I. Two Dogmas of Translation

When I was a child in Madrid, my friends and I took our literary pleasures where we could find them, and we found them very often in translation. René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo’s great “Astérix et Obélix” series came to us in Castilian furnished with occasional footnotes. “Juego de palabras intraducible,” it would say at the bottom of the page: “untranslatable word-game” or “untranslatable pun,” referring to words spoken by a Gaul, Roman, Belgian, and so on. At the time, we understood these footnotes to be characterizations of the Spanish words we had before us rather than of a French original, and I suspect, in fact, that it never crossed our minds that there might be a French original, no doubt because the notorious national rivalry between Spain and France made the possibility unthinkable. For us, it was the Spanish that was “intraducible,” with the language into which the comic could not be translated remaining unspecified; that the footnoted Spanish words were commonplace and should thus be easy to translate struck us as hilarious and seemed an indictment of that other, misty language and proof of Castilian’s nuance and particularity. Years later, when I read these same works in French and in English, I realized to my shock that the footnotes were not deliberate parabases but marks of melancholia or exasperation, a sort of throwing-up-of-the-hands left diacritically by a nameless translator who was unable if not unwilling to render into Spanish the French jeux de mots. “Juego de palabras intraducible,” she or he wrote when the going got sticky, closing off to Spanish readers of the books the avenue of the linguistically unfaithful but culturally correlative pun—something on the order of turning the name of Obélix’s minute dog “Idéfix” into “Dogmatix,” as the brilliant English rendering does, rather than conveying it merely as “Idefix,” as did the tired Spanish translator I now imagine.

One does not go unscarred through experiences like this. A host of retrospective reorderings, retranslations, and recathectings of primal relations can ensue when the ideas one formed in childhood about this or that important expression become unfixed, often with perilous consequences for one’s professional or psychic health. My choice of topic, translation’s “indecisive muse,” must surely count as one of the long psychic after-effects of the discovery that my childhood ideas about the translatability or untranslatability of names like “Idéfix” and referential expressions like “Juego de palabras intraducible” were not merely marks of linguistic ignorance and chauvinism, but incorrect to boot. Imagine again my exasperated Spanish translator: the confession of a term’s untranslatability speaks to his or her exhaustion, or to a literalistic turn of mind bound to conflict with the subtle extravagance of Goscinny’s script (one could reasonably argue, for instance, that “Idefix” is not a bad, but rather a particularly good translation of “Idéfix,” which like all proper names is untranslatable as a description of what it names)—unless, of course, the hilarity that these footnotes and bad jue­gos de palabras provoked among one group of pre-adolescents itself served as a sly correlative for the humor of Uderzo and Goscinny’s jeux de mots. In this improbably Straussian reading the marks of the translator’s seeming failure themselves succeed in conveying some of the “untranslatable” wit of the original, as unfaithfully but just as companionably as the more conventionally successful Englishing does. Improbable — but how would one know? On what grounds would one make such a decision? What might be at stake in deciding one way or another whether the imagined unimaginative Spanish translator did or did not mask an acute, dialectically inclined linguistic druid? How might one make judgments concerning a translations effects or felicities? What work might we expect the claim of “untranslatability” to do under these circumstances? Furthermore, when we judge the felicity and effects of a translation, do we not also need to know, as it were, a history of the translation’s effects yet-to-come? How might these be reckoned? What temporal and imaginative “translation” is required of us in order to inscribe upon the translation that we are evaluating the history of its effects?

These scatter-shot questions, addressed to the form that “decisions” take when we make judgments about translation, flow from the incompatible registers in which the determining notion of a translation’s “faithfulness” operates: a roughly “Idealist” or a roughly “materialist” approach to linguistic usage, the two dogmas of my subtitle.  My goal in casting Quinean doubts on this tired distinction is not, however, a skeptical one. Rather, I want to argue that grounds for establishing judgments concerning translation find a compelling weakness in both the surprise of their emergence (they are not determined) and in the dividedness of their conceptual domain (the notion of faithfulness, the notion that the translated word is similar to a proper name, though this name isn’t solidly either a designator or a description). The examples I have chosen—taken from the work of Jorge Luis Borges and Ludwig Wittgenstein —are drawn from the terrible years between 1937 and 1940, when both writers observed from abroad the rise, consolidation, and aggressions of European fascism—one from the basement of the Biblioteca Municipal Miguel Cané in Buenos Aires, the other from Dublin and Cambridge. Neither could know the outcome of the historical “darkness” into which they looked from different sides of the ocean. For both, an ethical disposition toward that great darkness — die Finsternis dieser Zeit, as Wittgenstein wrote some years later—passed through the problem and the question of translation. Between them—in a dialogue one can only wish had actually taken place, in public and well-attended, somewhere between Buenos Aires and Cambridge— there develops a determining account of the need for articulating the field of ethics, in which responses to the crisis of their times could be evaluated, with the problem of translation.