The Risks of Translator-Advocates as Enthusiasts

As to the translation, I have preserve the order of the original, except in a paragraph or two, which I have taken the liberty to restore to the chapters to which they evidently belong, and from which they must have been accidentally detached. The French translator hath gone much farther; he hath not only transposed every chapter, but every paragraph in the whole book. But in this, I conceive he hath assumed a right which belongs not to any translator, and which cannot be justified. His disposition may appear more systematical, but certainly the author has as undoubted a right to the arrangement of his own ideas as to the ideas themselves; and therefore to destroy that arrangement, is to pervert his mean­ing, if he had any meaning in his plan, the con­trary to which can hardly be supposed.--Translator's Preface to Beccaria's Essay on Crimes and Punishment.

The target of the quote's attack is the French philosophe, Andre Morellet.* To the best of my knowledge the author of these words, the anonymous English translator, is unknown.  Through the efforts of Malherbes and Morellet the work became famous in France. And it seems to have been familiar to d’Alembert, Helvétius, Buffon, d’Holbach, and Hume then living in Paris (see Harcourt p. 3). The fame of the work only increased when Voltaire commented on the book in print. The connection with Hume is intriguing because Beccaria is clearly relying on a moral psychology that has considerable affinity with Hume's (and Condillac and Smith). And I wonder if Hume (who had visited Italy as a young man, and who was very interested in Montesquieu -- the main acknowledged source of Beccaria) did not have a role in facilitating the more sober, English translation.

During the last few weeks, I have introduced the idea of a translator-advocate (recall here and here): the underlying idea that some works of philosophy written in non-hegemonic academic languages need an entrepreneurial like agent to become part of  the conversations in the lingua franca. This agent needs to have, I think, four distinct set of skills: (i) linguistic competence in at least two languages; (ii) conceptual sophistication (to grasp the philosophy and other elements of the work to be translated); (iii) being at good philosophical politics (recall this post), that is, an understanding of how to attract the interest of the intellectual milieu that shapes and sets the agenda for discussion in the core, that is, how the translated work is framed and introduced. I do not deny that these skills can be acquired during the process of translation (recall my post on Briggs).

Judging by the uptake of Beccaria in Enlightenment France, Morellet was an exemplary translator-advocate for Beccaria's work. Now it's impossible to know whether Morellet's efforts at systematic re-organization actually increased the audience and excitement of the work's reception in France. But his systematic re-arrangement clearly did not hurt the uptake--presumably because Morellet accurately discerned (recall this post) that the appearance of systematicity was increasingly central to Enlightenment thought (a good introduction is the  work by the Danish scholar, Leo Catana). 

The English translator attacks Morellet on moral (''right") and semantic ("perverted his meaning") grounds. Before I address those charges, it is worth noting that the English translator fails to address the question to what degree Morellet's systematic re-arrangement was necessary to the uptake of Beccaria. Perhaps, and this may be blasphemy to some purists, the successful uptake justifies the decisions. I don't mean to suggest that the eye-balls and financial rewards, if there were any, justify any changes. But if we care, say, about the epistemic contribution of Beccariá's work to discussions of philosophy of law (and political theory--there are quite a few pertinent chapters), then the uptake must count for something. Again, this is not to justify Morellet's decisions, but before we condemn, hard questions must be asked.

As an aside, if you think this whole post is merely of historical or 'academic' interest, recall that Jonathan Bennett's translations are very influential in philosophical pedagogy. Bennet's earlymoderntexts.org take quite some liberty (he makes them 'plainer' and 'more straightforward') to make the original works "more accessible" to contemporary audiences (recall this post). It is my sense that quite a few philosophy works have been altered in some sense or another in translation (one thinks of the recurring controversies over, say, Plato, Aristotle, Nietzsche, and Kant translations--I would love to hear from readers on their favorite examples). 

The English translator also assumes, without argument, that the systematic re-arrangement has transformed the meaning of the text. That is, the anonymous critic assumes that the arrangement of the text is constitutive of the meaning of the text. It is undoubtedly true that sometimes, maybe often, this is the case. But sometimes a slavish mimicking of the original arrangement -- say word-order -- may do no justice to the meaning. (Compare any of your favorite  translations of Latin with the original.) Of course, it is quite possible the English translator is right to suggest that French audience of Beccaria never really have read Beccaria's ideas/views, but rather a text inspired by Beccaria. (It would have been nice to see a few examples.) There are, of course, more complex issues here dealing with the nature of identity between original source and translation; in This Little Art, Briggs is very good at helping her reader see that there is a kind of imaginative  leap, I am tempted to say, a subtle form of self-deception, that comes with reading translations (in which one kind of effaces the fact that one is reading a translation).

Interestingly enough, the English's translator's decision themselves rely on the idea that slavish mimicry of the printed text is a mistake. She (I can't say for sure, of course, but so many translators have been women, it's a safe enough bet) also chose to change the text in light of with what she took to be intended meaning of the text. And she discerns this intended meaning -- notice her confidence ('evidently')--by assuming something like a principle of charity. My point here is not to challenge her practice -- I have no stake in the battle -- rather, that she recognizes that to grasp the intended meaning may require deviation from printed structure or even the idea-ational structure. For, and this point is more subtle, I think even the English translator recognizes that the relationship between "the arrangement of" the author's "ideas" (as presented in the text) "to the ideas themselves" (one may be tempted to say the propositional content discerned by the author) need not be one of isomorphism. 

I will close on an anti-climax, and ignore the moral charge against Motellet. Not because I don't take the morality of translation seriously. But rather -- and I am sincere here -- I do not quite understand the underlying argument about a right here. It's not that I deny there is no such right; I can imagine arguments that follow from the nature of personal identity or the nature of property or from the moral characterization of an intellectual credit economy that generate some such rights. But I am really unsure how an author's intended plan generates a right to fidelity to the plan in translation.

*Sadly neither Morellet nor Beccaria have an entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, despite Focucault's efforts to call attention the latter, especially (recall yesterday's post).

Comments

[David Duffy]

"He who translates is a heretic but he who refuses to translate is a blasphemer"

[Matt]

Have you read the interesting "note on the texts" in the Cambridge Texts i the History of Political Though edition, edited by Richard Bellamy? At the least, it's clear that the book has a highly complicated textual history. (At one point, Beccaria said the French version was better, but he didn't follow it for his later editions, for example, and Diderot supposedly said that Morellet had "'killed' Beccaria's book". Interesting stuff there, though it doesn't (and doesn't try to) solve scholarly disputes.