‘No problem is as consubstantial to literature and its modest mystery as the one posed by translation’, writes Jorge Luis Borges (1999b: 69) in ‘Las Versiones Homericas’. While Borges may appear to be saying that translation is a central problem of literature, he in fact suggests something even more fundamental. The word ‘consubstantial’ suggests that the ‘problem […] posed by translation’ is in some way made of the same substance as literature and its ‘modest mystery’. The problem of translation, literature and literature’s ‘mystery’—whatever this may be—are composed of the same material. However, ‘consubstantial’ could suggest a still closer linkage. In Christian theology, the doctrine of consubstantiality teaches that the three parts of the Trinity always already existed together: the Father, Son and Holy Spirit existed, of one substance, prior to everything else. Through the word ‘consubstantial’, Borges suggests the ‘problem’ of translation is inextricable from literature; to attempt to read literature is necessarily to face the ‘problem’ of translation.1 The third part of this trinity is literature’s ‘modest mystery’. As modest, it may not be noticed, yet, as a mystery, it remains unexplainable. This ‘mystery’ is present in all literature and all translation. Yet as David Johnson (2009: 6) points out, Borges’ word translated here as ‘literature’, letras, ‘also means, simply, “letters”, graphic alphabetic symbols’. It is not only ‘literature’ in question here, but writing as such—texts. Translation, texts and texts’ ‘mystery’ are inseparable.
The question therefore arises what it might mean to talk of ‘translated texts’. This means asking not only which texts count as ‘translated’, but also whether texts understood as ‘translations’ are ontologically different in some way from other texts. The ‘problem […] posed by translation’, in Borges’ terms, is the question of what a ‘translated text’ is—not merely in the sense of asking how we define ‘a translation’, but asking what, if anything, marks a translated text, as a text, as different from other texts. The answer necessarily has implications for how we understand textuality—that is, what defines a text as a text, what is ‘textual’ about texts. Either a ‘translated text’ is markedly different from other types of text, in which case there are multiple types of textuality, or there is no difference, prompting the further question of how we could distinguish between translations and other types of text.
Despite the highly diverse body of work that composes Translation Studies as a discipline, the link between definitions of translation and textuality remains under-discussed. Similarly, the rise in new theorisations of ‘world literature’ comprises much important work on the question of ‘translatability’, but such studies often focus on how literature or philosophical concepts ‘travel’, rather than the more fundamental question of the relationship between translation and textuality itself (see, for example, Damrosch 2003; Apter 2013). Walter Benjamin’s writings on translation begin to explore these subjects. Jacques Derrida develops, responds to and critiques some of Benjamin’s concerns in his own writing on translation. Despite Benjamin’s and Derrida’s philosophies of translation differing, both writers were interested in translation as a textual, as well as linguistic, phenomenon, and sought to describe the specific nature of the translated text. The current study highlights the extent to which both Benjamin and Derrida suggest a reshaping of our ideas of ‘the text’ through their writings on translation.
Benjamin seemingly uses a specific term to describe the nature of translated texts—‘afterlife’. ‘A translation issues from the original’, he writes, ‘not so much from its life as from its afterlife’ (Benjamin 1996d: 254). Derrida (2004b: 83), in his essays on Benjamin and translation, reformulates afterlife as ‘living on’ or ‘sur-vival’, and writes that ‘translation is neither the life nor the death of the text, only or already its living on, its life after life’. Translated texts, for both Benjamin and Derrida, are defined by inhabiting a state of ‘afterlife’. To understand what a translated text is, therefore, we need to understand ‘afterlife’.
This study argues that Benjamin’s and Derrida’s concepts of ‘afterlife’ suggest that all texts, not just those usually called ‘translations’, are involved in a continuous process of translation. It is not simply that all texts are translatable, or that all texts are translated. All texts are continually in translation, continually changing: there is nothing outside translation. The idea of ‘afterlife’ as a process of constant translation—here called ‘overliving’—thus necessarily implies a model of textuality—a novel way of understanding what ‘a text’ is. This model of textuality is complicated through another concept shared by Benjamin’s and Derrida’s thought: the ‘messianic’. For both Benjamin and Derrida, the ‘messianic’ refers to something outside current structures of thought; for example, a messianic event could not take place within (what we currently understand as) ‘history’. The messianic is an important motif in both Benjamin’s and Derrida’s thought on history, language and translation. While the centrality of the messianic to Benjamin’s thought on language in translation has been well-recognised, this book shows how a full appreciation of the role of the messianic in Benjamin’s and Derrida’s thought on translation is necessarily bound up with ‘afterlife’, and therefore, textuality.
This book therefore has two aims: to show how Benjamin’s and Derrida’s writings on translation suggest a new model of textuality, through the concepts of ‘afterlife’ and ‘the messianic’; and secondly, to show how we should understand what ‘a text’ is, in the aftermath of these ideas. This book develops a concept of textuality that understands texts as defined by an infinite potential for translation. Because the status of this potential as potential is what is essential to textuality, this book also shows that there is no meaning or state beyond translation that is accessible through translation. There is nothing but translation. It is this, however, that reaffirms the inexhaustibility of textuality’s potential.
The concept of ‘afterlife’ as a continual process of translation is developed through reading Benjamin’s and Derrida’s writings on translation, language and history. Language and history are our primary foci here as Benjamin and Derrida define these as the parameters within which translation takes place; moreover, both suggest that, in turn, translation is essential to the structures of both language and history. Building on and expanding what is suggested by Benjamin’s and Derrida’s writings on translation, this book emphasises the role of textuality itself as a third parameter. As we will see, both Benjamin’s and Derrida’s writings on translation have wide-ranging implications for the way we understand texts, even if neither writer draws attention to this fact himself.
The implications of our reading of Benjamin and Derrida are illustrated and developed through focusing on the ‘afterlife’ of one text in particular: Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra’s El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha, particularly its various rewritings by Borges. Borges’ Quijote texts provide a particularly apposite exemplar of the nature of ‘afterlife’, as understood here, thanks not only to the fact they are ‘translations’ or rewritings, but also because Borges repeatedly returns to Quijote, thus demonstrating different aspects of Quijote’s ‘afterlife’. The multiplicity of rewritings of Quijote, including Borges’ rewritings, also helps shape our understanding of the relationships between texts in ‘afterlife’, and the idea of ‘afterlife’ as an experience of potential, multiplicity and excess. Borges’ Quijote texts frequently explore questions of translatability and the potential for ‘another story’, and frame Cervantes’ Quijote as a precursor equally concerned with these ideas. Many of Borges’ poems, essays and fictions that return to Don Quijote are, essentially, rewritings about rewriting. They therefore help us work through how we might understand ‘afterlife’ in relation to individual texts, in addition to its ‘theoretical’ development here through Benjamin and Derrida.
Although, as with Benjamin’s and Derrida’s own writing, the examples used in this study are primarily from ‘literature’, this is not because the ideas derived here relate exclusively to a particular genre or form of texts. The ‘literature’ of this book’s title should be understood in the broadest sense. The arguments developed here concern translation and textuality, the very nature of what ‘a text’ is. The literary texts referred to here help us understand how texts are translated, the nature of translation and the relationships between texts—but historical, philosophical or scientific texts, for example, are subject to the same conditions of ‘afterlife’ described here, as they are texts. In Derrida’s writing, literary texts frequently exemplify or even shape the ‘philosophical’ arguments made, but they do not define or set the limits of those arguments. Similarly, this study uses literary examples which do indeed help shape our understanding of ‘afterlife’, but seeks to claim that overliving, a process of continual translation, affects all texts—because of their nature as texts.
Afterlife and Overliving
The term ‘afterlife’ comes from Benjamin’s 1923 essay on translation, ‘Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers’. Benjamin’s (1996d: 254) statement that ‘a translation issues from the original—not so much from its life as from its afterlife’ implies that a text must already be within ‘afterlife’ to be translated. ‘Afterlife’ makes translation possible. To understand Benjamin’s thoughts on translation, we must therefore clarify what he means by ‘afterlife’. Derrida discusses similar concepts to Benjamin’s ‘afterlife’, ‘living on’ or ‘sur-vival’ [survie], in his essays on Benjamin and translation, ‘Living On/Border Lines’ and ‘Des Tours de Babel’. For Derrida, ‘afterlife’ appears to be a matter of a text outliving itself. He cryptically writes that ‘living on’ is ‘neither life nor death’, and ‘is not the opposite of living, just as it is not identical with living’ (Derrida 2004b: 110). In ‘Des Tours de Babel’ he describes how in a state of ‘sur-vival’, ‘the work does not simply live longer, it lives more and better, beyond the means of its author’ (Derrida 2002: 114). ‘Afterlife’ or ‘living on’ is a kind of extended life for texts that is bound up with translation, but for both Benjamin and Derrida, it is not merely an ‘extra’ life given to texts through translation. Benjamin implies a text’s ‘afterlife’ must exist prior to translation, while Derrida suggests that, in being neither life nor an opposite of life, ‘living on’ is not simply a...