Second Finding: A Poetics of Translation

CRITICAL LEXICON

[447] Critical lexicon Critical lexicon appropriation: etymologically, the word is neutral, despite the evil connotations which it tends to acquire in common parlance (looting of the Baghdad museum, appropriation of Iraqi oil). I use the word in its neutral sense:“making one’s own”is a process central to any act of translation .Language use is intrinsically an appropriation:to use a language is to take over its system of deixis, appropriate its shifters and set one’s self up as the origin of coordinates of Benveniste’s “appareil formel de l’énonciation.” Language is meant to be appropriated. So is discourse: reading is always a reading-in, to read is to appropriate, at even the most basic level. Every act of criticism, every act of translation involves varying degrees of appropriation. It is impossible to analyze, or translate, a text without making it yours. Just as reading is always an act of reading-in, so writing a source-text into a target-text is inevitably and inescapably a “writing-in.” (Sunoco Station becomes la Gare de Sunnoco, in the Parisian translation of an American bestseller.) There are, of course, instances where the translator has acted to the detriment of the text. For such cases I reserve the word misappropriation .To reduce to its denotations poetry that lives in its music is an act of misappropriation. auctoritas: the Latin form of the word is an explicit reference to the medieval scholiasts (and authors), who routinely bolstered their arguments with irrefutable appeals to the likes of Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Plato: si en puis bien traire a garant / un auctor qui ot non Macrobes , / qui ne tint pas songes a lobes [Roman de la rose, lines 6–8]. French theorists such as Althusser, Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, Berman tend to get used as auctoritates in Anglophone academic discourse : cited from (more or less competent) translations, they are glossed and re-glossed, applied second-, third-, fourth-hand by scholiasts glossing one another’s scholia—with the inevitable misunderstandings and distortions. In the hands of the scholiasts, theorists wind up becoming auctoritates—quasi-mythical fonts of a wisdom that is incontrovertible, beyond appeal, irrefutable—and loaded with “bénéfice du citant.” bénéfice du locuteur: the self-serving, opportunistic payoff that comes from posturing as a champion of the subversive. Foucault coined the expression in describing the dynamics of a discourse that feeds off the hypothesis that bourgeois society is particularly repressive when it comes to sexuality,but his remarks can clearly be extrapolated to many other areas of discourse—including, naturally, some areas of translation studies: Mais il y a peut-être une autre raison qui rend pour nous si gratifiant de formuler en termes de répression les rapports du sexe et du pouvoir: ce qu’on pourrait appeler le bénéfice du locuteur. Si le sexe est réprimé, c’est-à-dire voué à la prohibition, à l’inexistance et au mutisme, le seul fait d’en parler, et de parler de sa répression, a comme une allure de transgression délibérée. Qui tient ce langage se met jusqu’à un certain point hors pouvoir; il bouscule la loi; il anticipe, tant soi peu, la liberté future.De là cette solennité avec laquelle aujourd’hui,on parle du sexe .. .Nous, depuis des dizaines d’années, nous n’en parlons guère [du sexe] sans prendre un peu la pose: conscience de braver l’ordre établi, ton de voix qui montre qu’on se sait subversif, ardeur à conjurer le présent et à appeler un avenir dont on pense bien contribuer à hâter le jour.Quelque chose de la révolte, de la liberté promise, de l’âge prochain d’une autre loi passe aisément dans ce discours sur l’oppression du sexe.(Foucault 1976,vol. 1, 13–14; my emphasis) discours de la répression revolves around the questionable and [448] [critical lexicon] self-important assumption that the issues it addresses are repressed by society at large. Example:“l’hypothèse que les sociétés industrielles modernes ont inauguré sur le sexe un âge de répression accrue”(Foucault 1976, 67); or the notion that translation is a “scandal” for the vested interests; or that “lexicographers don’t want to give women access to the words that would describe their sexuality”; or again, the assertion that “menstruation is taboo in literature,” as I heard a...