Echoes of Translation: Reading Between Texts

Criticism, in Rainer Nägele’s new book, becomes an “echo of translation”—a development that raises important questions about the integrity and mutability of different forms of linguistic practice. Exposing himself to the “frequencies” shared by translation and criticism, Nägele teaches primarily by example: what one finds in these pages is less a theory of translation than a performance, in the mode of criticism, of what Nägele believes translation to be. His performance belongs, moreover, to the tradition of the virtuoso, in the sense that his work, as a critic on the dust jacket observes, is “founded on prodigious feats of reading and interpretation.” And the sense of wonder evoked by Nägele’s readings does indeed stem from a kind of critical dexterity verging, at times, on illusionism. Yet to characterize virtuosity solely in terms of nineteenth-century associations with technical mastery obscures the importance of the figure of the virtuoso as a means of exploring the more problematic features of Nägele’s theory and practice of “translation.”

The term “virtuoso” was first used in the second half of the seventeenth century to describe not only certain individuals associated with the invention of the microscope, but also with libertinism and the experimental life of the natural philosopher, and with the “corpuscularian” hypothesis (the revival of atomism). The leading technicians and philosophers of microscopy, said to be gripped by “curiosity,” were called “virtuosos.” Thus, “virtuosity,” in its original sense, consisted not in flawless or prodigious technique in performance (as modern usage dictates), but in a talent for looking, collecting, and classifying. The virtuoso, in this sense, is at once curious and erudite, but also visionary. For virtuosity in the case of the microscopist involves discerning the true features of an invisible, material world. Philosophically, then, the practice of the virtuoso is embedded in the discourse of materialism, yet the virtuoso equates materiality and invisibility in a manner that exposes the phantasmagorical nature of materialism.

For a host of contemporary critics, including Nägele, Walter Benjamin is the great virtuoso of modern materialism—a modern monadologist preoccupied with immaterial substance and imponderable bodies. Nägele, adhering to the eccentric materialism of his master, identifies translation as a singular, material event and, more precisely, as a series of echoes emanating from a traumatic, yet pleasurable, encounter with a foreign text and extending into the form of criticism. The echoes of translation (and criticism) can therefore be described, according to Nägele, as the aftereffects of a linguistic shock or blow experienced indirectly by the reader. Translation, as such, occurs at the site of untranslatability, “it is at the moment of the impasse, when the word hits impassable obstacles, that translation takes place—in the echo of the shattered word” (93). By insisting on the singularity of the translational event, Nägele displays his affinity for the recent wave of neo-positivist criticism ranging from Gilles Deleuze to Friedrich Kittler and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht. Furthermore, Nägele invokes the discourse of Gestalt, as it descends from von Ehrenfehls and empirio-criticism, to account for the convergence of material and ideal qualities in his new physiognomy of translation.

Nägele, however, like the seventeenth-century virtuoso, undermines the credibility of his empiricist model by turning his attention to the invisible world of the letter, to the ghosts of material inscription. Hence he aims “to read what has never been written” (16). Further, he undermines the positivity of the translational event by assimilating the figure of the echo to the blank spaces within or between texts. To displace the figure of the echo into the void sacrifices the singularity of the physical event. Furthermore, Nägele sacrifices the physiognomic character of the Gestalt by repeatedly employing the term in its more popular usage, as a synonym for visuality, totality, and identity. I do not mean to suggest that Nägele’s equation of materiality and invisibility discloses the essential idealism of his project. On the contrary...