Introduction: Translation Matters

Abstract

IntroductionTranslation Matters Marc-Alexandre Reinhardt (bio) and André Habib (bio) Why translation? Doesn’t this theme seem archaic in our present day? Yes, precisely. One could say that translation is an outdated topic but it also embodies an outdated mode of historical inquiry into shifting media environments and constant reconfigurations of values, beliefs and representations. It is outdated in regard to its immemorial relationship to sacred texts and its crucial role in the transnational circulation of ideas and cultural productions in a global cultural context. Yet translation – and the untranslatability it elicits and sometimes implies – has come to embody a relevant ethos for the humanities and operates as a “theoretical fulcrum” (Apter 3) across diverse discursive fields. Furthermore, if it might appear as somewhat archaic and out of phase with more fashionable concepts, the anachronism of this construct becomes the very quality of its contemporariness and foregrounds its epistemological relevance. In other words, translation matters more than ever in comparative intercultural theories and histories. This issue aims to investigate translation’s relevance in current critical thought beyond its disciplinary identity – “Translation Studies” – in order to survey how it operates across different media and how it may function as a heuristic model to reflect changing social, political and aesthetic conditions of our global present. If it still accomplishes an instrumental function as a technical procedure that shapes a wide range of everyday transactions, it has nevertheless become a motif of modernity. A broader conception of translation as a critical practice of intercultural exchange, a compositional procedure, a literary figure, and a model of ethical subjectivity, allows us to be attuned to the dynamic displacements and the modes of relationality that unfold between cultural productions. In this perspective – addressing the aesthetics, politics and ethics of translation – this collection of essays seeks to come to terms with philosophical relativity (Cassin); migration of forms (Despoix); narratives of global circulation (Walkowitz); intertextual cine-poetics (Turquety); political agency (Razlogova); historical testimony (Habib); poïetic remembrance and mediation (Reinhardt); literary production of knowledge (Agnese); and intercultural quagmires (De Gaulejac). [End Page 3] Each text that composes this issue draws a problem of translation from a slanted angle, exposing hidden histories and practices, conceptual convolutions, philosophical inquiries (Cassin, Agnese), unearthing novel ways of considering at first view peripheral phenomena that can go unnoticed, like subtitling (Turquety, Habib), live over-dubbing (Razlogova) or modes of classification, organization and circulations of a particular library (Despoix), but exposing them as significant political, aesthetic and ethical modalities of knowledge production. Others address daunting questions like the inheritance of colonial past (De Gaulejac, Walkowitz) or remembrances of the Holocaust (Reinhardt, Habib) in specific sites and via the concrete, material and sometimes “anecdotal” threads that translation entails in order to illuminate those questions from a new and provocative perspective. It could also be worth noting that a great majority of these texts were translated and/or conceived by authors whose mother tongue is not English. Each text thus bears the trace of negotiations, the imprint of many hands; every article is marred with vertiginous problems of untranslatability, linguistic specificities and issues of migrations that somehow highlight and perform, in the flesh, the matter of translation we were hoping to address. Each text of this issue is speaking through, within, from or toward foreign tongues. They play out and map their own sets of difference, are always-already translated. What is more, we devised the issue by choosing texts whose varied natures translate different modes and forms of access to knowledge: the interview form, formal analysis, artists’ texts, case studies, the analytical-philosophical approach – all these articles are alternate and multifarious ways of showing why translation matters. We are aware that while dealing with the cultural currency of translation and expanding the scope of its object, we also run the risk of turning this critical construct into a trivial expression, a floating signifier that substitutes epistemological insight for abstract equivalence and abstruse speculation. Antoine Berman had hinted at this semantic slippery slope when he warned against the inflation of a general theory of all types of “change” under the umbrella concept of translation (Berman 292). This would make it nothing more than...