Nation, Language, and the Ethics of Translation (review)

It was a great blow to those of us who study and write about the history and theory of translation when Routledge scaled back its excellent series "Translation Studies" in the final years of the twentieth century, and a great boon when Princeton University Press launched a new one, "Translation/Transnation," under the editorship of Emily Apter. While not principally devoted to the study of translation in the most literal sense—the series's stated goal is to develop "approaches and topics that place renewed emphasis on the literary dimension of transnationalism"—it nonetheless highlights the field's ever more robust engagement with other branches of cultural studies, with even the more literary approaches to the discipline displaying the marked influence of postcolonial thought and the social sciences in general. The series has thus far brought us contributions by Azade Seyhan, Kirsten Silva Gruesz, Réda Bensmaïa, David Damrosch, Isabel Hofmeyr, Etienne Balibar, and Nicholas Brown, as well as a collection of essays, The Literary Channel: The Inter-National Invention of the Novel, edited by Margaret Cohen and Carolyn Dever. The latest Translation/Transnation book to appear, a hefty anthology entitled Nation, Language, and the Ethics of Translation, edited by Sandra Bermann and Michael Wood and with a lucid, informative introduction by Bermann, is sure to become required reading for students and scholars of the subject: taken together with Routledge's Translation Studies Reader (whose much-augmented second edition, edited by Lawrence Venuti, appeared in 2004), this new volume presents a well-balanced view of the current state of the profession and contains an unusually large percentage of essays (fully half) that can be considered significant contributions to the field.

At the same time, the anthology displays in its choice of texts some of the principal anxieties/uncertainties that have accompanied the expansion of translation studies over the past decade. As interest in the cultural, social, ethical, and political aspects of translation has grown, so too has the desire within "mainstream" literary studies to incorporate this rich body of themes and theories into projects of other sorts, resulting sometimes in the most fruitful crosspollination and sometimes in disappointment: the vocabulary of translation invoked without a deep engagement with its subject matter can appear merely decorative, a form of jargon.

This bifurcation of result is perhaps most clearly evident in the role played by Walter Benjamin's seminal 1921 essay "The Task of the Translator," by far the most frequently cited theoretical text in the anthology (with several works by Jacques Derrida collectively coming in second). In addition to the large number of references to this essay contained in virtually all the contributions, Nation, Language, and the Ethics of Translation (hereafter NLET) includes both a striking new interpretation of Benjamin's essay by Samuel Weber and an example of a less productive use of (Benjamin's) translation theory. The latter is to be found in the article "Translating History" by co-editor Bermann. In this essay, Bermann takes Benjamin's terms "fortleben" and "weiterleben" as a starting point for an analysis of René Char's "Feuillets d'Hypnos," a literary work based on the notebooks Char himself kept of his wartime experiences in the Maquis. After providing nuanced close readings of several passages from the "Feuillets," Bermann declares Char's work a "translation of history" and a "'translation' of traumatic experience into the medium of language" in terms so general they could pertain to most any literary work based on (traumatic) historical experience; her argument repeatedly invokes but does not actually rely on Benjamin's theory. Far richer in this respect is the brief reading with which Bermann closes her contribution, a tantalizing study of the "after-life" of Char's work in Adrienne Rich's volume of poems Midnight Salvage, which incorporates fragments of "Feuillets."

Samuel Weber's "A Touch of Translation: On Walter Benjamin's 'Task of the Translator'" offers a fascinating new reading of Benjamin's essay based on tactile metaphors that Weber derives...