation of homo faber. This dual aspect of man’s specificity is principally aesthetic.² Literature, as the artistic form that corresponds most closely, particularly in the form of the modern novel, to the rise of the bourgeoisie and the creation of the modern nation-state, would thus be the art of self-referentiality (pleasure) that is devoted to giving the apparatus of anthropological difference (in its guise as an apparatus of taste) a human face. Behind the institution of literature thus lies the aesthetic articulation of capitalism, colonialism, and science in the form of an evolutionary narrative. Étiemble’s ideal comparativist, composed of equal parts taste and pleasure, is not just something that belongs to the realm of literature; rather, it is the figure of evolution par excellence. As such, it comprises an intrinsic element of comparison, in which comparison serves to identify superiority in a taxonomic sense. Let us call this the taste of anthropological superiority crystallised in the comparative aesthetics of national humanism, and realised in the figure of the literary comparativist.

Just as I share in Derrida’s rejection of this aesthetics, I also share what I discern to be Derrida’s complementary rejection of an outright disqualification of the aesthetic category of taste. Hence, I will take the risk of speaking of, or at least evoking, a different taste, even if I, far more than Derrida, lack the ‘means’ to explain it fully. This taste, which I will call definitively common (hence neither colonial nor capitalist), not exceptional but singular in each instance, cannot be contained in the schema of the One and the Many or the logic of genus and species. To explain it via Derrida in relation to comparative literature, we might say that this taste is neither that of the generalist, who ‘transcribes […] the very object’ into a scientific, ‘universal metalanguage’ (Derrida, 2008: 41; word order modified), thus reducing the multiplicity of tastes to the one taste, nor that of the specialist, whose obsession with a particular object, invariably anthropologically coded and stamped with a particular taste, is easily conflated with or appropriated by the conceit of nationalism. Nor is it the sexualised taste of the ‘polygamist’ (as opposed to that of the ‘monogamist’) championed by Étiemble’s Japanese admirer, Sukehiro Hirakawa (Hirakawa, 2002), only several years after the appearance, in English, of an attempt by his compatriot Takayuki Yokota-Murakami to rescue the possibility of ‘non-comparison’ from hegemonic aesthetic humanism (Yokota-Murakami, 1998: x). The alternative taste that I have in mind is one that does not correspond to an anthropologically coded object, but is to be found, rather, in the practice of translation as a practice of relation to non-relation. We will have more to say about this practice in a moment.

In short, the dark side of translation is a brilliant formula that simultaneously captures both the various different tropes that have dominated the modern regime of translation (bridge, filter, transfer, exchange and brokerage), as well as the problematic ambivalence of translation in relation to ‘Aesthetic Humanism’³ (Redfield, 2003). How might we go beyond this configuration?

Silence and the apparatus of anthropological difference

Wherever translation serves as a bridging technology (Solomon, 2014: 175 passim) for the apparatus of anthropological difference, silence is appropriated and mobilised in specific ways. Gayatri Spivak’s essay, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, offers one of the classic introductions to the theoretical and political problems of this silence. In a post-colonial, post-Khurbn⁴ world, such appropriation by silencing has never appeared more untenable. Whether seen in the figure of the subaltern described by Gayatri Spivak or in that of the concentration camp survivor narrated, first in Yiddish then in French, by Elie Wiesel,⁵ silence denotes those places where the modern, i.e. international (hence colonial-imperial) notion of sociality, based on a representational order of nativity guaranteed by the state, enters into crisis. Silence is both a witness to the historical simultaneity of the post-colonial and the post-Khurbn moment as well as the rem(a)inder of the unrepresentable difference between (and internal to) the two. My aim is not assimilate one to the other, much less to privilege one over the other, but rather to call attention to the way in which the recuperation of silence by the self-referential system of anthropological difference through the modern regime of translation continues to be a necessary moment for political projects based on the imperial aesthetics of national humanism.

Martin Scorsese’s 2016 film Silence, based on Endō Shûsaku’s 1966 novel of the same name, will help me illustrate this point. Rather than being a film about missionary universalism and the irreducible quality of cultural particularism, as it is commonly billed, it would be more accurate to qualify Silence as a film about the scene of translation, in which the object of faith and conversion (two of the perennial governmental technologies in the postwar Pax Americana) has been directed towards secular power relations and political faith in cultural essentialism, identity politics and national sovereignty. Silence recounts the story, mediated by author Endō’s investment in the modern regime of translation, of Portuguese Jesuit priests in Tokugawa, Japan. The scene of translation occupies a central role in Scorsese’s film, particularly through characters such as The Interpreter (played by Tadanobu Asano), working for the Bakufu (the conventional term for the Shogunate that ruled Japan for nearly seven centuries), and the priests’ own translator (played by Ken Watanabe). Translational issues are featured in dialogues between the lead protagonist, Father Sebastião Rodrigues, played by Andrew Garfield, and The Interpreter and the priests’ translator, as well as in various scenes depicting Rodrigues’s encounters with members of the local ruling élite attempting to secure his apostasy (particularly governor Masashige Inoue, known in the film as The Inquisitor, played by Issey Ogata).

The crucial moment in the cinematic representation of the scene of translation occurs, however, near the end of the film, in the dialogue between Rodrigues and his mentor, Father Cristóvão Ferreira, played by Liam Neeson. Neeson’s casting in this high-budget production takes advantage of what Guy Debord identified as accumulation in the image. Neeson’s filmography boasts characters imbued with spiritual significance: including not only Jedi Master Qui-Gon Jinn in Star Wars: Episode 1—The Phantom Menace (1999), whose name and title are permeated with an Orientalist fetishisation of ‘Eastern mysticism’—something that also echoes throughout Scorsese’s film—but also seen in the halo around characters such as Godfrey of Ibelin in Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven (2005) and Oskar Schindler in Schindler’s List (1993). James Wolcott, writing for Vanity Fair about Neeson’s career transition from a ‘Much-Admired-Actor’ to a ‘vengeful giant’, summarises the image carefully crafted in Neeson’s career before the transition: ‘Neeson casts the cloud of a poetic brooder […] a wounded romantic who quotes Yeats and seems to crave soft candlelight’ (Wolcott, 2013). After the transition detected by Wolcott, Neeson’s image morphs, with post-9/11 films such as Taken (2008), the story of a one-man rescue mission launched by a former CIA agent whose daughter has been kidnapped. (‘America’ always wants to believe that CIA regime-change operations happen exclusively in the past tense.) The composite image that emerges after the transition is replete with significance for patriarchal authority in an era that is itself marked by struggles associated with historical transition. Neeson’s career is metonymically associated with the Zeitgeist of post-imperial, heterosexual, white male ressentiment in the wake of the disillusionment with anti-systemic, anti-patriarchal movements since the 1960s that for a brief moment seemed to challenge Pax Americana: his composite character is the consummate wounded wounder of the post-patriarchal return to white patriarchal normativity.

Having renounced his faith, adopted a Japanese name (Chûan Sawano), and taken a properly ‘local’ wife, Ferreira would seem to be the spokesman for an anti-imperialist ethics of respect for difference. Ferreira meets Rodrigues in the Buddhist temple where the former has been studying Buddhism for the past year and proceeds to tell Rodrigues that Christianity is a ‘lost cause in Japan’. Tinged with bittersweet pain, Neeson’s Ferreira explains to Rodrigues that the Catholic missions to the Bakufu failed precisely because the Catholic missionaries failed to understand the limits of translation. In a re-enactment of the mythical scene of first translation, Neeson’s Ferreira explains that the subjects of the Tokugawa shogunate, assimilated to an historically fictive ‘Japanese’ ethnos, never understood the word ‘God’:

Our religion does not take root in this country. The Japanese only believe in their distortion of our gospel, so they did not believe at all. They never believed […] Francis Xavier came here to teach the Japanese about the son of God, but first he had to ask about how to refer to God. Dainichi he was told. Shall I show you their Dainichi? [...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• The dark side: an introduction
• PART I: (Post-)colonial translations and hegemonic practices
• 1. Beyond a taste for the dark side: the apparatus of area and the modern regime of translation under Pax Americana
• 2. The language of the hegemon: migration and the violence of translation
• PART II: The Holocaust and the translator’s ambiguity
• 3. Primo Levi’s grey zone and the ambiguity of translation in Nazi concentration camps
• 4. Translating the uncanny, uncanny translation
• PART III: The translation of climate change discourses and the ecology of knowledge
• 5. Shady dealings: translation, climate and knowledge
• 6. Climate change and the dark side of translating science into popular culture
• 7. Darkness, obscurity, opacity: ecology in translation
• PART IV: Translation as zombification
• 8. Zombie history: the undead in translation
• 9. ‘MmmRRRrr UrrRrRRrr!!’: translating political anxieties into zombie language in digital games
• Index