Четверг, 28.03.2024, 11:17
Главная Регистрация RSS
Приветствую Вас, Гость
Категории раздела
Техника переводческих преобразований [17]
Художественный перевод [15]
Специальный перевод [5]
Перевод текстов масс медиа [14]
Метаязык переводоведения [14]
Методика перевода [16]
Проблемы языковой гибридизации [7]
Единицы перевода [23]
Новости Украины и языковая ситуация на Украине [41]
Насильственная украинизация
Классики о переводе [24]
Статьи из всемирно известных антологий
Дискурс [14]
Новостной дискурс, дискурс деловых писем, похищенный дискурс, англоязычный дискурс
Мини-чат
200
English at Work


Вход на сайт
Поиск
Tegs
At University
Статистика
Главная » Статьи » Классики о переводе

Jacques Derrida From Des Tours de Babel Translated by Joseph F. Graham
Jacques Derrida From Des Tours de Babel Translated by Joseph F. Graham "Babel": first a proper name, granted. But when we say "Babel" today, do we know what we are naming? Do we know whom? If we consider the sur-vival of a text that is a legacy, the narrative or the myth of the tower of Babel, it does not constitute just one figure among others. Telling at least of the inadequation of one tongue to another, of one place in the encyclopedia to another, of language to itself and to meaning, and so forth, it also tells of the need for figuration, for myth, for tropes, for twists and turns, for translation inadequate to compensate for that which multiplicity denies us. In this sense it would be the myth of the origin of myth, the metaphor of metaphor, the narrative of narrative, the transla­tion of translation, and so on. It would not be the only structure hollowing itself out like that, but it would do so in its own way (itself almost untranslatable, like a proper name), and its idiom would have to be saved. The "tower of Babel" does not merely figure the irreducible multiplicity of tongues; it exhibits an incompletion, the impossi­bility of finishing, of totalizing, of saturating, of completing some­thing on the order of edification, architectural construction, system and architectonics. What the multiplicity of idioms actually limits is not only a "true" translation, a transparent and adequate inter-expression, it is also a structural order, a coherence of construct. There is then (let us translate) something like an internal limit to formalization, an incompleteness of the constructure. It would be easy and up to a certain point justified to see there the translation of a system in deconstruction. One should never pass over in silence the question of the tongue in which the question of the tongue is raised and into which a discourse on translation is translated. First: in what tongue was the tower of Babel constructed and deconstructed? In a tongue within which the proper name of Babel could also, by confusion, be translated by "confusion." The proper name Babel, as a proper name, should remain untranslatable, but, by a kind of associative confusion that a unique tongue rendered possible, one thought it translated in that very tongue, by a com­mon noun signifying what we translate as confusion. Voltaire showed his astonishment in his Dictionnaire philosophique, at the Babel article: I do not know why it is said in Genesis that Babel signifies confusion, for Ba signifies father in the Oriental tongues, and Bel signifies God; Babel signifies the city of God, the holy city. The Ancients gave this name to all their capitals. But it is incontestable that Babel means confusion, cither because the architects were confounded after having raised their work up to eighty-one thousand Jewish feet, or because the tongues were then confounded; and it is obviously from that time on that the Germans no longer understand the Chinese; for it is clear, according to the scholar Bochart, that Chinese is originally the same tongue as High German. The calm irony of Voltaire means that Babel means: it is not only a proper name, the reference of a pure signifier to a single being— and for this reason untranslatable—but a common noun related to the generality of a meaning. This common noun means, and means not only confusion, even though "confusion" has at least two meanings, as Voltaire is aware, the confusion of tongues, but also the state of confusion in which the architects find themselves with the structure interrupted, so that a certain confusion has already begun to affect the two meanings of the word "confusion." The signification of "confusion" is confused, at least double. But Vol­taire suggests something else again: Babel means not only confu­sion in the double sense of the word, but also the name of the father, more precisely and more commonly, the name of God as name of father. The city would bear the name of God the father and of the father of the city that is called confusion. God, the God, would have marked with his patronym a communal space, that city where understanding is no longer possible. And understanding is no longer possible when there are only proper names, and under­standing is no longer possible when there are no longer proper names. In giving his name, a name of his choice, in giving all names, the father would be at the origin of language, and that power would belong by right to God the father. And the name of God the father would be the name of that origin of tongues. But it is also that God who, in the action of his anger (like the God of Böhme or of Hegel, he who leaves himself, determines himself in his finitude and thus produces history), annuls the gift of tongues, or at least embroils it, sows confusion among his sons, and poisons the present (Gift-gift). This is also the origin of tongues, of the multiplicity of idioms, of what in other words are usually called mother tongues. For this entire history deploys filiations, genera­tions and genealogies: all Semitic. Before the deconstruction of Ba­bel, the great Semitic family was establishing its empire, which it wanted universal, and its tongue, which it also attempts to impose on the universe. The moment of this project immediately precedes the deconstruction of the tower. I cite two French translations. The first translator stays away from what one would want to call "liter-ality," in other words, from the Hebrew figure of speech for "tongue," where the second, more concerned about literality (metaphoric, or rather metonymic), says "lip," since in Hebrew "lip" designates what we call, in another metonymy, "tongue." One will have to say multiplicity of lips and not of tongues to name the Babelian confusion. The first translator, then, Louis Segond, au­thor of the Segond Bible, published in 1910, writes this: Those are the sons of Sem, according to their families, their tongues, their countries, their nations. Such are the families of" the sons of Noah, according to their generations, their nations. And it is from them that emerged the nations which spread over the earth after the flood. All the earth had a single tongue and the same words. As they had left the origin they found a plain in the country of Schinear, and they dwelt there. They said to one another: Come! Let us make bricks, and bake them in the fire. And brick served them as stone, and tar served as cement. Again they said: Come! Let us build ourselves a city and a tower whose summit touches the heavens, and let us make ourselves a name, so that we not be scattered over the face of all the earth. I do not know just how to interpret this allusion to the substitution or the transmutation of materials, brick becoming stone and tar serving as mortar. That already resembles a translation, a transla­tion of translation. But let us leave it and substitute a second trans­lation for the first. It is that of Chouraqui. It is recent and wants to be more literal, almost verbum pro verbo, as Cicero said should not be done in one of those first recommendations to the translator which can be read in his Libellus de Optimo Genera Oratorum. Here it is: Here are the sons of Shem for their clans, for their tongues, in their lands, for their peoples. Here are the clans of the sons of Noah for their exploits, in their peoples: from the latter divide the peoples on earth, after the flood. And it is all the earth: a single lip, one speech. And it is at their departure from the Orient: they find a canyon, in the land of Shine'ar. They settle there. They say, each to his like: "Come, let us brick some bricks. Let us fire them in the fire." The brick becomes for them stone, the tar, mortar. They say: "Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower. Its head: in the heavens. Let us make ourselves a name, that we not be scattered over the face of all the earth." What happens to them? In other words, for what does God punish them in giving his name, or rather, since he gives it to noth­ing and to no one, in proclaiming his name, the proper name of "confusion" which will be his mark and his seal? Does he punish them for having wanted to build as high as the heavens? For having wanted to accede to the highest, up to the Most High? Perhaps for that too, no doubt, but incontestably for having wanted thus to make a name for themselves, to give themselves the name, to con­struct for and by themselves their own name, to gather themselves there ("that we no longer be scattered"), as in the unity of a place which is at once a tongue and a tower, the one as well as the other, the one as the other. He punishes them for having thus wanted to assure themselves, by themselves, a unique and universal genealogy. For the text of Genesis proceeds immediately, as if it were all a matter of the same design: raising a tower, constructing a city, mak­ing a name for oneself in a universal tongue which would also be an idiom, and gathering a filiation: They say: "Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower. Its head: in the heavens. Let us make ourselves a name, that we not be scattered over the face of all the earth." yhwh descends to sec the city and the tower that the sons of man have built. yhwh says: "Yes! A single people, a single lip for all: that is what they begin to do! . . . Come! Let us descend! Let us confound their lips, man will no longer understand the lip of his neighbor." Then he disseminates the Sem, and dissemination is here decon-struction: yhwh disperses them from here over the face of all the earth. They cease to build the city. Over which he proclaims his name: Bavel, Confusion, for there, yhwh confounds the lip of all the earth, and from there yhwh disperses them over the face of all the earth. Can we not, then, speak of God's jealousy? Out of resentment against that unique name and lip of men, he imposes his name, his name of" father; and with this violent imposition he opens the de-construction of the tower, as of the universal language; he scatters the genealogical filiation. He breaks the lineage. He at the same time imposes and forbids translation. He imposes it and forbids it, con­strains, but as if to failure, the children who henceforth will bear his name, the name that he gives to the city. It is from a proper name of God, come from God, descended from God or from the father (and it is indeed said that yhwh, an unpronounceable name, descends toward the tower) and by him that tongues are scattered, confounded or multiplied, according to a descendance that in its' very dispersion remains sealed by the only name that will have been the strongest, by the only idiom that will have triumphed. Now, this idiom bears within itself the mark of confusion, it improperly means the improper, to wit: Bavel, confusion. Translation then be­comes necessary and impossible, like the effect of a struggle for the appropriation of the name, necessary and forbidden in the interval between two absolutely proper names. And the proper name of God (given by God) is divided enough in the tongue, already, to signify also, confusedly, "confusion." And the war that he declares has first raged within his name: divided, bifid, ambivalent, poly-semic: God deconstructing. "And he war," one reads in Finnegans Wake, and we could follow this whole story from the side of Shem and Shaun. The "he war" does not only, in this place, tie together an incalculable number of phonic and semantic threads, in the im­mediate context and throughout this Babelian book; it says the declaration of war (in English) of the One who says I am the one who am, and who thus was (war); it renders itself untranslatable in its very performance, at least in the fact that it is enunciated in more than one language at a time, at least English and German. If even an infinite translation exhausted its semantic stock, it would still translate into one language and would lose the multiplicity of "he war." Let us leave for another time a less hastily interrupted reading of this "he war," and let us note one of the limits of theories of translation: all too often they treat the passing from one language to another and do not sufficiently consider the possibility for lan­guages to be implicated more than two in a text. How is a text writ­ten in several languages at a time to be translated? How is the effect of plurality to be "rendered"? And what of translating with several languages at a time, will that be called translating? Babel: today we take it as a proper name. Indeed, but the proper name of what and of whom? At times that of a narrative text recounting a story (mythical, symbolic, allegorical; it matters little for the moment), a story in which the proper name, which is then no longer the title of the narrative, names a tower or a city but a tower or a city that receives its name from an event during which YHWH "proclaims his name." Now, this proper name, which already names at least three times and three different things, also has, this is the whole point, as proper name the function of a com­mon noun. This story recounts, among other things, the origin of the confusion of tongues, the irreducible multiplicity of idioms, the necessary and impossible task of translation, its necessity as impos­sibility. Now, in general one pays little attention to this fact: it is in translation that we most often read this narrative. And in this translation, the proper name retains a singular destiny, since it is not translated in its appearance as proper name. Now, a proper name as such remains forever untranslatable, a fact that may lead one to conclude that it does not strictly belong, for the same reason as the other words, to the language, to the system of the language, be it translated or translating. And yet "Babel," an event in a single tongue, the one in which it appears so as to form a "text," also has a common meaning, a conceptual generality. That it be by way of a pun or a confused association matters little: "Babel" could be understood in one language as meaning "confusion." And from then on, just as Babel is at once proper name and common noun, confusion also becomes proper name and common noun, the one as the homonym of the other, the synonym as well, but not the equivalent, because there could be no question of confusing them in their value. It has for the translator no satisfactory solution. Re­course to apposition and capitalization ("Over which he proclaims his name: Bavel, Confusion") is not translating from one tongue into another. It comments, explains, paraphrases, but does not translate. At best it reproduces approximately and by dividing the equivocation into two words there where confusion gathered in potential, in all its potential, in the internal translation, if one can say that, which works the word in the so-called original tongue. For in the very tongue of the original narrative there is a transla­tion, a sort of transfer, that gives immediately (by some confusion) the semantic equivalent of the proper name which, by itself, as a pure proper name, it would not have. As a matter of fact, this in-tralinguistic translation operates immediately; it is not even an op­eration in the strict sense. Nevertheless, someone who speaks the language of Genesis could be attentive to the effect of the proper name in effacing the conceptual equivalent (like pierre [rock] in Pierre [Peter], and these are two absolutely heterogeneous values or functions); one would then be tempted to say first that a proper name, in the proper sense, does not properly belong to the lan­guage; it does not belong there, although and because its call makes the language possible (what would a language be without the pos­sibility of calling by a proper name?); consequently it can properly inscribe itself in a language only by allowing itself to be translated therein, in other words, interpreted by its semantic equivalent: from this moment it can no longer be taken as proper name. The noun pierre belongs to the French language, and its translation into a foreign language should in principle transport its meaning. This is not the case with Pierre, whose inclusion in the French language is not assured and is in any case not of the same type. "Peter" in this sense is not a translation of Pierre, any more than Londres is a trans­lation of "London," and so forth. And second, anyone whose so-called mother tongue was the tongue of Genesis could indeed understand Babel as "confusion"; that person then effects a confused translation of the proper name by its common equivalent without having need for another word. It is as if there were two words there, two homonyms one of which has the value of proper name and the other that of common noun: between the two, a translation which one can evaluate quite diversely. Does it belong to the kind that Jakobson calls intralingual translation or rewording? I do not think so: "rewording" concerns the relations of transformation be­tween common nouns and ordinary phrases. The essay On Trans­lation (1959) distinguishes three forms of translation. Intralingual translation interprets linguistic signs by means of other signs of the same language. This obviously presupposes that one can know in the final analysis how to determine rigorously the unity and iden­tity of a language, the decidable form of its limits. There would then be what Jakobson neatly calls translation "proper," interlingual translation, which interprets linguistic signs by means of some other language—this appeals to the same presupposition as intra­lingual translation. Finally there would be intersemiotic translation or transmutation, which interprets linguistic signs by means of sys­tems of nonlinguistic signs. For the two forms of translation which would not be translations "proper," Jakobson proposes a defini­tional equivalent and another word. The first he translates, so to speak, by another word: intralingual translation or rewording. The third likewise: intersemiotic translation or transmutation. In these two cases, the translation of "translation" is a definitional interpre­tation. But in the case of translation "proper," translation in the ordinary sense, interlinguistic and post-Babelian, Jakobson does not translate; he repeats the same word: "interlingual translation or translation proper." He supposes that it is not necessary to trans­late; everyone understands what that means because everyone has experienced it, everyone is expected to know what is a language, the relation of one language to another and especially identity or difference in fact of language. If there is a transparency that Babel would not have impaired, this is surely it, the experience of the multiplicity of tongues and the "proper" sense of the word "trans­lation." In relation to this word, when it is a question of translation "proper," the other uses of the word "translation" would be in a position of intralingual and inadequate translation, like metaphors, in short, like twists or turns of translation in the proper sense. There would thus be a translation in the proper sense and a trans­lation in the figurative sense. And in order to translate the one into the other, within the same tongue or from one tongue to another, in the figurative or in the proper sense, one would engage upon a course that would quickly reveal how this reassuring tripartition can be problematic. Very quickly: at the very moment when pro­nouncing "Babel" we sense the impossibility of deciding whether this name belongs, properly and simply, to one tongue. And it mat­ters that this undecidability is at work in a struggle for the proper name within a scene of genealogical indebtedness. In seeking to "make a name for themselves," to found at the same time a univer­sal tongue and a unique genealogy, the Semites want to bring the world to reason, and this reason can signify simultaneously a co­lonial violence (since they would thus universalize their idiom) and a peaceful transparency of the human community. Inversely, when God imposes and opposes his name, he ruptures the rational trans­parency but interrupts also the colonial violence or the linguistic imperialism. He destines them to translation, he subjects them to the law of a translation both necessary and impossible; in a stroke with his translatable-untranslatable name he delivers a universal reason (it will no longer be subject to the rule of a particular na­tion), but he simultaneously limits its very universality: forbidden transparency, impossible univocity. Translation becomes law, duty, and debt, but the debt one can no longer discharge. Such insol­vency is found marked in the very name of Babel: which at once translates and does not translate itself, belongs without belonging to a language and indebts itself to itself for an insolvent debt, to itself as if other. Such would be the Babelian performance. This singular example, at once archetypical and allegorical, could serve as an introduction to all the so-called theoretical prob­lems of translation. But no theorization, inasmuch as it is produced in a language, will be able to dominate the Babelian performance. ... I do not wish only or essentially to reduce my role to that of a passer or passerby. Nothing is more serious than a translation. I rather wished to mark the fact that every translator is in a position to speak about translation, in a place which is more than any not second or secondary. For if the structure of the original is marked by the requirement to be translated, it is that in laying down the law the original begins by indebting itself as well with regard to the translator. The original is the first debtor, the first petitioner; it begins by lacking and by pleading for translation. This demand is not only on the side of the constructors of the tower who want to make a name for themselves and to found a universal tongue trans­lating itself by itself; it also constrains the deconstructor of the tower: in giving his name, God also appealed to translation, not only between the tongues that had suddenly become multiple and confused, but first of his name, of the name he had proclaimed, given, and which should be translated as confusion to be under­stood, hence to let it be understood that it is difficult to translate and so to understand. At the moment when he imposes and op­poses his law to that of the tribe, he is also a petitioner for transla­tion. He is also indebted. He has not finished pleading for the translation of his name even though he forbids it. For Babel is untranslatable. God weeps over his name. His text is the most sa­cred, the most poetic, the most originary, since he creates a name and gives it to himself, but he is left no less destitute in his force and even in his wealth; he pleads for a translator. . . .
Категория: Классики о переводе | Добавил: Voats (20.09.2011)
Просмотров: 1903 | Рейтинг: 0.0/0