I only claimed to offer a crib in my last post, not a translation. And yet...
In his translator's note to Jacques Derrida's Archive Fever (Mal d'archive), Eric Prenowitz makes a cheeky claim: Being the reader of a translation is like being a little Jewish baby boy receiving his circumcision.
Or at least, if the translation is from a language that you can't read. Because, as Derrida points out in the book (which, it turns out, is as much about Freud's Jewishness and his circumcision as it is about archives), the circumcision is contract entered into by someone who is not able to sign his name, who doesn't have the ability to evaluate what he's getting into. Likewise when you read a translation, "you read something you cannot read, in any case something you will not have read once you are done reading. Like an infant who can neither comprehend nor respond." (106) And yet there is something authoritative or authoritarian about the translator, foisting this upon you...
Actually, you know what? This analogy is pushy, strained, and flawed, and it places the translator in the role of G-d in an egregiously tacky way. We had a fun few seconds with it, but maybe let's pretend this never happened. (Even though, you who perhaps have read the book will notice, I am archiving that it did happen. Teehee!)
Labels: Eric Prenowitz, Jacques Derrida, Sigmund Freud, translation
I can't get enough of translators' notes. My most recent favorite is Maureen Freely's note on her translation of Orhan Pamuk's THE BLACK BOOK. (I won't make a pun that Maureen "freely" translated Orhan's words.) Speaking of Orhan Pamuk, he opens his short novel THE WHITE CASTLE with a mistranslation:
To imagine that a person who intrigues us has access to a way of life unknown and all the more attractive for its mystery, to believe that we will begin to live only through the love of that person—what else is this but the birth of great passion?
—Marcel Proust, from the mistranslation of Y.K. Karaosmanoglu
Yes. Let's pretend it didn't happen. :-)