Exorcising Translation

Towards an Intercivilizational Turn

Douglas Robinson

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781501326066
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Exorcising Translation, a new volume in Bloomsbury's Literatures, Cultures, Translation series, makes critical contributions to translation as well as to comparative and postcolonial literary studies. The hot-button issue of Eurocentrism in translation studies has roiled the discipline in the past few years, with critiques followed by defenses and defenses followed by enhanced critiques. Douglas Robinson identifies Eurocentrism in translation studies as what Sakai Naoki calls a "civilizational spell." Exorcising Translation tracks two translation histories. In the first, moving from Friedrich Nietzsche to Harold Bloom, we find ourselves caught, trapped, cursed, haunted by the spell. In the second, focused on English translations and translators of Chinese literature, Robinson explores accusations against American translators not only for their inadequate (or even totally absent) knowledge of Chinese and Daoism, but for their Americanness, their trappedness in individualistic and secular Western thought. A closer look at that history shows that Western thought and Chinese thought are mutually shaped in fascinating ways. Exorcising Translation presents a major re-envisioning of translation studies, and indeed the literary relationship between East and West, by a pioneering scholar in the field.

1

Sakai Naoki on Translation

There is a group of scholars that have been publishing studies of translation for twenty years—without calling themselves translation scholars, indeed disavowing any connection with Translation Studies (TS)—who take as their task the tracing of the socio-ideological prehistory of TS, namely, the preparatory steps by which the unified and idealized conception of translation that TS takes as its field of study was created. For these scholars the TS “primal scene” of translation, in which a text in a unified national language cannot be understood by speakers of another unified national language until it is translated, was not primal at all; rather, it was a fairly recent historical development, closely linked to the birth of the nation-state in the early modern period, and was conditioned by the sociopolitical and socioeconomic practices that are the focus of their research.

That constitutes quite a trenchant challenge to the very foundations of TS, obviously. What struck me about this work as I began reading it was how little TS scholars know about it—to the point of almost total ignorance. The group has been loosely confederated around the leadership of Lydia Liu and Sakai Naoki (who publishes in English under the Western-resequenced name Naoki Sakai), in the monographs Liu (1995) and Sakai (1997), then the essay collections Liu (1999c) and Sakai and Solomon (2006), then converging in the special issue of translation coedited by Sakai and Sando Mezzadra in 2014 (containing articles by Liu and Solomon). Chinese TS scholars tend to know Liu, because she’s Chinese; but my impression is that they don’t seem to know quite what to do with her work. Sakai has been moving recently into the peripheries of TS scholars’ awareness, and was asked by Siri Nergaard to coedit the special issue of translation; but again, TS scholars who do know his work seem to be mostly at a loss with it, perhaps because there doesn’t seem to be any obvious TS work that can be done with it. The work he does with it, beginning in 1997 with his study of the eighteenth-century creation of the Japanese national language, doesn’t seem to be TS work; the contribution of Jon Solomon in Sakai and Solomon (2006) seems to push his thinking about translation into the world of political economics, and Solomon’s contribution to Sakai and Mezzadra (2014) is even more overwhelmingly a high-level retheorization of political economics, with only passing references to translation.

Not only that: these scholars don’t seem to have a name for their approach to the study of translation. I have elsewhere (Robinson 2017) named them Critical Translation Studies, or CTS for short, based on Lydia Liu’s self-description as a critical translation theorist on her Columbia faculty web page; but I have never seen anyone else use that term.

For twenty years, then, “CTS scholars” have been theorizing translation, without a name, and translation scholars have not known (much) about them; nor, for the most part, have the “CTS scholars” been reading us. Sakai (1997) mentions Benjamin (1923/72), Jakobson (1959), and Quine (1960: 27–79)—all major TS texts, of course, especially the first two, but not exactly indicative of an intimate familiarity with the field over the last half century. In Translingual Practice Liu (1995) mentions a double handful of TS scholars, including me, but very much in passing, as if by way of due diligence1; by Tokens of Exchange (Liu 1999c) she has pretty much written us off, hinting in rather terse break-up lines (“we can no longer talk about translation as if it were a purely linguistic or literary matter” [1999a: 1]) that TS has nothing to offer the approach she is developing—without giving any indication that she has actually read anything in the field, except (again) Benjamin and Jakobson.

To be fair, though, the logocentric assumptions that she dismissively associates with TS as a whole are not only still very much present in the field, but remain in some sense definitive for the field as a whole. The fact that some of us associate those assumptions with the linguistic approaches that dominated TS before the Cultural Turn began to take hold from the late seventies to the early nineties—and shudder to see the field caricatured along those lines—does not mean that TS is not still in (large?) part about that “process of verbal transfer or communication, linguistic reciprocity or equivalences” (Liu 2014: 149) that she pins on TS as a whole.

And to be even fairer, where are the intelligent, complex, nuanced assessments of CTS by TS scholars? Where is the evidence that TS scholars are even reading Liu and Sakai and the others?

My Critical Translation Studies (Robinson 2017) was an attempt to redress that neglect; it offered three series of Critical Theses on Translation, summarizing (1) Sakai (1997), (2) Sakai and Solomon (2006), and (3) Solomon (2014) and offering four chapters on Liu (1999c). Rather than simply referring you to that introduction, I propose here to offer a very brief summary of Sakai (1997), but with a very specific focus on the civilizational spells that he mentions in passing in Sakai (2010).

1.1 Sakai’s Model

Sakai begins his 1997 book Translation and Subjectivity, on the historical mobilization of practical acts (or “enunciations”) of translation to create a unified Japanese nation and national language, by challenging the standard account of translation as “a somewhat tritely heroic and exceptional act of some arbitrator bridging two separate communities” (3). The “separate communities” are, we assume, nations, national cultures, each speaking a single unified national language that is utterly incomprehensible to the other. The “somewhat tritely heroic and exceptional act” is specifically a secondary act that follows the (ideo)logically primary act of homolingual address: the normative act of communication is to address speakers/readers of one’s own national language, homolingually; translation, then, is a deviant act of rewriting that homolingual text in another unified homolingual sign system. Translation is of course a necessary act of rewriting, due to language difference, but nonetheless deviant, because it deviates from the normative regime of homolingual address.

Sakai identifies this set of assumptions as an ideological byproduct of the modern European nation-state, beginning in the early modern period and most influentially theorized by the German Romantics, according to whom there is a “natural” or “organic” relation between a nation and the single language spoken in it by the single ethnic group that comprises its entire population. This is not, in other words, a “natural” scene for translation. It is a cultural achievement—and a fairly recent one, articulated by a handful of German-speaking patriots two centuries ago, distressed at the occupation of the German-speaking principalities by Napoleon, convinced that the only thing that could protect “the German Nation” from future such incursions was a German Empire, the unification of German-speaking peoples into a true pan-Germanic Nation. German Romantic nationalists in the early decades of the nineteenth century, more than a half century away from actual political unification—it did not happen until 1871—tended to speak and write of the German Nation as if it were already a reality, populated with everyone who spoke “German”—some Germanic dialect, at any rate.

This nationalist conception of the integration of nation, people, and language—Ein Land, Ein Volk, Eine Sprache “One Land, One People, One Language”—meant that reality had to be brought into alignment with this ideological principle as much as was humanly (socially, politically) possible. The most extreme form this kind of reality-rectification has taken, of course, is ethnic cleansing, the deportation or even genocide of “foreigners”—people of a non-majority ethnicity, speaking a language that is not the One Language of the One Land and the One People—even if “they” have been living in the One Land for centuries. But there are many subtler forms of this reality-rectification as well. In his 1813 Academy address on the different methods of translating, for example, Friedrich Schleiermacher argues that:

Denn so wahr das auch bleibt in mancher Hinsicht, daß erst durch das Verständniß mehrerer Sprachen der Mensch in gewissem Sinne gebildet wird, und ein Weltbürger: so müssen wir doch gestehen, so wie wir die Weltbürgerschaft nicht für die ächte halten, die in wichtigen Momenten die Vaterlandsliebe unterdrückt, so ist auch in Bezug auf die Sprachen eine solche allgemeine Liebe nicht die rechte und wahrhaft bildende, welche für den lebendigen und höheren Gebrauch irgend eine Sprache, gleichviel ob alte oder neue, der vaterländischen gleich stellen will. Wie Einem Lande, so auch Einer Sprache oder der andern, muß der Mensch sich entschließen anzugehören, oder er schwebt haltungslos in unerfreulicher Mitte. (Schleiermacher 1813/2002: 87: 25–35)

For true as it remains in many ways that one cannot be considered educated and cosmopolitan without a knowledge of several languages, we must also admit that cosmopolitanism does not seem authentic to us if at critical moments it suppresses patriotism; and the same thing is true of languages. That highly generalized love of language that cares little what language (the native one or some other, old or new) is used for a variety is not the best kind of love for improving the mind or the culture. One Country, One Language—or else another: a person has to make up his mind to belong somewhere, or else hang disoriented in the unpleasant middle. (Robinson 1997/2002b: 235)

While Schleiermacher is clearly placing a patriotic limitation on cosmopolitanism here—the German Romantic dictum Ein Land, Eine Sprache “One Country, One Language” is pretty far from cosmopolitanism as we would normally define it—he is just as clearly not arguing for patriotism in place of cosmopolitanism. He wants both, in a mixture with unspecified proportions. It’s good to be cosmopolitan, good to learn foreign languages, good to read foreign literatures, but only up to a point—namely, the point at which cosmopolitanism begins to trump patriotism. As long as cosmopolitanism is clearly subordinate to patriotism, it’s okay. The form of cosmopolitanism whereby the native speaker of any given language no longer even notices what language s/he is speaking, and doesn’t care, is not a patriotic kind of cosmopolitanism, and is therefore to be avoided. The rechte und wahrhaft bildende “right and truly educational” love of language is at least implicitly the kind that loves the mother tongue first and most, and relegates foreign languages to second place.

Note that the idea is not just that people brought up monolingually will tend not to learn foreign languages well enough not to notice or care what language they are speaking. Nor is it just that more patriotic people, or people who feel so thoroughly at home in the culture(s) in which they have spent their childhoods (the cultures of family, friends, neighborhood, language, values, country, and so on) that they don’t mind being described as patriotic, may tend not to learn foreign languages well—perhaps because unconsciously they are afraid that learning a foreign language well would send a signal to their friends and family that they aren’t happy with them, that they want out, that foreign cultures look more attractive and enticing than their local one. This would be a social-dispositional tendency that might convincingly be attached to patriotism in some form. No, Schleiermacher is saying more specifically that patriotic people who aspire to being thought “educated and cosmopolitan” should consciously and systematically resist taking that extra step from rough amateurish proficiency in one or more foreign languages to feeling at home in them. This is the operative rectification of reality so as to make it align more perfectly with the ideological (nationalistic) norm. Apart from those freaks of nature who learn several languages well enough that they forget what language they’re speaking, Schleiermacher says, “alle andere Menschen, wie geläufig sie eine fremde Sprache auch lesen, behalten doch immer dabei das Gefühl des Fremden” (80: 37–9)/“all other people, no matter how fluently they read foreign languages, always have the Feeling of the Foreign while reading them” (232; translation modified).

Speaking foreign languages with a “native” accent is unpatriotic. Getting so caught up in a conversation in a foreign language (or several foreign languages) that one speaks fluently that one doesn’t notice what language one is speaking with whom is a slur to one’s native land. Ironically, “das Gefühl des Fremden”/“the Feeling of the Foreign” is the feeling of belonging to one’s native land and its culture. Anthony Pym (1995: 9) argues persuasively that “Schleiermacher’s prime concern is not translation as such but something as vague and as vast as a sense of living in a community, at home, at ease with oneself and with others, in the present and in the future, but most importantly within certain limits, particularly the spatial limits of community as place. Let me summarize this complex concern as a problematic of social ‘belonging’.” Learning an L2 well enough to feel entirely at home in it, even to prefer speaking it over the L1, and to prefer living among native speakers of it as one of them, is an implicit rejection of, and even insult to, one’s L1 community. In order to declare one’s loyalty to that “local” or “home” culture, in order to signal (and thus to sustain and protect) one’s belonging, one must hold back from learning foreign languages well, which is to say, from assimilating to foreign language-use communities. Speaking the L2 rarely and reluctantly, and retaining a strong L1 accent and halting rhythms and displaying frequent syntactic interference from the L1 when one does speak it, are useful signs of loyalty to one’s first language—and one should only have one first language—and its community of speakers.

So important is this ideological hierarchy that Schleiermacher tends to offer apparently “empirical” descriptions of the way things will typically go—der wird sich doch wohl bewußt seyn .../“will be perfectly aware that …”—when he is surreptitiously pursuing his nationalistic agenda:

Dasselbe ist der Fall mit dem romanischen. Wer gezwungen und von Amtswegen eine solche Sprache schreibt, der wird sich doch wohl bewußt seyn, daß seine Gedanken im ersten Entstehen deutsch sind, und daß er nur sehr früh während der Embryo sich noch gestaltet schon anfängt sie zu übersetzen, und wer sich einer Wissenschaft wegen dazu aufopfert, der w...

Table of contents

• Literatures, Cultures, Translation
• Title
• Contents 
• Preface
• 1 Sakai Naoki on Translation
• 2 The Casting of Civilizational Spells: Nietzsche as Precursor, Bloom as Ephebe
• 3 East and West: Toward an Intercivilizational Turn
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Copyright