Translation: between what can be translated and what must be translated

Magda Jeanrenaud

doi:10.17684/i3a38en

Abstract

Starting from a disconcerting interpretation of Jacques Derrida, our analysis aims at investigating and also tries to explain the blockage which appears in the English, French and Romanian translations (signed by Maurice de Gandillac, Antoine Berman, Laurent Lamy, Alexis Nouss, Harry Zohn, Steven Rendall, Martine Broda, Catrinel Pleșu etc.) of a well-known text of Walter Benjamin, Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers, when translators transpose in their target languages the two quotations given by Benjamin: one of Mallarmé, left untranslated in the source text, and another, signed by Pannwitz. The fact is that both quotations have something in common: a discoursive form which results from an unusual syntax, as if they were already, in a certain sense, „translations”. As if the translators feared—a feature of the translator’s psychology?—not to render their text sufficiently accessible, even when the source text is not intended to be accessible. Hence the painful dilemma of the intentional fallacy (not only of the text to be translated).

Highlights

The hermeneutics and æsthetics of reception would brilliantly confirm that text signification prevails over the author’s intentionality because it accumulates—through its diachronic existence—new layers of meaning impossible to anticipate by the author and even less by its first readers
The text no longer comprises only a sense—unchanging and interpretable as such from one reception to another, and a signification, due to which it articulates around a situation, being contextualized by the coordinates of each new reception
Whereas sense facilitates reception stability, signification explains the variations of text reception: sense is singular, while signification is open, plural, inexhaustible, and infinite

Summary

Introduction

Aufgabe des Übersetzers (Benjamin, 1972), and especially into the way in which the French, English, and Romanian translators proceeded for two quotations within this text. Regardless, through this decision, the translator alters the deepest layers of meaning in Benjamin’s text; she manages to make all paratexts attempting to decipher its symbolism—from Jacques Derrida to Antoine Berman, including Alexis Nouss and Laurent Lamy—

Results

Conclusion