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The Original and the Untranslatable

Deconstruction and hermeneutics both question an assumption behind fidelity and freedom alike: that there is an original which is whole and knows what it means. The untranslatable is where the limit they find becomes a method.

Derrida’s “Des Tours de Babel” (1985) read Benjamin’s essay against itself. Babel is the story of a proper name that cannot be translated and a God who imposes and forbids translation in one gesture; the original is not a self-sufficient source but a debtor, indebted from the start to the translation that will let it live on, and translation is both necessary and impossible. Paul de Man’s late lecture on the same essay found in it not a theory of pure language but a demonstration that the original was already unstable, already a failure to coincide with itself, which translation only makes visible. On their reading, deconstruction removes the fixed original that fidelity had presupposed, and with it the ground on which fidelity and freedom had been opposed.

Ricoeur’s late essays, collected as On Translation (2004; English 2006), took the opposite tone towards the same fact. Perfect translation is impossible and its dream must be mourned; what remains is a work, in the analytic sense, of finding equivalence without identity, and an ethic he called linguistic hospitality, in which the pleasure of dwelling in the other’s language is matched by the pleasure of receiving the foreign word at home. The hermeneutic tradition he speaks from, with Gadamer’s claim that all understanding is translation behind it, treats translation as the paradigm of interpretation rather than a special case of it. George Steiner’s After Babel (1975) made that claim at book length: to understand is to translate, within a language as much as between languages, and every act of it has a hermeneutic motion in four stages, trust in the text, aggression in seizing it, incorporation into the home language, and restitution of what the taking has cost the original.

Barbara Cassin’s Vocabulaire européen des philosophies: Dictionnaire des intraduisibles (2004; English as the Dictionary of Untranslatables, 2014) turned the limit into a method. An untranslatable, in her sense, is not a word that cannot be translated but one that one keeps on not finishing translating: Geist, logos, pravda, saudade, terms whose passage between languages leaves a residue that is itself philosophically informative. The dictionary is a history of European philosophy written as a history of its translations, on the premise that philosophy is done in languages rather than in a language.