Introduction Author(s): Lawrence Venuti Source: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 27, No. 2 (Winter, 2001), pp. 169-173 Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1344246 Accessed: 12/02/2009 21:42 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showpublisher?publishercode=ucpress. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with the scholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform that promotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Critical Inquiry. http://www.jstor.org
Introduction Lawrence Venuti "What Is a 'Relevant' Translation?" is an English version of a lecture that Jacques Derrida delivered in 1998 at the fifteenth annual seminar of the Assises de la Traduction Litteraire a Aries (ATLAS). A French organization with approximately eight hundred members, ATLAS works to promote literary translation and to protect the status of the literary trans- lator. About two hundred people heard Derrida's lecture, which was subsequently published in the proceedings.' As might be expected from an audience composed primarily of professional translators, the response was mixed, a range of variations between two extremes: on the one hand, the feeling that the lecture was provocative but too theoretical to be of practical value; on the other hand, the feeling that it was accessible and pertinent, indeed, an illuminating treatment of translation practices. Derrida anticipated such responses by acknowledging his audience in diverse ways. Not only does he open with an elaborate apology for I would like to thank Richard Sieburth of the Department of Comparative Literature at New York University for a painstakingly close reading that greatly helped to improve the translation. Eric Keenaghan of the English Department at Temple University assisted by checking some references. Dilek Dizdar and Dieter Huber of the Faculty of Applied Lin- guistics and Cultural Studies at Gutenberg University (Germersheim) invited me to participate in a seminar that Derrida conducted on his lecture, thus creating the occasion that initiated this project. Kristin Casady copyedited the text of the translation with care and sensitivity. Derrida generously answered my queries and encouraged some experimental renderings. 1. Jacques Derrida, "Qu'est-ce qu'une traduction 'relevante'?" Quinziemes Assises de la Traduction Litteraire (Arles 1998) (Arles, 1999), pp. 21-48. Critical Inquiry 27 (Winter 2001)? 2001 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/01/2701-0009$02.00. All rights reserved. 169
170 Lawrence Venuti Introduction speaking about translation to experienced translators, but he avoids a purely philosophical presentation of his ideas. Although he has frequently addressed the issue of translation, his approach has tended to take the form of speculation or a commentary on a key text.2 Here he addresses themes in the history of translation theory, notably the antithesis between "word-for-word" and "sense-for-sense" translation that occupied such writers as Cicero and Jerome. Yet he grounds his remarks in an incisive interpretation of the role of translation in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice (a text that also formed the basis of a seminar on forgiveness and perjury that he taught the year of the lecture). Derrida's effort to give specificity to his ideas, to locate suggestive applications, is perhaps most striking in his exploration of particular translation problems, especially those in which we get a glimpse of him as translator. He proposes a French version for a line in Portia's speech on "mercy" and recalls his own French rendering of a central concept in Hegel's dialectics, the Aufhebung. As a result, this lecture can be considered Derrida's most direct intervention to date into that fledgling discipline that in Europe and elsewhere is known as "translation studies." What contribution does it make, then, to the study of translation? The idea of a "relevant" translation is not new in translation theory, even if it has been subject to varying formulations, particularly over the last three centuries. In 1813, for instance, Friedrich Schleiermacher took up this idea when he questioned the translator who "leaves the reader in peace, as much as possible, and moves the author toward him."3 For Schleiermacher, relevance was questionable because it meant assimilation or domestication, an erasure of the foreignness of the foreign text by 2. See, for example, Derrida, The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation, trans. Peggy Kamuf, ed. Christie V. McDonald (New York, 1985) and "Des Tours de Babel," in Difference in Translation, trans. and ed. Joseph Graham (Ithaca, N.Y., 1985), pp. 165-248. It is also worth keeping in mind that Derrida's first book was a translation of Edmund Husserl's LOrigine de la geometrie (Paris, 1962). He alludes to this "first attempt" at the beginning of his lecture. 3. Friedrich Schleiermacher, "On the Different Methods of Translating," in Translation/ History/Culture: A Sourcebook, trans. and ed. Andre Lefevere (London, 1992), p. 150. Schleiermacher's ideas inform the translation ethics developed by Antoine Berman: see Berman's The Experience of the Foreign: Culture and Translation in Romantic Germany, trans. S. Heyvaert (Albany, N.Y., 1992), and La Traduction et la lettre ou l'auberge du lointain (Paris, 1999). A synthesis of Schleiermacher, Berman, and Ezra Pound underlies the formulation of "foreignizing strategies" in my study, The Translator's Invisibility: A History of Translation (London, 1995). Lawrence Venuti's latest publications are The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference (1998), The Translation Studies Reader (2000), and the translation of Juan Rodolfo Wilcock's The Temple of Iconoclasts (2000). He is professor of English at Temple University.
Critical Inquiry Winter 2001 171 rewriting it in the terms of the receiving language and culture. In the twentieth century, however, relevance came to dominate translation theory and practice. Eugene Nida, a theorist who has exercised an international influence on translator training since the 1960s, championed the concept of "dynamic equivalence" in which the translator "aims at complete naturalness of expression, and tries to relate the receptor to modes of behavior relevant within the context of his own culture."4 More re- cently, the branch of linguistics known as pragmatics has spawned an approach wherein the relevant translation communicates an interpretation of the foreign text through "adequate contextual effects" that take into account the receptor's "cognitive environment" and therefore require minimal "processing effort."5 Like Schleiermacher, Derrida questions relevant translation. He calls attention not only to its ethnocentric violence but also to its simultaneous mystification of that violence through language that is seemingly trans- parent because univocal and idiomatic. This view is based on his critique of the sign. The relevant translation, he writes, "presents itself as the transfer of an intact signified through the inconsequential vehicle of any signifier whatsoever." Yet the fact is that any translating replaces the signifiers constituting the foreign text with another signifying chain, trying to fix a signified that can be no more than an interpretation according to the intelligibilities and interests of the receiving language and culture. Unlike Schleiermacher, Derrida sees this practice as inevitable insofar as every translation participates in an "economy of in-betweenness," positioned somewhere between "absolute relevance, the most appropriate, adequate, univocal transparency, and the most aberrant and opaque ir- relevance." He is acutely aware, moreover, of the cultural and political implications of relevant translation. His reading of Shakespeare's play gains enormous interrogative power from his view that "everything in [it] can be retranslated into the code of translation and as a problem of translation." Thus he shows how Portia aims to translate Shylock's Judaic discourse of "justice" into the "merciful" discourse that underwrites the "Christian State." Derrida's reading enables-even if it nowhere articulates-an important insight into the social function of translation strategies. In the history of Western translation, Christianity has favored free domesticating strategies that render the "sense" or "spirit" of the foreign text, whereas Judaism has been stereotypically associated with literalizing strategies that render the "word" or "letter." In 1789, when domestication 4. Eugene Nida, Towards a Science of Translating, with Special Reference to Principles and Procedures Involved in Bible Translating (Leiden, 1964), p. 159. 5. For the linguistic theory, see Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, Relevance: Communication and Cognition (Cambridge, Mass., 1986), esp. pp. 13-14, the source of the quotations in this sentence. For the application of this theory to translation, see Ernst-August Gutt, Translation and Relevance: Cognition and Context (Oxford, 1991).
172 Lawrence Venuti Introduction had already achieved canonicity in English-language translating, George Campbell's commentary on his version of the Gospels drew this distinction and revealed its anti-semitic burden: "A slavish attachment to the letter, in translating, is originally the offspring of the superstition, not of the Church, but of the synagogue, where it would have been more suitable in Christian interpreters, the ministers, not of the letter, but of the spirit, to have allowed it to remain."6 True to the stereotype, Shylock in- sists on a literal translation of the contract, demanding a pound of flesh for the unpaid debt while refusing the free "merciful" translation that would absolve his debtor. Yet the Christians adopt an even more rigorous literalism when Portia insists that, according to the wording of the contract, Shylock can't shed one drop of blood in carving out the pound of flesh. It is this unexpected Christian rendering of the letter that compels the Jew to submit to the translation of the hegemonic discourse, Christianity itself. Thus, no translation strategy can be linked deterministically to a textual effect, theme, cultural discourse, ideology, or institution. Such linkages are contingent upon the cultural and political situation in which the translation is produced. Literalizing strategies have actually been put to contrary uses in the history of translation. Among German Romantics like Schleiermacher, such strategies, while preserving the foreignness of foreign texts, were intended to construct a homogeneous cultural identity at home; they served a Prussian nationalist agenda during the Napoleonic wars.7 In the twentieth century, Antoine Berman saw the same strategies in ethical terms, as a discursive gesture of respect for the foreign that introduces a difference into the translating language and culture.8 Derrida remains unsure about whether to apply the term translation to his rendering of Portia's line, "when mercy seasons justice." I want to suggest that it is indeed a translation, although one that exemplifies what Philip Lewis, influenced by Derrida's thinking, has called "abusive fidelity."9 This translation practice, Lewis observes, "values experimentation, tampers with usage, seeks to match the polyvalencies and plurivocities or expressive stresses of the original by producing its own." It is demanded by foreign texts that involve substantial conceptual density or complex literary effects, namely, works of philosophy and poetry, including Derri- da's own writing. This kind of translating is abusive in two senses: it resists the structures and discourses of the receiving language and culture, espe- cially the pressure toward the univocal, the idiomatic, the transparent, and in so doing, it interrogates the structures and discourses of the for- 6. George Campbell, The Four Gospels, Translated from the Greek: With Preliminary Dissertations, and Notes Critical and Explanatory (London, 1789), pp. 456-57. 7. This critique is presented in Venuti, The Translator's Invisibility, pp. 99-118. 8. See Berman, La Traduction et la lettre, pp. 69-78. 9. Philip E. Lewis, "The Measure of Translation Effects," in Difference in Translation, pp. 31-62.
Critical Inquiry Winter 2001 173 eign text, exposing its unacknowledged conditions. Thus, Derrida's rendering of the Hegelian Aufhebung as releve turned the French word into a technical philosophical term and highlighted the contradictions in the dialectical movement of thinking, "the double motif"-as he puts it- "of the elevation and the replacement that preserves what it denies or destroys."10 Similarly, by using releve to render Portia's verb "seasons," Derrida at once deviates from accepted French versions of Shakespeare and indicates the assimilative violence involved in translating Shylock's demands into the Christian discourse of mercy. In translating Derrida's lecture I sought to implement his reflections on translation, as well as the concepts and practices that those reflections have inspired in the work of other theorists and translators. This meant adhering as closely as possible to his French, trying to reproduce his syntax, lexicon, and typography by inventing comparable textual effectseven when they threaten to twist English into strange new forms. The possibilities, however, are always limited by the structural and discursive differences between the languages and by the need to maintain a level of intelligibility and readability, of relevance, for my English-language readers. Many of these readers will be accustomed to reading Derrida in English and will expect to confront a page punctuated by foreign words and annotations. I have taken advantage of this expectation by inserting Derrida's French within square brackets where a particular effect could not be easily achieved in an English rendering. Because this is a lecture about translation that addresses the question of polylingualism and is itself polylingual to some extent, effectively turning its audience into translators, I have also kept certain words in the original French or German. Key terms like releve, which Derrida describes as untranslatable, have remained untranslated in most passages. But because releve is the object of a richly detailed interpretation, I have rendered it expansively in some instances, making explicit the range of meanings that it accumulates in Derrida's discussion. Whether my translation is finally relevant, abusive, or some gradation between, I leave to my readers to consider. 10. See Alan Bass's illuminating comments on Derrida's translation in Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Bass (Chicago, 1982), pp. 19-20 n. 23.