0415357772.Routledge.ON.TRANSLATION.Dec.2006

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by the reception language; construction of the comparable.
But is that not what happened in several periods of our own culture, when the Seventy translated the
Hebrew Bible into Greek, into what we call the Septuagint, something that Hebrew specialists alone can
criticize at their leisure? And St Jerome did it again with the Vulgate, construction of a Latin comparable. But
before Jerome the Latins had created compa-rables, by deciding for all of us that aret was translated by
virtus, polis by urbs and polits by civis. To remain in the biblical domain, we could say that Luther not only
constructed a comparable in translating the Bible into German, in german-izing it, as he dared to say, in the
face of St Jerome s Latin, but created the German language, as comparable to Latin, to the Greek of the
Septuagint, and to the Hebrew of the Bible.
3. Have we followed the idea of the untranslatable through to its logical conclusion? No, since we solved
the mystery of equivalence by constructing it. The construction of the
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comparable has even become the justification for a double betrayal insofar as the two incommensurable
masters were rendered commensurable through the translation-construction. So there remains a final
untranslatable that we discover through the construction of the comparable. That construction is accomplished
at the level of meaning , the only word that we have not commented on, because we took it for granted. Now
the meaning is extracted from the unity it shares with the flesh of words, that flesh which we call the letter .
Translators gladly removed it, so as not to be accused of literal translation ; translating literally, is that not
translating word for word? What shame! What disgrace! Now excellent translators, modelled on H�lderlin, on
Paul Celan and, in the biblical domain, on Meschonnic, fought a campaign against the isolated meaning, the
meaning without the letter, contrary to the letter. They gave up the comfortable shelter of the equivalence of
meaning, and ventured into hazardous areas where there would be some talk of tone, of savour, of rhythm, of
spacing, of silence between the words, of metrics and of rhyme. Undoubtedly, the vast majority of translators
rush to oppose this, without recognizing that translating the isolated meaning means repudiating an
achievement of contemporary semiotics, the unity of meaning and sound, of the signified and the signifier, in
opposition to the prejudice one still finds in the early Husserl: that the meaning is complete in the act of
conferring meaning , of Sinngebung. Husserl treats expression (Ausdruck) like an article of clothing external
to the body, which really is the incorporeal soul of meaning, of the Bedeutung. The result is that only a poet
can translate a poet. But I would reply to Berman, were he still alive dear Berman who, sadly, has left us and
whom we miss I would reply that he has moved the construction of the comparable a stage
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further, to the level of the letter; on the basis of the disquieting success of a H�lderlin who speaks Greek in
German and, perhaps, on the basis of that of a Meschonnic, who speaks Hebrew in French & So the literal
translation, which he chases relentlessly, is not a word for word translation, but a letter for letter one. Did he
go as far as he believed he had, in his nearly hopeless criticism of the equivalence of meaning to meaning, of
the construction of a comparable, of a literal comparable? Is not the continuity in the struggle against the
constantly recurring untranslatable read in the closeness of two successive titles: The Test of the Foreign and
Translation and the Letter or the Faraway Inn [La traduction et la lettre ou l auberge du lointain3].
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Notes
Introduction
1 Paul Ricoeur, Sur la traduction (Paris: Bayard, 2004); translated here by Eileen Brennan as On Translation.
2 I am indebted to Dominico Jervolino for this reference to Dolar and to several other sources on the history of
translation cited below. See his illuminating paper, The hermeneutics of the self and the paradigm of translation ,
presented at the Rome International Conference on Translation (April 2004) and his Introduction to La traduzione:
una sfida etuca (Brescia: Morcelliana, 2001), pp. 7 35. See also his pioneering essay, Herm�neutique et traduction.
L autre, l �tranger, l h�te , Archives de Philosophie 63 (2000), pp. 79 93.
3 Antoine Berman, L �preuve de l �tranger (Paris: Gallimard, 1984).
4 Jervolino, The hermeneutics of the self . See also Paul Zumthor, Babel ou l inach�vement (Paris: Seuil, 1997).
5 �mile Benveniste, Le vocabulaire des institutions indo-europ�ennes (Paris: Minuit, 1969).
6 Ricoeur, Sur la traduction, pp. 19 20.
7 Jervolino, The hermeneutics of the self ; see also Jervolino, Translation as paradigm for hermeneutics and its
implications for an ethics of hospitality , Ars Interpretandi 5 (2000), pp. 57 69.
8 Jervolino, The hermeneutics of the self and La question de l unit� de l Suvre de Ricoeur: la paradigme de la
traduction , Archives de Philosophie 4 (2004), pp. 659 68.
9 Ricoeur, La M�moire, l histoire, l oubli (Paris: Seuil, 2001), p. 657; English translation by David Pellauer, Memory,
History and Forgetting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
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Translation as challenge and source of happiness
1 Deutsches Verlagsanstalt. It is both a branch of the Bosch Foundation and a publishing house.
2 Antoine Berman, L �preuve de l �tranger (Paris: Gallimard, 1984, 1995). [S. Heyvaert translated this book into
English under the title, The Experience of the Foreign: Culture and Translation in Romantic Germany (New York:
SUNY Press, 1992). However, for reasons to do with Ricoeur s subsequent reflections on the meaning of the word
�preuve, I am unable to fully adopt Heyvaert s rendition of Berman s title. EB.]
The paradigm of translation
1 George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (Oxford: Oxford Paperbacks, 1998).
2 The words, signs which & concern things render the French signes qui & valent pour des choses, but the English
verb concern does not capture a possible connotation of the French verb valoir. In this context, valoir also carries
the associated sense of being worth something , an association that Ricoeur draws upon when he goes on to talk [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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