Event Date 25 – 26 January 2012
The Modelling Studio
Dorich House Museum, Kingston University
Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy
Presents:
Transdisciplinarity and the Humanities: Problems, Methods, Histories, Concepts
2011–2013 (AHRC 914469)
Workshop 1
From Science and Technology Studies to the Humanities:
The State of the Field & The Concept of ‘Problem’
Professor Emily Apter (New York)
‘Doing Things with Untranslatables’ : The Problem of Translation and Untranslatability in the Comparative Humanities
Translation—its practice, the institutions that support it, and increasingly the theory of translation—is at the heart of a number of current disciplinary debates. These include rather heated polemics on the difference between World and Comparative literature; on the impact of globalization on university culture; on the purchase of philosophy in literary studies, and of linguistically-oriented approaches within philosophy. The number of publications devoted to the practices and theory of translation has increased dramatically in the past decade. The trickle of ‘Translation Studies’ readers, anthologies, and conferences has become something else – a disorganized stream, perhaps. The very number and variety of works suggests the combination of excitement and disaggregation characteristic of an emerging discipline.
There are substantive historical reasons for this increased interest. The Cold War’s distribution of political and economic power into recognizable and antagonistic blocs served to focus intellectual attention on linguistic and cultural blocs, to the profit of a largely European worldview, and to the detriment of a more fragmentary and variegated cultural landscape, always latent but patent and increasingly important since 1989. In every respect, translation has taken center stage since the fall of the Berlin wall. This may seem paradoxical, given the global reach English has achieved in commerce, politics and the academy. In step with this globalization of English, however, an increasing need is felt, in each domain, to attend to particular cultures, regions or markets: India and South East Asia; China; Latin America; and of course the Arab world, whose relations to what can no longer be called ‘the West’ were manifestly disregarded in the Cold War era.
Translation, from trans-latio, the old word for imperial as well as linguistic movement or displacement, is the key term in this new landscape. How does a culture or a work, specific to a location or a time, travel? What is the relation of so-called peripheral cultures to metropolitan ones? How do increased mobility and increased ease of communication change our objects of study? Who translates, why, to what ends? Are there un-translatable terms, concepts, or problems? If so, what challenges and opportunities do these classes of terms pose and provide to scholars?
Within translation studies a nodal field that might be called ‘untranslatability studies’ has gained traction recently. It criticizes models of ‘world literature’ (developed by Moretti, Casanova, and Damrosch among others) on the grounds that they presume translatability as a given. The result has been a practice that accounts insufficiently for incommensurability or the untranslatable within literary heuristics. The notion of an Untranslatable takes its cue from the subtitle of a project published in France as the Vocabulaire européen des philosophies: Dictionnaire des Intraduisibles [The Vocabulary of European Philosophies: A Dictionary of Untranslatables]. In conceptualizing the project, Barbara Cassin was committed to activating philosophy as both medium and life-form. Here, the Untranslatable refers to a term that has, historically, been left untranslated as it transferred from language to language (as in the examples of Polis, Begriff, Praxis, Aufheben, Mimesis, Feeling, Lieu Commun, Logos, Matter of Fact), or that has been constantly subject to mistranslation and retranslation (especially evident in such entries as Subject, Translation, World, Truth, Sense, Sovereignty, and Categories). The Untranslatable can sometimes be defined as an intractable nub of semantic opacity – as something stubbornly resistant to equivalency and substitution. It has affinities with what Wittgenstein termed the Unspeakable. It is a boundary line of the sacred, that issues the edict “Do not translate here! Thou shalt not translate me!” And it is arguably a convergence point where the void of meaning in one language finds its counterpart in another. The Untranslatable challenges the soft international diplomacy model of translation, traditionally defined by the desire to screen out disagreement and avoid direct encounters with insecurable knowledge. I will argue, then, that ‘doing things with Untranslatables’ has become a new kind of theoretical practice and pedagogy in the transdisciplinary humanities.
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