Translation

Abstract

This chapter considers translation in terms of how a particular relationship to language is born with the decoding of the Rosetta Stone. It shows how the Rosetta Stone is transformed from an object to a text to be deciphered, decoded, and analyzed by an international network of scholars. What is discovered with the Rosetta Stone, the chapter argues, is less an object than a particular textuality based on an understanding of language as a code. It also explains how the translational ethic that points to the equivalence of Greek and hieroglyphics actually levels the political and theological distinctions between the three languages: the Greek language, the language of politics, demotic, and hieroglyphics, the language of the gods. This phenomenological leveling of languages is ultimately read in relation to the comparative gesture of world literature, which levels distinctions between literature and scripture under an emergent paradigm of modern literary reading.