Foucault in English

Abstract

It is something of a cliché to affirm that translations into English are almost always domestications, privileging fluency and naturalness over fidelity to the source text. However, back in the 1970s, many of Michel Foucault’s major texts, which were introduced to the English-speaking public for the first time through Alan Sheridan Smith’s translations for Tavistock Publications, were not domesticated at all. Despite the fact that the originals are grounded in a non-empiricist theory of knowledge and use terms drawn from a universe of discourse that would have been completely alien in the English-speaking world, these translations closely follow the patterns of the French, with few or no concessions to the target reader’s knowledge and expectations. This paper analyses passages from Sheridan Smith’s English translations ofLes Mots et les chosesandL’Archéologie du savoirin order to discuss the long-term effects of this translation strategy. It then goes on to compare and assess two very different translations of Foucault’s lectureL’ Ordre du discours(1970), an early one by Rupert Swyer(1971), which brings the text to the English reader, and a later one byIan McLeod (1981), which obliges the reader to go to the text. The paper concludes by reiterating the need for Anglophone academic culture to open up to foreign perspectives, and suggests, following Goethe (Book of West and East,1819) that new epistemes are best introduced gradually in order to avoid alienating or confusing a public that might not be ready for them.