Translating (as) Excess: Toward Communitas in the Hermeneutics of a Saturated Phenomenon

6

� �

Jordan a. yamaJi Smith

Translating (as) ExcessToward Communitas in the Hermeneutics

of a Saturated Phenomenon

Literary translation—as a hermeneutic event laden with competing demands, an impossibility of simultaneously performing, replicating, transferring, mediating too many functions—has been understood as something of an interpretive heresy toward the literary sublime: that untouchable, perfect complexity of the text must be profanely touched for translation. And the touch of translation is always too rough, too awkward, leaving traces, damaging delicate appendages, or knocking the structure off balance.

This view posits translation as something inherently at odds with a text’s funda-mental ontology: the text is always damaged or silenced piecemeal in translation. The restrictive emphasis on the ontology of a literary text allows translation critics to judge and dismiss a translated text according to impossible standards. It is not that translation itself is impossible so much as that a virtual infinitude of interpre-tive emphases creates or reconstitutes a text in too many ways to render in a single translation. Literary translations simultaneously face so many competing demands, it is as though in translation, a text is suddenly responsible for standing up and de-claring its laden ontology in one polyphonic burst. Structure, rhythm, meter, ca-dence, syntax, connotation, political implications both subtle and overt, character-istic diction, allusions, allegorical suggestions, mood, tone, deconstructive gestures, affinities, aporia, latent ideologies, echoes of literary influence, diachronic literary historical relationships, genre conventions: these are the basic componential stan-dards that variously coalesce on translated texts in addition to the supposedly basic criterion of semantic “accuracy” of varying degrees of “literalness.” Translation criticism yields abundant examples, some of which are discussed below. Although critics may not go so far as to articulate their thoughts on the categorical impossi-bility of translation, their critiques nonetheless effectively enforce the notion.

As an alternative to this critical mode, translation practice must face excess as “saturated phenomenon” (building on Jean- Luc Marion’s phenomenological notion) by shifting toward regarding translation as a mode of invitation: acknowl-edging the “excessive” demands on translation and its essential incompleteness and,

Translating (as) Excess 7

instead, offering its object as an icon of other texts—both the translated text itself as well as future texts (interpretive, translational and creative)—that will function systemically. Translation can only respect the primary excess of the text when it de-clares itself a node and invites infinite linkages.

The concept of “excess” always implies a judgment, be it critique or celebration, of a degree or magnitude of a quality or substance without which the thing or sub-stance to which that quality pertains could (somehow, essentially) still successfully exist. With literature in particular, the “excess” of textual meaning should neither be thought as an essence, nor as an ontological fact inherent to the text, but as some-thing produced through multiple communicative contexts articulated across mul-tiple interpretive engagements and multiple (hermeneutic) discourses. If the excess of the “original” text can be thought as a product of interpretive communities and networks of meaning they generate in traditions of cross- reading, then transla-tional communities can function analogously by translating transparently in ex-cess; that is, sublime translation requires a hermeneutic excess that only begins with the act of translation proper.

Rather than yield to the reductive impetus implicit in crediting translations as even partially complete avatars of “originals,” translation should be understood as matching an excess of meaning in the text as sublime with a parallel excess of her-meneutics as communitas of interpretation, wherein excess is regarded as infinite invitation rather than repellant, scornful ideal. The latter would demand that trans-lation retreat or admit defeat. “Retreat” is the extreme strategy of anti- translation proponents, those who would demand that the excess of the text be met with the infinitude of language proficiency and congruently sublime hermeneutic; and “to admit defeat” is typified in the trope of the translator’s humbly apologetic preface. This essay proposes a third route for translation, where the incompleteness of trans-lation is neither an inherent weakness nor a shameful confession; instead, transla-tion of the text as excess, as unattainable nexus of hermeneutic demands, must be practiced with the a priori understanding that the translation process always only opens into the hermeneutic communitas.

Conceptualizing translation in these terms helps augment Steven Shaviro’s claim that “to appropriate an excess is to efface its status as excess, to reduce it to the di-mensions of homogeneous existence, to reinscribe it in the horizon of definite value” (55). Instead of appropriating or reducing the excess of meaning that constitutes the original text, here we see translating the sublime excess of the text as a nodal moment in the hermeneutic communitas that reinscribes the text in a horizon of multiple, indefinite value—if anything, translation should be seen as an expansion of hermeneutic horizons rather than a relegating of the multidimensional to the linear; we must not critique one linear component (or several finite components)

8 the ComParatiSt 38 : 2014

of a network for not being that entire network. Seeing it this way additionally helps us resolve statements of anxiety over the dangerously infinite excess of meaning in a text and about the limits and objectives of translation.

We begin with an assessment of the critical climate of translation studies today, followed by mapping a route through Jean- Luc Marion to a hermeneutic phe-nomenology conducive to a more accurate understanding of translation, and con-clude by tying this hybrid philosophy to suggestions for a revised critical practice in translation studies.

tranSlatinG in today’S CritiCal Climate: PoiSon the maulerS

Translators frequently express angst over the critical reception of their works, and rightly so—a quick glance at the critical climate would indicate that they can do little good in the eyes of critics. Almost any reviewer or literary critic who pauses to mention the translation does so with a passing breeze of vaguely complimentary adjectives (fluid, lucid, cogent, coherent, eloquent) and tarries only if sufficiently horrified. This climate bespeaks an excess of demand, based on an inadequate con-nection between the origins of the excess and the demands, and creates an envi-ronment wherein translation is discouraged in the guise of discipline and critiqued inadequately under an illogical multiplicity.

Let us examine a few case studies. In a review titled, “Mauling Maupassant: Les-sons from a Failed Translation,” Clifford Landers analyzes an uncredited translation of Guy de Maupassant’s short story “Petit Soldat” (1885). Despite the fact that his essay is largely disparaging of the translated text, his purported point is broader: “A transla-tion can be judged wanting even by a reader innocent of a single word of the source language. Bad writing is bad writing whatever its provenance, and most readers can sense it even if unable to articulate why it’s bad” (29). Declaring, “I know a flawed translation when I see one” (20), Landers also admits that his “commentary was written without benefit of the French original” (30). It thus both critiques the uncited translation and pretends to theoretical truism: “The aim of this article is twofold: to offer a cautionary example of how far a translation can stray from literary norms and still somehow end up in print, and to show that even a monolingual reader perceives lapses that mark a text as aberrant” (33). Of course a monolingual reader could cri-tique a text in this way—why would it be surprising that a speaker of standard En-glish could examine an utterance in terms of its adherence to the norms of standard English? This latter point about translation being judged by those with no knowledge of the source language is well- taken—indeed, most readers of published translations will have little to no knowledge of the original, yet they are ultimately the critics whom publishers and perhaps translators seek most eagerly to satisfy.


Despite his claim of equal- access for translation critics, Landers does privilege bilingual readers and posits them as central to a successful translation and publi-cation apparatus:

[. . .] it is important to bear in mind that this is a published translation, not the tremulous attempt of some undergraduate French major. That such a woeful effort was printed at all raises two thoughts. The first, more charitable one, is that as editor, Perrine chose a poor translation of a mediocre tale to reinforce his implicit view of the story’s limited literary value. The second is more worri-some: that its inclusion reflects the low status of translation at the time. Perhaps a rendering replete with questionable word choices, strained constructions, and even a soupçon of outright howlers passed muster because no one was interested enough or skilled enough to check the translation against the original. Perhaps any odd turn of phrase or idiosyncratic sentence formulation was ignored as merely symptomatic of the “otherness” of the source language text. Perhaps a transla-tion by what appears to be a nonnative speaker of English was deemed “good enough.” (30; former emphasis in original; latter emphasis added)

Despite his claims to offer a valid critique despite possessing no knowledge of (nor even access to) the original French, Landers seems here to admit that the most desirable critiques of a translation can only be conducted by those with linguistic knowledge. Lacking knowledge of French, Landers’ arguments become speculative ad hominem attacks on the translator and the hypothetical moment of the transla-tion’s production, when in some historical past, an entire company was filled with incompetent staff, and they simply could find “no one” to help. Though Landers claims the translator was likely a “nonnative speaker of English,” it seems equally likely that the text was translated by a native English speaker who was also a stu-dent of French—oftentimes, students of a foreign language enjoy showcasing in their translations the exotic difference of a source language from the target lan-guage. This comes from the exuberance in having assimilated a linguistic difference that the language student wishes to share.

Hostility against pronounced foreignness in a text has even been applied to nonnative English- speaking authors writing in English (see Nancy Tsai’s cri-tique of Ha Jin’s 1999 novel Waiting). Yet literature can employ “non- standard,” in-flected, accented, hybridized language to splendid and powerful effect. In similar fashion, translation can strategically employ such tactics, allowing a text to retain traces of the source language in order to distance us enough from a text’s language that we remember and appreciate the fact that we are reading “foreign” literature. Such defamiliarization is central for many theorists of literary translation. Antoine Berman, for example, argues that translation should aim “to open up the foreign work to us in its utter foreignness” (240). Indeed, Berman critically centralizes the


alienating techniques of translation, which he dubs “the most singular power of the translating act,” namely: “to reveal the foreign work’s most original kernel, its most deeply buried, most self- same, but equally the most ‘distant’ from itself.” Law-rence Venuti’s concept of “foreignizing” (vs. domesticating) a text, though it proved a controversial notion for some in translation studies, calls for similar leeway—at times, for certain purposes, a translation may benefit from traces of foreignness (see Venuti, The Scandals, The Translator).

In Landers’ critique, when he does focus on the text rather than on the imagined translator, his speculations about the linguistic characteristics of the text reveal little about the translation or the original text—his itemized list of translatorly faux pas focus on idiomatic differences, collocation, and customs involving verb tense. Many of the supposed blunders target phrases as awkward or incorrect, when they are actually relatively commonplace, even in native English expression.

But Landers’ aim reveals much about the type of demands typically placed on literary translations. Though he actually only critiques accuracy and naturalness in the target language, he claims to critique literary style evinced in the transla-tion. Conflating accuracy with style effectively elides the latter, giving the illusion that a stylistic critique has been made. At most, one might agree with Landers on the fact that the text is marked by a rather heavily exotic “Frenchness.” Does this marking constitute mauling (to borrow the metaphor from Landers’ title)? And if Maupassant has been “mauled,” what is the unmauled, healthy Maupassant? Would an encounter with the text by anyone literate in French even necessarily be marked by unfettered access to a primary textual ontology? Does any interpretation not “maul” a text, if the text is so frail?

Let us turn to another example: a review by a reader who does have access to the original text, and who finds great disappointment that the text she savored in Spanish cannot be equally enjoyed by English- language readers: Linda Britt’s re-view of Like Water for Chocolate, Carol and Thomas Christensen’s translation of Laura Esquivel’s Como agua para chocolate (1989). Her article begins with the ques-tion, “What level of betrayal is acceptable in translation?” (10). She foregrounds the fundamental ambivalence in her review, noting, “Although the question presumes the contrary, I would argue as a translator that translation has nothing to do with betrayal. [. . .] As a reader, however, I find traitors lurking among the pages of my books, hiding behind the most innocent- looking words and, sometimes, robbing entire novels of their vitality” (10). In the end, the professed ambivalence turns out to be specious. She rather unambivalently characterizes the translation as one em-ploying “methods that I am tempted to describe as insidious [. . .] resulting in a neutered text” (10).

Britt hints that the Christiansens’ translation may have been motivated by their attitudes as “unbelievers” in the magic of the text’s realismo mágico, and thus sought


to make it “tamer, more palatable to readers like themselves” (12). She posits what would be a rather imperialist ideology for translation, yet seems relatively unper-turbed by the political implications. Despite the gestures toward uprooting the ideological bent and damning the style, again (as with Landers) the conclusion seems to be that gross inaccuracies in translation can only be recuperated under translation regimes focused on particular artistic emphases—and there are many inaccuracies: “But one might see fit to forgive such lifeless prose, if the translation were otherwise accurate” (12). Yet here too, many of the inaccuracies she highlights (e.g., “uproar” for the Spanish susto) are perhaps within the range of rational choice (if we see fright/susto as leading to a larger reaction). Britt ultimately concludes, partly playfully, but with noteworthy vitriol, that the translators should be “forced to eat a large slice of Tita’s nausea- inducing wedding cake” (14). In sum, translation can never be a betrayal, but this translation is a betrayal, and the translators should be poisoned.

In a recent interview with Steven G. Kellman, prominent critic, editor, and trans-lator, Ilan Stavans succinctly expresses the state of contemporary translation work as “[. . .] at once essential and essentially doomed: essential because without transla-tion, modern life would be impossible; essentially doomed because all translations are temporary exercises, and, as such, imperfect, error- driven, ephemeral, and—the strongest of adjectives!—profane” (10). He elaborates on the double bind of trans-lation as essential(ly doomed) practice, positing an ironic paradox at the heart of how to select an author to translate:

The best author to translate is a dead author. The reason is simple: he can’t com-plain. This doesn’t mean complaints aren’t forthcoming; they always are, espe-cially in the age of the Internet, when it is easy to let people know what you think, even when your thoughts aren’t fully formed yet. Ironically, the worst author to translate is also a dead author because if he’s dead and there’s need for translation, it probably means his oeuvre is part of a reservoir deemed necessary by the arbiters of culture. (10)

The specter of excess critical demands haunts every choice of text for translation. Indeed, fear of such “complaints” seems to motivate such choices. This fear is wide-spread and goes hand- in- hand with that nagging phrase that never seems to ex-haust its own reservoir of accusation: traduttore, traditore. Stavans reminds us that the phrase, and all such accusations, bear down on the affect of translators to the point that, consciously or not, it likely steers translators to avoid certain texts that would either present linguistic difficulty or be delivered into a hostile critical cli-mate—and especially texts where the former would guarantee the latter.

This critical climate exceeds the critique of a translation for its flaws. Critics also frequently point out that a translation seems to ignore a previous translation or a


reading offered in a paratext (here signaling Genette’s term as adapted by Andre Lefevere for translation studies). Stavans also notes that translating a “dead author,” whose texts are “part of a reservoir deemed necessary by the arbiters of culture” provides an opportunity for translators to engage with the history of those texts’ translations and critical readings: “These books [. . .] have layers upon layers of accumulated interpretations. Studying those interpretations for me is part of the pleasure” (10). It is somewhat ironic that Stavans’ own review of Like Water for Chocolate mentions the translation only in a parenthetical reference and provides no substantial engagement with the translated text as one of the “layers of accumu-lated interpretations.”

The call for translators to demonstrate awareness of previous hermeneutic tra-ditions (among which translation is one) makes demands of both the translated text itself and of its accompanying paratexts (explanatory notes, translators’ intro-ductions, etc.). This level of demand shows in articles such as that by Timothy Sergay reviewing Peter Constantine’s translation of the complete works of Isaac Babel. Though many of Babel’s works had appeared previously in English transla-tion, this volume represented the first time all of Babel’s works had been translated into English by a single translator and published together.

In assessing Constantine’s engagement with this translation tradition, Sergay notes the “erasure of predecessors” (37) in the paratexts. This critical erasure, one orchestrated by the translator and the editors of the volume, allows “a subtle chur-lishness by omission toward preceding translators to become a consistent policy for the volume as a whole” (37). Thus, an introduction that does not reference (or, as Sergay argues, actively omits mention of) previous translations is seen as indicating that the translators and editorial team have not systematically considered them throughout the translation process. In this particular volume’s introduction, Sergay points out, the editors “anonymously subsume [all previous translators] in a single phrase,” vaguely assigning credit to some and blame to others and claiming that they have achieved “unique coherence and consistency” by having a single trans-lator translate Babel’s complete oeuvre.

Quite possibly, this is just marketing bluster: literary markets require such claims. A new translation must not only feature subtle shades of difference with otherwise high- quality, functional translations that precede them—it must affect the pretense of absolute originality, a complete, revolutionary breakthrough that leaves the past behind. Along these lines, Sergay admits, “[. . . P]erhaps a tight lid on the acknowledgement of preceding translators is nothing more than an obligatory ‘hard- ball’ sales strategy, made strictly in concession to the marketing department” (38). But the claims to originality in contradistinction to previous works, nonethe-less, elide a communitas of hermeneutics, part of which is a legacy of translations.

Beyond this, translators may wish to omit engagement with textual predeces-


sors out of pride in a tradition of hermeneutic and creative independence. Sergay points out that Robert Chandler, in his notes to Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida, writes of how many retranslators “are ashamed to admit” that they read or refer to previous translations. Chandler registers surprise at this sense of shame—after all, “in most fields of human endeavor ignorance of previous work in a given field is considered unacceptable” (Sergay 38; Chandler xviii). It is due to this rather backward custom, Sergay surmises, that “a solipsistic stance toward one’s pre-decessors has perforce become the rule in the presentation of high- profile new editions of classical Russian literature in English” (38). I would like to emphasize Sergay’s characterization of isolated translations, cut off from the network of pre-vious paratexts (including translations), as solipsistic. The translator is, in this self- performative construction anyway, made to appear as a lone figure, cutting paths through new terrain with new tools, striking ever closer to the ultimate ontology of the text in itself.

Other critics, Sergay also notes, have equated this solipsistic gesture with an act of kindness. Take for example W. H. Auden’s review of David Luke’s retranslations of Thomas Mann’s Tonio Kröger and Other Stories, wherein Auden bemoans, here too, a translatorly double bind: “Anyone who offers a fresh translation of a prose work—poetry is another matter—is in duty bound to justify his undertaking by explaining why he thinks that earlier versions are unsatisfactory, a task which can only be con-genial to the malicious.” If this is the case, then the least “malicious” of retranslators, in affecting total ignorance of the hermeneutic tradition at work in previous trans-lations, would actually be demonstrating kindness by their willful neglect.

Sergay goes on to praise other translators, such as Robert Fagles, for “grace, hu-mility, and active engagement with the English translatorly tradition” (38). Cer-tainly, Fagles’ hermeneutic engagement represents praiseworthy thoroughness from an accomplished scholar and translator whose translations distinguish him as one of the heroes of world literature. But is the converse demand true? Are we to critique translators who do not or cannot engage in this hermeneutic work? Are we really to demand of translators, and especially of retranslators, that they offer not only the slavish devotion required to translate, but the time it takes to read multiple translations of the same texts and keep track of characteristic or distinguishing fea-tures of their own translations in contradistinction to previous translations? Trans-lators would be able to work on even fewer texts over a lifetime, and in currently prohibitive economic conditions, would have to subject themselves to the most dire of lifestyles in order to attempt critical acts that, according to the model of herme-neutic phenomenology I offer below, must, at any rate, unfold through the efforts of multiple scholars, readers, critics, editors, and authors of related paratexts.

As a counter both to the imperative to engage intimately with past versions of a retranslated text and to the ethics of creative independence that would cause


a retranslator to labor in critical solitude, Sergay considers the Russian Futurist model of Vikentii Veresaev, who critiques the field of translation as being domi-nated by the “cult of originality” (39) against which he proposes an ethic of “accu-mulative translation among successive translators” (Sergay’s translation). Veresaev, who actually seamlessly incorporated passages of previous translations into his own “updates,” seems to be anticipating a wiki- translation model, where edits can be made and the changes effaced for the sake of the cumulative accrual of grace and accuracy, or a kind of Saussurean Rubic’s cube of syntagm and paradigm, without a need to affix (or accredit) certain shifts of originality to a named translator. Sergay pragmatically remarks that “implementing Veresaev’s ideas [of this kind of com-munitarian translation] would entail problems of licensing, royalty- sharing and general ego- management” (39)—as though all translation and publishing arrange-ments within capitalist production networks somehow do not entail such problems already. “But in spirit, those ideas are far more appealing, far more ‘Russian’ than the pose of creative isolation and self- sufficiency” (39) adopted by Constantine and other translators purportedly working in “splendid isolation.”

Ultimately, in deconstructing the myth of “splendid isolation” and in insinu-ating an ideal of translation practice as based on communitarian hermeneutics, Sergay moves translation criticism in the same direction this article will propose, but he stops just short. Seeking to establish an ethics of “rejoicing,” Sergay takes a phrase from the special issue of the journal, Conjunctions, focused on translation studies (No. 38, 2002), called Rejoicing Revoicing—which Peter Constantine actu-ally co- edited. In the spirit of fraternity and fellowship, Sergay suggests a new mode of translation that acknowledges antecedents:

When revoicing foreign texts that others have already lovingly revoiced into the language we share with them, surely an attitude of simple respect for those others should have some place in our “rejoicing.” After all, far sooner than we’d like, and particularly if we attempt retranslations of classics, we ourselves will be “others” for someone else. (39)

We arrive at a happy ethic: do unto other translations as you would have translation critics do unto your translations.

My proposal essentially is in concord with this golden rule of translation criti-cism, but not merely because scholarly collegiality or respect is inherently good. Rather than to cut off the karmic cyclicality of omission and willful ignorance, the aim, as laid out below, is to remove the barriers of “splendid isolation.” The motive, however, is not to free the translator as from the solipcism of the Cartesian subject or the lone genius, but to reposition the text as central, matching the excess of the original with an “excess” of hermeneutics.

In the section that follows, I offer a brief theoretical mapping of one intersec-


tion of hermeneutics and phenomenology in order to propose a translation studies paradigm capable of dealing with the text as saturated phenomenon and with the matching excess of critical demands.

From teXt aS ontoloGy to hermeneutiC PhenomenoloGy

Many of the critical demands placed on translated texts assume a primary ontology of the text that must be carried over in the translation process. Any translation that does not succeed in this complex ontological transfer is deemed a failure. The cen-sure of this failure comes in many varieties, some of them bemoaning the inevitable impossibility of translation as a whole and some more surgical in their focus on certain types of omissions or on certain especially inadequate texts. In this section, I will argue that the origins of the excessive critical demands are rooted in an onto-logical model that neglects in a practical and fundamental way the fact of the lit-erary text as produced through a network of hermeneutic exchanges, apprehended best via phenomenology.

I am not the first to point out the need to abandon textual ontologies in the study of world literature, nor the first to attempt a critical practice that demonstrates such an abandonment. Neither is David Damrosch, but he is cited here nonetheless be-cause his work serves as a revealing mid- point for the theoretical suggestion I pro-pose. In his broadly influential book, What is World Literature?, Damrosch asserts, “To understand the workings of world literature, we need more a phenomenology than an ontology of the work of art: a literary work manifests differently abroad than it does at home” (6). The phenomenology he suggests is similar in some ways to (world or poly- ) systems theory, most famously advocated by Immanuel Waller-stein (in his multi- volume The Modern World- System) and Itamar Even- Zohar (1990), and later by Franco Moretti (“Conjectures on World Literature,” in The New Left Review, among many) and Pascale Casanova (La république mondiale des let-tres, 1999). Damrosch’s text traces the roots and follows the routes of individual texts in spatial (cross- linguistic) circulation and across time.

This more fluid understanding of a text’s ontology, as something that changes within and across contexts of history, culture, and language, bears significant im-plications for the systematic study of world literary history. But what implications does it bear for the realm of translation criticism? Let us follow on the shift Dam-rosch exemplifies, namely, that from text as ontology to text as phenomenology. To this shift, we add the phenomenological understanding of texts as resulting from a layered, communal hermeneutic process that constitutes the text as a meaningful node in a matrix of critique. The text retains an ontological status, but the alteration of this status through a hermeneutic phenomenology is fundamental.


The phenomenology of Jean- Luc Marion provides a useful beginning. Marion’s extended work with “saturated phenomena” and with “phenomena” in general spans a “trilogy” of texts: Reduction and Givenness: Investigations of Husserl, Hei-degger, and Phenomenology (Réduction et donation, 1989), Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness (Étant donné, 1997), and In Excess: Studies of Saturated Phenomena (De surcroit, 2001). Not wishing to rehearse Marion’s entire phenome-nological gesture, what follows is a critical summary of the points most relevant to the present argument.

Marion’s phenomenology continues his early work away from the Cartesian subject, toward phenomenology itself as an alternative “first philosophy.” I read his critique of Cartesian epistemology as a decentering of the Cartesian ego, that is, the ego cogito as a singular entity (even if Descartes merely thinks it as singular in the sense of standing abstractly for all egos). But Marion’s gesture is far from the de-struction of that ego, or its folding into the non- ontological status of the adonné (the givee)—on the contrary, Marion’s shift away from the (singular) ego cogito makes room for the pluralization of the subject, reminding us that the ego cogito is something “we” all are (plurally). Marion’s phenomenology thus helps us decenter the Cartesian self only by reminding us of what emerges between plural selves, positing the most important emergence as that which occurs in the exchange of interpretations. The phenomena interpreted “emerge” into being through the her-meneutic dynamic.

This phenomenological turn follows Husserl’s famous emphasis—“to the things themselves” (35)—reducing an object to a pure givenness given to a subject, thought now as the adonné. This givenness even comes to include the Cartesian subject itself. Through this inclusion (or occlusion), Marion purports to go beyond both Husserl and Heidegger’s conceptions of the object into a pure, radical givenness, one that must be free from all limits, including any intention from a defining subject.

But the subject in Marion seems to pull a poor disappearing act, and we see in his oeuvre moments of longing for the subject, the implication of its existence, in multiple ways. Shane Mackinlay neatly summarizes these implications into five types. To paraphrase (54–56):

1) an entity or action only appears as a gift when “recognized” as a (potential) gift by its giver or givee; but the recognition of something as gift is itself an act of hermeneutics, requiring a subject of some sort to perform the recog-nizing

2) phenomena can only appear by arriving to a subject 3) his descriptions of the transformation that occurs when the given is re-

ceived involve metaphors of passing through a filter or prism, which again echoes the act of interpretation (hermeneutics)


4) he acknowledges an “infinite hermeneutics” and the presence of a herme-neutic circle in his description of the icon

5) his examinations of saturated phenomena admit that the adonné “trans-forms the given into a phenomenon.” (Mackinlay 56)

Thus, though Marion’s theories of saturated phenomena center on givenness of the phenomena, regardless of subjectivity, and though he actively seeks to decenter the Cartesian ego, his attempts to replace it with the adonné—the object that gives itself, that is indeed pure givenness, whose being is not summoned by any subject—leave us with a philosophical system that retains traces of subjectivity. Such traces of the subject can only be accounted for by a phenomenological hermeneutics.

In recognizing a latent subjectivity bound with hermeneutic processes in Marion’s phenomenology of saturated phenomena, Mackinlay is not alone. He cites the work of Jean Greisch, Jean Grondin, and Richard Kearney, and to this list we might add Robyn Horner, the English translator of Marion’s In Excess. In her “Translator’s Introduction,” Horner also recognizes traces of the subject in Marion as necessitating the inclusion of hermeneutics: “What we have, in fact, is a phenomenology that has recognized shortcomings and must be explicitly sup-plemented by hermeneutics” (xiii). All of these pointed critiques still find value in Marion’s phenomenology of saturated phenomena and do not require that we abandon his theories wholesale.

What follows, then, is my attempt to merge Marion’s phenomenology with the hermeneutic suggestions that Mackinlay and others have seen as already latent therein. Most central to Marion’s work is the notion of “saturated phenomena,” which he defines as those phenomena whose meaning is always in excess of any attempt by intuition or intent to circumscribe, define, intuit or otherwise com-prehend. This partly derives from Husserlian appresentation (Appräsentation), wherein partial perception of an object gives the illusion of the object’s existence beyond what is directly observed. This appresentation “intervenes as soon as the knowledge of the object occurs, before and independently from access to the other person” (In Excess 105). He grounds his discussion of appresentation with the ex-ample of a tobacco box (104), reminiscent of Husserl’s example of a cube. Marion points out that, though he knows that it contains six sides, he can visually confirm only three at a time.

With phenomena more complex than the tobacco box, the appresentation be-comes more resistant to, or more capable of exceeding, the “knowledge” of an object in its complete phenomenality. These Marion calls “saturated phenomena,” wherein “the excess of intuition over signification censures the constitution of an object and, more radically, the visibility of a unified and defined spectacle” (119). Two such satu-rated phenomena are the idol and the face of the other. With the idol: “The excessive


quality of the idol is emphasized and celebrated: no one look can capture what is made visible; art demands a multiplicity of intentional aims, not only from the one person, but from many” (xvi–xvii). Though the idol’s complete, saturated existence may exceed singular comprehension, its existence may be constituted within a matrix of intentional aims; or, as one might say, within a hermeneutics as communitas.

Similarly, the face of the other, as a saturated phenomenon, is always an appre-sentation. Through this face, the other appears to the “I” on the condition of un-conditionality, that moment “when I no longer master or constitute the other and admit that he or she expresses self without signification” (In Excess 122). But this lack of signification does not, according to Marion, relegate the phenomenon to the realm of unintelligibility. As Horner underscores, this face “demands an infinite hermeneutic, proceeding from its priority in appearing to me as saturated phe-nomenon” (xviii). The other itself is the ultimate saturated phenomenon, and one knows the other through love and infinite hermeneutics, until its death. Death itself only brings home exactly how truly saturated the other is and has been.

If we consider translated texts as a hybrid of Marion’s notion of the idol and the face of others, we begin to approach translation through the hermeneutic phe-nomenology for which I herein argue. With translated texts facing the excess de-mands of criticism, the call to mean everything at once, we must remember the texts’ “original” or source ontology. Following our critique of Marion’s attempt to obliterate ontological origins, where he folds ontology awkwardly into radical givenness, we might remember the production of the literary text (the good, old- fashioned, untranslated “original”) as a phenomenon saturated with intuition, at-tempts at knowing, deconstructions, structural analyses, stylistic traces, and history is itself the product of a collective hermeneutics: multiple interpretations produce the text, bringing about its meaning(s) in the exchange between multiple subjects.

If this virtually infinite hermeneutic produces the text prior to a moment of translation, then why would we expect anything but a continual hermeneutic inter-play in the reconstitution and critical negotiation of the text in the registers of “this” linguistic domain? Yet, this is precisely what translation critics do when they dis-miss or excoriate a text for “being” one thing but not the other, “representing” or “emphasizing” one textual aspect but not the other. Our experiment in forging a union between hermeneutic phenomenology and translation surely can yield more productive approaches.

toWard a CommunitaS oF hermeneutiC PhenomenoloGy: imPliCationS For PraCtiCe

If translation can be thought of as giving “the face of the other,” calling for an “in-finite hermeneutic,” what practical outcome would we derive from such unending


cyclicality? Do we have time, patience, or resources for an “infinite hermeneutic”? Obviously not: few and perverse are those who yearn for such a hellish utopia. We must acknowledge that the hermeneutic circle spins well only for so long. If we reconsider the translated text as something derived from a “saturated phe-nomenon”—the “original” text in the source language and context—we no longer expect it to utter the full contents of its own saturation. If we remember that satu-ration of a text is produced by the multiplicity of subjects who encounter and ex-change meaning with it, then we will not expect the text to reproduce that multi-plicity of encounters.

Concretely, if somewhat bluntly, speaking, literary criticism and translation studies reveal this neatly. We find one of the most similar models to this in Ortega y Gasset, for whom “a translation is not the work, but a path toward the work” (109). Here, the original work is seen as having an a priori existence—it already forms a locus where we may arrive via the translation. But to arrive via the translation is an unsatisfying metaphor: how does the translation become a path? Who travels it? How are they propelled forward? What constitutes moving forward in this meta-phor of vectors? We might alter Ortega y Gasset’s terms in our framework for a hermeneutic phenomenology: the translation is not the work, not the endpoint of criticism, but part of a network of hermeneutic exchanges that constitutes the work as such.

Further support for this model comes from Don Ihde, whose analysis of Ricoeur’s hermeneutic phenomenology argues that language is primarily a “me-diating function [. . .] between prelinguistic experience and expression” (96). Thus, we would do well to remember that the text itself is not the endpoint of this me-diation, and a hermeneutics of communitas performs that function by which pre-linguistic experience becomes more imaginable, even more accessible, though not completely or categorically so.

Viewing translation as a mediating act, capable of sustaining in each iteration or version a subset of literary demands, helps guard against the specious logic of what Douglas Robinson has called “perfectionist translation.” Robinson writes passion-ately against the critical fallacies of such an ideal. Yet he also warns of the limits of theoretical gestures: “Just detheorizing perfectionist translation does not liberate us from perfectionism, of course, any more than articulating the patriarchal ideology that instrumentalizes women liberates them from their inner feelings of instru-mentalization” (120–21).

If the goal is a translation criticism that takes as foundational the notion of text as saturated phenomena, what would its attainment look like? It might re-semble the figure of Jacques Derrida, standing before the French translation so-ciety ATLAS (Assises de la Traduction Littéraire à Arles) in 1998, giving his lec-ture, “What is a ‘Relevant’ Translation?” In his opening sentences, Derrida asks


self- reflexively, “How dare one speak of translation before you who, in your vigilant awareness of the immense stakes—and not only of the fate of literature—make this sublime and impossible task your desire, your anxiety, your travail, your knowl-edge, and your knowing skill?” (174). Acknowledgement such as this, followed by a critical engagement with translation that does not offer a standard of “perfection” against which it crucifies the translated text, is necessary if the critic truly means anything by “impossibility”: how can any legitimate criticism profess to deride the imperfection of an impossibility? If translation is such a miraculous impossibility, this kind of traitorous criticism is tantamount to observing that though water has become wine, a chardonnay, rather than a cabernet, would have gone better with the loaves and fishes.

Though the spectacle of the critic quailing before the translator may be some-what gratifying to translators, this is also not my proposition. Derrida’s humility, pretended or genuine, bespeaks a zone where translation can operate with full ac-cess (at least potentially) to the saturation of the text—and to the multiple satura-tions that form the corpus of untranslated texts available for selection as the next text to translate. In such an open domain, for one, emerging from “splendid iso-lation,” translators would have the option of acknowledging textual precedents but would not face diatribes if they decided to offer a “clean” break and translate without significant recourse to previous texts. Critics who see fit to identify other hermeneutic strands not taken up in the translation would be tasked with offering their own translations, or with offering a new critical paratext that emphasizes what side of the phenomenon is visible from their perspective. This act of communitas rectifies the “appresentation” of the text in its full saturation, and in all likelihood, will be an incomplete rectification calling for others.

As a practicing translator, I have sought to maintain this notion of my own translations, one that sees texts as phenomena fundamentally produced by a com-munitas of hermeneutics, not a hermeneutic circle so much as a hermeneutic cipher (perhaps even borrowing a gloss here from contemporary hip hop). This means that the critical practice surrounding the translated text, that is in the para-texts I (co)produce, I must invite others to join me in constituting the text in its ex-cess. Therein lies the principal strategy for converting excess critical demand into a communitas of hermeneutics.

In my translator’s notes for Yoshimasu Gōzō’s poem, “Naked Memo” (for a forth-coming volume edited by Forrest Gander, Alice, Iris, Red Horse: Selected Poems of Gozo Yoshimasu: A Book in and on Translation), I seek to countenance and rectify the kind of marketing that Constantine’s introduction, with its claims to extreme originality, exemplifies. I shift the metaphor from “groundbreaking translations” to translations as “groundbreaking ceremonies,” to an opening of the text to inter-pretation, an invitation for future hermeneutic acts, from translators, critics, critic-


translators, and translator- critics. This liberates translation to declare its motives, identify its particular hermeneutic horizons and affinities, and retain an experi-mentality otherwise crushed under the default regime of the accuracy police—ones whose pretensions of earnestly but bitterly patrolling for linguistic accuracy typi-cally mask their own more insidious attempts at enforcing unspoken (or lightly whispered) demands on style or politics.

California State University

WorKS Cited

Auden, W. H. “Lame Shadows.” Rev. of Tonio Kröger and Other Stories by Thomas Mann. Trans. David Luke (Bantam, 1970). New York Review of Books, September 3, 1970.

Berman, Antoine. “Translation and the Trials of the Foreign.” Trans. Lawrence Venuti. The Translation Studies Reader. 3rd ed. Ed. Lawrence Venuti. New York: Routledge, 2000.

Britt, Linda. “Translation, Criticism or Subversion? The Case of Like Water for Chocolate.” Translation Review 48–49, 1 (1995): 10–14.

Casanova, Pascale. La république mondiale des lettres. Paris: Éditions de Seuil, 1999.Chandler, Robert, ed. Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida. New York: Penguin,

2005.Constantine, Peter, Bradford Morrow and William Weaver, eds. Rejoicing Revoicing: A

Special Portfolio of Translations- in- Progress. Special Issue of Conjunctions 38 (2002).Damrosch, David. What Is World Literature? Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003.Derrida, Jacques. “What is a ‘Relevant’ Translation?” Trans. Lawrence Venuti. Critical

Inquiry 27, 1 (2001): 174–200.Even- Zohar, Itamar. “The Position of Translated Literature within the Literary

Polysystem.” Poetics Today 11, 1 (1990): 45–51.Husserl, Edmund. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological

Philosophy, First Book. Trans. R. Kersten. Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1983.

Ihde, Don. Hermeneutic Phenomenology: The Philosopher of Paul Ricoeur. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1971.

Kellman, Steven G. “Translating Rulfo: A Conversation with Ilan Stavans.” Translation Review 86, 1 (2013): 1–11.

Landers, Clifford E. “Mauling Maupassant: Lessons from a Failed Translation.” Translation Review 83, 1 (2012): 29–33.

Mackinlay, Shane. Interpreting Excess: Jean- Luc Marion, Saturated Phenomena, and Hermeneutics. New York: Fordham University Press, 2010.

Moretti, Franco. “Conjectures on World Literature.” New Left Review 1 (1990): 54–68.Marion, Jean- Luc. Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness. Trans. Jeffrey L.

Kossky. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002.———. In Excess: Studies of Saturated Phenomenon. Trans. Royn Horner and Vincent

Berraud. New York: Fordham University Press, 2002.———. Reduction and Givenness: Investigations of Husserl, Heidegger, and


Phenomenology. Trans. Thomas A. Carlson. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1998.

Ordóñez López, Pilar, “Ugly Translations: Ortega y Gasset’s Ideas on Translation within Contemporary Translation Theories.” Cadernos de tradução 1, 21 (2008): 41–66.

Ortega y Gasset, José, “Misery and Splendor of Translation.” Theories of Translation: An Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derrida. Eds. John Biguenet and Rainer Schulte. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. 93–112.

Robinson, Douglas. The Translator’s Turn. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991.

Sergay, Timothy D. “Translation and the Individual Talent: The Splendid Isolation of Our Retranslators of Russian Classics.” Translation Review 71,1 (2006): 37–40.

Shaviro, Steven. Passion & Excess: Blanchot, Bataille and Literary Theory. Gainesville: Florida State University Press, 1990.

Spivak, Gayatri. Outside in the Teaching Machine. New York: Routledge, 1993.Stavans, Ilan. “Tita’s Feast.” The Nation, 14 June 1993.Venuti, Lawrence. The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference. New York:

Routledge, 1998.———. The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation. New York: Routledge, 1995.

Translating (as) Excess: Toward Communitas in the Hermeneutics of a Saturated Phenomenon

Documents

Transcript of Translating (as) Excess: Toward Communitas in the Hermeneutics of a Saturated Phenomenon