The Art of Double-Betrayal, or What Comparatists Can Learn from Translators

Abstract

In light of the perennial demand for an ethics of translation as a key to intercultural communications, this paper seeks to provide an ontological account of language that grounds the translation process and that can consequentially serve as a practical standard for comparatists, through inquiries into the seminal theoretical works of Jacques Derrida, Antoine Berman, and Emily Apter and with respect to such contemporary linguistic and philosophical topics as cultural globalization, untranslatability, among others. I argue that to prevent translation from becoming an explorative apparatus of hegemonic power that leads to cultural appropriation and domination, translators need to continuously stay aware of the fundamental and pre-originary care one innately bears towards the other. An ethics of translation – as that of comparative literature as a discipline – is constitutive of a non-national, non-identity, and non-subjective set of ethical principles that sustains and balances the powers coming from the host regions of related languages, while acknowledging the naturally irreconcilable and chronologically dynamic tensions in between. The very technicalities of the translating practice consist not only of the mechanical endeavor of pairing up words of various linguistic origins, but indeed an art of creating relations for a communicative understanding and experience of the foreign other, and simultaneously presenting a self-effaced invisibility of committed identity through a gesture of double-betrayal and resignation.