I would be unconvinced by an account of translating that passes too quickly over or fails altogether to notice its chance of learning. The chance it offers of becoming expert, becoming-critical, becoming-intimate, becoming a better -- or, if not a better (because are we really getting any better at reading and writing? Is it useful to think of these activities in terms of progress?) -- then certainly a different reader and writer. Translations as the chance -- a translation projects as a means of giving oneself the chance -- of being taught by the other's writing, where answers to the questions of how to be responsible for this writing, and whether or not you or I will be capable of taking responsibility for this writing are, again, in no way given in advance....It's rather to offer a view of translation as a site for learning through reading and writing, through testing and researching, through asking and arguing. Kate Briggs (2017) This Little Art, pp. 207-21o; emphases in original). [HT: Petra Van Brabandt]
One thing Elizabeth Anscombe, John McDowell, Jan Łukasiewicz, Martha Nussbaum, W.D. Ross, and Eleanore Stump have in common is that they produced major translations of complex, philosophical works. (When I looked up Łukasiewicz I expected to find translations of logic texts, but I learned he produced a translation of Hume's Treatise.) I also believe they did so relatively early in their careers. That they translated is, with the exception, perhaps, of Ross, not a major part of their professional identity. But notable, nevertheless. The list of philosopher-translators is, of course, much longer; plenty of trained and professionally employed philosophers devote considerable attention of their scholarly life to producing editions of translations for use in the classroom and scholarship. But this activity is generally not the way we receive and award professional recognition or credit. This is true, I think, even in (at least some)* areas of the history of philosophy; the fact that, say, Curley, Ariew, Garber, Lennon, Berges (etc.) produce major translations is not the reason why the rest of us admire their work. If anything, if at a conference dinner, we praise the translation too much, we may well be suspected of having a low opinion of their philosophical and scholarly work.
Last week I noted that absent a translator-advocate, some works of philosophy will always remain obscure outside the home language. I kind of presupposed that in philosophy, a translation alone is not sufficient to make a linguistically distant text available to readers. It will also require philosophical creativity to articulate the significance of such a work to an audience that may be unclear about the problematic and potentially bewildering conceptual framework, not to mention tacit commitments, of such a text. This requires considerable philosophical acuity on the part of the translator-advocate** because one must understand not only the contemporary philosophical scene to some degree, but be able to learn another, potentially alien approach. That is to say, I tacitly assumed that translator-advocates are over-achieving philosophers, who are also skilled at philosophical politics (recall this post); they can survey multiple cultural traditions and then set in motion arbitrage among them.
Reading This Little Art, a sympathetic and enchanting guide to the art of translation and the meaning of life, made me realize that my assumptions need some adjustment. (Briggs is a translator of works by Roland Barthes.) I hope to return to her important book some other time (including the question of responsibility--a theme I often digress about). Here I note that she calls attention to an important feature of translation that's also true of philosophical translation. One may think that translation is the skilled repetition of another's writings in a new language. One can hold on to this image of translation even when one grants the creativity and skill that is required for a philosophically sensitive translation (Google translate has not cracked that code yet). But while we tend to think of repetition as a kind of automatic, machine-like mirroring, in translation it is much more akin a copying of and thereby mastering of another's dance moves (as Briggs shows).
Briggs argues persuasively that the process of translation entails an enormous amount of learning prompted by the source text. Some of this learning may well take place before a translation begins, but a lot of is prompted by the text itself. Here it is important to recognize that what one learns is not just the views expressed in the text ("being taught by the other's writing"). But one also often needs to come to understand a far wider context. Reading Briggs brought me back to my own experience (now almost twenty five years ago) of translating Christiaan Huygens' (1688) report to the Directors of the Dutch East India Company On Finding Longitude at Sea with a Pendulum (and a series of letters connected to this report).+ Before I undertook that translation I had taken a number of courses on seventeenth century physics. So, while I was just a bachelor student, I was not a naive translator.
Even so, it's not just that I had to learn an earlier version of Dutch (my language), and become proficient in seventeenth century Dutch natural philosophy--few dictionaries and professional vocabularies had explanations of all the terms I encountered. (I learned that most work on seventeenth century Dutch is done by art historians, book and literary scholars.) I also had to learn about seventeenth century map-making, the actual practices of longitude finding, the rules governing life aboard an East India Company ship, the complex social relationships among Huygens (a Dutch patrician), Volder (a university professor), and Hudde (a Dutch patrician-politician and director of the Company). Along the way, I had to go to three different archives because I had to figure out what had happened to some of the characters and ships mentioned in the text I was translating. Some of this work generated my first scholarly publications (about seventeenth century sea-maps). En passant, I learned about Jesuit scientific expeditions (recall).
Now, the philosophically significant thing I learned was that the rejection of action at a distance was not merely motivated by metaphysical rejection (as Koyré argued and lots of folk have echoed thoughtlessly) or conflicting- paradigm-induced-intolerance, but Huygens had a decent empirical argument. (That argument turned out to be based on flawed data, but that was difficult to know at the time.) Along the way, I fleshed out the significance of my favorite walk-on philosopher (recall this post). But I also learned an enormous amount about what it was like to engage in the overlapping practices of natural philosophy, mixed mathematics, longitude finding, almanac writing, commercial map trade, map-making, and commercial sea-faring (a dangerous activity) at the time. (I also became something of an expert on Johannes Hudde and De Volder.) Much of this learning was utterly unanticipated, and yet it transformed my understanding of the period.
Briggs hints that the practice of translation can transform the practitioner ('a different reader and writer'). This is due not just to being engaged intensely over an extended period with the thoughts of another at an extreme level of detail. But we also have to be engaged with the significant details of the relevant bits of life-world that go into that author's text. Being a philosophical translator may transform us philosophically (see L.A. Paul). Perhaps, this is why, in our community, we prefer not to talk about the art of translation too much.
*I hedge a bit because I can imagine that in some other areas of scholarship, translation is valued more highly.
**Of course, the tasks of translator-advocate may be split among more than one person. But the translator will require considerable philosophical skill.
+The translation and commentary (with George Smith) has been forthcoming for a long time. For the scholarly relevance, see here.
Another striking example of the translational shift. J L Austin published his translation of Frege's *The Foundations of Arithmetic* in 1953, when he was 32 (and in a professional sense younger, if 5 years of military service is taken into account). Surely this choice of treatise, as an object for translation, helped him to make the dramatic shift from the philosophical practice of his teachers (Cook Wilson, Joseph and Prichard) to the radically different methods of his maturity.
Posted by: Adamhodgkin | 10/15/2017 at 07:09 AM
One thing Elizabeth Anscombe, John McDowell, Jan Łukasiewicz, Martha Nussbaum, W.D. Ross, and Eleanore Stump have in common is that they produced major translations of complex, philosophical works.
Also, maybe, Foucault (depending on what counts as a "major translation"), as he translated Kant's Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View as part of his doctoral work, and the translation was published. I say "maybe" because I don't know if it was a translation that was widely used or not. I've bee lazily reading his introduction to it for a while, and enjoying it.
Posted by: Matt | 10/15/2017 at 01:15 PM