I'd like to begin with a kind of homage to our invited speaker, Edwin Gentzler, and I can think of no better way of paying than homage than by citing him. One could pick any number of sentences from his book on translation for special attention. I offer you this one, to my mind one of the richest and most provocative, though no doubt not for the reasons one might suspect, not even, I think, for the reasons its author might have intended:
Translation Studies scholars no doubt can learn much from scholars of ethnic minorities, women, minor literatures, and popular literatures. Much of the most exciting work in the field is already being produced by scholars from "smaller" countries--Belgium, the Netherlands, Israel, Czechoslovakia, and French-speaking Canada.
These sentences are particularly satisfying in the context of our discussion today, which will, I'm sure, return once and again to the felicitous and often surreptitious effects of the "minor" and the marginalized, their disruption of the hegemonic discourse of "large" countries. It will no doubt come as a surprise to no one here that the margin works as powerfully upon the centre as the centre does upon the margin.
To register my appreciation in good conscience, though, I must admit that what I find most interesting in this passage comes in the form of the final of these "smaller" countries, "French-speaking Canada." Not that I have any great claim to pride here, I don't, since I am not from that country, although I am from Canada, and since, although I speak French and even translate from French, I can hardly consider myself "French-speaking." Although Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien might be alarmed to hear "French-speaking Canada" declared a country, however small, I like the phrase, not out of sympathy for Québecois separatism, and not only because it might be a proleptic look at a possible future reality, but because it speaks precisely to the question of globalization. Interestingly, the field of influence Edwin Gentzler points out includes one country that is not one, to adopt Luce Irigaray's now-famous formula-Czechoslovakia now being doubled, in a sense--and one that is not yet one, at least not in the strict political sense (French-speaking Canada).
And what is more, "French-speaking Canada" is also a vexed term because, strictly speaking, it cannot be contained within the political boundaries even of a given province, in this case Québec, since French-speaking Canadians can be found in other, presumably in all the other, provinces and territories of Canada. What the inclusion of Czechoslovakia and "French-speaking Canada" might signal, here, then, is not only the field of exciting new work from the camp of the minor, work that works to break down national borders and introduce difference into the powerfully unified and hegemonic discourse of large nations, but the construction or at least the recognition of new borders even within given political, geographical, and linguistic fields. In other words, what if translation, while disrupting borders, while marking the crossing of borders, while declaring itself at the border of such fields also set them up, constituted or re-constituted these borders through their very crossing?
This will need some clarification. Could translation set up boundaries? One way of approaching the question would be to return to the question of language itself. Unless I'm mistaken, there is no mention in either of the texts under discussion today of the necessity or even the desirability of anyone other than the translator mastering the two or more languages of the translation other than in the hybrid form of the translation itself. To be fair, the recognition of cultural and linguistic difference that is the stated goal, as I understand it, of both Gentzler and Venuti, could, most likely would, in fact lead to increased interest in foreign languages that would lead many students to study them.
But this itself leads us to a potential paradox facing translation studies. If the study of not only culture but language, since there would seem to be consensus that they are not fully distinguishable, if the study of language and culture, then, is to be a goal, declared or not, of translation, and even if, not a goal, such study is one of the effects of translation, then what happens to translation? We were asked to consider, today, how translation might revive the study of the humanities. One of the ways in which it might do so would be to lead beyond itself, to provide the impetus to go "beyond translation" in the strict or conventional sense and learn foreign languages.
Translation in this conventional sense will never spell its own demise fully, since there will always be many who will read only "in translation," but it will also and necessarily have as its stated goal its own overcoming and sublation. Translation would value difference, that is, not only in that it brings that difference to light through the felicitous effects it can work on a given text, however defined, but in that it would signal that difference that exists beyond the borders of the translation itself. Translation, then, would not only harbor, expose, and stage the scene of linguistic and cultural difference in a global environment but would signal another difference--the difference from translation itself.
Moving "beyond" translation will of course reveal, as Venuti suggests, other translations. It will bring to light the various linguistic, cultural, and other translations already at work in a given language and culture. And this is no doubt as it should be. But perhaps we should not be too quick to celebrate the potentially disruptive effects these translations have upon a dominant culture. French has been quite open to admitting words from the Maghreb into the language, so that the word toubib, for example, originating in Algeria and meaning "doctor," has become very common in everyday speech. One would not be at all surprised to hear a French person say he or she is going to the toubib. It might, however, be rather more surprising if the toubib were actually a toubib, Algerian. The word toubib entering into the language is one thing; actual Algerian toubibs in France might well be another. And if there is any doubt of this, we need only refer to the lois Pasqua and other projects aiming at the exclusion of North African immigrants from French territory. The imbedded translation within the French language, here, might be particularly fruitful for an investigation of the relation of translation to culture. What it would suggest is that language is out in front of culture and not a mere indicator of cultural change. It may well be that the "translations" at work within French are the necessary precondition for cultural transformation. That is, perhaps it is or was necessary to say the word toubib before one could ever imagine going to a toubib who is a toubib and not a medecin.
But what if the language of translation were not merely the reflection of processes of cultural formation; what if translation were not the harbinger of cultural transformations to come; what if, that is, there were a fundamental asymmetry between translation and culture? At the very least, the relation between culture and translation would no longer be clearly or easily decidable. Venuti, for instance, turns to the Nigerian writer Gabriel Okara, who, Venuti notes, believes not only in using African ideas, folklore, philosophy, but also that they have to be translated almost literally into a given European language if they are to achieve all their force. Venuti quotes and comments on a number of passages. One of them reads:
Shuffling feet turned Okolo's head to the door. He saw three men standing silent, opening not their mouths. "Who are you people be?" Okolo asked. The people opened not their mouths. "If you are coming-in people be, then come in." The people opened not their mouths. "Who are you?" Okolo again asked, walking to the men. As Okolo closer to the men walked, the men quickly turned and walked out.
(Venuti 176-177)
Venuti reads this and other passages expertly, though somewhat predictably, commenting upon how the "translation" "defamiliarize[s] English by resituating English literary traditions in a postcolonial context" (177-78). What I find interesting here is that a number of the particularities of this translation, what Michael Riffaterre would call agrammaticalities, might equally have been translations from other languages. One could easily imagine, for example, constructions like "coming-in people" coming from a stubbornly literal-minded, although felicitously so, translation from another major European language such as German. Clearly, this changes things dramatically, for the strange construction in the English translation now signals not the postcolonializing of English but something like two dominant languages fighting it out for supremacy.
How, in fact, are we to know that this "almost literal" translation is a translation from an African country and that it takes place in a postcolonial context? How are we to know whether we are confronted with the interference of another dominant or even colonial language or a language from a postcolonial context? Are there syntactical and grammatical signs of this in the translation, signs specific to that context? It may well be, in fact, that the agrammaticalities of the translation will not be able to translate precisely that context and that, therefore, the "context" of the translation remains an irreducible outside to its language as such. In other words, we might never be able to decide on the source language and the tenor of the battle being waged within the translation without reference to something outside the language of the translation itself.
The very necessity of such a gesture to the "outside" might therefore suggest that the cultural processes at work are not rendered unequivocally in the translation and that the translation might even make them unrecognizable. As unpopular as such a possibility will surely be in the age of cultural studies, it could nonetheless signal a real possibility for translation, the possibility, once again, of difference and even, to recall Venuti's title, of the ethical. For what translation would signal, now, is that it is irreducible even to cultural formations and transformations. We might want language and translation in particular to serve the ends of disrupting hegemonic structures, but as long as it remains a tool of the intentional control of the agents of a given cultural and political project it will be subject to the manipulations of culture. Venuti's characterization of translation, as I read it, shows translation working both for and against the forces of hegemony, so that there is little reason to see in translation anything other than one factor like another in the processes of the consolidation and disruption of power. If translation is to remain inaccessible to the manipulations of power, it would have to resist being deployed for any cultural project, no matter how laudable it might seem, for the very possibility of that deployment would also signal an inverse and equally undesirable deployment.
The paradoxical and always disruptive efficacy of translation, then, would lie in its irreducibility to the manipulations of cultural projects. Translation would resist our attempt to use it unequivocally as a decolonizing tool as much as it resists the language of colonization. Which also makes it impossible for me to fulfill the task assigned me today--if, that is, I am to speak of how translation might be used to revive the humanities. For translation would resist use, intentionality, pure and simple. Translation would resist its deployment for any particular cultural or political project, and even the project of culture itself. As such, it would signal the possibility of an absolute freedom. This, I want to suggest, constitutes the possibility of a much more radical ethics. An ethics of translation.
Jan Plug
University of Wisconsin-Madison