From Theology to Theological Thinking

A Note on the Translation

A Note on the Translation w. chris hackett It is perhaps a paradox that translators, at least the honest ones, attempt to hide themselves through their work. John Scotus Erigena, the Irish thinker, is a famous example. As the translator of the Dionysian corpus into Latin in the tenth century, he “introduced” apophatic theology into the Latin context. He also transformed it (in this way he only pushed in a new direction Pseudo-Dionysius’s own unique, Christian transformation of the religious impulse within Neoplatonism). This inevitable transformation was therefore not merely the result of the transfer through Erigena’s pen of something born in one world of thought, the Greek one, into another, alien world, the Latin one. Erigena also self-consciously and perhaps duplicitously (since he explicitly denied it in his preface to the Areopagitica; see Patrologia Latina 122, 1032 b–c) developed what he received, which marked a clear transformation that will only come to reach its most concrete historical form in Thomas Aquinas. Erigena translated the Dionysian corpus for reasons having to do with his own theological-philosophical questions. It is truly fitting in this and every case that “translator” is, in Latin, interpres. Nevertheless , this hiding or masking or self-erasure normatively has as its end in the first place pure transparency or duplication. And however distinct the mediums of this duplication, French and English, they are nevertheless both included in the same set of things called “language.” (The measure of the success of this xxiv a note on the translation task is thankfully not determined by the relation of “duplication ” to “duplicity,” Erigena notwithstanding.) Such “transparency ” is no doubt—as we “critical thinkers” today know only all too well—an “infinite task” in its own right, always receding beyond the horizon of the work that is produced. Repetition is non-identical, particularly when the repetition is a translation . The translator is himself the passage from one language to another, one world of thought to another, and his thinking, his reception and understanding of the text, is ever-present in the work that he renders. The path of transition is also always one of transformation. Every word and phrase carries with it the necessity of a choice among a multitude of possible renderings ; philosophical concepts in particular are among the most pernicious choices to make, and never quite meet up, in their own irreducible complexity, with that of the word they stand in for. (The reader will thank me for sparing him any neologism in the text—I did use the word “scientificity” for scientificité, which means something like “characterized by a correspondence to the criteria of science.” It is perhaps self-evident why I employed it, and it is not exactly a neologism: Terry Eagleton used it in 1976 in Criticism and Ideology.) Try as he might, the translator therefore leaves his mark on the text he translates. The translator’s work is not description, but transposition and interpretation. He must think in order to do his work. So in however a minor way my thinking, unfortunate for you, marks this text from end to end. And such, anyway, is the micro-drama (and excitement) of translation. Now this marking is for the most part, I hope, invisible: fidelity to the original text and even to the “mind” and “spirit” of the author were my goals. No Erigenian “faithful duplicity” here. Translation is, as you can no doubt surmise, an arduous and painstaking labor. It is fraught with difficulties, blind lanes, dead ends—and inevitably, mistakes. It brings with it little glory in the present academic “regime,” which, in its quantitative (and, let me soberly add, nihilist) metrics of “learning outcomes” does not recognize translation’s importance for “the advancement of a note on the translation xxv knowledge” not to mention its place as a serious contribution to a field of research. The pay is also hardly ever any good (the present case is a happy exception). However, any scholar worth his salt knows the validity of the following statement: give me one great text, translated into English, rather than a thousand and one mediocre “original” texts (the ratio in our university’s libraries is in reality more like 1,000,000 to 1). It goes without saying—and translators know this better than others—that as far as the ideas go, as a rule originals are more important to read than...