Histoire de la traduction: repères historiques et culturels by Michel Ballard (review)

This book struggles heroically against its own inevitable indigestibility. It is a history of translation, or, rather, a history of translators and translated texts, according to country of origin; but it has not the space to treat the landscape evenly or contemplatively: as the subtitle indicates, one can only traverse the subject ‘à grands pas’ (p. 7), with the help of landmarks and reference points and often cursory overview. Michel Ballard points out in his ‘Avant-propos’ that his subject is itself resistant to easy synthesis: translation has taken centuries to come to a proper consciousness of itself and has been a victim of its own dispersal as a practice, of a failure to draw its own threads together. Ballard signposts his texts with a multiplicity of sections and highlighted inset panels, but he cannot avoid the need to take short cuts by falling back on enumerative sequences, and as the history emerges from deepest antiquity — Pharaonic Egypt — so, unavoidably perhaps, it becomes increasingly Eurocentric, albeit with ‘quelques brefs prolongements vers d’autres cultures’ (p. 7). Ballard insists on the ‘caractère initiatique’ (p. 7) of this book, but it might be argued that the reader is not provided with enough hints for organizing the knowledge offered here and taking it forward; it is a pity that there is little thematic structuring, although various theoretical preoccupations are made fully evident. True, each chapter ends with a bibliographical overview (‘Pour aller plus loin’) of the history and geography covered, and also with a range of questions (‘Testez vos connaissances’), but these latter seem conceived more as tests of memory and recall than as spurs to relate different issues and reflect on larger implications, despite Ballard’s view that they do both, that is, ‘stimulent le souvenir des acquis ou incitent à la recherche’ (p. 8); and the conclusions (‘Faites le point’) by which, in each chapter, bibliography, and questions are preceded, are equally summaries of ground covered rather than the extrapolation of repercussions to be pursued or projects to be imagined. But the book does paint a vivid picture of the radiation of works in time and space, of the rhythms and scopes of these radiations. It helps us understand, too, the senses in which translation puts at stake different versions of knowledge, good writing, and textual authority. And, last but by no means least, it provides the reader with a remarkably comprehensive picture of the neglected and chequered career of translation up to the eighteenth century, before moving into the more familiar waters of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Indeed, one might begin to regret the discrepancy here between, on the one hand, the overwhelming wealth of material, and the critical and scholarly acumen of the author, and, on the other, the modest ambitions — ‘éveil à une prise de conscience de l’importance d’un champ immense’ (p. 8)—of a rather too textbookish enterprise.