Across Languages and Cultures 2 (2), pp.

227–235 (2001)

THE BUTTERFLY AND THE TRANSLATOR:

REFLECTIONS ON HYBRID TEXTUALITY

ALEXIS NOUSS
Université de Montréal, Faculté des arts et des sciences
C.P. 6128, succursale A Montréal, Québec H3C, 3J7 Canada
E-mail: Nouss@aol.com

Abstract: The notion of hybridity in light of the French concept of métissage opens a
third way between the reefs of totality (fusion, homogeneity) and differentialism (fragmen-
tation, heterogeneity). In an hybrid composition, the components are still visible and it is the
tension between them, not the resolution, which gives its full value and its character to the
alloying. In that approach, hybridity loses its negativity and becomes an ontological cate-
gory which should be not dependent on cultural and socio-historical factors. There is no
such thing as original purity (for texts or anything else) which becomes modified and yields
to impurity (hybridity being one example). As long as any being is subject to time – which
is the primary condition for being – its essence and existence become a succession of al-
tered states. This paper, drawing from contemporary translation studies as well as Nietzsche
and Deleuze, explores the applications of such a theorisation to translation as a model of
hybrid textuality and defines a “translative text” functioning as a bridge between the so-
called source and target texts which are only two sequential moments of textuality and two
modes of saying.
Key words: métissage, textuality, becoming, ontology, Deleuze

INTRODUCTION

Borges tells the story of someone who, awaking one morning, does not know if
he is a man who dreamt he was a butterfly or if he is a butterfly dreaming he is a
man. An exit out of this aporetical situation would be to consider that this crea-
ture was, as a matter of fact, both: a butterfly and a man. Close to Kafka’s
Metamorphosis hero, Gregor Samsa whose nature, after a similar morning
awakening, was transformed into a dual identity: man and insect.
The most important element here is most discreet: the conjunction “and”.
The ground for the notion of hybridity lays in this modest word. “And” has a
semantic value opposed to the value of the hyphen. English language speaks of
a hybrid plant but uses “crossbreed” to designate similar phenomena in the ani-
mal kingdom; crossbreeding can help us understand what is at stake. A hybrid is
an offspring of mixed origin, resulting from the encounter of different breeds or
species. Crucial to our analysis is the fact that hybridisation does not erase the

1585-1923 © 2001, Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest

228 ALEXIS NOUSS

composite process, that the hybrid composition finds its value or its essence in
the very fact that it is composed of different parts. Concerning crossbreeding,
French language uses hybride to stress the result, but borrows métis from the
anthropological lexicon to stress composition. That dimension is crucial in ex-
ploring the concept of hybridity.
The people of Brazil, to quote a classical example of a métis population,
are proud to present themselves as African and Indian and European, which is
not the same thing as, let us say, to be Afro-American or Italo-American. The
latter want to be African and American, Italian and American, at the same time
whereas the former choose to be African at a certain time, then Indian at another
time, and so on. The notion of creole, applied to both ethnicity and language,
shows the same dynamics. Other examples could be drawn from history
(Mediterranean empires), geography (cities such as Alexandria, Granada, Jeru-
salem, Trieste, Vienna), literature (from Rabelais to Joyce and Salman Rush-
die), painting (cubist collages, pop art figures), etc. (see Nouss and Laplantine
1997). In all these cases of métissage, the components are still visible and it is
the tension between them, not the resolution, which gives its full value and its
character to the alloying. It is neither blending nor confronting but a principle of
alternance where there is no domination and no certainty. Military images fade
before metaphors of love. Contemporary epistemology (relativity of knowledge,
chaos theories, fuzzy logics) as well as certain trends in continental philosophy
(Derrida, Deleuze, Lyotard) familiarised us with such conceptions where differ-
ence is valued for itself, not in relation to norms. Time, as becoming and not as
duration, becomes not only the medium but the dimension of the process. A
third way is thus open away from the reefs of totality (fusion, homogeneity) and
differentialism (fragmentation, heterogeneity).
In that approach, hybridity loses its negativity and becomes an ontological
category which should be not dependent on cultural and socio-historical factors
such as those proposed about translation in the discussion paper. There is no
such thing as original purity (for texts or anything else) which becomes modi-
fied and yields to impurity (hybridity being one example). As long as any being
is subject to time – which is the primary condition for being – its essence and
existence become a succession of altered states.
Translation theory knows of a similar notion which had to be cleared of its
moral and ideological connotations to allow a paradigmatic renewal: betrayal
(the famous and ad nauseam repeated Italian epigram is one of many illustra-
tions of such condemnation). Shakespeare’s Brutus already advocated that there
could be valid treachery if for a good reason: “Not that I loved Cæsar less, but
that I loved Rome more.” (III, 2) And Mozart’s operatic characters often proved
the point. Numerous contemporary theories have definitely shown that transla-
tion is not a transfer but an encounter of cultures and that equivalence could not
serve as a goal but, for the best, as a guideline.

Across Languages and Cultures 2 (2) (2001)

 THE BUTTERFLY AND THE TRANSLATOR 229

In this perspective, translations as hybrid texts are not a feature and a prod-
uct of contemporary intercultural communication. On the contrary, they provide
the pattern for such exchanges. Europe began to exist when texts begun to be
translated and the major phases of its constitution (Rome, Renaissance, the En-
lightment) correspond to major translational activities. This holds true as well of
the links between West and East.
Translation thus offers a model of hybrid textuality which I would call the
translative text. Henri Meschonnic (1973) defines translation as a textual rela-
tion which stays relational, which bears the marks of the relation. Its function is
to reveal that there are different languages, that together they form the pure lan-
guage theorised by Walter Benjamin, and not to erase the signs of diversity.
Translation is not a transportation but a deportation, not a replacement but a
displacement. One should not be afraid of the uncomfortable historical conno-
tation of such words since they stress the political pertinence of translation, as a
practice and a theoretical object, for our contemporary societies.

TRANSLATION AS TRANSFORMATION

Translation transforms language and culture as well as the subject, author or

reader. Of translation one can say what Peter Brook says of the dramatic play:
what matters is not what an actor does with the text but what the text does with
the actor. The meaning is in the process, in the movement of meaning, in the
becoming and transformation induced by such a movement. In the beginning
was the wording. Faust’s passage about the translation of John’s gospel is often
quoted: “In the Beginning was the Word. [...] The Word 1950 – impossible so
high to rate it.” (1950:43) After rejecting “Thought” and “Power”, Faust
chooses: “In the beginning was the Act.” If understanding the concept of force
or action amounts to a problem of translation, it is because translation offers a
pragmatic insight on these issues. Similarly, in his Three Essays on the Theory
of Sexuality, when Freud deals with the issue of sexual pulsion (or force or drive
or power: the German “Trieb” belongs to the mechanical engineering vocabu-
lary), he raises a problem of intralingual (two meanings of the German “Lust”)
and interlingual (“Lust” and “libido”) translation. One shouldn’t be surprised
that he begins his book by the expression “Die Tatsache” (It is a fact that...)
where, beyond the colloquial use, gleams through the word “Tat”, act. The no-
tions of action and movement are essential to the hybrid phenomenality since it
is defined by a ceaseless and never achieved process of transformation.
A phenomenology of translation as transformation will abandon the very
ideas of source (text or language) and target (text and language) and I would
suggest using the terms of translated text and translating text – both constituting
and shaping the translative text – stressing in the later the necessary inachieve-

Across Languages and Cultures 2 (2) (2001)

230 ALEXIS NOUSS

ment of the process, open to following versions. The translating text exists only
in the light of the translated text and the translated text has meaning(s) within
the history of the translating texts. Their identities are mutually founded in both
a diachronical and synchronical balance. The being of the original is a being-to-
be-translated and the being of the translation is a being-translated, a being-
having-been-translated. Thus neither of the two texts are ever present to them-
selves. Which means that the notions of equivalence, adequacy, compensation
or fidelity are of a limited use in translation theory (i.e. for pedagogical pur-
poses) and have to be refuted or at least revisited. Hybridity appears to be a
much more efficient conceptual grid to analyse the process. Translation doesn’t
function on a polarity or on a dual mode but in the logic of continuity, circular-
ity and contiguity. Contrary to what etymology suggests, its nature is me-
tonymical, not metaphorical. The following statement was made by Walter
Benjamin in his 1916 essay on language: “Translation is removal from one lan-
guage into another through a continuum of transformation. Translation passes
through continua of transformation, not abstract ideas of identity and similar-
ity.” (1986: 325) Faithful to German and to a principle of intertextual hybridity,
I would propose “transference” instead of “removal” and “metamorphosis” in-
stead of “transformation” as echoes of Freud’s and Kafka’s lexicons.
Translation is traditionally dealt with through the ideological grid of the
self and the other. To translate would be to convert alterity into sameness. In a
classical quote Dryden asserts: “I have endeavoured to make Virgil speak such
English as he would himself have spoken, if he had been born in England, and
in this present age.” (in Steiner 1975:256). But alterity does not follow a one-
way street. Otherness, to truly have the quality of otherness, has to be always
other, changing and different. Alterity constantly undertakes a process of al-
teration. Identity does not dissolve alterity in integrating it, it is itself trans-
formed, becoming other. An 18th Century English Virgil would not speak as any
of his contemporaries. Translation is to textuality what identity is in the field of
ontology: between the same and the other, neither the same nor the other. Be-
tween is its site and becoming its way of being. The essence of translation is as
much – if not more – history than language.
Commenting a statement by Nietzsche on the constancy of becoming to
which we are blind and which therefore makes us call a tree a tree in spite of its
on going transformation, Barthes (1973) condemns for the same lack of subtility
any theory of literature since a so-called text is only a temporary designation,
reflecting a provisional condition. In that case, translation theory should provide
the science of becoming called upon by Barthes and which alone could yield the
“pleasure of the text”. Indeed, if the text in general resembles Nietzsche’s tree,
the translative text resembles it even more since the term would describe a tex-
tual form led by a tension, a movement, a dialectics which unites translated and
translating texts without one superseding the other, in the same way that con-

Across Languages and Cultures 2 (2) (2001)

 THE BUTTERFLY AND THE TRANSLATOR 231

scious and unconscious are ruling human psyche through interaction and mutual
fecundation.
Deleuze’s concept of becoming gives us another insight in investigating the
notion of translation as hybrid text and thus as a phenomenon of becoming. The
translator will not be surprised that Deleuze opens his Logique du sens (1973)
with Alice in Wonderland. The troubles which the young heroine encounters are
translation problems: how to represent herself in another code, corresponding to
the reality in which she is suddenly plunged? Besides Lewis Carroll’s wonder-
text plays constantly on the polysemic potentialities of language in a way fa-
miliar to translative strategies. The paradox of “pure becoming” (pur devenir)
which serves Deleuze in analysing Alice’s metamorphoses proves of immediate
applicability in the consideration of translative hybridity.
Deleuze notes that when it is said that Alice is growing up, two phenomena
are involved: she is becoming taller than before but she also was smaller before
than now: “Elle est plus grande maintenant, elle était plus petite auparavant.”
(1973:8) Not that she is taller and smaller at the same time, she is becoming
taller and smaller at the same time. Two identities for the price of one. And as
time ticks, life amounts to acquiring thousands and thousands of identities, back
and forth. The becoming ignores the present, does not accept the distinction
between before and after, past and future. Quite the opposite, it links both of
them. Where common sense and dictionary rationality require one meaning for
any given thing, at any given time, the paradox claims two meanings (or more)
simultaneously or at different times. This paradox is well known to the transla-
tion process: the translative text functions as a bridge between the so-called
source and target texts which are two sequential moments of textuality and two
modes of saying, two textual avatars if one wants to borrow from reincarnation
vocabulary.
As a matter of fact, Alice translates herself into herself, in a constant
metamorphosis. In translation the phenomenon is the same: a text translates it-
self into itself. It is the same and it is different. This will provide other than psy-
chological explanations for some practices which give the reader the feeling that
the translators are merely (re)writing their own texts (a more or less explicit
claim for some of them): Nerval’s treatment of Goethe’s Faust, Baudelaire’s
recognition of his double in Poe, Artaud’s reclaiming his translations of L.
Carroll as mere restitution of stolen texts, Pound’s reading of Chinese ideo-
grams through his own theory of language. And Paul Celan’s two volumes of
translations (from seven languages and more than forty authors) find naturally
their place in the five volumes of his Complete works.
Even Deleuze’s rhetorical strategy, his use of paradox (Logique du sens is
composed of 34 chapters which are 34 series of paradoxes), is familiar to trans-
lation theory. Is not translation para-doxical, that is: located in the margin,
para, of the doxa, the discourse? In the margin of the original, between its lines.

Across Languages and Cultures 2 (2) (2001)

232 ALEXIS NOUSS

Jewish common editions of the Old Testament in Hebrew integrate in the mar-
gin the Aramaic translation and its reading is a ritual practice. And Walter
Benjamin concludes his essay written as foreword to his translation of Baude-
laire’s Tableaux parisiens with the famous sentence: “The interlinear version of
the Scriptures is the prototype or ideal of all translation.” (1977:82). In the pre-
vious century, Chateaubriand expressed a similar goal in the foreword of his
translation of Milton’s Paradise Lost. The notion of interlinear textuality quali-
fies obviously as a superb example of textual hybridity.
Textual continuity which Gentzler defines, in his commentary of Pound
and Will, less “as a ‘carrying over’ of content, but as a ‘carrying on’ of the
content in language”. (1993:34). And when Deleuze links this pure becoming of
being(s) to language considered as “a flow of words, a maddened discurse” («un
“flux” de paroles, un discours affolé qui ne cesserait de glisser sur ce à quoi il
renvoie, sans jamais s’arrêter», 1973:9), it is rather tempting to propose transla-
tion as a model for such a definition of language. Deleuze remarks that if Alice
is threatened to lose her own name faced to the infinite becoming surrounding
her, it is because nouns guarantee a permanence in the knowledge of reality. I
recognise in this floating identity an essential aspect of the translative process.
Who is the author of the text given as a translation? The one who wrote the
original or the one who (re)formulated it in the target language? The answer is
not easy. Rather than adopting an ideologically motivated position it seems
wiser to accept the idea that a translation is simply a floating text whose dual or
shared authorship implies its hybridity. A translation has always two signatures.
John Johnston (1992) has shown how Deleuze’s notion of simulacrum
could be useful in translation theory since it destroys the hierarchical distinction
between model and copy, original and imitation. Deleuze’s theorisation is based
on a rereading (and a deconstruction) of Plato’s Sophist. But the doubt cast on
fixed identity is already in Plato’s text, more precisely in the narrative of it.
Let’s remember that the character which exposes the development on good and
bad images, good and bad copies, is only called... “the Stranger”, a familiar fig-
ure in the translation picture (e.g., Berman 1992). As if Plato, by this choice,
was performing his theory. How could one not being fascinated by this unique
occurrence in Plato’s dialogues, a spokesperson without a name, the anonymity
of speech. A spokesperson without a name? Could we not recognise the profile
of the translator?
The message about the original foreignness of beings is thus conveyed by a
foreigner. Furthermore, N. Cordero, a French translator of Plato (1993), draws
our attention to the fact that there is a problem in folio 216a: two homonyms,
héteron/hetairon, in the sentence presenting the stranger as a companion of
Parmenides. If it is a mere repetition (a notion that Deleuze invites us to use
with caution), the versions suppressing one of the two terms are right. But those
are really two words, the first one being semantically connected to the idea of

Across Languages and Cultures 2 (2) (2001)

 THE BUTTERFLY AND THE TRANSLATOR 233

difference, the second to the notion of companionship. Useful confusion from

which arises a definition of the stranger, of the other: he is different and he is
still a companion. Relevant expounding of the hybridisation process: in spite or
because of their differences, the components become associated. So it is para-
doxically (a now familiar rhetorical twist, thanks to Deleuze) in Plato, via
Deleuze, that one finds the ground for a reversal of the traditional platonician
conception of translation where the original claims a superiority based on ante-
riority or the authority of authorship (the etymological doubling being in itself a
deconstruction). Platonism and christianism – in a filiation pointed out by
Nietzsche’s genealogical criticism – by distinguishing between idea and matter,
spirit and form, have drawn the metaphysical landscape which allowed the be-
lief in the possibility of separation between meaning and text and between
source and target texts. Traditional translation theory could then easily claim the
possibility of transferring without loss a message from one linguistic form to
another. Poststructuralism and deconstruction have now established that the
cards played in linguistic games represent only themselves. In the absence of
any transcendent signified, signification depends on the relations between the
signifiers and hybridity could well be the name of the game. Translators would
be the first to be invited to the table.

TRANSLATION AND HYBRIDITY

The concept of hybridity has such an extension that it would be detrimental to

limit it and to weaken the validity of the hypothesis suggested by Christina
Schäffner and Beverly Adab. In that respect I would like to conclude by ob-
jecting to some elements in the content of the discussion paper although I rec-
ognise their relevance in the chosen contexts (mainly commercial and institu-
tional communication), my remarks applying to a different corpus.
First the insistence, repeated over and over, on the “targetness” of the proc-
ess. If Pym (1993:81) is quoted in order to reconsider the notion of the source
text, his call for a liberation from any form of conceptual dominance, source
text or target text, should not be amputated. As I stated supra, hybrid textuality
offers a way out. Conflict, then, could define contact, be cultural or textual, if
the tension is not (resolved), if the translation retains its strategic function of re-
sistancy (see Venuti 1995) and if the hybrid text remains not accepted in the
target culture. Non-acceptance is the main feature of a translation as a hybrid,
independently of the variations of the time or societal factors. A translation has
to remain a translation: that is what creates its authoritative and referential
function. The Bible and other sacred texts, the great works of world literature
are perfect examples of this process in which foreignness or strangeness are not
negative but legitimising aspects.

Across Languages and Cultures 2 (2) (2001)

234 ALEXIS NOUSS

It is then difficult to establish identifying features with a generalised appli-

cability. The very nature of a hybrid text in our definition should prevent any
normative attempts of such sort. The process of hybridisation consists in the
blurring of the very notion of identity. The only possibly registered feature is a
structural one, that is hybrid texts are composite and made out of heterogeneous
features, specific to every hybridisation. In the case of translations those fea-
tures will come from both source and target cultures, and not by mere adoption
of source culture features. As Jakobsen rightly points out, it is the specificity of
translation to privilege an “intertextuality relationship” (1993:163) but one
should not forget that intertextuality works in both ways. Integrated elements
are modified by and through the integration in their new settings as deeply as
the reception medium is transformed. It is true for cubist collages, Pound’s
Cantos, Joyce’s Finnegans Wake or Ginsberg’s poems and for Bartók’s or
Stravinsky’s borrowing of folklore patterns in their “classical” composition. It is
true for E. Fox’s translation of the Bible (1993), R. Fagles’ translation of
Homer’s Odyssey (1996), L. Venuti’s translation of De Angelis’ poetry (1995)
or into French, Markowicz’s translation of the complete works of Dostoyevski
(e.g., 1993). In all these examples, translations as hybrid texts mix elements
from both source and target cultures, whether on syntactic, lexical or stylistic
levels.
Should we fear that these loaded translations become so heavy as to be in-
digestible for the reader? On the contrary. By fluctuating in the open, between
two textual and historical spaces, they acquire a quality of aerial lightness, as
light as the quality that Nietzsche (1974:137) asks of a proper translation: not
“to brush the dust off the wings of the butterfly that is called moment”.

References
Barthes, R. 1973. Le plaisir du texte. Paris: Le Seuil.
Benjamin, W. 1977. Illuminations. Translated by Zohn, H. New York: Schocken Books.
Benjamin, W. 1986. Reflections. Translated by Jephcott, E. New York: Schocken
Books.
Berman, A. 1992. The Experience of the Foreign: Culture and Translation in Romantic
Germany. Translated by Heyvaert, S. Albany: SUNY Press.
De Angelis, M. 1995. Finite Intuition. Translated by Venuti, L. Los Angeles: Sun and
Moon Press.
Deleuze, G. 1973. Logique du sens. Paris: U.G.E. 10/18.
Dostoyevski, F. 1993. L’Idiot. Translated by Markowicz, A. Arles: Actes Sud.
Fox, E. (tr.) 1993. The Five Books of Moses. New York: Schocken Books.
Freud, S. 1942. Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie. Gesammelte Werke. Band V,
Frankfurt: Fischer Verlag.

Across Languages and Cultures 2 (2) (2001)

 THE BUTTERFLY AND THE TRANSLATOR 235

Gentzler, E. 1993. Contemporary Translation Theories. London and New York: Rout-
ledge.
Goethe, W. 1950. Faust. Translated by Taylor, B. New York: The Modern Library.
Jakobsen, A. L. 1993. Translation as Textual (Re)Production. In: Dollerup, C., Gottlieb,
H. & Pedersen, V. H. (eds.) Perspectives. Studies in Translatology, N. 2. Copen-
hagen: Museum Tusculanum Press. 155–165.
Johnston, J. 1992. Translation as Simulacrum. In: Venuti, L. (ed.) Rethinking Transla-
tion. London and New York: Routledge. 42–56.
Homer 1996. The Odyssey. Translated by Fagles, R. New York: Viking.
Meschonnic, H. 1973. Pour la poétique II. Épistémologie de l’écriture. Poétique de la
traduction. Paris: Gallimard.
Nietzsche, F. 1974. The Gay Science. Translated by Kaufmann, W. New York: Random
House.
Nouss, A. & Laplantine, F. 1997. Le métissage. Paris: Flammarion.
Nouss, A. & Laplantine, F. forthcoming. Dictionnaire des métissages. Paris: Flam-
marion.
Platon 1993. Le sophiste. Translated by Cordero, N. Paris: Garnier–Flammarion.
Pym, A. 1993. Epistemological Problems in Translation and its Teaching. A Seminar
for Thinking Students. Calaceit: Caminade.
Steiner, G. 1975. After Babel. Aspects of Language and Translation. New York and
London: Oxford University Press.
Venuti, L. 1995. The Translator’s Invisibility. London and New York: Routledge.

Across Languages and Cultures 2 (2) (2001)