Kant's Dog: On Borges, Philosophy, and the Time of Translation

2. Belief, in Translation

2 Belief, in Translation This accident is all the more interesting since it touches on the idiom, precisely—on the untranslatable singularity at the very heart itself of translation. —Jacques Derrida, On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy As soon as one makes a literal translation everything is changed. —Martin Heidegger, “Only a God Can Save Us Now” One can always act as if it made no difference. —Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy During a roundtable discussion devoted to the problem of translation, Derrida availed himself of Borges’s “Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote” in order to respond to a series of comments posed by Patrick Mahoney. Mahoney prefaced his remarks and question with an anecdote. After noting that “The diagnosis of schizophrenia is much more frequent in America than it is in Europe,” Mahoney observed: “if ever someone were to be diagnosed here as schizophrenic, then the cheapest cure would be quite simply for him to book passage on a transatlantic ship” (Derrida, et al. 1985, 94). He remarked that this would be “a case of translation 45 46 Kant’s Dog curing translation” and then concluded, “But now, let’s be serious” (94). Undoubtedly, Mahoney’s desire to return to an appropriate seriousness indicates that the preceding has been intended more or less as a joke, but it also recalls Walter Benjamin’s claim in “The Task of the Translator” that there can be no translation of translation, which makes impossible, therefore, translation’s viability as a cure for translation. In short, translation is fatal, terminal. It is serious business and the possibility of the translation of translation as the cure for or of translation is no less so, not least because such restorative translation is impossible. Mahoney’s comments turn on the problem of singularity and repetition, on the return to the father. Derrida responds by invoking two examples. The first is the challenge Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake poses for translation. The second is Borges’s “Pierre Menard,” which, Derrida writes, “gives the account of a Frenchman who has conceived the mad project of writing, for the first time, Don Quixote. That’s all there is to it: He wants to write not a version, not a repetition or a parody, but Don Quixote itself” (99). Derrida goes on to point out that although “Borges’s text is written in Spanish, . . . it is marked by the French atmosphere” (99), specifically, that “there are all sorts of resonances that led Borges to write this text in a Spanish tongue which is very subtly marked by a certain Frenchness” (99). This French accent accords to “Pierre Menard” its untranslatable singularity. Derrida explains: “Once, in a seminar on translation, I had a discussion with a Hispanist student who said about the text: ‘In the end, the French translation is more faithful and thus better than the original.’ Well, yes and no, because what is lost in translation in the French translation is this superimposed Frenchness or the Frenchness that inserts a slight division within the Spanish, all of which Borges wanted to mark in the original. Translation can do everything except mark this linguistic difference inscribed in the language, this difference of language systems inscribed in a single tongue” (99–100). In order for the French translation to be “more faithful” than the original, it would have to translate the story’s “superimposed” Frenchness, which Borges marks by overdetermining as foreign the Spanish in which the story is told and which, therefore, constitutes the atmosphere of “Pierre Menard.” To do so would require translating this foreignness into the French of the story’s context. Such a translation would have to find a way to make the French of a French symbolist poet from Nîmes foreign 47 Belief, in Translation to itself. The way to mark this would, perhaps, be to turn Pierre Menard into a Spaniard and to have him write, for the first time, France’s most important early modern text. But this would no longer be a translation —in the strictest and most common sense—of “Pierre Menard.” It would amount to a French rewriting of the story. Derrida’s anecdote draws attention not only to the impossible task of translation insofar as every language or linguistic system is contaminated by linguistic difference, but also to the role of faith, of belief, in the constitution of the original. The Hispanist’s assertion...