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Translating Philosophy, Translating Poetry: Comparisons and Contrasts

Duncan Large
p. 27-45

Résumés

On a tendance à croire que le langage conceptuel et le langage poétique sont de nature très différente, sinon totalement opposés l’un à l’autre. Une approche déconstructionniste permet de rapprocher ces deux types de discours en mettant en évidence la métaphoricité fondamentale de tout langage ; cet article développe une telle approche afin de mettre en relation discours philosophique et discours poétique à partir de la question de la traduction et de la traductibilité. Il part du constat que, au cours de l’histoire, de semblables conclusions ont été tirées concernant la traduction de la poésie comme de la philosophie: il est couramment affirmé que l’une et l’autre sont «intraduisibles», et qu’elles nécessitent une expertise particulière de la part du traducteur. Cet article se focalise sur la philosophie et la poésie en tant que types particuliers d’utilisation de langue spécialisée, et il postule que la question de leur traduction nous aide à mettre en lumière tout à la fois leur spécificité et leurs points de convergence.

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Introduction: Translating Philosophy, Translating Poetry

  • 1 J. Rée, “The Translation of Philosophy”, p. 226.
  • 2 G. Steiner, After Babel, p. 255.

1Conceptual and poetic language are often assumed to be markedly different in nature, if not radically opposed to one another, but in this article I want to bridge the gap between the two and explore their affinities by focussing on questions of translation and translatability. I was initially drawn to such a comparison when I was occupied with the question of the translatability and untranslatability of philosophy. The question of untranslatability is a fundamentally philosophical question, so it is perhaps not surprising that in the literature on the subject philosophy itself has so often been singled out as the kind of writing that is particularly untranslatable. Now given the nature of philosophical material it is of course a truism that philosophy translation is a difficult business – that, as Jonathan Rée puts it, “of all the kinds of translation, none is trickier than the translation of philosophy”1. It is but a short step from perceiving that philosophy translation is difficult to claiming that philosophy is untranslatable, and indeed George Steiner warns that “so far as philosophy goes, problems of untranslatability strike at the heart of the whole philosophic enterprise”2. Claims for the untranslatability of philosophy go back at least as far as the German Romantics, where they emerge in the writings of Humboldt, Schleiermacher and their colleagues at the point in the development of nascent German nationalism where a concern with the specificity of German cultural traditions, and linguistic and literary traditions in particular, leads to speculation that the peculiar (eigenthümlich) “genius” of a language dooms any attempt at translating it to ultimate failure, and that conceptual language captures the essence of a worldview more than any other kind, so (at the very least) any translation of philosophy is going to be more approximate than for other kinds of language. This kind of argument will lead forward to figures like Walter Benjamin and Martin Heidegger in the twentieth century, and indeed to the radical relativism of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that separate languages encapsulate distinctive, individual, peculiar worldviews which are, at the deepest level, not mutually intelligible and hence, a fortiori, untranslatable.

  • 3 D. Large, “The Untranslatable in Philosophy”.
  • 4 J. Boswell, Boswell’s Life of Johnson, p. 36.
  • 5 A. Schopenhauer, “On Language and Words”, p. 33.

2I have already written about these matters in a chapter on the untranslatability of philosophy to which this article is intended as a follow-up3, for I have been struck by how often the claim of the specific untranslatability of philosophy echoes arguments that have been put forward about the untranslatability of poetry. It is a curious aspect of the history of translation theory that commentators have often been given to adjudicating a kind of perverse beauty contest which is periodically conducted to determine which text type or literary genre might count as the most untranslatable. The leading contenders are always philosophy, scripture (where the notion of untranslatability is ultimately not so much a metaphysical as a theological conception, relating to the ineffable status of the word of God), and, precisely, poetry. Indeed it is a trope of criticism that (as Robert Frost did not say) poetry is what gets lost in translation. In 1776 Samuel Johnson concurred with James Boswell that “Poetry, indeed, cannot be translated”4; in 1851, Schopenhauer opined in similarly apodictic fashion: “Poems cannot be translated; they can only be transposed, and that is always awkward”5. A century later, Heidegger remarks in his study Der Satz vom Grund (The Principle of Reason, 1955/56):

  • 6 M. Heidegger, The Principle of Reason, p. 97.

Translating and translating are not equivalents if in one instance what one is concerned with is a business letter and in another instance a poem. The former is translatable, the latter is not6.

Contemporaneous with Heidegger’s study is the 1959 essay by Roman Jakobson “On Linguistic Aspects of Translation”, where he peremptorily dismisses what he terms “the dogma of untranslatability” and counters with:

  • 7 R. Jakobson, “On Linguistic Aspects of Translation”, p. 158 sq.

All cognitive experience and its classification is conveyable in any existing language. […] No lack of grammatical device in the language translated into makes impossible a literal translation of the entire conceptual information contained in the original. […] Any assumption of ineffable or untranslatable cognitive data would be a contradiction in terms7.

Jakobson seems to be taking an eminently pragmatic, no-nonsense line here, but at the last he brings in poetry as the great exception to an argument which turns out retrospectively to have been crucially circumscribed, and which cannot be accounted for by his essentially information-theoretical framework of enquiry:

  • 8 Ibid., p. 160.

In poetry, verbal equations become a constructive principle of the text. […] The pun, or to use a more erudite, and perhaps more precise term – paronomasia, reigns over poetic art, and whether its rule is absolute or limited, poetry by definition is untranslatable. Only creative transposition is possible: either intralingual transposition – from one poetic shape into another, or interlingual transposition – from one language into another, or finally intersemiotic transposition – from one system of signs into another, e.g., from verbal art into music, dance, cinema, or painting8.

  • 9 L. Kelly, The True Interpreter, p. 216 sq.
  • 10 G. Steiner, After Babel, p. 49 (italics in the original).

3I do not want to go into great detail here about the relatively controversial question of untranslatability per se: suffice it to say that from these examples it should already be evident that whether or not you accept untranslatability as a category hinges on how much latitude you allow in your definition of what translation is. Louis Kelly argues that “Whether translation is possible or not, turns on the concept one has of fidelity”9; another way of looking at it is according to your understanding of the kind of equivalence of which translation is capable when it comes to these more challenging types of text, and the extent to which you are prepared to acknowledge with Jakobson that “equivalence in difference” is the name of the game. In other words, one person’s “creative transposition” is another person’s “translation”: you can easily box yourself into a purist corner if you misguidedly persist in defining translation as exact correspondence, as expressing “the same thing in a different language”, and find yourself looking around in vain for examples. You can counter that with George Steiner, arguing in After Babel that “inside or between languages, human communication equals translation10, but when a definition of translation is that universal it effectively shades into meaninglessness, since it acknowledges no meaningful distinction (no difference of kind) between translation, adaptation and rewriting; on Steiner’s model these are at best only differences of degree. Or to take another line, Lawrence Venuti argues in his latest book, Contra Instrumentalism:

  • 11 L. Venuti, Contra Instrumentalism, p. x.

stop asserting that any text is untranslatable.
start realizing that every text is translatable because every text can be interpreted11.

4Our bookshops may be heaving with popular linguistic presentations of so-called “untranslatable” words like tingo or hygge, but in the specialist literature, at least, our contemporary age has a more permissive and pragmatic take on untranslatability. Here is John Sallis bringing poetry and philosophy together precisely from this perspective, as he argues for the relative translatability of both:

  • 12 J. Sallis, On Translation, p. 84.

One can agree that most poetry and many philosophical texts are untranslatable if untranslatable means precisely not translatable without loss of signification, even perhaps very significant loss of signification. One can agree that such kinds of texts are untranslatable if untranslatable means that the translator will never succeed in changing nothing but the language, in effecting a pure transition from one language to the other. Yet translations there are, and though they may never be without loss, the loss and the reduction and distortion it can produce are not such as to disentitle these translations altogether. […] For the most part – and certainly in such exceptional instances – it is not a matter of untranslatability in an unconditional sense, as though any attempt at translation would inevitably fail to produce anything that could even be deemed a translation. Rather, in every instance it is a matter of a reexpression12.

  • 13 Cited in ibid.

5Sallis is proposing a kind of conditional untranslatability which effectively boils the term down to an expression of relative translation difficulty. Whether or not we ultimately think of “untranslatability” as a useful analytical category, though, what I am interested in here is the fact that philosophy and poetry have been brought together under its heading (i.e. however one defines the term, commentators have been clear that poetry and philosophy are particularly salient examples). Nor is Sallis alone in putting the two together in this way. He is taking his cue from thinkers in the German tradition like Schopenhauer – who as well as arguing for the untranslatability of poetry argues in the same essay “Ueber Sprache und Worte” that in order to understand concepts in a foreign language one cannot rely on translations and one is really obliged to learn that language – and Heidegger, who argues in the so-called “Spiegel-Gespräch”: “Thinking can no more be translated than can poetry”13.
I am not the first, then, to consider together the translation of philosophy and the translation of poetry, but I want now to ask a number of related questions about that relationship: what, if anything, does this parallelism or congruence (on the question of untranslatability) tell us? Specifically:
1) do the translation of philosophy and the translation of poetry have a special affinity not just in this regard but more generally? Do they deserve to be attributed a shared exceptionalism in other ways, too?
2) does the supposed commonality over untranslatability tell us something intrinsic about the nature of these two forms of language, or is the similarity merely contingent?
3) in what areas might the translation of poetry and the translation of philosophy
not be comparable?

6The remainder of this article falls into three sections, then, in an attempt to go at least some way towards answering these questions. I want next to consider what a comparison between philosophy translation and poetry translation can tell us about the respective distinguishing characteristics of the two practices and the two genres. Then I will get personal and consider who is doing the translating here, and for what purposes, before finally considering ways in which the translation is practised.

Philosophy and Poetry: Equally Untranslatable?

  • 14 B. Cassin (dir.), Vocabulaire européen des philosophies.
  • 15 B. Cassin (ed.), Dictionary of Untranslatables.

7Firstly let us examine in more depth what untranslatability claims tell us about philosophy, poetry and their translation. At this point it is high time to consider the project that has contributed more than any other to highlighting the issue of philosophy and untranslatability in recent years, namely Barbara Cassin’s monumental Vocabulaire européen des philosophies. Dictionnaire des intraduisibles14. A great deal has been written elsewhere about this wonderful book, which includes articles on some 4,000 philosophical terms and expressions and their (closest) equivalents in fifteen main languages. Of course the very notion of interlingual equivalents immediately gives the game away as far as Cassin’s conception of the key term “intraduisible” itself is concerned. She certainly does not take a hard line on untranslatability: hers is a kind of knowing, postmodern gesture, to include a large number of translations of supposedly untranslatable terms – and indeed in turn to sanction a raft of translations of the whole book, including the English version which appeared under Emily Apter’s editorship a decade after the French original, as Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon15. In Cassin’s Introduction (included in both French and English editions), she describes “untranslatables” as “symptoms of difference”:

  • 16 B. Cassin (ed./dir.), Dictionary of Untranslatables / Vocabulaire européen des philosophies, p. x (...)

To speak of untranslatables in no way implies that the terms in question, or the expressions, the syntactical or grammatical turns, are not and cannot be translated: the untranslatable is rather what one keeps on (not) translating [l’intraduisible, c’est plutôt ce qu’on ne cesse pas de (ne pas) traduire]16.

  • 17 See K. Davis, Deconstruction and Translation, p. 67.
  • 18 R. Rorty, “Philosophy as a Kind of Writing”.
  • 19 J. Derrida, “La mythologie blanche”; S. Kofman, Nietzsche et la métaphore.

8A special sense of “untranslatable” emerges here which I find extremely helpful. One might say that, as with Sallis, Cassin is also proposing a more pragmatic kind of “conditional untranslatability”. It clearly draws on Derrida’s understanding of translation as impossible but necessary, caught in a double bind17 – and the parenthetic “(ne pas)” is a highly Derridean gesture. One can go further, I think, for Cassin’s position betrays certain relativistic philosophical assumptions about non-fixed meaning, and certain assumptions about translation as an asymptotic process whose completion is endlessly deferred. In other words: Cassin’s is a knowing reprise of the Romantic position, but informed by a post-structuralist sensibility. The emphasis on the untranslatability of philosophy in more recent times arises out of a particular moment in the history of (continental) philosophy, specifically out of Derridean, post-structuralist claims concerning what Richard Rorty calls “philosophy as a kind of writing”18. What the Cassin project does is highlight what one might call the literariness of philosophy, and it is this move that allows philosophy and poetry to be aligned, for it highlights precisely what is poetic about philosophy, just as surely as when Derrida highlights the metaphoricity of philosophical enquiry in “La mythologie blanche” or when Sarah Kofman focuses on Nietzsche et la métaphore19.

9Now “philosophy” of course covers a very broad spectrum of text types (from Platonic dialogues to philosophical logic), but it is the great achievement of this post-structuralist line of enquiry, it seems to me, to establish that even what some philosophers have liked to think of as the most rigorously conceptual language is not absolutely distinct from metaphor and the other resources of poetry. On the other hand, clearly philosophers such as Derrida and Kofman, or the tradition that they are drawing on, from Plato to Hegel, Nietzsche and Heidegger, see themselves as consciously drawing on poetic resources and celebrating their use in philosophy rather than denigrating them and viewing them as some kind of guilty secret to be repressed in the history of philosophy. If we go back to Classical philosophy and e.g. Lucretius’s poem De rerum natura, then philosophy and poetry were one, anyway, before modern philosophy lost its way and became systematic, technical and professionalised (alienated itself from its poetic roots). All this is by way of saying that it is not surprising if the translation of philosophy and the translation of poetry have been allied, for (at least in this kind of example) the two are not very distinct in the first place. What Nietzsche et alii do is bring philosophy back to its poetic roots and draw attention to the fundamentally poetic (rhetorical) sense of philosophical language, bridging the age-old divide between philosophy and poetry, philosophy and rhetoric.

  • 20 F. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, p. 75.

10Where does this leave translation, then? It leaves us with a recognition that translators of (certain kinds of) philosophy and (certain kinds of) poetry face similar issues. Generally speaking, both philosophy and poetry court difficulty; they specialise in the art of indirection. Is a self-consciously metaphorical philosophy more difficult to translate than a less-metaphorical philosophy which places greater emphasis on rigidly (would-be univocally) defined concepts? The answer has to be a resounding “Yes!”. For one thing, technical terms are often actually easier to translate, for there are more often agreed one-to-one equivalences available in the dictionary, or one can simply import or loan-translate (as e.g. Cicero did when he was creating a philosophical vocabulary in Latin, or Kant when in an analogous position for German). Nietzsche, by contrast, uses remarkably few technical terms and at the other extreme composes a significant amount of actual philosophical poetry which he likes to append to his more traditionally philosophical works – such as “Scherz, List und Rache” (“Joke, Cunning and Revenge”), the “Prelude in German Rhymes” which precedes his text The Gay Science (1882) “proper”, or the “Lieder des Prinzen Vogelfrei” (“Songs of Prince Free-as-a-Bird”) which he included in the second edition of the same text (1887) as an appendix. Nietzsche published two freestanding volumes of poems (Idylls from Messina, Dithyrambs of Dionysus) and planned several more; then there is the work he considered his magnum opus, the quasi-Biblical Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883/85). In all his works, though, Nietzsche is exercising a fine literary sensibility, a rhetorical and stylistic awareness – and thereby posing considerable poetic problems for the translator. His day job as a classicist meant that he was giving lectures in Basel on ancient Greek prosody, so it is hardly surprising if he showed a concern for rhythm and metre in his own philosophical work. Nietzsche is a poet even when he is not writing poetry – in his exploitation of (often highly extended) metaphors, puns and plays on words, of ambiguity and polysemy; in his allusiveness, in the concentration and concision of his writing. As Nietzsche puts it in Twilight of the Idols, “it is my ambition to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a book – what everyone else does not say in a book”20.

  • 21 See D. Large, “On the Work of Philosopher-Translators”, p. 185.
  • 22 J. Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy”, p. 431. In turn this claim has been taken as a point of departure (...)

11The parallel between (the translation of) philosophy and poetry is obvious enough when we are dealing with such philosophical poetry or poetic philosophy. Likewise when we are dealing with philosophers translating poetry (e.g. Rousseau’s Tasso translations, Schelling’s Dante) or poets translating philosophy (Chaucer’s Boethius; Shelley’s translation of Plato’s Symposium, remarkably the first in English). On a more meta-level: I want to argue that in important ways, both philosophy and poetry are constituted by translation. If we continue with the Nietzsche example, many of the formal features of his philosophy are consciously borrowed from other traditions in order to get away from what he sees as the stultification of native German philosophical forms. Thus he prides himself on the apophthegm, but he is borrowing this from Sallust and the French moralistes; while the Zarathustra style is also borrowed from the Bible and pastiched from the Zend Avesta. In the case of philosophy more generally, so many of the key terms in the Western tradition are derived through translation (or borrowing) or loan-translation21. As Derrida puts it in “La pharmacie de Platon” (1972): “With this problem of translation we will thus be dealing with nothing less than the problem of the very passage into philosophy”22.

  • 23 D. Constantine, Poetry, p. 40.

12In the context of this article what I find particularly interesting about such borrowings is the similarity in this respect between philosophy and poetry, specifically the importation of poetic forms via translation. In the case of English poetry, this is most famously the case with the sonnet (imported into English by Wyatt and Surrey in the mid-sixteenth century and brought rapidly to a new height of expression by Shakespeare at the end of the century). But the list of verse forms imported into English poetry is very long – from earlier forms like the terza rima that Chaucer imported in his translation of Dante, or the (Pindaric) ode, the sestina, villanelle and heroic couplet, right up to the haiku. It is difficult in fact to find a verse form that has not been imported, and even blank verse is the product of Surrey’s translation of the unrhymed hexameters of Virgil’s Aeneid. Nor is the English tradition special in this regard; thus David Constantine writes that “German poets in the seventeenth century imported the Alexandrine from France via the Netherlands; and, more productively, in the latter part of the eighteenth, several verse forms and strophic forms out of Greek via Latin”23. Now neither philosophy nor poetry can lay claim to exclusive rights in this regard, and both form part of the much broader picture of what one might call literary traffic between traditions (which would include for example the essay as form, invented by Montaigne, translated by Florio into English, subsequently adopted by Emerson et alii), but I would argue that philosophy and poetry are notable for the enthusiasm with which they have sought to renew themselves formally through such translated innovation.

Apprentices and Experts: Strong Poets, Strong Philosophers

  • 24 See L. Venuti (ed.), “Introduction”; Ch. Lombez, La seconde profondeur.
  • 25 W. Barnstone, The Poetics of Translation, p. 271.

13Let us move on from formal and linguistic comparisons between poetry and philosophy translation to consider instead the more sociological question of who is doing the translating and for what purposes, for here again my earlier work unearthed points of comparison. What interests me here is the fact that many major poets – what one might call, after Harold Bloom, “strong poet-translators” – have attempted to overcome the difficulties inherent in the process of poetry translation24. Willis Barnstone singles out for praise the translations of Mary Herbert, Hölderlin, Pasternak, Rilke, Valéry, Lowell, Moore, Pound, Quasimodo and Bishop25, and one could easily add a string of other names, of poets such as Paul Celan, Joseph Brodsky, Yves Bonnefoy and Seamus Heaney who have risen to the heroic challenge, and whose translations have been the focus of frequent analysis. For poets such as this it is seen as a formative rite of passage to translate others’ poetry at some stage. Kenneth Rexroth waxes lyrical in his 1959 essay “The Poet as Translator” about the practical, self-educational benefits of translation to a poet learning his craft:

  • 26 K. Rexroth, “The Poet as Translator”, p. 49.

As Eliot, paraphrasing Dryden, has said, inspiration isn’t always at its peak. Today we demand practically unrelieved intensity in poetry. […] No poet ever could meet such a demand every day in the week. Translation however, provides us with plenty of poetic exercise on the highest level. It is the best way of keeping your tools sharp until the great job, the great moment, comes along. More important, it is an exercise of sympathy on the highest level. The writer who can project himself into the exaltation of another learns more than the craft of words. He learns the stuff of poetry. It is not just his prosody he keeps alert, it is his heart. The imagination must evoke, not just a vanished detail of experience, but the fullness of another human being26.

  • 27 D. Constantine, Poetry, p. 38.

14David Constantine puts it more succinctly: “translation can help a poet into his own voice and, doing so, can further the making of a national literature”27. Yet there has been no similar focus on major philosophers who have translated works of philosophy; indeed, the category of the philosopher-translator does not really exist in the same way that terms such as “poet-translator” and “author-translator” have gained currency in recent times.

  • 28 For more detail on the examples in this paragraph, see D. Large, “On the Work of Philosopher-Tran (...)
  • 29 A. Compagnon, “Montaigne”, p. 37.

15In my earlier chapter “On the Work of Philosopher-Translators”, then, I was keen to establish and explore this category, pointing out how often philosophers have translated other philosophers in order to familiarise themselves either with a particular precursor or with a whole tradition (e.g. twentieth-century French phenomenologists translating Husserl, from Lévinas and Ricœur to Derrida, Suzanne Bachelard and Françoise Dastur)28. In cases such as these, translation has proved an invaluable aid to the close study of philosophical precursors, and generally speaking philosophers – like their poet-translator cousins – have chosen to translate other philosophers in whom they had a particular interest, out of a sense of affinity and as an act of homage. Again as with poets in formation, there is a long tradition of philosopher-translators translating other philosophers at the beginning of their careers in order to develop their ideas and style, for example Montaigne translating Raimond Sebond from Latin into French (which Antoine Compagnon refers to as his “apprentissage par la traduction”29), or Diderot whose French version of Shaftesbury’s Inquiry Concerning Virtue and Merit (1745) proved a launching-pad for his own aesthetics. Women philosopher-translators, in particular, have taken this route (e.g. Elizabeth Anscombe translating Wittgenstein, Seyla Benhabib translating Habermas, or Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s version of Derrida’s Of Grammatology, to cite three twentieth-century examples). Another sub-category of philosophy translators worth highlighting here is the self-translators: again, this has been a significant category in the history of philosophy and, I would argue, every bit as important as self-translation in poetry (from Chaucer to Brodsky). In the early modern period philosophers such as Bacon, Hobbes, Descartes and Spinoza often translated Latin-language works into their respective vernaculars (and vice-versa), and this practice persisted as late as Schopenhauer and Nietzsche in the nineteenth century, while philosophers such as Hannah Arendt in the twentieth century, displaced into exile, faced the need to translate their work so as to find a readership (and indeed sell some books and make a living) in their new culture.

16The frequency of self-translation in philosophy and poetry is a product of the difficulty of the material and the sense of a required level of expertise. One presumes that no-one will understand the source text materials better than the person who produced them. By extension, it can be expected that the chief advantage of having a philosophical work translated by another major philosopher will be the maximal avoidance of misunderstanding. However, one would also expect that, as with “strong” poets translating their predecessors, major philosophers would be more tempted than other translators (including other, less inventive philosopher-translators) to take liberties in the course of their translation work, editing, interpreting and responding as they go. After all, more or less by definition, major philosophers are such because they are more than averagely creative.

17There is a striking parallelism between philosophy and poetry translation in respect of this shared anxiety expressed over the liberties that “strong translators” might take. What happens when the apprentices who are learning their trade (whether poetical or philosophical) by translating get rather good at it? Does there come a point where one can be too good a philosopher (or too good a poet) to be permitted to translate? That is a curious way of formulating the question, but it arises out of the unease that many have expressed with “strong poets” or “strong philosophers” translating (particularly in the historical period when translation itself was frowned on as an ancillary activity not worthy of a talented writer, to say nothing of a translator of genius). Is it a problem when the translator is too creative with a translation? Translation theory has often viewed it as such. From the point of view of poetry translation, the most striking example here is the reception granted Ezra Pound, especially his Homage to Sextus Propertius. As J. P. Sullivan reports:

  • 30 J. P. Sullivan, “The Poet as Translator”, p. 462.

When the first four sections of the Homage to Sextus Propertius appeared in Harriet Monroe’s Poetry in 1919, W. G. Hale of the University of Chicago wrote a letter to the editor in which he listed a selection out of the several score errors of translation he claimed to have found in the Homage. He also accused Pound of perverting “the flavor of a consciously artistic, almost academic, original” and concluded: “If Mr. Pound were a professor of Latin, there would be nothing left for him but suicide”30.

Conclusion

18So far I have been making a case for parallels between translating poetry and translating philosophy, but I want to conclude by highlighting some of the obvious differences, and the Pound example throws up one, the question of relay translation. As Rexroth explains with reference to Pound’s 1915 book Cathay:

  • 31 .K. Rexroth, “The Poet as Translator”, p. 46.

The greatest translators of Chinese, Judith Gautier, Klabund, Pound, knew less than nothing of Chinese when they did their best translations. […] Pound worked from the mss. of Fenollosa, who was himself badly informed by two Japanese whose knowledge of Chinese was already out of date, hopelessly Japonified for even the Japan of their day31.

  • 32 See M. Heidegger, Being and Time; I. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason; F. Nietzsche, Unpublished Fra (...)
  • 33 K. Nishitani, The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism.

19Collaborative translation certainly exists in philosophy translation, and has produced notable successes – such as John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson’s 1962 version of Heidegger’s Being and Time, Paul Guyer and Allen Wood’s more recent translation of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason for “The Cambridge Edition of the Works”, or Paul Loeb and David Tinsley’s recent translation of a volume of Nietzsche Nachlass notes in the Stanford University Press “Complete Works” series32. These translation teams usually contribute equally to the outcome (perhaps sharing philosophical and linguistic expertise); even when translating works into English from outside the Western tradition, the collaborative model in philosophy is something like the Anglo-American philosopher Graeme Parkes (who has good Japanese) collaborating with his Japanese wife Setsuko Aihara on the translation of Keiji Nishitani’s The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism33. I was surprised when another friend was commissioned to translate a major Italian-language work on Nietzsche’s philosophy despite the fact that he did not speak Italian, but my surprise was all the greater when he told me that the publisher was happy for him to do the translation from the already-existing French version. This was twenty years ago, but the translation was subsequently taken up by a major US university press and is still in print. This constitutes the exception to the rule, though, since it is rare for a philosophy translator not to be conversant with the source language, and indeed publishers will normally insist that they be.

20Perhaps the most salient difference between philosophy and poetry translation relates to the epistemic content of the philosophy: because of the nature of the subject matter, philosophical translators have tended to prioritise terminological precision and consistency above all else. Their translations, in other words, have tended to be conservative and risk-averse. Partly this has to do with the high percentage of career academics who have translated philosophy (as opposed to jobbing literary translators) – and, for that matter, the academic milieu of reception for which they were translating (to be read in university classes, published by university presses). But Venuti counters that there is nothing pre-ordained about this: it is a contingent feature of the academic and publishing landscape, not a necessary one. I referred above to the perceived danger that a strong translator might produce an excessively creative translation of a work of philosophy, but is that actually a danger? Can we not, instead, invert the perspective (in good Nietzschean fashion) and consider what benefits it has brought to philosophy and to poetry to have wonderful poets and philosophers willing to enrich and enhance native traditions through importing in this way? That is certainly Venuti’s view, and his essay on philosophy translation included in The Scandals of Translation (1998) concludes with a rallying cry for more adventurous translation styles in philosophy:

  • 34 L. Venuti, “Philosophy”, p. 122.

The translation of philosophical texts can be improved, and the issue of translation productively introduced in philosophical interpretation, if translators take a more experimental approach to their work34.

One does not have to look far for the alternative model that he has in mind, and he spells this out in 2011 in his introduction to the special issue of Translation Studies that he edited on poetry translation:

  • 35 L. Venuti (ed.), “Introduction”, p. 127.

Released from the constraint to turn a profit, poetry translation is more likely to encourage experimental strategies that can reveal what is unique about translation as a linguistic and cultural practice35.

21In the terms of his more recent work, philosophy translations have tended to be highly “instrumental” in their concern to convey (i.e. find a target language equivalent for) the epistemic import of the philosophy, but there is absolutely no reason for Venuti why philosophy translation should not be more “hermeneutic”. In other words, for Venuti (in a view I very much support), philosophy translation could do with being more like poetry translation where it isn’t already. Philosophy translators should learn from and seek to emulate poetry translators more. Just as, with Rorty, philosophy needs to be viewed as a kind of writing, so translation needs to be viewed as a kind of creative writing. This is the ultimate lesson of poetry translation for philosophy translation. We might say, following Kant, that the watchword of the philosophy translator should become “transferre aude!” Following Nietzsche, perhaps the philosophy translator just needs to live a bit more dangerously?

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Bibliographie

Barnstone, Willis, The Poetics of Translation: History, Theory, Practice, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1993.

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Notes

1 J. Rée, “The Translation of Philosophy”, p. 226.

2 G. Steiner, After Babel, p. 255.

3 D. Large, “The Untranslatable in Philosophy”.

4 J. Boswell, Boswell’s Life of Johnson, p. 36.

5 A. Schopenhauer, “On Language and Words”, p. 33.

6 M. Heidegger, The Principle of Reason, p. 97.

7 R. Jakobson, “On Linguistic Aspects of Translation”, p. 158 sq.

8 Ibid., p. 160.

9 L. Kelly, The True Interpreter, p. 216 sq.

10 G. Steiner, After Babel, p. 49 (italics in the original).

11 L. Venuti, Contra Instrumentalism, p. x.

12 J. Sallis, On Translation, p. 84.

13 Cited in ibid.

14 B. Cassin (dir.), Vocabulaire européen des philosophies.

15 B. Cassin (ed.), Dictionary of Untranslatables.

16 B. Cassin (ed./dir.), Dictionary of Untranslatables / Vocabulaire européen des philosophies, p. xvii.

17 See K. Davis, Deconstruction and Translation, p. 67.

18 R. Rorty, “Philosophy as a Kind of Writing”.

19 J. Derrida, “La mythologie blanche”; S. Kofman, Nietzsche et la métaphore.

20 F. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, p. 75.

21 See D. Large, “On the Work of Philosopher-Translators”, p. 185.

22 J. Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy”, p. 431. In turn this claim has been taken as a point of departure by later commentators. Cf. A. Benjamin, Translation and the Nature of Philosophy; M. Crépon, “Deconstruction and Translation”; P. Kamuf, “Passing Strange”.

23 D. Constantine, Poetry, p. 40.

24 See L. Venuti (ed.), “Introduction”; Ch. Lombez, La seconde profondeur.

25 W. Barnstone, The Poetics of Translation, p. 271.

26 K. Rexroth, “The Poet as Translator”, p. 49.

27 D. Constantine, Poetry, p. 38.

28 For more detail on the examples in this paragraph, see D. Large, “On the Work of Philosopher-Translators”.

29 A. Compagnon, “Montaigne”, p. 37.

30 J. P. Sullivan, “The Poet as Translator”, p. 462.

31 .K. Rexroth, “The Poet as Translator”, p. 46.

32 See M. Heidegger, Being and Time; I. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason; F. Nietzsche, Unpublished Fragments from the Period of “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”.

33 K. Nishitani, The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism.

34 L. Venuti, “Philosophy”, p. 122.

35 L. Venuti (ed.), “Introduction”, p. 127.

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Duncan Large, « Translating Philosophy, Translating Poetry: Comparisons and Contrasts »Études de lettres, 318 | 2022, 27-45.

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Duncan Large, « Translating Philosophy, Translating Poetry: Comparisons and Contrasts »Études de lettres [En ligne], 318 | 2022, mis en ligne le 05 juin 2023, consulté le 17 février 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/edl/3898 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/edl.3898

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Duncan Large

University of East Anglia

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