“The philosophical account of translation in this book is of what it means to read like a translator” (5) writes Damion Searls. Some might object that philosophy isn’t particularly good at describing reading (or writing, for that matter) and argue that one should prefer literary theory, but Searls enlists philosophers to describe what translators do (they read). Philosophy, moreover, usefully displaces translation ‘theory’ which too often, in his view, involves telling translators what they should or shouldn’t do.
In his “The History of ‘Translation’” chapter, Searls objects to how Schleiermacher’s “On the Different Methods of Translating” has been reduced to the following line: “Either the translator leaves the writer alone as much as possible and moves the reader toward the writer, or he leaves the reader alone as much as possible and moves the writer toward the reader” (Schleiermacher quoted in Schulte and Biguenet, 42). It’s too easy to concretize an either / or dichotomy and deem one option good, the other bad. Searls objects more strongly to how Schleiermacher’s either / or has been transposed into Lawrence Venuti’s opposition between foreignizing and domesticating translation. The value judgments become more strenuously expressed: domesticating is really bad, foreignizing is the only good. In respect of Venuti’s The Translator’s Invisibility, Searls observes that “the more you look at it, as more recent translation theorists have been doing too, the more incoherent the distinction between ‘foreignizing’ and ‘domesticating’ translations starts to seem. What is a ‘foreignizing’ translation anyway? As Venuti says outright, no translation is truly foreign, because any translation into English is written in English” (21).
Maybe so, but just because a translation is written in English doesn’t mean that foreignization is entirely precluded. When Seamus Heaney translated the Anglo-Saxon of Beowulf, he foreignized that English by inserting words and tonalities from Ulster English. It’s an English-to-English translation, not “truly foreign” therefore, but it’s nonetheless a foreignizing translation. (And, since I come from the same part of the world, namely Northern Ireland, for me, it’s also a refamiliarizing translation since it reminds me of that Ulster Irish vocabulary and diction which, since moving to the United States, I had almost forgotten. I’ll say more about that below.) Searls moreover neglects Venuti’s critique of the Anglophone context where the dominant paradigm entailed a transparency model whereby the translator disappeared from view, having ideally provided so fluid a translation one didn’t discern it as a translation at all. Domestication, Venuti argued, abetted the translator’s invisibility, and hence foreignization was intended to resist that relegation of translators to unseen margins.
Venuti deserves more credit, I feel, than Searls is willing to give him. True, a Spanish Inquisition seems to have emerged in some quarters where translation Torquemadas sniff out the heresy of domestication, subject you to the auto-da-fé or burn you at the stake. For Searls, though, Venuti’s model elicited a dogmatic good / bad binary, namely “value judgments (ethnocentric or sensitive) disguised as a conceptual difference (domesticating or foreignizing). There are ways to judge a translation – whether it is respectful or disrespectful, accurate or inaccurate, readable or unreadable” (23-24). Indeed so, and one discourse that specializes in establishing “conceptual difference” (perhaps to disguise its own value judgments) is philosophy. Philosophical concepts are formed by a procedure that needs ‘difference’ to oppose two terms and thereby produce the binaries so cherished by philosophy. Considering value judgments, and since Searls mentions one instructive binary – between the beautiful and the ugly – in connection with Plato’s Euthyphro, take Kant’s Critique of Judgment as well, and contemplate how the putative stability of beautiful / ugly is vital to his account of how philosophy judges whether something is an artwork or not.
Moreover, since the history of translation is at issue, one might add that part of that history concerned the criterion by which translations were adjudged to be accurate or inaccurate. That criterion was supplied by mimesis, informed by Plato’s own value judgment on the ‘accuracy’ philosophy solely gets to establish, and where that accuracy is benchmarked to the opposition between truth and lies. Now, whether the mimetic paradigm was replaced by a German Romantic paradigm is a thorny issue. But if one guardedly accepts to view it like that, then once mimesis stopped providing the benchmark for judging translations, a benchmark Platonists would call objective, Romantic investments in ‘expressivity’ or ‘creativity’ couldn’t give us sufficiently stable criteria in the same way.
If the situation is that we now lack the putatively objective criterion formerly supplied by mimesis (or ‘equivalence,’ Venuti might add, even as he asks, in Contra Instrumentalism, whether that model has gone away), Searls still wonders whether there has been an over-dogmatic reliance on the foreignization / domestication binary to supply the value criteria we apparently still need to judge translations. But, to remain with the German Romantics, they argued, writes Searls, “that the writer is profoundly connected to, intimate with, his or her (usually his) ‘mother tongue,’ while a language as a whole profoundly embodies the spirit and mentality of the population or ‘race’ that speaks and thinks in it” (33). The footnote linked to Searls’s remark is to Yasemin Yildiz’s Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition, and I assume Searls adverts to that book in order to imply that there never was a lingual condition before that postmonolingual condition.
But I prefer to invoke Jacques Derrida’s Monolingualism of the Other which also problematizes the idea of a mother tongue. For what Searls and Derrida have in common is that neither wishes to take the idea of ‘a’ language for granted, as if ‘a’ language is some kind of monolith. I won’t quote Derrida, but here is Searls’s view on that: Schleiermacher, he says, “has a complex account of the relationship between an individual and his culture, while the domestic / foreign polarity assumes that anyone reading in English is part of a monolithic ‘domestic culture’ while anything written in, say, Igbo is part of an equally monolithic ‘foreign culture’” (45-46). Long is the list of writers who challenge that assumption – Joyce would be high on the list, I suggest, but another writer, translator and theorist who also challenges that assumption is Lawrence Venuti.
Searls wants translators to pay “sensitive attention to different registers in language without forcing them into a polarity of foreign = good, domestic = bad” (48). What increasingly comes into view, however, is not just language, but literature’s way with language and its multifarious registers. In this regard, and given that polarity, Searls might have inspected how Venuti addresses the latitude specifically literary translators enjoy to foreignize. Searls might then have then compared his own investment in literature’s specificity as opposed to, for instance, philosophy. Searls translated Nietzsche, after all. Does literature abet more translatory experimentation – whether one calls it foreignization or not – than philosophy? If so, why so? Is there something one should mark concerning the difference between literary language and philosophical language?
Some of the answers come when Searls adverts to Antoine Berman’s book L’épreuve de l’étranger (the English translation is titled The Experience of the Foreign) and cites his reference to the “native strangeness” (55) of literary language. Mallarmé’s French, say, is already strange to a French reader and so a translator translating his poems into English must register and somehow replicate that étrangeté. Searls, noting the title of Berman’s book, remarks on how étranger hovers between ‘strange’ and ‘foreign.’ The German fremd offers a similar ambivalence. Following Berman’s lead, Searls remarks that “a work of art is in itself strange” (55), and “translation helpfully emphasizes, adds to, that quality of the original” (55). Note “work of art.” It really depends on what one considers that linguistic or artistic “quality” to be, I think, whether any literary theory or philosophy can characterize that for us, and whether one assumes that philosophy, for instance, doesn’t have that quality a work of art does.
In any case, Searls might perhaps agree with Humboldt’s “Introduction to Agamemnon”: “As long as one does not feel the foreignness (Fremdheit) yet does feel the foreign (Fremde), a translation has reached its highest goal” (Humboldt quoted in Schulte and Biguenet, 58). It’s a pity Searls doesn’t exploit that surely capital line. One grasps Searls’s agenda nonetheless: it’s less to dismiss Venuti’s foreignization model altogether, but more to modify the sense of foreignness or strangeness at issue. Thus: “It is an illuminating exercise while reading Schleiermacher, and Venuti […] to as it were correct fremd / étrange in English, mentally replacing each occurrence of ‘foreign’ with ‘strange’ and turning every distinction between ‘domesticated’ and ‘foreignized’ into a distinction between ‘familiar’ (clichéd, predictable) and ‘unfamiliar’ (surprising, alien). Doing so makes many of their claims truer” (56-57).
Searls, pursuing the path of defamiliarization (if not foreignization), invokes Shklovsky’s doctrine of ‘defamiliarization’ specifically, reminding us that he asked art to refresh our perception of ordinary things, like a stone: art should make us see the stone’s stoniness. So how do translators go about refreshing our perceptions? It starts by the translator discerning the native foreignness Berman detects in literary source texts. And, like Berman, Shklovsky “insists that any good text is étrange whether read in the original language or in translation” (39). Note “good text”: a bad text, presumably, is one which doesn’t warp language and words into a sharply new, appreciably strange profile. The problem, however, is that to perceive linguistic strangeness one needs a background, a silhouette of linguistic ordinariness or familiarity – strangeness, whether in painting or in reading, is perceptible only via contrast.
Searls suggests that we regard matters concerning linguistic strangeness, and literature’s practice of making language strange again, from “a phenomenological perspective, in terms of deviation from a ‘baseline’” (81). Searls continues: “the ground or baseline isn’t really ‘the language’ but the collection of expectations that readers have, the various habits and customs of speakers, which a writer can either go along with or surprisingly, confusingly, incomprehensibly go against” (99). Here, then, is what reading is and translating is: “Reading with attention to the baseline of the language, as opposed to taking the language for granted, is reading like a translator” (84). Searls doesn’t deploy Ordinary Language Philosophy in respect of this baseline (as he might have done) but rather phenomenology and its approach to visual perception. Consider, therefore, chapter 3, titled “Perception and Affordance,” and his definition of ‘affordance’: “a chair affords us the possibility of sitting in it” (73). The baseline, I suppose, is that the word ‘chair’ refers to a chair that ‘affords’ itself to our bottoms so we can sit on it. A chair mostly wants to be regarded as a chair. One could choose to see it like that or incomprehensibly “go against” that plain meaning and functionality, like Roquentin in Sartre’s Nausea contemplating a red café bench which might be, he thinks, a red lobster. Searls asks: “What do we gain by applying this language of ‘affordances’ to translation? The point isn’t to redescribe ‘knowing what words in another language mean’ with a new philosophical term. The point is to get around the false dilemma of whether a translator (or translation) is or should be ‘free.’ We should stop thinking of translators as ‘free to choose’ their translation: we are actually guided by the original in the same way that a chair ‘makes us’ see it as a chair” (77).
So while it’s not that translators are forbidden from taking the liberty to radically defamiliarize ‘chair’ and call it a ‘lobster’ instead, it’s that Searls largely prefers that translators respect the chair’s request to be translated as a chaise or Stuhl. Recall Shklovsky: a stone wants to be recognized for its stoniness. Possibly Searls might agree with Walter Benjamin in “The Task of the Translator” that “the words Brot and pain ‘intend’ the same object” (Benjamin quoted in Schulte and Biguenet, 75) but, preferring not to engage with Benjamin’s essay, Searls thereby avoids the complexities of Benjamin’s subsequent remark that “the modes of this intention are not the same” (ibid., 75) since differentiating between what is meant and the ways or modes of meaning would muddy the waters considerably and force Searls, I think, into envisaging a much more challenging philosophy: a blend of phenomenology and the philosophy of language.
Such complexities would compromise what, in the end – and despite the imposing title of his book – is a desire to de-complexify how we think of translation and to do so by offering a modest plea to translators (or translation theorists). Something like: let words be what they want to be, mean what they want to mean. Translators must appreciate that. Let (literary) texts guide you to that appreciation, and assuredly the path might involve a process of defamilarization, but the path terminates in the achievement of a translation that does something similar to what a literary work in the original language does: literature refamiliarizes a reader with his or her own language (Heaney’s Beowulf does that for me). Searls doesn’t put it like that, but I hope he would agree that literature’s vital capacity is that it creatively weds defamiliarization to refamiliarization, and if literature does that for readers in their original language, then Searls is right, I think, to ask translators to enhance that same capacity as they take up (or “accuperate” [50]) their source texts, as they translate with and on behalf of words, and try to do justice to the sometimes radical, but also sometimes modest service such words render to the meaning – or the wanting-to-mean – of something as humble as a stony stone, a rosy rose, a sit-thee-down chair or a chewy piece of bread, Brot or pain. The Philosophy of Translation conveys that plea with verve, conviction and stimulating provocation.
Searls, Damion. The Philosophy of Translation. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2024.
Brian O’Keeffe is a Senior Lecturer in the French Department at Barnard College, an Associate Director of the Barnard Center for Translation Studies, and an associate editor of The American Book Review where he writes a regular column on the topic of translation. He is a former President of the Society for Comparative Literature and the Arts, and in 2023 was the Visiting Fellow at Peterhouse, Cambridge University.
Works Cited
Schulte, Rainer & Biguenet, John. Theories of Translation: An Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derrida. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.