Untranslating Machines: A Genealogy For The Ends of Global Thought by Jacques Lezra (review)

Translators are wearily familiar with the attitude that deems their task doomed to failure. Traduttore traditore—translators always betray the original. The best they can hope for is a better failure next time. This is hardly a morale-boosting endorsement of translation's creative successes, and, in any case, it must be hard for translators to close their ears to pronouncements concerning the impossibility of translation—pronouncements particularly audible in the sector of translation studies that cleaves to critical theory and philosophy of the post-structuralist and deconstructive sort.

Translation studies finds support in philosophy of a different sort, however. Take Gadamer: at issue is the dialogue between two interlocutors, where hermeneutic success involves finding common ground. Overcoming the difficulty of participants speaking different languages would accordingly exemplify that success: the overcoming, or conquest of alienness. "The fact that a foreign language is being translated," Gadamer writes in Truth and Method, "means that this is simply an extreme case of hermeneutical difficulty—i.e. of alienness and its conquest" (387). But how extreme might that case be before translation cannot serve as the epitome of hermeneutic achievement tout court? For if translation is shadowed by untranslatability, translation might discover interpretation's limits, locate places where common ground is inconceivable, where the conquest of alienness is impossible. Gadamer, invested in a more "diplomatic" hermeneutics (like Ricoeur), might reply, however, that there's something perverse in always seeking out the limits of interpretation and translation—the perversity of a "radical hermeneutics" focused on the untranslatable exception, on the obdurately alien, on unconquerable alterity.

Gadamerian hermeneutics celebrates the achievements of translation. But translation is a taxing business, and, as a practice, it cannot always be made amenable to philosophical determinations of interpretive method. Whence, in philosophy, the tendency to ignore translation or idealize it. Jacques Lezra, in this regard, gives us an account of such tendencies (or dogmas) in chapter 1. If one activates the maritime metaphor resident in translatio and deems the exercise a transportation of meaning from one shore to another, then what is to be transported would ideally remain untouched, like an object picked up on one shore and plonked down on the other. Translation, in that sense, Lezra observes, stresses a topology of place and displacement but elides, by the same token, the interpretive operations that occur when the object is conveyed from shore to shore—if the object is a linguistic object, it cannot be parachuted (to change metaphors) into the drop-zone without some creative and interpretive mediation having happened during the transit itself. Another ideal is that the translator is well-nigh absent as an agent (or interpreter): "Translation entails minimally the disappearance of any consideration of the translator as an intentional agent" (32). The translator would never interrupt the impersonal business of carrying the text towards its foreign readers. The translator should be as unobtrusive as a good butler. The translator should be a linguistic match-maker, ensuring the correspondence of words in one language to those of another. Ideally the translator becomes "the anonymous bearer of knowledge concerning linguistic synonymy" (32).

So much for the translator. As for translation, it would preferably be a seamless, frictionless operation. It would never snag on the thorns of untranslatable words, idioms, and idiolects. Yet translation does get snagged like this. Perhaps translation should entangle itself in the snares of the idiomatic and the idiolectic, Lezra argues. Not simply in order to resist the hegemony of "major" languages, however. For we might also wish to resist other hegemonic forces that erase differences of all sorts, including the difference of particular idioms. Aren't we all suborned by the international language of finance? Hasn't globalization achieved translation's ideal—universal equivalence, where Difference is overcome and only the Same reigns? For if the great locus for translation is the global market (translation-as-transaction, the conversion of money into money), it's also the place where human beings...