(What follows is adapted from - and translated from - my participation in two roundtable discussions on translation: "Jacques Derrida et ses traducteurs," 15e Assises de la Traduction Littéraire, Arles, 15 November 1998, with Jacques Derrida, Vanghélis Bitsoris, Peggy Kamuf, Michael Naas, Cristina de Peretti, Paco Vidarte, Geoff Bennington, Mikhaïl Maiatsky, and Astra Skrabane; and "Traduire la francophonie," Congrès mondial du Conseil international d'études francophones, Sousse, Tunisia, 29 May 2000, with Sherry Simon, Farid Zahi, Karim Traoré and Françoise Kourilsky.)
Promets-le: qu'elle se défigure, transfigure ou indétermine en son port, et tu entendras sous ce mot la rive du départ aussi bien que le référent vers lequel une translation se porte.
(Che cos'è la poesia)
I find myself, not so much a hedgehog on the autoroute of Che cos'è la poesia, as driving on one of those three-lane French provincial national roads lined with poplar trees, whose middle lane can be used by overtaking cars travelling in either direction. It is in such a no man's land that translation takes place, and my relation to it is entirely accidental. Accidental yet personal, for perhaps what we call accidents, those things that befall us - birthdays, encounters, falling in love, coups de foudre, loss, separation, death - are in fact the experiences in which we are the most personally implicated. Hence, and given the personal circumstance that occasions, becomes the case or fall for these remarks, namely Jacques Derrida's 70th birthday, I ask the reader to forgive and forbear the personal tone and references of much of what follows by means of which I will recount, in two words, hurriedly and hesitantly, something of my accidental relation to translation.
I don't have the vocation of translator. If two texts by Derrida have appeared in English in my translation it is because of a request in one case (from the editors of Art & Text for Droit de regards) and a form of necessity in the other (Derrida's proposal to give a chapter of Donner la mort as a lecture when I invited him to my institution). However, such accidents derive from the fact that I have for a long time been a reader and student of Derrida's work. His texts invariably deal with the matter of translation, perhaps more than anything else. For all his declaring himself to be indisputably monolingual1 he persistently demonstrates that there is no text without commentary, no commentary without translation, no translation without commentary. His texts often lean in the direction of translation, are written en route to translation.2 However, the translation towards which his texts are inclined, in whose direction they move or are carried along, is always an impossible yet necessary translation, necessary because impossible, possible because impossible, such that before all else translation is already (always) required within that aporetic and somewhat fraught relation. By attempting it one ventures into that sort of risk, with traffic and heavy transports in both directions, one must negotiate such a hasardous terrain along the solid or interrupted lines of black and white, print as macadam, the abrupt turns and disputed priorities within the rigid confines of a treelined road or squarely cut page.
I have been a reader and student of Derrida's work for a long time but not for so very long. Derrida had already reached the age I now have before I began reading him; had already spent more than ten years publishing the extraordinary work that we know, starting with Of Grammatology and up to and including La Vérité en peinture. When he burst onto the scene in the mid- to late-sixties I was finishing highschool and was about to appreciate the force of an untranslatably Greek and Latin preposition, pro-, then being used - this was the context that dated it precisely and brought it home to me - to describe the students rioting in Paris. My local provincial newspaper had them tagged them as "pro-Maoist." Derrida, as he has told us, was active in those events but also "on [his] guard, even worried in the face of a certain cult of spontaneity" that characterised them.3 Some thirty-two years have now passed to bring us to the happy event of his seventieth birthday. I have spent well over half of those years as a reader and student of his work, bringing me to this point, these two words pro-Derrida. My two words are suspended in the tension of that preposition as it has developed from its varied Greek and Latin senses and their derivations and corruptions, alternately meaning, on the one hand, "for" in the sense of "tending towards," "coming from a position behind," and ultimately "on behalf of"; and, on the other hand, "before," "forward," "in front of," "standing in for." Pro- is a preposition uncertain of its position, that unsettles positionalities. As I write on this date, looking forward to the celebration of 15 July 2000, and in the company of eminent colleagues and cherished friends, all writing "for/pour" Jacques Derrida, the preposition translates the anxiety of my postposition, the breathless game of catch-up that for some twenty years now been regulating my relation to his work, that has me doubting I will ever reach it, find myself in its vicinity. It translates that passage or movement across a divide that I have elsewhere described, as always after Derrida, as mourning and as haunting4 a passage that should here be translated as that of translation itself, the work of propositioning by means of which one attempts to bear a text from one language into another.
My two words pro-Derrida are but two hurried steps taken, on the eve of an anniversary, in the direction of his work. My first, then, derives from the fact that I do not have the vocation of a translator but have for some time been a reader and student of his work, and that like any reader of Derrida, I would maintain, I find myself in a situation of provocation with respect to his work. Provocation is my first word. The text by Derrida that first had me wanting to write on it in any serious way - and indeed it became the first that I ever tried to translate, since when I wrote (in English) on it it had only recently appeared in French - provokes the reader in the most explicit manner. I refer to the "Envois" of The Post Card and its division of addressees between tu and vous, its play of apostrophe, shared or not shared confidences, and the repeated discussion of stake-raising (surenchère) and flimflam (superchérie) in the context of auctions and bonfires. As I was led to suggest at the time it is a text that comes as if with its own matchbook, and when I came back to it more than a decade later I was still wrestling with the translation of its most discreet yet monumental wagers, its blank spaces and punctuation marks.5 Whenever one reads Derrida there occurs this call to respond, this invitation or incitation to the reader that is a provocation in the most ordinary sense of that word.
But there is also in Derrida a provocation of another type. It derives from his explaining that every utterance takes place as a transfer across a void, over an abyss of non-sense, misunderstanding, and ambiguity, or more precisely that as each and every utterance takes place and communicates, it also fails to take place or communicate by transiting through, and sometimes, or indeed structurally, never emerging from that void. The abyss forms part of the structure that opens or inaugurates utterance, which thus occurs as a rupture with respect to itself. This aporia of the utterance has been developed by Derrida in various paradoxical or logically incompatible formulations such as those of Monolingualism of the Other ("I only have one language; it is not mine" or "We only ever speak one language / We never speak only one language") or of The Ear of the Other in which the origin of language is located, via the Babel myth, as the plurality of language(s) and the necessity of translation.6 This is recounted as God's injunction, or provocation, to the Shems to translate the inalienable singularity of his name, even though his name is Babel or confusion. The word is therefore born into that sort of rupture, dispossession or exappopriation; the speaking voice of the enunciating subject and the language she speaks are required to negotiate with that sort of alienation, the force of a becoming-foreign. Even to the simple extent that one borrows rather than invents or possesses the language one speaks, the voice one uses must cede to the tongue of an other. Another voice speaking for you, in a language that can never be utterly familiar. From this point of view translation will never simply be something that comes to a text - or to any utterance whatsoever - as the result of an accident or a decision to have it read in another language; the text will always already be on the way to the foreignness of another language, it will begin by opening itself to the perspective of, or the demand for a translation. As Derrida says "the original is indebted a priori to the translation."7 Or indeed to a reading, a commentary, or any other sort of transposition or recontextualisation. In this way the text will structurally require another (text, commentary, language) to speak in its name, for it, on behalf of its own voice: it will be such a pro-vocalisation, such a pro-vocation. End first word.
I do not have any thesis to offer on translation other than the theoretical generality derived from Derrida that I have just outlined. In the event I find translating to be a rather mechanical operation: one searches and one finds. On the other hand, it seems most successful when its programmatic imperatives - finding the words and syntax that best convey the sense of the original - remain open or hospitable to the surprise or invention that comes from the other, the original language surprising the host language or vice versa. For my second word, instead of a thesis on translation I would emphasize the surprise enacted upon the textual corpus by this invention of the other.
In English, as we know, the word "translation" is derived from that most irregular of Latin verbs, ferre (fero, ferre, tuli, latum), meaning "to bear." It involves a slightly different form of transfer or transport from the French traduction whose pulling or drawing (ducere) is of the toytrain, draughthorse or tractor-trailer variety. Translation suggests a closer relation to the body that can describe the fact of one's bearing or borrowing one's own language and utterances as an otherness within, as an alterity that forms part of one's own body. By means of language my body articulates with and translates to what it outside it - another body, the world - but in such an intimate way as to be indistinguishably inside or outside. The other body I communicate with uses the "same" words as I do, so they cannot be "mine," they cannot be said to form part of my (corporeal) identity, yet those words have emanated from my body and without them my identity is difficult if not impossible to define. From this point of view the tongue that one speaks is an other that one bears; not surprisingly, the metonymies by which the body names language - tongue, lip (Hebrew) - attempt to convey both corporeal intimacy and articulation with the outside.
I have exploited at great length this rupture in corporeal integrity that is the body's carrying or wearing, not to say assimilating an otherness. In order to account for such an internal exteriorisation, which is also a technologisation of the body, I have had recourse to the term "prosthesis." Here, in place of a thesis on translation I offer it again as my second word. Prosthesis was undoubtedly not the form of "afterlife" Benjamin had in mind for the "transformation" that he held to take place via translation, imbued as his discourse is with an organist or transcendentalist conception of the text. But in spite of that he accepted that "the continued life of works of art [is] far easier to recognise than the continual life of animal species," thereby ascribing to the afterlife that is translation a supplemental materiality, an artificial adjunctionality that we could rightly call prosthetic. It was clear to Benjamin that the textual corpus lives on by having other bodies of text added to it, though he would probably not intend that those adjunctions disturb the integrity of the original. That, however, is precisely what prostheticity presumes.
However, before coming to refer to a wooden leg or any similar artificial supplement to the body, prosthesis seeks to describe precisely the differential transfer or articulation by means of which the body is disturbed or problematised in its supposed self-intactness; it refers to that transfer-out -of-itself that is the becoming translation of the original, supposedly intact "first" body. As the experience of language shows, it is as if one carries or transfers one's detachable bodily effects into a relation with the outside. From this point of view prosthesis is before anything else a matter of trans-lation. Allow me to quote from the opening pages:
The significance and effect of transfer is not something subsequent to a given prosthesis but rather what occurs at its beginning, as its beginning. Prosthesis occurs as a rapid transfer. The extreme form of that transfer is to be developed out of the sense of beginning that this prosthesis finds in . . . the necessity of . . . translation. . . . we reach the extreme sense of transfer or translation as more precisely ablation, the idea of a transfer across and into nothingness, a carryover that is a carrying off, the event of radical loss or irretrievability. . . . it is necessarily a transfer into otherness, articulated through the radical alterity of ablation as loss of integrity. And this otherness is mediated through the body, works through the operation of a transitive verb - movere, ferre - signifying first of all something carried by the body. (Prosthesis, 12-13)
Irretrievability is an idea common to most traditional conceptions of translation: "something gets lost" in it, traddure/tradire and so on. But the structural ablation that is a constitutive element of prosthesis serves to emphasize the originariness of that loss, lack or default, the originary prostheticity which returns us to the fact of their being no intact original untouched by translation. As prosthesis is described above as the "rapid transfer" to alterity before being the artificial object that is supposedly transferred to, so must it be understood that the transfer or translation-effect is always already in process in the origin itself. In the beginning was translation, the body in/as transfer.9
A literal staging of these effects takes place in Derrida's Post Card. It is the pretext for and enacting of the provocation which, I claimed earlier, structures the "Envois." I refer to the blank spaces of 52 characters that, according to the narrator, stand in, like some prosthetic absence, for the personal passages excised from the letters published there. The blanks are thus parallel to the apostrophes through which the narration switches or transfers from the generality of the vous to the particularity of a singular and familiar tu. Or, if you wish, there is a progressive "privatisation," that also functions as an "abyssalisation" of the text, from vous to tu and then to blank space. The blank spaces, representing the most intimate moments of the correspondence, should be read as most metonymic with the body of the narrator, most intimately connected to his/her tongue. Punctuating the textual body with emptiness they nevertheless function as (stand-ins for) the absent - because transferred and translated - body of the narrator. But because the spaces are mechanically, even arithmetically determined, the 52 characters being automatically imposed irrespective of the length of the passage excised, it can also be argued that the textual corpus, and hence also the narrator's body, become progressively technologised and prosthetised. At least that is the conclusion I arrived at in "Geneva, 1978," in attempting, literally, to translate those gaps in the text, to account for how a predetermined blank space in one language would be rendered in another language, especially once a particular blank space was found to be haunted by spectral punctuation marks, not just the apostrophe extrapolated from the reference to the rhetorical practice that informed the recourse to tu, but a particular parenthetical crochet that disappears from the letter of 20 April 1978, thereby opening the text to an abyss of supplementarity and digressivity, disseminating textual and narratorial bodies, attaching to them any number of contrivances or discursive contraptions.10
If prosthesis begins with translation, it necessarily develops as an exercise in rhetoric or extends as an experiment with bilingualism. The body that discovers language as its own otherness, that speaks only one language that is not its own, is, at the very least, structurally bilingual. However, lacking both the native competence of anything but anglophonia and the vocation of translation, I could only adopt forms of bilingualism as prosthetic contrivances, give myself the pretense of writing fiction as well as criticism, autobiography as well as theory, nostalgia as well as logic, French as well as English; and then, more contrived still, anecdotal analysis, signatory axiomatics, fluid rigour, gallic phlegm, and so on. Accidental as is my relation to translation so any bilingualism I would lay claim to is entirely artificial. And yet, more natural than my fascination with matters linguistic I cannot imagine. Exceeding the borders of its own self-definition this fascination, experientially bound, cognitively unbound, or vice versa, can only be, once more, a translation. And like a translation in the ordinary sense: it is entirely natural to presume that a Japanese or Arabic speaker can understand Derrida's idea of differance as well as a French speaker; but the transcriptions that the French word will give rise to in either of those languages will never avoid contrivance. The pro-vocation that is the experience of translation involves such a prosthesis.
To conclude let me invoke or adopt those credentials that originate in the absence of credentials, begging the indulgence of a rapid transfer of faith that would clear the passage to the artificial accident or the accidental artifice of a prosthetic bilingualism that finds me here, hurriedly and hesitantly, provoking beyond what I can lay claim to a competence in or any control over, proffering two words via translation pro-Derrida.
End word two and, to end, two languages and two words, happybirthday jacquesderrida.
1 Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other. Trans. Patrick Mensah. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996, 1.
2 Starting, for example, with "Living On / Borderlines." Trans. Sam Weber, in H. Bloom, ed., Deconstruction and Criticism. New York: Seabury Press, 1979.
3 "A 'Madness' Must Watch Over Thinking." Points. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995, 347.
4 See my "Re: Mourning / Objet: Deuil," Tekhnema 4 (1998).
5 See my "Post/Card/Match/Book/Envois/Derrida," Substance 43 (1984), and "Geneva, 1978" in Prosthesis. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995.
6 Monolingualism, 1, 7; The Ear of the Other. Ed. Christie V. McDonald. Trans. Avital Ronell and Peggy Kamuf. New York: Schocken Books, 1985, 98-102.
7 Ear of the Other, 152.
8 Walter Benjamin, "The Task of the Translator." In Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken Books, 1968, 71.
9 In the pages from which the cited passage is drawn the origin of prosthesis is "identified" as a phantom pain, or, more precisely, indistinguishably a phantom pain and the utterance that accompanies it. The origin is thus the echo or haunting of a lost origin. See Prosthesis, 1-14.
10 See Prosthesis, 288-98.