Éloge de la traduction.

Compliquer l’universel, by Barbara Cassin, Ouvertures, Fayard, Paris

2016, 246 pp., €19.00 (paperback) ISBN 978-2-213-70077-9, €13.99 (e-book) ISBN 978-2-
213-70378-7

Readers of translation theory most probably know Barbara Cassin through her ground-breaking
project of the Vocabulaire européen des philosophies. Dictionnaire des intraduisibles
published by Seuil (Cassin 2004). The book was translated into English and published by
Princeton University Press (Cassin 2014). Barbara Cassin is a French philologist, philosopher
and translator, as well as a specialist in Greek civilization and language. Her work focuses on
rhetoric, Sophism, and their relation to philosophy. She was director at Jacques Derrida’s
Collège international de philosophie and director of research at the CNRS. In 2006, she became
director of the Centre Leon-Robin at the Sorbonne and in 2010 president of the Collège
international de philosophie in Paris.
Éloge de la traduction. Compliquer l’universel [In Praise of Translation. Complicating
the Notion of Universality], is based on 12 articles – two of which are available on line –,
published over a period of more than twenty years, ranging from 1989 to 2016. However, most
of them were written in the wake of the Vocabulaire européen des philosophies and the different
attempts at translation and interpretation that ensued from it. As Cassin points out in the
foreword, Éloge de la traduction is more of a logbook and a diary than a full-blown academic
treatise. In fact, besides its essayistic qualities, the text retraces parts of her own academic career
and contains some of the most important interrelated moments of her inner intellectual
archipelago. Furthermore, it is not a work addressing translation directly like Walter Benjamin’s
The Task of the Translator (Benjamin 2000) or Henri Meschonnic’s Poétique du traduire
(Meschonnic 2012); it narrates the author’s repeated encounters with plurilingualism and
translation and the effects of these on the development of her thinking. The book praises
translation as a way of questioning the idea of a universal language and the ontologies of
national languages in three separate sections closely related to each other: ‘Éloge des
intraduisibles’ [in praise of untranslatables], ‘Éloge de l’homonymie [in praise of homonymy]
and ‘Éloge du relativisme conséquent’ [in praise of a consistent relativism]. The three chapters
are framed by an introduction ‘Éloge du grec’ [in praise of Greek language] and an epilogue
‘Entre’ [in-between].
As a philologist and philosopher, Cassin studied Greek to gain a different and better
sense of what a language is. In the book, she points out that this specific language choice goes
against prevalent contemporary academic trends, especially with regard to the mounting
criticism of the legacy of European humanism. Furthermore, this starting point has a
paradoxical dimension; if there ever was a proudly monolingual culture, it was that of the
Greeks of classical antiquity. However, the lack of interest for other languages and cultures –
that they considered barbaric – is countered by the thinking of the pre-Socratic Greek
philosophers and rhetoricians Gorgias and Protagoras who looked for ways of criticising
language from the inside. Contrary to the ontology developed by Aristotle and Plato, Gorgias
and Protagoras allow for a ‘logologie sophistique’ [a sophistical logology] (49) that begins not
with things but with words. Reality is an effect of language and of speaking. Cassin links this
tradition to the work of Wilhelm von Humboldt, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Jacques Lacan,
Jacques Derrida, Hannah Arendt and J. L Austin.
The irreducible plurality of languages and the ensuing possibility of comparing them
through multiple continuous processes of translation is the a priori of Cassin’s thinking.
Language must always be thought of in the plural: ‘Je n’ai jamais rencontré le langage, je n’ai
rencontré que des langues [I have never met language, only languages]’ (30). ‘C’est qu’il faut
au moins deux langues pour en parler une et savoir que c’est une langue que l’on parle …. [You
need at least two languages, one to speak and one to know you are speaking it]’ (39). Cassin
strongly criticises all forms of singularity that deny the fundamental plurality of world views
ensuing from multilingualism, primarily globish, the global English of the contemporary
globalised world, but also different attempts to create a universal language and the various
national ontologies that claim some languages are better suited to philosophical thought than
others. She does not deny the originality and uniqueness of single national languages, that which
the French philosopher Étienne Bonnot de Condillac called the ‛genius of language’. What
Cassin is asking for is a denationalisation of languages. One has to cut the link between people
and language – ‘délier langue et peuple’ (216) – and to deliver the notion of mother tongue
from its rootedness in a specific national territory. ‘… les frontières entre langues et États-
nations ne coïncident pas …. [The borders between languages and nations do not coincide]’
(218). It is necessary to show the “genius” of languages in non-nationalistic terms, that is,
without a territory [‘… montrer les “génies” de manière non nationaliste, sans territoire …]’
(217). Referring to Antoine de Rivarol’s discourse on French as the universal language held on
June 3 1784, she calls for ‘rivarolismes tolérables’ [tolerable Rivarolisms] and for a ‘rivarolisme
du multiple’ [a rivalorism of the multiple]. (216)
As the programmatic subtitle of the book emphasises, translation is always a criticism
of narrow and unilateral notions of universality, which tend to exclude rather than incorporate
otherness. The irreducible plurality of languages calls for strategies that question the pathology
of the universal (32), which is always the universal of someone in particular [‘L’universel est
toujours l’universel de quelqu’un …’]. (35) Cassin proposes a notion of universalism that goes
beyond dualistic definitions of right and wrong, a consequent relativism animated by the idea
that the truth is never absolute but always the consequence of a performative act looking for the
relatively better, more acceptable, point of view. She quotes an illuminating passage form
Hannah Arendt’s journal written in November 1950 that suggests a possible answer to the
tension between diversity and universality. If there were only one language, we would probably
be more at ease as to the true meaning of things. However, there are many different languages
– both from the point of view of semantics and syntax –, which means that there are also
different ways of thinking. Nevertheless, every language can be learned.
As mentioned above, a major part of the book deals with the theoretical relevance of the
Vocabulaire européen des philosophies and the different translations and re-elaborations this
project has led to in the last few years. ‘Une langue diffère d’une autre et se singularise par ses
équivoques, la diversité des langues se laisse saisir par les symptômes que sont les homonymies
sémantiques et syntaxiques [Languages differ from each other and are unique through their
equivocations, the diversity of languages can be seized through symptoms which are the
semantic and syntactical homonyms]’ (24). For Cassin the notion of homonym and the
theoretical legacy of pre-Socratic Sophism are interlinked. Homonyms are the key to the
dictionary; they are not chance phenomena but built into the genetic structure of language and
languages. They are the very imprint of languages and the sign of their singularity. Because of
the disturbing ambivalence of their meaning, homonyms have been traditionally thought of as
a dangerous, destabilising, aspect of language that had to be taken care of when philosophising.
Aristotle suggested possible ways to tame the phenomenon and yet, to proscribe homonymy
means to reduce the word to the concept and to create a unilateral relationship between the two.
Cassin proposes we think of homonyms in different terms, following the suggestions of the pre-
Socratic sophists as well as the theoretical insights of thinkers like Humboldt, Lacan and
Derrida. The Vocabulaire is based on a symptomatic and systematic comparison of the possible
equivocations that emerge when philosophical concepts migrate from one language to another.
Homonyms are untranslatables that appear when we look at them from the point of view of
another language. One language becomes visible in the mirror of the other. This is a reciprocal
process. The Russian word pravda is a homonym from the point of view of the French language:
it means both justice (justice) and verité (truth). The French word verité, on the other hand, is
a homonym from the point of view of the Russian language: it means both pravda (justice) and
istina (exactitude).
 Homonyms are essential to an understanding of translation. They show that languages
can only be partially superposed. Languages are linked to each other through clouds of
homonyms and terminological networks that can, and at the same time cannot, be superposed.
Strictly speaking homonyms are untranslatables. Cassin distinguishes between the
Untranslatable with a capital U, which is strictly singular, and untranslatables with a small u
and in the plural. The first form of untranslatability is linked to the sacred ontology of national
languages, something to be venerated and protected. In this view, the Untranslatable becomes
the very criterion for truth. The second, more comparative form of untranslatability is the
starting point of the Vocabulaire where it is used as a method to open languages to each other.
The Vocabulaire has spawned a whole series of related research projects (73-76) that
Cassin aptly describes in terms of “traduction-adaptation-réinvention” [translation-adaptation-
reinvention]. (72) A Ukrainian translation was published between 2009 and 2016. The same
team worked together with Russian researchers and produced a Russian version that was
published in 2016 in Kiev. An Arabic edition dealing only with the political and the juridical
part of the Vocabulaire was published in Paris in 2012. A Romanian version is currently in
press and more translations are to follow, including Brazilian-Portuguese, Argentinian and
Mexican Spanish Greek, Italian, Hebrew. There is also a project dealing with the
interrelationship of English, French and Fulfudé and Bamanankan, two Sub-Saharan languages
(79). This constantly growing whole could be described as a possible ‘Wikipedia’ of
untranslatables (78).
Thus, Cassin develops a critical concept of translation that avoids simple dualisms.
Translation is a never-ending process, a performance in Austin’s sense. It should not aim for
the absolute truth but orient itself according to a law of the possible. ‘La traduction … est et
n’est que le sommet d’un iceberg’ [Translation is and is only the tip of an iceberg] (119)…‘La
traduction ne se décrit correctement qu’au pluriel, et les traductions sont mesurées par l’intérêt
qu’elles présentent’ [Translation can only be considered in the plural, and translations are
judged by the interest they attract] (121). Translation can be used as a model to deal with
differences. It is the new paradigm in the humanities, not the only one, but the best for the
moment, ‘le contre-imaginaire qui permet d’articuler autrement … l’unité et la diversité’ [the
counter-imaginary that allows to articulate in a different way unity and diversity] (232). ‘Les
langues, pas plus que les troupeaux, ne s’arrêtent pas aux frontières; elles migrent, laissent des
traces les unes dans les autres, se transforment et demeurent singulières [Languages, like herds,
do not stop at borders; they migrate, leaving traces within each other, they transform and remain
unique] (231).
 Cassin’s engaging and provocative book is very much to point with regard to the present
predicament of multilingualism and translation. It provides an inspiring analysis of the
epistemological potentialities inherent in untranslatability. While the circular, expanding
structure of the book leads to a few repetitions, these do not really impair the reading
experience. The only point that is perhaps missing in her analysis is the aspect of power. Who,
for instance, decides about the value and soundness of a translation? Éloge de la traduction is
an excellent introduction to Barbara Cassin’s thinking and a must for everyone interested in
translation theory and its wider philosophical implications.

References

Benjamin, Walter (2000): The Task of the Translator. In Lawrence Venuti (ed.), The
Translation Studies Reader, London and New York: Routledge, 15-25.
Cassin, Barbara (ed.) (2004): Vocabulaire européen des philosophies. Dictionnaire des
intraduisibles, Paris : Seuil.
Cassin, Barbara (ed.) (2014): Dictionary of Untranslatables. A Philosophical Lexicon,
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Henri Meschonnic (2012) : Poétique du traduire, Paris: Verdier.

Rainer Guldin
Università della Svizzera Italiana
guldinr@usi.ch
© 2017 Rainer Guldin