Responsibility, Foreignness, Intimacy: Embodying Ethical Subjectivity in Emmanuel Levinas, Edmond Jabès, and Rosmarie Waldrop

“Le traducteur est endetté, il s’apparaîtcomme traducteur dans la situation de ladette; et sa tâche c’est de rendre, de rendre cequi doit avoir été donné.”¹

I. Responsibility as Infinite Translation

In his reading of Walter Benjamin’s influential essay, “The Task of the Translator,” Jacques Derrida foregrounds the obligation, responsibility, and debt implied by the task (tâche, Aufgabe) of Benjamin’s title (Psyché 211-14). That is, the translator, indebted to the translatable text, can only render this debt by giving over (rendre, Aufgeben) or, to use a concept shared by Edmond Jabès and Rosmarie Waldrop, by actualizing, in the language of the translation, the virtuality of the original text. Furthermore – and here Derrida’s reading joins Benjamin’s – this virtuality of the original text can only be actualized in the language of translation. However, this task is impossible, “insolvable”: the translator can never ab-solve herself of her obligation, or dis-solve her debt to that which she translates (211). Even so, she remains responsible for the survival of the work through the task of translation, a task that can never be completed, a task that, once undertaken, itself only renders the impossibility of completing that task. Yet the indebtedness of the translator makes possible an economy of ever-renewable and ever-regenerative returns to, or re-turnings of, the translatable text.

Lavish Absence, Rosmarie Waldrop’s memoir of her “translationship” and friendship with Edmond Jabès, directly addresses and even performs this relationship of indebtedness of translator to translatee and to translatable text. After having translated, over a twenty-year period, the vast majority of Jabès’ poetic texts, Waldrop testifies in this memoir to her continuing obligation to the life, work, and memory of Jabès even after his death, as if the decades she had spent giving his texts over in/to English were still not enough to absolve her translator’s debt to him.

Three times in this memoir, Waldrop cites a particularly charged Jabésian sentence, translating, retranslating, explicating and re-explicating it: this sentence and her repeated returns to it thematize and perform the indebtedness of the translator to translatable text. In the original French, as it appears in Jabès’ Elya (1969), the fifth book of Le Livre des questions, the sentence reads: “Jamais le livre, dans son actualité, ne se livre.” Waldrop’s translation, published in 1973, reads: “The book never actually surrenders.” Her amended translation in Lavish Absence (2002) reads: “The book in its actual state never surrenders.” It is worth citing Waldrop’s explication of this sentence at length:

I have claimed that this “livre” refers to the metaphorical book of the universe, of infinite potential, the Name of God that contains all language, the ‘book’ that all writing ‘reads’ and ‘translates.’ Hence dans son actualité is crucial, is the actual state of this book – the ‘actual’ state of potential. This is an amazing statement. I still am not sure I understand it. Is it that potential does not surrender to actualization? To its actualization in the book? If we allow the pun on livre its play: it does not ‘book’ itself? Or is it sheer paradox: the ‘actuality’ of potentiality? Or is this the one unquestioned certainty of The Book of Questions: infinite potential exists? In which case this affirmation of possibility is so much taken for granted that it appears in a subordinate clause.

(137–138)

It is not a failing on Waldrop’s part that after thirty years, a stable interpretation, let alone translation, of this sentence, continues to elude her; in effect, the articulation of this elusiveness is perhaps the closest she comes to fulfilling her debt as translator. In the “sur-render” of her translation we also hear the render-ing, the rendre of Derrida’s translator, who both gives and abandons (Psyché 212): accordingly, in this passage Waldrop both attempts to exhaust the significance of “the book in its actuality” (my own - perhaps too literal - translation) and abandons the...