The Poetics and Politics of Literary Translation (colloquium)

[Background paper, without notes or bibliography]

Didier Coste
Em. Prof. of Comparative Literature, U. Bordeaux Montaigne
Distinguished Research Fellow elect, JNIAS, New Delhi

INTRODUCTION

0. The title of this position paper carefully avoids the word “ethics”, a word whose return to
the foreground of theoretical, or anti-theoretical discourses from the 1990s onwards is, to
my mind, highly suspicious in that it could be used to host and veil conventional and
conservative notions of ‘morality’, without taking sufficiently into account the spatial
dimension of ethos, the Gordian knot of localization in an ever more globalized world, habitat
and its displacement rather than habitus and the permanence of mores. The conspicuous
absence of the word “ethics” from this descriptive and interrogative title therefore locates
theoretically the notion where it misses: between poetics and politics. The questions I shall
address are those of a common ground between poetics and politics as its necessity surges
from the practice and theory of literary translation, a common ground that it may help us to
construct, since it is by no means a theoretical, let alone a pragmatic given.

0.1. Literariness

The multiple ambiguities of the English noun ‘translation’ and its quasi-
equivalents/synonyms in other languages are at the heart of our topic. It is necessary to
provide a working definition of ‘literary/literariness’ beforehand, in order to rely on some
firm basis at first, and see later whether a study of the acts of translation can in turn (re-)
define literariness, or complement and confirm its initial definition.
For the purpose of the present inquiry, ‘literariness’ will be characterized as any aestheticized
use of natural languages in acts of verbal communication, whether oral, scriptural or mixed.
‘Aestheticization’ does not necessarily imply de-referenced speech or any ‘gratuitous’,
disinterested, autotelic, self-referential use of speech, but an actualized (inscribed)
intentionality aiming at generating certain enhanced emotions and a beauty-effect through
the selection of signifying matter (the signifiers), their arrangement (dispositio), a particular
sign-relation (e.g. iconicity or connotation), and the choice and arrangement of the signifieds
and referents.
Whatever ‘translation’ is, ‘literary translation’ will therefore encompass speech acts that bear
secondarily on other acts already labelled literary and seek to maintain or enhance their
literariness, and speech acts that aestheticize previous acts of speech.
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0.2. Translation

Limiting oneself to the narrow everyday, pragmatic value of “translate” and “translation”, as
in simple word-for-word bilingual dictionaries (the Spanish word “palabra”, translating as
“word” in English, “mot” in French, “Wort” in German, etc.), would block any poetic or
political approach to translation, especially in its literary variety. We must, on the contrary,
consider literary translation in its intralingual and/or intracultural manifestations, as well as
between cognate and remote languages and cultures.
Secondly, although the task carried out by the (interlingual) translator is the most common
model adopted to examine acts of translation, we must also take into account the
translational aspects of reading/listening and transmitting (rewriting, revisiting, editing,
quoting, repeating, re-uttering), and the poetic and political implications of translation
theories themselves.

0.3. Poetics and politics

Translation, like politics, is a present and future-oriented activity, even when it presents itself
as tradition and is grounded in and motivated by that which is classified as past and origin.
‘Poetics’ will be considered both under its normative and its critical aspect, as a theory of
action/creation (poietics) through the art and constraints of speech: mastery of language
structures, playing with the limits of intelligibility, with projection and introjection, with the
authority of language(s), with the cultural in-betweenness of situations. The poetics of
literary translation does not only concern the production of the translated but also the
production of the ‘original’. In the sphere of translation, the conative function of language is
always involved as much as the poetic function.
‘Politics’, or the regulation of power and empowerment in human relations and the
struggle(s) for this regulation, will be considered both as law and pragmatics and at the three
levels of community, society and the cosmopolitan anthropo-scene. Like translation, politics
is in a constant tension between conservation, preservation, perpetuation, reproduction and,
on the other hand, a (re-)foundational drive. In its temporal dimension, politics, like
translation, is torn between plain copying and radical re-scripting of extants and images of
the past.
The politics of literary translation does not only reside in the poetics of actual translations,
but also in bi- and multilateral relations between the cultures concerned by numerous,
symmetric or asymmetric translational exchanges or yet the utter lack of the same. A case in
point is that of “minor” and “minority” literatures at world scale, in relation to
“dominant/hegemonic” cultures and languages.

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1. Concepts of (literary) translation, their creativity, their limits and their
political implications

There are certainly more actual or possible concepts, since ‘translate’ and ‘translation’ are
words that show a high propensity to enlarged semantic extension, notably but not only
through their metaphorical uses, as when we say “translate our impressions” or that an
expression, used ironically, “translates as its opposite”, but, for the sake of clarity, I have
chosen to limit myself to three concepts that seem to be dominant among modern and
contemporary translation theorists:
—The hermeneutic concept: translation as amplification and explicitation
—The transfer/transport/transposition concept: translation as displacement and placement
—The dialogic-conversational concept: translation as communicational interaction and
suture.

1.1. The hermeneutic concept

Basically, the hermeneutic paradigm is motivated by the paradoxical, double assumption that
no text is self-explicit within the boundaries of the natural language in which it presents itself
(it is either obscure, secretive, or incomplete as totality) and it can be better displayed by
means of another natural language and/or another discourse type. The hermeneut is also a
translator, a ‘hermenaut’ insofar as he/she navigates from the text to its margins, where he
will make the deposit of the reading, understanding and emotions experienced in the inner
space of the text.
The concept and its paradox originate, for one thing, in the (in)famous supposed
monolingualism, or mono-logism of Ancient Greece, according to which the perfection of
the Greek logos condemns its barabarization: there is no gain, only loss from considering the
lesser thought carried by other languages, so that the only legitimate kind of text
transformation is an interpretation within the finite infinity of the logos, an intralingual
interpretation. In modern parlance, the role of an interpreter relies on the virtual unity/deep
identity of different languages. But, as the practice of biblical translation and the limited
debate on its legitimacy might show it, at least in most of the Christian world, translation as
interpretation can also be motivated by the purpose of transmitting or imposing theological
‘truth’ to the faithful who do not know and cannot learn the language of the original
prophets. If their discourse is inaccessible or obscure to the faithful, it must be interpreted
by those who know: interlingual translation is then another form of exegesis, justified by the
fact that God’s language is the father of all languages. The modern sacralisation of the
literary text (heir to the sacred Book, as secular philosophy is heir to theology), its
hierophany vs. the invisibility, debasement and exclusion of demotic speech, that print and
other recording, dead memories have much contributed to establish, goes hand in hand with
the hermeneutic concept of translation.

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The hermeneutic view of literary translation would thus be one that, in every case, tends to
deny the otherness of the other and benefit only the ‘original’ text, discourse and language by
supplementing them, stretching their limits, making them more valuable by clarification and
expansion. In economic terms, even when its pretext is a supposed need and a service
rendered to new generations and populations, added value returns to the dead capital of the
original. Poetically, it treats the text as a monument, a patrimonial possession, it sides
therefore with an aesthetics of restoration, or amplification and embellishment, its main
problem is the incompatibilities always encountered between care or conservation and
change, in the form of additions, substitutions of parts or even unveiling the text, cleaning
the dirt of time accumulated on its surface. A political analogy would be a new law,
presented as change in support of tradition, a law that ultimately benefits the legislator or a
new jurisprudence that benefits the judge.

1.2. The transport concept

Beyond the usual metaphors of the bridge or the boat used to cross a gap, a ditch or a river,
if not a sea, the transport concept is certainly the most multifarious and equivocal of all three
considered here. Contrary to interpretation that acts on a text, a piece of discourse,
manipulates all its semantic and emotional aspects, ‘transport’ leaves open the question of
what is transported, how, in which direction and from what point to what other location.
Insofar as literary translation also deals with semantic contents, knowledge and reference to
what is held as the real, we can say, depending on the point of view, that it imports or
exports these contents from one linguistic space to another. The contents will be conveyed
by/in a different medium, you unload the goods from a truck and load them to a cargo
plane, or vice versa. They are supposed to be useful or at least usable in the new context
where they are made available, or sometimes imposed, like a car made in Japan can be driven
in the US as long as you shift the position of the steering wheel from right to left.

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But, whoever transports a cultural good and for whatever purpose, cannot do so without
transporting values, visible or subliminal, and altering in many ways the value systems of
both spaces involved in the shipping: the European fashions of Chinese, Egyptian, Japanese,
Indian and African arts and crafts, from the 18th century onwards, had aesthetic and
ideological, and hence political consequences in the exporting extra-European areas as well
as in Europe. In Europe, it would mean both an encyclopaedic, orientalist expansion, a
wider coverage that paralleled colonial ambitions and domination, but also an acceptation of
some exotic values as fully human alternatives to the home-grown brand, the dawn of
cultural equality or the birth of relativism. The —voluntary or not— exporting cultural areas
could interpret the successful transport as recognition or as robbery and desecration, they
would often standardize the production of their own cultural artefacts to suit the ‘taste’ of
the foreign buyer, pre-translate these artefacts, if I may say, or they would refrain from
altering, modernizing their cultural production so that it would remain exotic enough and
exportable, or they could even devalue it at home, on the contrary, because
transportable/translatable items would not be deemed different enough to represent their
irreducible specificity.
Transport is not mere quantifiable transfer, like a wire transfer of convertible funds, by
which the same purchase value, less a commission or transaction costs, is supposed to be
found on the other side of the continent or the planet:

it involves transference, projection and introjection. The translating subjects, individual or

collective, build new family novels, new fantasies every time they make aliens speak their
own language, they play a serious game of kinship exchange when these aliens are made,

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even temporarily, to speak to them and within them the mother-tongue of the forebearers,
the sister-tongue of the childhood lover. Personalities, identities are in question, re-built and
modified (as in the psychoanalytic process) when the trial meets with some measure of
illusionistic success, they are re-inforced and locked when the alienness of the other resists
the subject’s desire to the end and will not surrender. The advent of mestizo, evolutive
identities, its stopping at the hybrid stage, the two modes of alienation that are assimilation
and isolation in a walled site of represented origin, are all results of largely sub- and
preconscious translational displacements and the resistance to them. The more conscious a
poetics of translation becomes, the least perverse its politics. We have to ask, in each
situation: what translation protocols are the more likely to bring the psychological and
political stakes of translation acts and choices to consciousness.
Translation and transfer are words whose technical meanings in other fields than linguistic
and cultural moves remain unfortunately unthought by most. In geometry, translation is:

“ ‘Sliding’: moving a shape without rotating or flipping it. The shape still looks exactly the
same, just in a different place.” Geometrical translation is then exactly what linguistic/
cultural translation cannot do, it is the improbable ideal of translation that no actual
translation can achieve, since every time one moves a ‘shape’ from one context (an array of
other shapes) to another, it looks all the more different if you don’t flip, rotate or distort it.
In art work (drawing), ‘transfer’ names three different techniques to transfer a drawing from
one surface to another: a) decalcomania, b) blind drawing on a blank sheet that is made
visible on another sheet underneath by the intercalation of carbon paper, c) drawing on a
sheet of paper placed over an inked surface, so that an inverted image of the drawing prints
simultaneously on the back of the drawing paper.

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All these technical meanings could be used as metaphors of different translation/non-
translation processes and ideals: the Pierre Ménard miracle of the cloned text, the ‘literal’
mania, equivalence by symmetry, etc., but they do not clarify the relation between
displacement and placement, their balance and their compatibility: does or can
transporting/translating/transferring anything from one linguistic and cultural environment
to another take something off, rest something from the initial environment? Can this thing,
or even the image of this thing be grafted on the target environment, or fused in its melting
pot? Is there a place in the target body designed for placing the graft? Do we need to make
an incision in this body, or to reduce its immune resistance to prevent rejection of the graft?
These many interrogations, highly political in terms of the distribution of power, in terms of
the formation and transformation of communities (or commonwealths) and societies, and
how their boundaries are drawn, tightened or made weak and porous, cannot even be
formulated meaningfully if we do not subject them to the dialogic or negotiative view of
translation.

1.3. The dialogic-conversational concept

The dialogic-conversational concept of translation is primarily communicational in the sense

that it involves at least two subjects in the scene of message transfer. It might therefore be
misunderstood as incompatible with the poetic function defined by Jakobson, particularly
with its autotelic version, inherited from the ‘ivory tower’, art for art’s sake legacy of the
European 19th century, a defensive reaction against the general merchandisation of human
and symbolic values. Nevertheless, we should always remember firstly that, if each
Jakobsonian function of language is more or less prevalent or minor in different expression
scenes, they are all and always co-present; secondly that we must not adopt a secessionist
poetics, one that cuts an ‘ordinary’ or ‘plain’ practice of language from its presumptively
aestheticized practice; and thirdly, that Jakobson’s diagram is fundamentally monological, not
dialogical or even cooperative. The fierce objections of Meschonnic and others to a
communicational view of translation may have other motives, but they are undoubtedly
dependent, as we shall see later, on a nostalgia of oneness, of the great One, according to
which the song sings itself, without the mediation of a plurality of actors.
When communication is not one-way, and venal, as it is with these translations of the Bible
that are designed to “propagate the faith”, to conquer ‘souls’, there is no valid reason to
reject outright a communicational view of literary translation, in the proper sense of putting
on the negotiation tables as many resources of the parties involved as possible. Reception
studies, reception aesthetics, reader-oriented criticism, intertextual studies, the psychoanalytic
of the literary text and even more the psychoanalysis of reading (Norman Holland)
contribute, descriptively and hermeneutically, to validate the principle of a dialogic-
cooperative concept of literary translation and give it poetical and political relevance.
When dialog is mentioned in relation to translation, it is often the kind of dialog that takes
place on the side of the translating activity, as help, hindrance or complement, for example,

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between the translator and the living author of the work translated, or other readers,
professional and non-professional, between the self-translator and his persona as author, etc.
But what will be more relevant to the theory and philosophy of translation, as a branch of
human communication, is the virtual, simulated dialog between the imagined enunciator(s)
of the ‘source text’ and the yet-to-speak or yet-to-be-confirmed enunciator of the text of the
translation, how this dialog develops or not, what illocutionary modes are activated in its
course, on both sides, what (virtual) arbiter or moderator is posited to regulate the dialog and
helps solve or dismiss conflicts. In the translation of ‘sacred’, ‘holy’ or ‘religious’ texts, the
figure of ‘God’ or some divine avatar would play this role: in modern literary translation,
who, what figure plays it? It is poetically and politically fundamental to determine whether it
is a guardian of universal values, the present public, posterity or the market.
Translation is successive in two ways, it takes place in response to a first enunciation, that of
the work translated, but it also goes by parts, like a conversation, with its turns of speech, its
interruptions and resumptions, its first and its last word, except that there is no last word in
translation, translation, like psychoanalysis, institutes an inconclusive, unfinishable dialogism
and engages mutual responsibilities that none of the actors can ever shake off his shoulders.
This is why I propose a more radical version of the conventional dialogic-conversational
concept (a dialog between texts or languages), akin to Bakhtin’s polyphony, dialogism or
plurilingualism, when I say: “Translation is the pursuit of the conversation in another language.” If,
by any chance, the two (or more) languages became indiscernible, became one, translation
would be dead; understanding oneself in one’s own language is not a translation, and it is not
understanding anything. Understanding is re-formulating, the opposite of pure repetition and
tautology. Like any real conversation, beyond total acquiescence or rejection, it is impossible
without a constant negotiation of codes and modes, styles and contents. Thus described and
practiced, it is an archetype of democratic exercise, an exercise in power-sharing and mutual
empowerment for the benefit of more than one cultural community. Unlike professional
sports, it is not just an abstract show, it is directly engaged with the production of meaning
and emotions by every member of the extended community it rallies around itself.

In real life as in the actual theorisations of translation, the three concepts outlined above
overlap and combine to a certain extent, they compete and struggle with varying outcomes.
The avowed purpose of translation is to unify, its failure in this respect generates intense
nostalgia, unless it is this ingrained nostalgia of unity that operates as the effective prime
mover of translation.

2. The nostalgia of One-truth and its discontents

There is no “babelfish” that one can insert in one’s ear to instantly convert any expression of
others into one’s own language. Even if the gadget existed, every man should be equipped
with one, free of charge and in good working condition, to simulate mutual intelligibility.

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Moreover, the device, an instant automated vocal translator, would be rather deficient in
terms of literary communication insofar as delay, deferral and multivocity, a personal
investment of the receiver, time and effort dedicated to representation instead of the
material immediacy of the world, an oscillation between floating attention, reverie and
intense perception and interpretation are known to be basic requirements of the literary
experience. More curiously yet, your “babelfish”, like yourself, speaks only your own
language to you; placed in your ear, not your mouth, it prevents you from exchanging roles
with interlocutors who are speakers of other languages, it keeps you in a strictly monolingual
space. A “babelfish” is like those target-oriented translations of the Bible whose purpose is
to give the pagan savage the illusion that the Christian God speaks his same, his own
language, as Eugene Nida once remarked approvingly.
Goddess Vac, Speech, is both the daughter and consort of Prajapati (Time the Ruler), she is
the maker and dispenser of words and creates things by naming them, she is the provider of
expression and intellection, the vision of truth through language, she is the mother of
Sarasvati, the goddess of poetry and wisdom, who becomes one with her in the course of
time, as the myth evolved from early Vedic stories to brahmanic interpretations. Bountiful
Mother Speech is the mother of all speakers, whatever language they speak, and she herself
has many names, that are only partly synonymous, in stark contrast with the one and unique
God of the Bible. Where the multiplicity of languages and the dispersion of populations is,
or should be a blessing for Hindus, it is a curse according to the myth of the tower of Babel.
Its destruction is a second Fall. As Adam and Eve were expelled from Eden for ingesting the
magic fruit of knowledge plucked by the devil from the tree of divine truth, the re-united
people of Noah, saved from the Flood, were expelled from the high tower-city they built
thanks to their cooperative effort, made possible by a single language. The tower threatened
to reach the vault of the sky, to lick divine truth; a jealous God, wrapped in his own self-
knowledge of all things, reacted angrily in fear of being touched, smeared and perhaps
unveiled. It is interesting that a somewhat symmetrical story seems to exist in Sumerian
culture, and located in Uruk, the city of Gilgamesh. Middle-Eastern gods, from Inanna or
Ishtar to Yahweh are apparently bent on tempting man with illusions of power, grandeur
and immortality, only to teach him limits by way of destruction and dispersion. What is
always at stake through the unity of language or its second-best, the mutual intelligibility, the
translatability of their discourses, is definitely a question of power, a Promethean struggle
between mankind and a god.
Repairing the tragedy of Babel is the Judeo-Christian translator’s angst. It already appears in
Jerome’s treatment of Bible translation into Latin, first from the Greek version of the
Septuagint, but later “directly” from the Hebrew, and his heated controversy with the
younger Augustine, of which their correspondence, preserved in the Patristic collections and
much later translated into European vernacular languages, bears testimony. To cut a long
story short, both men were haunted by a twofold quest: spreading the faith and keeping the
unity of the Christian ecclesia as it was growing in size and its cultural backgrounds and its
languages were diversifying. Since Latin had become, by the 4th century, the dominant

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vehicle of beliefs in a vast area of Christian territory, including Augustine’s North Africa,
Latin versions of the Bible were considered necessary for reading in Church and welding the
Latin speaking Christian community around a body of texts of which they thought they
could make sense. Now, neither the Prophets nor Jesus had been Latin speakers: was the
Old Testament to be re-translated into Latin from one or more of its Greek versions (those
“spoken” by the Apostles, Christian interpreters of the Old Law), or were they to be
translated anew, ‘directly’ from the Hebrew manuscripts? The comic debate on “gourd”,
“ivy” or “self-standing shrub” between Jerome and Augustine is revealing not only of their
different attitudes and strategies, of how they differ about the transmission of meaning, but
also of what they share ideologically, namely, the equation between truth, authenticity and
priority. Truth resides in the authentic older text, the only problem is to determine who was
better acquainted with the older text and could give a rightful version/interpretation of it in
a different language. Augustine blames Jerome mainly on two accounts: contesting the
accuracy of the Septuagint in places, and translating directly from the Hebrew —as if he had
a better knowledge of the language than the Seventy together! Or does he trust today’s
Jewish informants, who would be either ignorant or deliberately misleading, since they may
have forgotten the old language and do not accept the new faith either? This is a directly
political argument: let us trust our own people, the Apostles, and who are we to correct the
Septuagint? Either a passage or a word was clear and the Seventy could not err, or it was
obscure and the single modern translator (Jerome) is at least as likely to err. If we accept this
“syllogism”, Jerome retorts, then, recursively, all successive interpretations should be
discarded, only the Hebrew text should stand, even if we cannot access its meaning. But
Augustine’s other argument, illustrated by a supposed incident regarding the reading of
Jerome’s version by a bishop in church, a version in which the usual “gourd” plant of the
Septuagint had become “ivy”, is just as political. The faithful were shocked at the change, so
shocked that the guilty bishop almost lost his posting, Jewish neighbours confirmed that
“gourd” it had to be, not “ivy”, the bishop had to confess his Jerome-induced fault and ask
for his community’s forgiveness. According to Augustine, then, authority resides in habit,
that must not be disturbed. What passes for authentic out of habit is the real thing.
Translation should not be anything but a means of transmission, a tradition that simulates
continuity. Useless to say, both Augustine and Jerome are ‘conservative’, but Jerome’s
innovation, his attempted return to the roots, paradoxically interrupts tradition, it sounds like
treason to Augustine. In this first quarrel of the Ancient and the Modern, the Ancient is the
Modern. Even when it is detheologized, as Meschonnic pretends it can be, the question of
Bible translation remains a working model, in the West, for all theories of literary translation.
In this perspective, we have the following choices: either a poetics of continuity or a poetics
of discontinuity, either a classical, readerly poetics or a deconstructive, writerly poetics. We
don’t have to agree with this binary opposition or rally to one of these poetics, but it is
striking that the poetics of literary creation and literary translation appear homothetic in this
light.

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Curiously, the advent of the Messiah, the redemptive embodiment of the Word has the same
effects as the destruction of the tower of Babel on the communicability of human thought:
the new Law, a new aesthetics, new emotions conveyed in one new language paved the way
for a diaspora of interpretations in multiple languages. Although he exposes a radically non-
communicative view of all art forms in the opening lines of his famous essay, Walter
Benjamin is, in modern times, a key exponent of a program for translators, creative writers
and their readers that reflects the nostalgia of One-language, of a (lost) unity that could be
the natural seat of universals, be it Hebrew or the Greek mono-logos. It may be rather
confusing that, after stating that “the philosopher’s task consists in comprehending all of
natural life through the more encompassing life of history,” Benjamin insists that “the
kinship of languages is brought out by a translation far more profoundly and clearly than in
the superficial and indefinable similarity of two works of literature.” [76-77], but “the kinship
of languages is marked by a distinctive convergence. Languages are not strangers to one
another, but are, a priori and apart from all historical relationships, interrelated in what they
want to express.” [ibid. 77] In fact, there is no contradiction, at least in the a priori position of
the philosopher: the “life of history” is not itself historical or contingent, it is the essence of
what all different languages want to express, what they want to express is their want to
express —not communicate. Languages are not for the addressee (this would be speech) any
more than the work of art is for a receiver, reader, listener or beholder. Their kinship,
manifested in translation, is their raison d’être, it signifies the will-to-be-to-oneself of the
Verb. Identity of origin cannot be proven and it would be incidental, what matters is origin
in an identity of intention, manifested by languages in myriad modes. If any translation is
challenged to bring the hidden meaning of language closer to revelation “by the knowledge
of remoteness […] all translation is only a somewhat provisional way of coming to terms
with the foreignness of languages. An instant and final rather than a temporary and
provisional solution of this foreignness remains out of the reach of mankind; at any rate, it
eludes any direct attempt.” [78] A direct attempt would be like re-building the tower of
Babel. The many indirect attempts that all essential (non-informative) translations constitute
are therefore acts of worship, offerings to a divine unity, perhaps not lost but dispersed in
the non-totalizable totality of the Verb, or the history of life. The metaphorical scene of the
translator not entering the forest, but standing at its edge, is unequivocal. For sure, Mallarmé,
quoted by Benjamin at this point, verges at times on a similar mystique, but we know that his
temporary divorce from mimesis was a necessary step and the coup de génie that allowed him
to throw the ultimate dice and recover the functionality of mimesis through the dislocation
and re-location of the impurities of language. Benjamin’s notion of a “language of truth”, a
“pure language” indissolubly associates power and, worse, the legitimacy of power with
mystery. His exalted poetics of translation, sharply separating the task of the poet, invested
in a particular context, from that of the translator, invested in the universality of the Verb,
remains or renews a brand of idealist humanism that gives little credit or potential to the
political responsibility of subjects placed in particular, concrete, pregnant situations (in the
Sartrian sense), situations in which the interlinear translation of the Holy Writ and the

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erasure of “sense” are of no succor.

It would be tempting to follow, at least from Benjamin to Foucault, Antoine Berman and
Venuti, the gold token of Hölderlin’s translations from the Greek, passed untarnished from
hand to hand, mostly endowed with a special status that exempts them from consideration
of the long lists of “deforming tendencies” established by Berman or Meschonnic, among
others, tendencies that mar all literary translations to various degrees, according to them. But
too much has already been said on this subject. To conclude this section, I prefer to adopt a
very different point of view: that literary translation —whether it is aware of it or not,
whether or not it playfully or seriously avows it— is make-belief, pretence, “as if”,
simulation and dissimulation rather than the kind of fiction that pays its dues to
verisimilitude —as the family novel sometimes does.
According to Eco, translation “says almost the same thing”, according to Mona Baker, it
speaks “in other words”, as does the speaker/writer who drops the skin of one language to
enter the body of another, according to Jhumpa Lahiri. Basically, any translation makes some
enunciators, the author of the ‘original’, its narrators and often their characters in a typical
narrative of human actions, speak, write, sing and think in a language they do not or are not
supposed to know, utter words they could not pronounce or read, whose meaning they
could not even guess. There is no difference in this respect between the King James Bible or
Luther’s translation of the Bible in German, and Julius Caesar or Cleopatra prattling in 16th
century English in Shakespeare’s historical tragedies, talking animals in a fable or a joke, or
Chinamen discussing the good and bad things of life in French in Jules Verne’s imaginary
journeys, or in the Jesuits’ reports on their exotic missions. Ab absurdo, is it necessary to
translate if the same thing or almost can be said in any language (if the kinship of languages
is assumed or verified), or, if it cannot be said in any pairing of different languages, is it at all
possible to translate? I shall return to the question of ‘untranslatables’ and untranslatability at
length in the next section, but, for now, I will limit myself to affirm that translation is based,
like a theatrical performance, a prosopopeia or a ventiloquist’s stunt on an enunciative fraud, in
order to sketch a fundamental, materialist critique of Benjamin’s idealism and the shared
value of authoritative tradition in Jerome and Augustine.
Translation is a lie, overt or covert, insolent or subtly crafted, but always a lie. But it is a lie
about the source of the words it utters. It pretends that somebody said or is saying what this
creature could or would never say. The notion of a ‘pure language’, of a language that would
be the truth in and by itself, implies that it would be spoken by no one in any actual
situation, since it should be untainted by human historicity, by the deficiency of human
action and memory as supplemented by speech and inscription. Augustine was one who
condemned lying on any occasion, even to save the life of one’s best friend threatened by a
murderer, he did not consider that words were meant to do things, right or wrong, with
them, but to exercise the gift of speech piously, speech given to man to repeat the Verb, pay
homage to It. Translation, according to this vision (I take the word ‘vision’ literally) would
ultimately be nothing more than a kind of contemplative silence of man in front of a

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Creation that is the fruit of an absolute and mysterious, sublime poetics. But a political,
democratic poetics is on the contrary an experiment that bears on the voice of the other, a
cosmopolitan experiment that makes me aware of as many other voices in and out of my
situated and transitory existence, it lets me listen to all these voices, it lets them contradict
themselves and lets me contradict them and whatever my own voice could utter amidst their
discordance. Translation is not an afterlife, it is potential life, it performs potential lives through a
shift of actual languages.
This is why untranslatability is, all in all, a big scam.

3. Impossible, forbidden and all-too-possible translation

For Benjamin, the possibility of a successful literary translation, one that would illustrate, if
not demonstrate the deep kinship of all natural (“human”) languages, depended on the
poeticity, on the degree of literariness of the original, that is on how much this text carried
something else than mere information/content. In other terms, the more translatable a text
in the conventional sense of communicating semantic, referential contents across a language
barrier, the least worthy of translation it was for Benjamin; and the more impossible and
useless a translation would be in a conventional sense, the worthier and more feasible for
him. Literary translatability, as suggested by Benjamin, is a question of poetics that would
upturn any consideration of communicability between social and material cultures, as
reflected or determined by linguistic structures and the lexicon, the problems typically
addressed by linguists, socio-linguists, anthropologists and ethnographers. We might wander
if poetics, there, does not displace or even suppress politics.
Translatability and untranslatability are not facts, binary properties of texts, or features that
could be measured and graded, they shelter the ideological core of all theories of literary
translation. We must therefore revisit these notions under three angles and ask these three
distinct questions: in theory and in practice, a) Is translation possible? b) Is translation
desirable? c) Is translation allowed?

3.1. Impossible translation

Georges Mounin’s thesis on the Theoretical Problems of Translation, published in 1963, could
only shine as a breakthrough in France at the time, and remain as a quasi-classic and a
reference work for students to this day because the Francophone world, including linguists,
philosophers and literary translators, had lagged so much to theorize in this field, and also
because Mounin’s narrative and categories are (perhaps deceptively) simple. Translation has
often been considered impossible, for theoretical reasons, although it exists in practice and
we always translate, even unknowingly. How can we react to this contradiction between
theory and practice? Rather than re-theorizing the comparative practice of X (“translation as
action”), investigating what theories (of language, culture, art and communication) are tacitly
implied by practice, or wondering what had been or would be the impact of various theories

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of X’ (translation as concept) on the practice of X, Mounin chooses to reject the radical

impossibility of translation between languages because it would result into accepting a
monadic vision of human subjects, each of them ineffable and locked up in his/her private
idiolect. If the impossibility of translation is logically untenable and above all morally
questionable, we shall rather list and classify the obstacles that make it difficult, aleatory and,
sometimes only, punctually or locally impossible.
These obstacles are grossly of two kinds: cultural and linguistic. The first ones are of two
sorts: those, of a referential nature, related to material culture and the environment (the text
refers to a plant, an animal, a technique, a gesture, etc. that is unknown in the cultural space
of the target language, for which there is therefore, no name in this language, or those of a
symbolic, immaterial nature (the general categories of siblings or in-laws, or parentality, or
sainthood do not exist in the culture of the target language in which I want to describe a
European scene, European bonds, feelings, emotions). The second large category of
obstacles is “linguistic”: grammatical categories, syntax, modes and tenses can differ widely,
even between relatively close, historically cognate languages, such as French or Spanish and
English; there comes the famous example of the expression of movement and the means of
displacement: “he swam across the river” vs. “il traversa la riviere à la nage”. Clearly, insofar
as translation, literary or not, bears on “semantic contents” and relies on denotational parity
rather than complex contexts and recontextualization, paraphrase, description, neologisms
and notes will often do the trick. How do you say “motorbike” in Latin? How do you say
“camel” in Inuit? “Sudra” in Amazigh? From a mimetic point of view, the same action is
described correctly in English by “walking around the block” and in French by “faire le tour
du pâté de maisons à pied” —it takes just a bit longer in French! If, on the contrary, we are
dealing with the rhetorical, stylistic, connotative, emotional, holistic aspects of the literary
text, cannot we transcribe the score for a different instrument? Tune a violin so that it
sounds like a horn? Add keys to the piano? But, is not translation meant to show and
thereby bridge gaps between voices and make the unthought or the unthinkable of each
situation and each expression appear through the continuum of ‘untranslatables’, as the
narration and analysis of the dreamwork are supposed to do the trick in psychoanalysis?

3.2. Untranslatables and the (un)desirability of literary translation

As it can be rather easily inferred from a recent article by Barbara Cassin, commenting the
many adaptations or translations of the French Vocabulaire européen des philosophies produced
by a large French team that she headed, the ‘untranslatables’ are individual lemmas,
compared and ‘compaired’, collocated next to other lemmas in the same and in other
languages where they form metonymic chains and semantic constellations. Barbara Cassin
repeatedly stresses that “this is a philosophical and a political gesture” [26], or, in a slightly
different formulation, that “this philosophical gesture is also, and today perhaps mainly, a
political gesture.” By which we must assume that a philosophical gesture (thinking about

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thought, metathinking) is not only distinct from a political gesture, but that it is not always
intrinsically political, that it is more political or shifts toward the political in certain
“contexts”, in critical historical circumstances. If a philosophical gesture is an act of
translation —translating untranslatables, defined not as items that can and must not be
translated, but defy and require perpetual translation—, does it mean that, reciprocally,
translation is philosophical and political, or also and perhaps mainly political today?
These untranslatables (from one language to another, or between historical states or regional
dialects of a ‘same’ language) are words or other low scale minimal units in context, that is in
the environment of the texts, works and discourses, and the state of a language in which they
are present. When Cassin speaks of “translation as transfer from one language and culture to
another” without specifying what is thus transferred or not, we have to assume that it is
language-specific and culture-specific ways of thinking revealed by words and relations
between them and with one or more natural languages. What remains obviously absent from
this approach —that links words to language(s) through “contexts”— is the poetic level, the
level of the text as text, not instrumentalized as context, the level of the ‘literary work of art’.
A theory of literary translation is not primarily concerned with the levels of words and
languages, and how or why they are transferred and spill or not from one cultural space or
system to another, its object of inquiry is a particular translingual set of relations between
entire texts, posited as relatively stable, autonomous and significantly delimited units of
discourse. The object of inquiry of any study of literary translation is an actual or virtual
intertextual corpus of such ‘texts’, it is an exercise in metapoetics that cannot be carried out
without a poetics of text in the first place. As Samuel Weber reminds us, “translation,
translatio, does not merely signify carrying across, transporting, transferring in general, it also
entails a specific, singular relation of texts to one another, and more particularly of a text to
that which it transports, its origin or original.” While common semantics is eliminated by the
mystical, sacralizing attitude of a Benjamin or a Meschonnic to the Verb, renamed Poetry,
Cassin’s untranslatables run the risk of eliminating poetics altogether and therefore leading
to a mere politics of languages in which active individual subjectivities are drowned,
dissolved and forgotten. Even in the case of ‘pragmatic’, non-literary translation, it is
accepted by linguistic commonsense that “translation is an operation that bears on the
message, not on the signification of each of the terms constitutive of the message.”
Untranslatables, when they are unduly placed at the centre of a political theory of literature,
are instantly re-sacralized as so many symptoms, scars, stigmata of the general
unacknowledged demarcation between cultures, mores, ways of life, ways of thinking whose
autonomy and bio-diversity is threatened by trade, transaction, miscegenation. With Emily
Apter or Jacques Lezra, untranslatables erect a wall “against World Literature” in the name
of denouncing the continued violence of the old “humanist” Humanities that were,
according to the vulgate of mainly American establishment radicals, nothing but humane, a
mere front screen for racialist colonial domination, exploitation, cultural eradication and
physical genocide. Extrapolating from the Humboldtian notion, expanded by Sapir and
Whorf, that different languages have a different take on objects, percepts, abstract

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categories, relations (a difference that is only perceivable because of the inbuilt multiplicity
of potential takes on the world in any human language), the Great Untranslatable becomes
the guardian spirit of “cultural” relativism, a relativism that is not shared, we should note, by
the cultures that a cultural relativist recognizes as valuable because of their singularity, their
narrower location and their particularism: it is a standard feature of communitarian cultures
to consider themselves as superior and more universal in scope than the culture of their
neighbours or that of any unknown aliens. Untranslatables, as manifestations of the Great
Untranslatable, are worshipped, one by one, because they project onto any Other the lost
purity of at-oneness and, at the same time, they can safely manifest the repressed desire to
relate, to mix and become another, inclusive ‘we’, breaking away from paranoid solipsism,
listening to voices other than dead and deadly echoes. Between the thesis of universal and
unlimited translatability —a wish-fulfilling fantasy— and that of the fundamental
untranslatability of the literary text, especially poetry, the seat of love and beauty, of verbal
eroticism —a paranoid projection—, we can see a similar contrast as between anarchist
utopias and romantic nationalisms. Is there a third way, and one that would not reduce the
poetics and politics of literary translation once again to a bland middle-class compromise
formation? Fortunately, there are signs, primarily from outside the inner circle of Atlantic
theorizing, that we should no longer be content with the usual evaluations of literary
translation found in most leading academic journals since the 1970s: “The glass of
translation is half empty and half full, translations are not perfect, not everything can be
translated, but the multiplicity of translations and re-translations contributes to the ‘compte
total en formation’.”

3.3. Compulsory vs. forbidden translation: struggle, labour and care

Because of its militant bias, not in spite of it, Edward Said’s Orientalism has not yet, in almost
forty years, stopped attracting attention to the fact that literary translation is not just possible
or impossible, easy or difficult, desirable or not, moral or immoral, honest or dishonest, it is
dependent on government policies, official and unofficial censorship and incentives, local,
regional and world market economy and other manifestations and factors of political power
that always threaten to relegate private aesthetic enjoyment (art for enjoyment’s sake) and
disinterested acquisition of knowledge (art for the enlargement of the ego) to the empty
margins of the book world. Basically, literary translation is submitted to the same constraints
as literary creation and reading, but these constraints are very often much more severe for
translations due to the requirements of communal (national, ethnic and/or religious)
cohesion that will wave linguistic banners in order to dissimulate and silence domestic
oppression, class struggle, socio-economic and cultural disparities within the cultural space
that is supposed to coincide with a cultural territory. Translating requires an extensive
knowledge of at least two languages, schooling or self-schooling, access to documents and
tools, it wants training, effort and patience, it is time-consuming and, to this day, does not

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carry, if it is successful, the same symbolic or monetary rewards as professional sport,
showbiz or even the authorship of pulp fiction. If translators are paid at all, translated works,
that will compete at a disadvantage with locally produced, unmediated works on the book
market, will be more expensive to produce and publicize for publishers. Official bans are not
needed to bar translations. Conversely, official and non-official incentives, in other
circumstances, for example where at least one authoritarian regime is involved, are enough
to make some translations as good as compulsory: Aragon’s weekly magazine, Les Lettres
Françaises, survived as long as it was financed by the Kremlin. Aragon and the French
Communist Party, through Aragon’s influence with Gallimard and the party’s vast
propagandistic and publishing network, made sure that certain Russian literary works were
translated into French, while certain French and Francophone writers were translated into
Russian and lavishly invited in the USSR. The wide publicity given to French translations of
official Russian writers also encouraged, as a counterpart, the publication in France and in
French translation, of oppositional samizdat literature. On the other hand, the powerful
French Communist editorial network effectively barred the publication of French
translations of non-communist Spanish literary works that will probably never be accessible
to the Francophone reading public.
If it is simplistic to see in the development of Orientalism and the accompanying literary
translations from the 18th century onwards an exclusively appropriating and distorting drive,
and its effects, in the long run, have turned out to be ideologically oppositional (Thoreau)
and served the anti-colonial cause (Gandhi), it is equally necessary to question
nativist/nationalist ideologies that blame heterolingual and plurilingual writers from the
‘global South’ (and elsewhere) and embedded minorities of the ‘global North’ for betraying
the cultural and political cause of anti-imperialist liberation and empowerment, a cause that
often confuses undoing colonial wrongs with returning to pre-colonial modes of oppression
(the caste system, forced marriage, tribal justice…). However, despite its identitarian cult of
‘origins’, its deliberate ignorance of the miscellaneous, transcultural character of all living
cultures, despite its contradictions and inherent reactionary bend, nativist cultural critique
and theory has proved very useful in many respects. For one thing, its all-embracing
indictment of writing only in an “alien” language (Rushdie, Ghosh, Goytisolo, Djebar…), of
writing also in an alien language (Tagore, Alexakis, Boudjedra…), of self-translation or re-
writing into an alien language, especially when such translations emasculate cultural
difference, adapt to some supposed foreign, international or world taste, and finally its
protestation against seeking and encouraging exo-translations into ‘imperial’ languages, show
that literary translation is more than translating a pre-existent work into another language. It
is always also re-writing, writing anew and writing toward another virtual original; there is a
dotted continuum between translating an existing work written by another, translating
oneself and discovering the alienness of oneself to oneself, reading oneself in translation and
discovering oneself in another, and writing in another language that will embody your desire
of being true to your singularity, as Jhumpa Lahiri explains it gracefully in her Altre parole.
The politics of identity are certainly not the same with ‘target-oriented’, ‘transparent’

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translations that smooth out the linguistic, cultural, aesthetic and ideological difference of the
original work with the corresponding features of the average literary production in the target
language, and the ‘source-oriented’, foreignizing mode advocated by Venuti under cover of
the translator’s visibility, or yet with various modes of and justifications offered for
‘transcreation’, on the one hand, ‘literal’ translation, on the other, but any literary translation
whatsoever denies and defies untranslatability, it questions the stability and uniqueness of
identity, the straightforwardness of all and every tradition, and, at the same time, it fights
indifference. If ‘globish-technish’ could by any chance become a literary language, it would
cease to foster the standardisation of Weltliteratur feared by Auerbach. The secondary
aestheticization of discourse in natural languages (and the unnatural languages that imitate
them) effected by literary translation is a lesson in poetics that forcefully counters any notion
of a fixed identity, individual or collective.
This is why we have a lot to learn from older, ancient and/or non-Western concepts of
translation. As Martha Cheung writes about the displacement of a (mis-)translated
untranslatable (jihe for maths) into Chinese, “Each work of translation, because of its
(inter)textuality, is a site for the analysis of cultures in contact, confluence, conflict or
contest. Each act of interpretation is also an instance of such interaction.” [56] Huiwen
Zhang’s ‘transreading’ notion, re-applied to and derived from Lu Xun or Feng Zhi’s
intertextual space with Germanic literature and philosophy, will equally demonstrate, in a
delicate interaction balance between inbuilt textual ‘prompts’ and the puzzled interrogations
of alien readers in translation, that literary translation’s political impact is that of an inevitably
dialogic meeting point, be the meeting sweetly amorous or harshly polemical. Literary
translation provides an intercultural maidan, sometimes in a festive mood, sometimes at the
risk of firing and stampedes.
It would be stimulating to investigate how, on the basis of some non-Western views of
translational practice, the three main concepts outlined at the beginning of this essay might
be put to work together rather than remaining irreconcilable or motivating separate
approaches to the poetics and politics of literary translation (attached to partitioned
disciplines such as philosophy, linguistics, psychology, sociology and history). Sujit
Mukherjee reminds us that in the North-Indian cultural “Middle Period” of Sanskrit
hegemony, modern vernacular Indo-Aryan languages never stopped re-telling great stories
from the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. “These were not, of course, translations as we
understand the term today. […] Quite significantly, we don’t have a word in any Indian
language that would be equivalent of the term ‘translation’. We borrowed anuvad from
Sanskrit (where it means ‘speaking after’) and tarjuma from Arabic (where it is nearer to
‘explicate’ or ‘paraphrase’).” [45] The triple operation carried out by the literary translator
(re-teller) and his/her readers is clearly hinted at by this apparent duality of lexical
borrowings: ‘speaking after’ can be an act of relaying, echoing and transmitting, in time and
space, but it can just as well be a dialogic, displacing, deferring response to the cue offered
by the earlier utterance, a way of continuing the conversation in another language, that will

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operate as an intertextual tool of interpretation. When C.T. Indra presents the central
concern of her essay “Horizon of Expectations: Hermeneutics and Translation”, she states
that it is “to examine the subliminal act of interpreting in the act of translating.” She adds
that part of her concern “is also to locate the interface between critical theory […] and
translation […],” thus giving herself a new tool to “rethink the very idea of the text”, no
longer to be taken “as a stable entity flowing continuously from the author to the reader.”
[153] This approach might also reveal that there is a measure of continuity or commonality
between transcreating, transreading and deconstructing the set discourses that obstruct the
way to a poetics of political action.

Conclusion

Is the polyphonic revolution suggested above the same as the translational turn of
Comparative Literature, often dated 1993, with the closing chapter, “From Comparative
Literature to Translation Studies,” of Susan Bassnett’s Comparative Literature: A Critical
Introduction? And is this turn prolonged or inverted by Emily Apter’s The Translation Zone and
her subsequent published research? Curiously, the running title of Bassnett’s famous chapter,
simply reads “Towards Translation Studies,” as if Translation Studies was the undefined goal
of a quest that had no point of departure, no ‘original’ that it could stem from, transmit,
interpret and transcreate, with which it could be compared.
Possible answers to these questions are bound to remain ambiguous. Bassnett relied heavily
on Itamar Even Zohar’s polysystem theory and the work of other members of the Porter
Institute, such as Gideon Toury, theories that we might label culturally functionalist.
According to her, this was a salutary departure from earlier comparative studies in
continental Europe as well as in the US. “Binary comparative studies stood firmly against the
idea of translation. A good comparatist […] would read original texts in the original
languages […]” [139] But I am afraid she goes much too fast and is unwarrantedly reductive,
ignoring the basic fact that the bilingual/multilingual comparatist, as ideally portrayed by
Étiemble and Marino, for example, was ipso facto an intertextual transreader, one who could
not but be at least subliminally aware of his two-way subliminal operations of translation,
one who could not but read almost simultaneously in one language through one or more
other languages. Actually, a true comparatist is one who cannot but read a single text written
in a single language without feeding into it the ghost of its possible actualizations in one or
more languages. As far as American Comparative Literature is concerned, Bassnett writes
that it “simply ignored the question of translation altogether” [ibid.] It is certainly true of the
anthologies of World, i.e. mostly Western literatures, used to teach any literature in English
translation. But again, if to a lesser extent, the act of comparison would discriminate between
what the ready linguistic ‘intelligibility” of English translations flattens out in the guise of
(pseudo-)universals and what distinctive discourse, narrative and poetic structures must
assign to cultural and linguistic heterogeneity.

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Is the translation turn of Comparative Literature to be followed dialectically by a

Comparative turn of Translation Studies? And what would such a turn entail for the poetics
and politics of Literary Translation? Shouldn’t we compare translated literatures, such as
“Indo-English” with heteroglossic literatures, such as “Indian English” (admitting that this
English is not a language of India), perhaps to find that heteroglossia is at once the driving
force of all literature, as much as it is an obstacle to the fake transparency of Barthes’
classical or readerly text?
This paradox is best illustrated, maybe, by the incongruous intellectual adventure of Joseph
Jacotot at the University of Leuven in 1818: how to teach French literature to students who
do not know French and whose language you do not know either? Jacques Rancière invites
us to meditate on the almost miraculous hermeneutic and didactic implications of
exchanging mutual ignorance. And this is a possible prototype of what can be gained by a
dialog of impossible translations in the multicultural metropolis and in the global village to
come.

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