Trois essais sur la traduction by Jean-François Billeter

Abstract

Reviewed by: Trois essais sur la traduction by Jean-François Billeter Josh Stenberg (bio) Jean-François Billeter. Trois essais sur la traduction (Three essays on translation). Paris: Allia, 2014. 119 pp. Paperback €6.20, isbn 978-2-84485-896-2. Francophone Sinology, it would seem, is no longer familiar to most English-language academics in the field, unless it is in the guise of scholars such as the late Pierre Ryckmans (aka Simon Leys), who made their academic career in the English-speaking world. Yet Francophone work on modern and classical Chinese literature, especially with regard to translation, is often more extensive than its English-speaking counterpart. And while many German, Dutch, Swedish, and Czech scholars tend to publish in English at least as much as in their native languages—France, as in prerevolutionary Shanghai, maintains its own concession in the territory of Sinology. In an era where English-language Sinology has also been greatly enriched by an influx of Asian-born scholars, the tendency to drop French is understandable, but has the drawback of marginalizing a longstanding and independent tradition of engagement with China. In this new slim volume of three essays on translation from the Chinese, Swiss Sinologist Jean-François Billeter shows that the ignorance is not mutual: Billeter engages with English-language Sinologist scholars and translators such as Waley, Watson, and de Bary, while also comparing (and proposing corrections to) Francophone work by Paul Jacob, André Lévy, Ryckmans, Liou Kia-hway, etc. The author addresses himself to the general interest reader (as he has previously in his popular work on philosophy, especially on Zhuangzi), using the particularly difficult issues inherent in rendering Classical Chinese into modern Western languages as a case study. This creates an avenue for using his specialist knowledge to approach conceptual questions in translation studies. I use “conceptual” rather than “theoretical,” for while Billeter is engaging in issues of considerable abstraction, he nowhere succumbs to vagueness, jargon, or citation in lieu of explanation. Those who write about Chinese translation run the risk of being accused of exceptionalism, for translators of other languages are often unaware of the specific issues that face the translator from the Chinese: for instance, unmodifiable ideographs, a lack of grammatical clues and often punctuation, the habitual absence of the subject, of time markers. Billeter is not shy about making claims: his first essay, “Chinese Poetry and Reality,” begins with the sentence “The resources of the Chinese language and the French language are so different that no one has yet managed to give an accurate idea of a Chinese poem by means of translation alone and no one ever will” (p. 11). Throughout this work, Billeter makes the case that translation is a necessary and insufficient approach, that discussion about the problems of translation will “grant indirect access to the poem just as the poem itself gives indirect access to reality” (p. 12). In this work, the central claim is that “moving from Classical Chinese to French is indeed such that the difficulties inherent to all translation are more [End Page 288] apparent than elsewhere, and can be analysed more minutely” (p. 7). He goes on to explain for the layman the process that distinguishes classical Chinese from, for example, translation within “languages of the same family, [where] translation appears to consist of a conversion from one system to another” (p. 84). The structure of classical Chinese represents a case in which the complex semantic questions derive from a simplicity of form which is singularly dissimilar from Indo-European languages; but this is then not merely a case of simple non-relation (as between English and, say, Indonesian or Hebrew) but is, in my view, generated by the fact that Chinese is the only major ideographic (and basically nonphonetic) writing system. Major difficulties in translating from Vietnamese, Korean, or Japanese are also associated with the influence of classical Chinese. Various studies of Chinese poetry have made the point about difficulty and interpretability (such as Eliot Weinberger’s 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei), but these tend to be illustrations by means of comparative translation. Billeter instead furnishes an anatomy of the mental process of rendering. Classical...