Heidegger and the Aporia: Translation and Cultural Authenticity

Abstract

The paper looks at the significance of practices of cultural translation in contested representations such as those created by the Troubles. Cultural translation – paradigmatically, the textual practices of literary translation – resists the ‘grain’ of discursive conventions. Such conventions define discourses – viewpoints and ways of thinking – against each other. The narratives of Northern Irish history which underpin the Troubles work in just this way: the mechanism which underlies their conflict is discursive rather than simply circumstantial. This mechanism is uncovered by postcolonial critiques of cultural resistance but also, at the level of language, by Heidegger and his successors; when they suggest that language, since it necessarily fails to re‐present the world, is to a degree arbitrary. However between the local ‘truth’ of an account, and the necessary compromises of the encounter with the Other, an aporia opens: the abyss of horror and incomprehension which surrounds the loss of discursive solipsism. This imagined aporia is closed by transgressive acts of listening. In the North of Ireland, these acts of attention must transgress traditional discursive loyalties. Cultural translation requires active attention in order to resist the conservative forces of discursive violence. Literary translation is a particularly useful paradigm of this attention because of the ‘thickness’ of detail it requires we recognise in an ‘Other’ discourse.