I say “thank my sign” the way one says “thank God.” A way of saying: faithful, unfaithful, all that’s old hat. To what subject are these words addressed? This whole business is a question of point of view.
I make this reflection only on, and from, what is commonly called translating, apparently from one language into another.
Which is to say that the first thing to flush out, the theoretical precondition, is to make understood — though I harbor no illusions, which is also why I adopt this tone — that the major obstacle is the soft, metaphorical assimilation between understanding and translating, inherited from the essentialization of language in Heidegger. According to which, since in both cases there is interpretation, to understand is already to translate, and to translate, of course, presupposes understanding. I am thinking of certain philosophers, and even of a certain philosophical establishment, perfectly represented by Paul Ricœur, for instance in his last little book, Sur la traduction (On Translation) (Bayard, 2004), where he says it at least three times (pp. 22, 44, 50): “To understand is to translate,” referring moreover to George Steiner, in After Babel. The same specialty of uttering banalities in a penetrated tone: of stirring up the received ideas of fidelity and betrayal. Which perhaps explains the media effect, the answer to the horizon of expectation. Ricœur thus advances, as though they were discoveries, that “it is because men speak different languages that translation exists” (p. 22) and that “it is always possible to say the same thing otherwise” (p. 45). Where Ricœur puts on the same plane “what we do when we define a word by another of the same lexicon, as all dictionaries do” (p. 45) — that fine ignorance of the notion of discourse, which retains, or knows, only the notion of language, and that confusion between translation and metalanguage. All this to arrive at the discovery, against the famous motif of the untranslatable: “For translation exists” (p. 56). What he calls “linguistic hospitality” (pp. 19, 43). Always the house of Being and the man of Being.
All this, these fossils of thought, in the terms of “the flesh of words, that flesh that is called ‘the letter’” (p. 67), places translating in advance within hermeneutics, that is, within the cultural tradition of the sign.
This is why I say: “faithful, unfaithful — all the same.” Because despite their apparent opposition these two notions do the same thing: stay within the opposition between form and content, that is, in both cases, within the sign. Whether you translate-faithful, or you translate-unfaithful, you do one and the same thing, you translate the sign, instead of translating, when it happens, the poem of thought. When poetics shows discourse, the system of discourse, the hermeneuticized translator and the philosopher look at the sign. The finger, instead of looking at the moon. All they can translate is what an utterance says or seems to say, not what a system of discourse does, what it does to you. And it does subject to you.
To put understanding and translating into a continuum is not even to realize that one is replacing a thinking of language, a theory of language, with the fashionable motif of communication and information. It is no accident that translators have a soft spot for the metaphor of the conveyor [passeur], and like to see themselves as conveyors. They have the wrong patron saint: it is no longer Saint Jerome, it is Charon on the Styx. They convey corpses. What arrives on the other shore, according to this division between the flesh of words, the letter, and the spirit — if one separates the two — is a corpse.
All this in this contemporary fairground of thought where identity is opposed to alterity, language-annexation to language-decentering, the source-followers to the target-followers, the calque to the natural, without seeing that what is taken for the effect of the natural is the height of the cultural. From language to language.
A single small example, at this stage, illustrates it: when, at the beginning of Aristotle’s treatise on interpretation, the words ta en tê phonê, “the things that are in the voice,” are translated by Tricot, in the Vrin edition, as: “words.”
By which one can perhaps begin to see that the ambient hermeneutics is an effacer, that translation in the terms of the sign is an effacer, for the same reason, that there is therefore a radical critique to be made of the concepts and practices taught as a nature of things and a necessary evil. And one cannot get out of it except by taking another point of view.
Faced with the omnipresent character of what I consider an absence of thought that does not know itself as such — and quite to the contrary it is the dominant thought — I could only, to outwit the false seriousness of the Seated Ones, give myself over to a game, which is to tally up the bill to be paid. To translate. To retranslate. To know what speaking means, and can do.
So, I proceed in nine moves, and I count.
First move, a piece of good news: there is no problem of translation, there is no untranslatable, there is only a problem of theory of language, of representation of language. The sign prevents thinking language, paradox number one, while it passes for the nature of language. As it prevents thinking language, it prevents thinking the poem, except through itself. Thus to translate poem through the categories of the sign is not to translate the poem, it is to translate the sign. So the sign also prevents thinking what translating is. I specify that I call poem the invention of a form of life by a form of language and the invention of a form of language by a form of life, both inseparably. Which makes thought, eventually, a poem, and lets one speak of a poem of thought. If there is a poem of thought, it is this poem that there is to translate, not the sign. When one translates in the terms of the sign, it is not what there is to translate that one translates, it is one’s own representation of language, in the terms of the sign. From there, I no longer know whether what I announced as good news is good news, for the problem is much more difficult than one believes when facing a text to translate. And it is not translating alone that can get out of it. Since it is the problem of our whole representation of language, and it is so made that it gives us neither reason nor means to get out of it.
Second move: precisely, to show that what we take, by the means of the sign, for the nature of language, is only a representation of it. On the one hand, this is possible from anthropology, which allows us to get out of the jar in which we were thrashing about, and from the experience of the poem; and on the other hand it is necessary in order to take stock of the effects of the sign, and of its limits. It is therefore a matter of making the critique of the sign — where the mere association of the two terms shows what is to be understood by critique. It is the study of the functioning and the effects of theory. In which critique is constructive (I say so since some believe it is destructive, when they do not confuse it with polemic, and there are even those who say it is Jewish), and it is also, by that very fact, the work of recognizing the effects in practices, by which the difference between weak theories and strong theories emerges. A question of yield.
Just one example. When Cicero speaks of vis verbi, vis verborum, simply “the force of the word, the force of words,” the French edition of Freund’s dictionary and all the Belles Lettres translations render it: “the meaning of the word, the meaning of words.” And yet it is, in the dictionary, under the entry vis, normally rendered by “force.” Thus one can measure the loss of thought, the theoretical weakness of the sign, which fails to recognize the notion of “force” by assimilating it to the notion of “meaning.” Involuntarily making it appear that the notion of meaning can be an epistemological obstacle to the knowledge of language.
The sign is an omnipresent cultural ensemble, for about two thousand five hundred years. It has the force of the familiar reinforced by the language sciences, in their general state. It is commonly represented according to the dualism of form and content, of the letter and the spirit, in which the difference of languages is inscribed, to be translated eventually. There are grammars and there are dictionaries. This duality too characterizes the linguistic representation of languages. Humboldt called them “the dead skeleton of language.” So, when one translates, one translates from one language into another language, that’s obvious.
Here there are two effects of theory. One is that the things of language — that is, of the sign taken for language — constitute a linguistic model. That is the very business of the language sciences, of general linguistics and of the linguistics of language by language. The other effect is that this model, such as it is represented, in the terms of the linguists, in signifier and signified, does nothing but juxtapose, as two things heterogeneous to each other, sound and meaning.
And what the critique of the sign shows, from the point of view where I place myself, is that the sign is not at all only a linguistic model, but a model constituted of six paradigms, all binary, so that the sign is six times two equals two; and on the other hand, of these two constituents of the sign, one empirically takes the place of the other, which is curiously at once spirited away and maintained. All six according to the same homology. But the sign, by itself, does not let it be seen.
So, first, there is the linguistic dualism of the signifier and the signified. If something shows that the signified takes up all the room, and that the signifier is at once spirited away and maintained, it is precisely current translation, which runs after current French. For religious texts, the Christianized Bible, it runs after the clientele. Its effects of theory are the rhetoric of the proper and the figurative, etymologism among those who take the origin for the meaning (like Chouraqui in his translation of the Bible), and it is the opposition between prose and poetry, of which Shelley said in A Defence of Poetry that it was a vulgar error. It is also what Saussure called the “traditional divisions” and which he criticized: lexicon, morphology, syntax. It is the primacy of language [langue], which prevents thinking discourse. It is poetic language conceived as a deviation in relation to ordinary language — which is aggravated by the old couple, Heidegger-style, of the authentic and the inauthentic, there where Malinowski discovered the phatic function. From the point of view where I place myself, poetic language and ordinary language are two real entities — phantoms of thought. A bizarre effect of language, that realism should produce phantoms.
Then there is the philosophical paradigm, which opposes things and words, according to the old problem, to be taken up again in its ethical and political implications, of realism and nominalism. See Hegel: the word is the death and even the murder of the thing. With that old Punch-and-Judy show that is the question of origin. But it is still playing: see Merritt Ruhlen: The Origin of Language (1994), translated in 1997 under the title L’origine des langues. Subtitle: Sur les traces de la langue mère (On the Trail of the Mother Tongue). And one confuses origin and functioning, the arbitrary and convention. That is one of the comic sides. The other being that one retains only the resemblances. Now it is the differences that count the most: see synonyms.
And the anthropological paradigm opposes language to life, the general to the particular, the written and the voice, the letter and the spirit, but also, in Lévy-Bruhl, the civilized and the primitive. There too there is occasion to recognize that one opposes not language to life — as Wittgenstein does, as Adorno does — but a representation of language to a representation of life. There are necessarily repercussions there on the thinking and the practice of translating. And on the confusion between word and concept.
But it is not over. Academicism renews itself. Lévy-Bruhl opposed the normal civilized white male adult not only to the primitive, but to the whole set of the woman, the madman, the child, the savage, and the poet. In this logic there is the rejection of the foreigner, as certain names of peoples show, but also that delicious jam that is gender studies, the essentialist-realist opposition of the masculine and the feminine, and the confusion between biological sex and grammatical gender.
I come to the theological paradigm, a cultural paradigm — but they are all cultural. It is the staging of the signifier spirited away and maintained. It is the Old Testament, and the signified that gives it meaning is the New Testament, according to the Christian theology of prefiguration. There again, thank you Hegel, the religion of hatred and the religion of love, and the political theologies of Verus Israel. Seventeen centuries of habit, it isn’t even noticed anymore: the proof, the continuum from anti-Judaism to antisemitism, and the use of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and of Mein Kampf in the Islamization of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which (left-wing) right-thinking does not want to see.
As for the effects of ideologisms, the finest is certainly the “God of armies,” adonaï tsevaot, which I translate “God of the multitudes of stars.” That is the meaning, attested by the Koehler-Baumgartner dictionary.
The translation “God or Lord of armies [hosts]” goes back to the Vulgate, Dominus exercituum, Deus exercituum. In French it is in Le Maistre de Sacy, “the Lord of armies,” who sometimes translates “the Lord of powers,” a translation of the Septuagint, Kurios tôn dunameôn; it is in Ostervald, “the Eternal of armies,” and in Segond, likewise; in Crampon, “Yahweh of armies,” and in Osty, “Yahvé of armies,” and Dhorme, likewise. It is in the King James Version, “The Lord of hosts”; in the “New World” translation: “Jehovah of armies”; in the Spanish Biblia del peregrino, “El Señor de los Ejércitos,” and in the Latin American Spanish, “Jehová de los Ejércitos.”
In the Bible Bayard, the translation varies according to the texts and, for example, it is “YHWH of the Troops” in Isaiah and “Yhwh of Armies” in Amos.
Yes, all this is to be vomited.
But the sign is also its social paradigm, the opposition of the individual to society. It too has its ideologisms, its theologisms: like individualism as destroyer of Western society, for socio-theologians like Lipovetsky or Louis Dumont. For whom the model of hierarchy is the caste society in India and the second account of the Creation, in Genesis, the story of the rib chop.
Insofar as this paradigm has had literary effects, it is also at once a paradigm of language and a marker of translating.
The last paradigm of the dogma is an aporia of the political, in the opposition proper to the Social Contract between minority and majority, where the identification of the majority with the Sovereign, according to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, also perfectly accomplishes the maneuver of the spiriting-away-maintenance of the minority. It is a political conventionalism. In which the literary myth of the horizon of expectation is inscribed. Which also poses the problem of the intelligibility of the present, of the unforeseeability of the past, of the power-effects of the greatest number on received ideas, in which is inscribed what is revealing about the delays in translation: LTI (Lingua Tertii Imperii) by Victor Klemperer, translated under the title La langue du IIIe Reich (The Language of the Third Reich) in 1996, took forty-nine years to be translated in France, whereas it was a bookshop success in Germany as early as 1947.
The sign is all of that, and it hangs together. It is therefore a force, an omnipresence, that determines a rotting of thought: of the thinking of language, of the thinking of the poem, of the thinking of ethics and of the thinking of the political.
Now translating works at the critique of the sign, by its own historicity. Translating is not isolated in an autonomy of procedures. The transformation of intercultural logics (decolonization, primitivism) and the transformation in the thinking of language, by the notion of discourse, have transformed, or are working to transform, translating.
But it must be recognized that what reigns, in the thinking of translating, is the linguistics of translation, with the expansion of the notions of formal equivalence and dynamic equivalence, according to Eugene Nida. Which comes down to the superimposition of form on the source language and of content on the target language. The binary of the sign where pragmatics does nothing but add the stimulus-response coupling onto the form-and-meaning coupling. Empiricism as much as hermeneutics reinforce this schema. And yet this schema, which reigns, is bad for translation. As I am going to prove.
I want to make it heard that the familiar, the apparently reasonable, what is taught as the truth and nature, the sign, is a madness, a schizophrenia of language. You have perhaps forgotten, but this is the third move. The paradox, if one thinks of Tzara, of Antonin Artaud, is that the relation to the body and the cry passes for close to madness. Whereas it is the separation of language into two elements radically heterogeneous to each other that is a madness. Which means that afterward one rigs up bridges: the symbolism of sonorities that makes an originism, or a motivation by expressivity, or the prolonged hesitation between sound and meaning, as Valéry says. Whereas from the point of view of the experience of thought that the poem is, and that overflows all experimentalism as much as all mysticism, just as there is the discontinuous in language, so too there is the continuous. But the sign does not know it, and it prevents knowing it. The sign is the major example that each knowledge produces a specific ignorance, does not know it, and therefore hides that it hides what it hides.
In which the sign perfectly resembles what current translation does, which I call an effacer.
There is therefore, starting from the experience of the poem and the experience of translating a poem, a crisis of sign to provoke. Crisis of sign: an allusion, of course, to Mallarmé’s Crise de vers (Crisis of Verse). But the stake is to push further, and beyond a difference of epoch, a malaise. It is a matter of recognizing a universal masked by misrecognition, and a coherence hitherto unperceived.
It is a matter of panicking the sign, this madness of language. And, socially, this madness of panicking it. To show its falseness in the illusion of the limitless, that is, its limits, is the utopia and the prophecy of the theory of language: utopia, for it has no place and it is displaced; prophecy, by the refusal of received ideas. It is these two conditions that make its freedom.
Destabilize the sign. Without repeating the pseudo-madness of the sixties that proposed a way out beyond the sign. That literary Nietzscheanism that deconstructionism prolongs, in a bastardized manner. No, show the force, and the weaknesses, of the sign. Give the sign a Bible-blow. A rhythm-blow. A blow of rhythm, of the poem. The sign breaks at the poem. Its weakest link. A blow of radical historicity against its essentialization, its dualization in a chain. To set off a precipitation of its paradigms that little by little would lose their elements as, in the drawings of the humorist Ronald Searle, books lose their letters. To make room for other paradigms.
A new praise of folly, perhaps. And the height of utopia: not to remain out of place, but to disqualify the installed incompetence.
It is also to show the limits of hermeneutics — not that one has no need of it, but to show that when it takes itself for everything one can say and do, of meaning, it is only entirely within the sign. Whence the weakness of the autonomization of translating into translation studies.
On top of that one must strike another blow, the fourth, by denouncing an imposture that has lasted only too long, and that to my knowledge still reigns: it is the identification of linguistic structuralism with Saussure. Saussure is given as the inventor of structuralism, of which it would be the continuity. But structuralism is, as one can better assure oneself since the 2002 publication of the Écrits inédits (Unpublished Writings), an ensemble, if I count right, of nine misreadings of Saussure. A massif of misreadings.
First misreading, Saussure says “system,” structuralism says “structure,” and makes them interchangeable, whereas system says the interaction of all the elements of language, in the continuity of Humboldt, and structure is purely formal. Which the rest confirms.
Second misreading, Saussure, in his semiology, posits that there are only points of view on language; structuralism, in its semioticism, presents itself as describing the nature of language.
Third misreading, Saussure comprises a wholly deductive systematicity of the theory of language, and invents the expression “theory of language” against the knowledges of the epoch; structuralism does the descriptive.
There where Saussure thinks the unity language-speech [langue-parole] and discourse, structuralism installs a separation between language and speech, and was above all a linguistics of language. Fourth misreading.
From his thinking of discourse, Saussure postulates a poetics, even if he did not make it, as far as we know, but structuralism opposed the rationalism of the Course to the madness of Saussure in the anagrams. Misreading five.
Six. Saussure opposes the associative, which is multiple, to the syntagm; structuralism is in the binary of the paradigmatic and the syntagmatic.
Seven. Saussure thinks the sign as radically arbitrary, the arbitrary in the sense of a radical historicity, which makes it so that for him each time one looks for the origin one finds the functioning; structuralism understands the arbitrary as a conventionalism, and so can only let the originist myth develop.
Eight. For Saussure, diachrony and synchrony are together history in movement; structuralism opposed diachrony, understood as history, to synchrony seen as the state of language.
Nine: Saussure makes a critique of the traditional divisions (lexicon, morphology, syntax); structuralism reinforced the discontinuous and the heterogeneities of the sign.
All that makes the systematicity of the things of language, seen from the point of view of Saussure, which I make my own. This is why I posit that there is a need to think Humboldt today. Because the diffusion of structuralism, reinforcing the sign with its apparent scientificity, cannot but have effects of theory and practice on the act of translating, and on the result that comes out of it.
So this is the fifth blow to strike: to construct, against the coherence of the sign, the counter-coherence of the continuous. Where I can only indicate things rapidly.
Because I posit a first continuous, which is the body-language. A text, in the sense of the poem, is what a body does to language. But this body is not meat. No flesh — that delicatessen — nor neurons in a poem. To think the body-language is to think anew the relation between language and life, from the definition of “human life” according to Spinoza, in the Political Treatise (V, V), not by the “circulation of the blood” but “above all by reason, the true virtue and life of the Mind — sed maximè ratione, verâ Mentis virtute, & vitâ.” As this necessarily supposes language, it is opposed to the common opposition between language and life.
In discourse, this is what I propose to recognize as a system of discourse, that is, a serial semantics that takes in a continuum rhythm, syntax, and prosody: rhythm as organization of the movement of speech, and therefore the rhythms: rhythm of position, rhythm of attack, rhythm of endings, rhythm of repetition, syntactic rhythm, prosodic rhythm. One sees that it is no longer words, it is no longer the sign that is the unit. The consequence is that it is not languages that are maternal, it is works that are maternal. This is why I say that it is the Bible that made Hebrew, not Hebrew that made the Bible. It is only an example.
One understands that the consequences are ineluctable for translation. But also for what reading is. Just two examples.
In Poétique du traduire (Poetics of Translating)1, there is the example of two lines of Homer (Iliad VIII, 64-65) that shows what words do not say, the equality between the word that says the cry of misfortune of those one kills (oïmôguè), three longs, and the cry of triumph of the killers (eukhôlê). And this rhythmic equality, hidden in the metrics of the hexameter, recovers what Homeric anthropology discovers.
But in Spinoza, there is an example that seems to me particularly comic, from my point of view, of course. Spinoza begins the Political Treatise with Affectus, quibus conflictamur concipiunt Philosophi… I translate: “The Affects, by which we are in conflict, the Philosophers conceive as vices…” Affectus is the first word of the sentence, the first word of the book. It is a major concept in Spinoza. Now Pierre-François Moreau translates: “The philosophers conceive the passions to which we fall prey…” There where the thinker put “the affects” first, the philosopher put “the philosophers” out front. A subtle index that the philosopher knows of the body only the body of professors of philosophy. And what is more he translates affectus sometimes by “affection,” sometimes by “passion.” Which at once breaks the coherence of Spinoza’s thought and prevents thinking language in Spinoza.
If one thinks discourse, one thinks rhythm, in the sense of the organization of the movement of speech. That is a first sense of the continuous. But this sense has three consequences.
The first is that there is another paradigmatics to think than that of the sign. Six for six. Instead of the internal dualism of the sign, of form and meaning, to think the continuous is to think force in language. Which takes nothing away from meaning, on the contrary.
Instead of the opposition between words and things, between convention and nature, to think the radical historicity of language, its systematicity, and the point of view.
Instead of a binary and mythologizing anthropology, to think plurality and diversity, not the opposition between identity and alterity, but that identity comes about only through alterity.
Instead of the theological paradigm of the Old and the New Testament, a paradigm that opposes the theologico-political to a generalized de-theologization. I come back to it further on.
Instead of the social paradigm that opposes individual and society, a thinking of the subject. Of subjects.
And instead of the binary political paradigm, minority against majority, or force against freedom, a thinking and a practice of plurality.
A consequence, too, is to see the systematicity that holds all this thinking of the continuous, so much so that the continuous body-language necessarily opens onto the continuous language-poem-ethics-politics. So much so that a poem is a poem only if it is an ethical act, and if it is an ethical act it is a political act. Whereas in the sign language is a certain number of technicalities for linguists, poetics is a formalism, ethics is an abstract thinking of values, politics is the cynicism of force.
In this case, translating is also an ethical act, it is translating the poetic ethics of the poem. Otherwise, it is only reducing to the sign, that is, de-writing.
This systematicity makes it necessary to review the question-of-the-subject. To mark a sixth blow. There too it is an interesting situation, for instead of a subject, that indistinct generic, it gives birth to twelve subjects, and even thirteen to the dozen.
Quickly: the philosophical subject, conscious unitary voluntary, it is better that he not write a poem, for if he knows what he does, he does what he knows; the psychological subject, who has emotions, if he writes a poem, he can only state, name, describe what he feels, it is better too that he abstain, but it is true that the bookshops are full of his productions; then, the subject of the knowledge of things, subject of science, and the subject of the domination of things, subject of technique — they do what they have to do, nothing to do with a poem; and the subject of the knowledge of others, who invented ethnology, with little to do with the subject of the domination of others, who invented slavery and colonization; then the subject of right [law], a capital one that, by article 1 of the declaration of rights of 1789: “All men are born and remain free and equal in rights…”, it was not true, it is still not true, but it is a true categorical imperative, a universal, which shows at once what happens when one confuses the universal with the universalization of the Western model, in order to reject it, and thus reject the universal at the same stroke; then Diderot invented the subject of happiness — Heidegger followed by his followers knows only domination and the-question-of-technique, but in any case he does not think the subject, since man, for him, speaks only when he answers to language [la langue]; and there is the subject of history, passive or active, and for the realisms only the masses or the nations are subjects, the individual is but a number; then there is the speaking subject of the language, who is transformed as soon as he opens his mouth into a subject of discourse, he knows nothing of it but it is unimportant, he is as much subject to as subject of; finally comes the Freudian subject, but we are all Freudian subjects, and if you look for him in a literary text, you will find him, for two reasons: the first is that he is there as the letters are in the word and the words in a sentence; the second reason is that in looking for him one necessarily applies to it the concepts of psychoanalysis, one therefore finds there what one put there, no difference with the grammarian who is going to find verbs, adjectives, and complements and who moreover has no right to say anything else, and above all not whether it is a poem or an imitation, he has not the means for it, or else it is that to be a grammarian he is no less a man, or a woman; and in conclusion, if the Freudian subject is found in a poem, it is not he who makes it a poem or an imitation thereof.
So much so that after this enumeration, of which I in no way affirm that it is complete, I am obliged to conclude that not one of these subjects wrote a poem. I am therefore obliged to postulate a thirteenth subject, which I call the subject of the poem. And it is not the author, that psychologico-juridical notion, nor the individual whom one pats on the shoulder; what I mean by it is the maximal subjectivation of a system of discourse, which makes it so that orality is no longer the sonorous. It is the subject that one hears. The invention of a specificity and a historicity.
From there, it is this subject that there is to translate, to make heard.
In other words, and this is the seventh blow struck, what there is to translate is the listening, which consists in hearing what one does not know one hears (like the expansion of the name Ophelia in the words that surround it, I showed it in Poétique du traduire), and that overflows all hermeneutics: it is a desemioticized significance. Whence, a vast program, there would be a need to retranslate everything that has been translated only according to the sign. Which implies a critique of transparency as much as of the calque, and of no longer opposing an alterity to an identity but making heard an alterity that transforms an identity.
And there rhythm, the rhythms play a major role. One that no longer has anything to do with a form, nor with that bronchial metaphor of respiration. There are too many examples. I will mention only one: in Isaiah (40:3) the place of the major disjunctive accent was for a long time set so as to say, like Le Maistre de Sacy: “The voice of him that crieth in the desert was heard: Prepare the way of the Lord,” for qol qorè // bamidbar panu dérekh adonaï. And the King James Version translated: “The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord,” after the Septuagint, and after Matthew (3:3) and John (1:23). For two centuries, practically all the translations have reestablished the rhythm that makes the meaning, and for example the Bible de Jérusalem translates: “A voice cries: ‘In the desert make ready the path of Yahweh…’” I myself would translate: “A voice cries // in the desert open the way of Adonai…” But the vicious translation lasted long enough to give a saying: “to preach in the wilderness, to hold forth without being listened to” (Grand Larousse de la langue française). And the translation of Le Maistre de Sacy, which some Catholics want to see as the most beautiful of the French ones, and which was reissued in the “Bouquins” collection in 1990, thus still maintains today the faulty version.
If one dwells a little on the effects of theory of the relation to the biblical text, briefly, the effect is at once double and a single one. This is the eighth blow. A Bible-blow.
First effect, from the pan-rhythmics of the text, the organization of the ta’amim, plural of ta’am which means “taste,” the taste of what one has in the mouth, a term which is by itself a parable of orality and of the body-language: I take rhythm as the theoretical lever that can displace the whole theory of language.
And what is revealing is also that a theologically programmed objection has refused, and practically continues to refuse, to listen to this rhythmics, which makes it so that there is neither verse nor prose, and which is therefore irreducible to our Greek categories of thought. Thus the combat for rhythm is a combat against a, or against the, theology.
Second effect, from the very text of Genesis, and from the point of view of the poem, there is a distinction to recognize that the religious do not make, whoever they are, on a text that is, it is true, culturally a religious text, founder of religion, and it is the distinction between the sacred, the divine, and the religious. Which the text nonetheless shows clearly.
It is from the text that I define the sacred as the fusion of the human with the cosmic. It is the fusional, the time when the beasts spoke, like the serpent to Eve. Which at once makes it possible to distinguish the sacred from the nostalgia for the sacred. When Heidegger interprets Hölderlin, das Heilige sei mein Wort, “the sacred be my word,” as an indicative and not a subjunctive-optative, he confuses the two, which is not without consequences for ethics.
The divine is the passage of life from the creative principle of life to the least living creatures. There is not yet the religious. The divine is itself fused with the sacred.
The divine separates from it in Exodus 3:14 when, instead of the name that Moses asks for, God answers with a verb. I translate: “I will be / that I will be,” a taking up again of the promise of verse 12. The suppression of the name at once makes a rupture with the fusional of the sacred, an absolute transcendence of the divine in relation to the human. All at once, negative theology. And the paradox is that it is the divine, thus understood, that makes the infinite of history and the infinite of meaning.
The religious appears further on, in the book of Exodus, and in Leviticus, as socialization and ritualization, the appropriation of the sacred and the divine, all three fused into one. This is why the religious do not make the distinction that I make.
From the point of view of the poem, I consider, in the wake of Maimonides moreover, as an idolatry to speak of “sacred text” and of “holy language” — Hebrew says only “language of holiness,” lechon haqódech.
One is then before a quadruple effect. The first is a paradox: it is that the more the religious sees in the text he reveres a truth, the more he weakens this text when he translates it, because truth, like meaning, produces a residue, the form. And the continuous, the force of the text becomes the discontinuous, the sign. Confessional translations show this paradoxical consequence and at the same time they do not see it and can do nothing about it. The religious sees only himself, like the sign.
Second effect, for this text, at once effaced and instrumentalized by the religious, by a whole history, I posit that to make it heard one must de-Christianize, de-Hellenize, de-Latinize, de-current-Frenchify it, in order to re-Hebraize it and hear it as a poem. To de-God it.
Thirdly, there is a need to recognize that the religious — contrary to Lactantius’s definition, according to whom religion, religio, bound (from the verb religare) men to God and men among themselves — religion is, or contains, the theologico-political. Christian continuity from Lactantius to Durkheim. And nothing divides men more than the theologico-political. It suffices to think of the history of religions. They are killers. Whence I am obliged to draw the consequence that the theologico-political is the major enemy of a human life.
Which leads, fourthly, to recognizing that the work of the poem, from which the translating-poem flows, is to de-theologize the divine. By which the theological paradigm becomes the combat of the chained de-theologization of language, of the poem, of ethics, and of the political against the theologico-political.
Thus, translating shows at the same time, inseparably, the interaction between language, the poem, ethics, and the political.
Obviously, translating Shakespeare or Dante, or Kafka, does not have the same effects. It is proper to a text become cultural, the “Great Code,” to exacerbate these effects. Its interest is all the greater, of making this revelator. Perhaps the greater the texts are, the more they play this role, since one never ceases to retranslate them. It is through them that translating appears not only as an experimental poetics, but also an experimental ethics of the subject of the poem, and an experimental politics of language.
So, the last blow to hammer, the ninth, which gathers them all, imposes itself: it is to think this interaction language-poem-ethics-politics as a single systematicity. It is there that translating reveals itself in its major importance. No longer much to do with a go-between, a passage from language to language, which irresistibly recalls what Montesquieu says of the translator in the Lettres persanes (Persian Letters): that he does not think. Nor is it any longer a matter of a translation studies. The exercise of an overall theory of language works at “a human life.”
Notes
Henri Meschonnic, Poétique du traduire, Verdier, 1999, pp. 107-111.↩︎