Introduction Knowing Oneself, Untranslatably: Paradoxes of Authenticity in an Age of Globalisation

Dionysios Kapsaskis

doi:10.12681/syn.17280

Abstract

No abstract (available).

Highlights

Knowing Oneself, Untranslatably: Paradoxes of Authenticity in an Age of GlobalisationDionysios KapsaskisIn Don DeLillo’s novel Cosmopolis (2003), which is set in New York City on the cusp of the twentyfirst century, self-understanding and the communal sense of identity depend upon the possibility of translation
Dionysios Kapsaskis In Don DeLillo’s novel Cosmopolis (2003), which is set in New York City on the cusp of the twentyfirst century, self-understanding and the communal sense of identity depend upon the possibility of translation
The protagonist Eric Packer’s ability to think and speak in such a new language has helped him amass a mythical fortune as an asset manager

Summary

Dionysios Kapsaskis

In Don DeLillo’s novel Cosmopolis (2003), which is set in New York City on the cusp of the twentyfirst century, self-understanding and the communal sense of identity depend upon the possibility of translation. Based on a peculiar but topical understanding of translation as convertibility (of the natural into the mechanical, of the archaic into the futuristic, of the experiential into the digital), DeLillo argues that authenticity begins precisely where translatability ends It is the unreadable element —that which “is not susceptible...to computer emulation” (207)— which constitutes the irreducible bit of the self and of the shared identity. In his study of this essay, Antoine Berman insists on the resonances of the term “authentic” (eigentlich) in Schleiermacher’s text He concludes that to authentically represent the foreignness of the original text (as opposed to keeping the appearance of purity of the mother tongue or of the transparency of the translation process) is a choice that the translator has to make. How are we to understand the modern contention that authenticity defines the limits of translatability? does the translatability of culture and language necessarily entail a loss of authenticity? Is it possible to understand authenticity in a less exclusive way, so as to do justice to what is untranslatable in a local identity and still allow for this identity’s transformation as a result of cultural, social or linguistic encounter? Secondly, how does the contemporary direction from an intercultural and interlingual situation to a global setting stretch the significations of translation and authenticity? How is the interface between them reconfigured when the local is translated into the global?

The paradox of authenticity

The contributions

Works Cited