Jacques Derrida and the Paradox of Translation: You must go on. I cant go on. I will go on.

Arka Chattopadhyay
What must be translated of that which is translatable can only be the untranslatable. Jacques Derrida (258)

Whether it is the movement from the letter to the litter in James Joyce (93), or what one may call trans-litter-ing of translation in Jacques Derrida, the essential question concerns the beyond of language and the attempts to deal with a lack through a supplementary act. Derridean supplement is a double-bill of addition and substitution, whereby translation tries to fend for the inexorable lack. Following Derrida, we have to say that the original always already lacks its translation. The original text demands translation (152). The question is--how does this fending operate? Does translation fill up the unfillable gap or does it constitute the gap by constructing the rim, the way a potter braces the empty space within a pot by making the pot? I would argue that Derridas musings on translation, running from one end of his canon to the other, bring into focus this problematic of what Spivak calls in her essay The Politics of Translation, the spacy emptiness (398) between the body of the self and that of the other i.e. the inhospitable intermediary in the hospitality-links between the host and the target language. Philip E. Lewis in his essay Measure of Translation Effects (1985), rightly underscores the Derridean shift of emphasis in Translation Studies as one from equivalence to difference. Translation is both impossible and necessary in Derridas vision. It is impossible because of an inevitable failure of semantic transference, marked by the irreducible differential schema of language while it is necessary because it is a practice in differencethe most potent site to discern the post-structuralist implications of language. In a talk named What is a Relevant Translation? (2001), Derrida talks about an oscillation between powerless implicatedness within language and the unlimited power (193) of what remains absolute impossible (193) at the level of inscription as being related to the im-possible possible of translation (193). As Derrida says in the same talk, translation is a sort of hyphen. It shows us the difference between the effable and the ineffable. Derridean ethic of translation is all about admitting the lack and then trying to make the lack functional. The translators failure is, thus, an interesting failure, to use the words of Samuel Beckett. Derridas ideas on translation make use of disciplines like Linguistics, Literature Studies, Cultural Studies and especially Psychoanalysis. In Freuds Legacy, Derrida saysany signified whose signifier cannot vary nor let itself be translated into another signifier without a loss of meaning points to a proper name effect (312). The proper name is that which cannot be translated. In Positions (1972), a set of interviews, Derrida clearly articulatestranslation practices the difference between the signified and the signifier (19). In the same work, he also expresses his preference for the term transformation, in all its Freudian implications over the term translation. He calls this a regulated transformation of one language by another, of one text by another (19). In
pdfMachine A pdf writer that produces quality PDF files with ease! Produce quality PDF files in seconds and preserve the integrity of your original documents. Compatible across nearly all Windows platforms, if you can print from a windows application you can use pdfMachine. Get yours now!

Freud and the scene of Writing (1967), Derrida maps out the resistance to translation in the psychoanalytic discourse and comments on Freuds metaphorical use of the word translation. He underscores the materiality of a word and its absolute untranslatability into another language. To relinquish materiality, Derrida says, is the driving force of translation (264). In the same work, he also refers to the horizontal impossibility of translating psychical writing into a foreign language and the vertical untranslatability of the Unconscious into the Conscious (264). Derrida uses the word translation in a very broad sense where it underpins the process of representation, as rightly pointed out by Lewis, the psychoanalytic process of translation and the cultural process of translation under the social rubric, as Derridas investigation into Shylocks theologico-political (197) translation in What is a Relevant Translation? shows. Translation in Derrida is also inextricably linked with the quest for knowledge that constructs the backbone of the philosophical discipline. Since meaning lies before or beyond language, philosophy rests on translatability. And if translation fails in a special way, so does philosophy (120). In another set of interviews, The Ear of the Other (1985), in the section called The Roundtable on Translation, and the talk Les Tours de Babel, given more or less in the same period, Derrida discusses the construction of the tower of Babel section in Joyces Finnegans Wake. He reads the act of constructing the tower as a kind of linguistic imperialism, whereby Shems, the constructors, try to impose their lip on the world. The word Shem in Hebrew means lip. The suspension of this construction, in Derridas eyes, implies the condemnation of humanity to a multiplicity of language (98). When this jettisoned construction is named Babel, Derrida says, it is the name given by God, with obvious connotations of the Lacanian patronymic. To translate Babel as confusion is to translate a proper name into a common noun and this is one confusing translation, according to Derrida (101-102). In this signifier Babel is contained the double-bind of translation. I think Derrida locates the mythical birth of translation in a political moment where the monolith of language is destroyed and its egalitarian multiplicity brought into being. Much like Bakhtins heteroglossic figuration of language, Derrida evokes the fraying of multiple languages or tongues that are operative within a single linguistic system and it is this many in one figuration of language that even the best of translations fails to get across (99). This loss is democratic while this loss, when lost, uncovers the totalitarian political possibilities of translation. Derrida exemplifies this point by referring to the Borgesian Spanish which has a curious Frenchness in Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote. A more precise example is, however, a sentence from Joyces WakeAnd he war (qutd in Derrida 98). Now, how do we read this word war? Is it the English for battle or the German be-verb was? How do we translate this word which inhabits the void between the two languages or travels between the two like a Rushdiesque migrant? My own example would be Becketts use of the word Godot in the French title of his play En Attendant Godot (1949). He does not use the French synonym of God which is Dieu but evokes the English word God in his French. Taking the cue from Walter Benjamins notion of pure language in his landmark essay The Task of the Translator (1969), Derrida imagines a universal brotherhood of languages where there is harmony stemming from the fact that however plural they may be, they are all languages nevertheless. Thus, the lesson of translation is that there is language and that language is language (124). In Derridas opinion, a good translation is
pdfMachine A pdf writer that produces quality PDF files with ease! Produce quality PDF files in seconds and preserve the integrity of your original documents. Compatible across nearly all Windows platforms, if you can print from a windows application you can use pdfMachine. Get yours now!

that which preserves the text within this universal language and also performs a promise of a possible reconcilement among languages (123). But this emancipatory and reintegrative function of translation does not fall prey to the politics of the metanarrative since Derrida also talks about the compulsive aporetics of translation. To use the ethical paradigm Alain Badiou maps in his book Ethics (1998), Derrida is ethical in his take on translation in the sense that he does not force the point of the unnamable in truth but rather constitutes this unnamability as the lack around which the signifiers carry out their translational failures. The philosophy that rests on the metaphysics of presence fails with this translational failure as the anti-philosophy of the lack braced by the translating signifiers, arrives. Now, let us try and see how the signifiers brace the lack and how holding onto the lack instead of filling it up becomes the translational strategy in Derrida. Whether it is the word retrait in The Retrait of the Metaphor or the word relevant in What is a Relevant Translation? Derrida makes a signifier float between two languages. Is the signifier retrait same as retreat in English? What about the French present participle relevant that comes from the French verb relever? Is it same as the English adjective relevant? The phonemic similarity highlights the mutual difference of these words. I think, by making these signifiers hang between two languages, Derrida makes them constitute the lack between the two. This is not a filling up of the lack but rather a stitching up of its edges because it becomes undecidable whether the word retrait is French or English. These signifiers are made to embody the gap without filling it up with a phantasmatic screen. They only make the lack self-evident by becoming signifiers of pure language which function through the lack. This ethics of the lack is also in tune with Derridas deconstructive practice in the sense that it forecloses all possible binary oppositions. I do not fully agree with Lewiss idea of an ab-imitative fidelity (271) to the original in Derridean translation. The point is not just to oppose or abuse the original in translation but to create a field of opposition where the translation will affiliate itself neither to the host language nor to the target language. In the psychoanalytic clinic, what the analyst does is to return the speech of the analysand in an inverted order so that the truth that lies on the other side of the analysands speech is uncovered to him. If this is translation, it is all about honouring the impinging of the Unconscious in the gaps of the analysands speech. The inversive opposition between the analysts and the analysands speech is aimed at charting this field of separation by privileging the lack. The differential field opened up by the original and its translation in tandem is a surface on which the growth of both the host and the target languages is to be mapped. Translation does not merely forward the legacy of the original; it has its own life. It lives on, as Derrida would say, taking the cue, once again from Walter Benjamin. In this on is an addition, a sense of an after-life of the original that is brought into being by the translated text (121-122). The example with which I will end is the title of Samuel Becketts 1965 prose Le Depeupleur which he translated into English as The Lost Ones. The literal meaning of Becketts French title is the one who de-populates or the de-populator whereas his English title refers to the lost ones who are de-populated by the depopulator. This transformation of the pole of the subject into the pole of the object through the act of translation cuts open the vast tract of the unnamable in between. Like Derrida, Beckett, the translator, foregrounds this gap between the subject and the object that problematizes their relation.
pdfMachine A pdf writer that produces quality PDF files with ease! Produce quality PDF files in seconds and preserve the integrity of your original documents. Compatible across nearly all Windows platforms, if you can print from a windows application you can use pdfMachine. Get yours now!

Works Consulted: Badiou, Alain. Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. Trans. Peter Hallward. New York: Verso Books, 2001. 80-89. Beckett, Samuel. The lost Ones. Vol. 3 of The Grove Centenary Edition of The Complete Works of Samuel Beckett . New York: Grove Press, 2006. 381-399. Beckett, Samuel. En Attendant Godot. Paris: Ed Du Minuit, 1997. Benjamin, Walter. The Task of the Translator. Illuminations. New York: Shocken Books, 1969. 70-82. Borges, Jorge Luis. Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote. Collected Fictions. New York: Penguin Classics, 1998. 88-95. Chakravorty, Spivak Gayatri. The Politics of Translation. The Translation Studies Reader. Ed. Lawrence Venuti. London: Routledge, 1998. 397-416 Derrida, Jacques. What is a Relevant Translation? Critical Inquiry. 27.2, (2001). 174-200. --- Les Tours de Babel. Difference in Translation. Trans. and ed. Graham F. Joseph. London: Cornwell University Press, 1985. 165-208. --- Freuds Legacy. The Postcard: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987. 292-337. --- Freud and the Scene of Writing. Writing and Difference. London: Routledge Classics, 2001. 246-291. --- The Retrait of the Metaphor. The Derrida Reader: Writing Performances. Trans. F. Gasdner ed. J. Wolfreys. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998. 102-129. --- Two words for Joyce. Post-Structuralist Joyce. Ed. Derek Attridge and Daniel Ferrer.
pdfMachine A pdf writer that produces quality PDF files with ease! Produce quality PDF files in seconds and preserve the integrity of your original documents. Compatible across nearly all Windows platforms, if you can print from a windows application you can use pdfMachine. Get yours now!

London: Cambridge University Press, 1984. 145-159. --- The Ear of the Other. Ed. Christie V. McDonald. New York: Shocken Books, 1985. 91-164. --- Positions. Trans. Alan Bass, New York, Continuum, 2004.16-33. --- Acts of Literature. Ed. Derek Attridge. London: Routledge,1992. 253-309. Joyce, James. Finnegans Wake. London: Penguin Books, 2000. Lewis, E. Philip. Measure of Translation Effects. The Translation Studies Reader. Ed. Lawrence Venuti. London: Routledge, 2000. 264-283.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

pdfMachine A pdf writer that produces quality PDF files with ease! Produce quality PDF files in seconds and preserve the integrity of your original documents. Compatible across nearly all Windows platforms, if you can print from a windows application you can use pdfMachine. Get yours now!