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The Risk of Translation

Linguistic hospitality promotes translation as a mediation between host and guest languages. There is a double duty here: to remain faithful to one’s own language and to welcome the foreigner’s language at the same time.

This double duty entails important ethical responsibilities. It is a challenge we can fail by succumbing to one of two temptations. First, there is the danger of absorbing the Other into the Same, assimilating the singular differences of the guest tongue to the totalizing norms of the host tongue. This makes for a bad translation, and at a moral and political level can lead to extremes of linguistic chauvinism, xenophobia, or imperialism. Second, there exists the contrary temptation to surrender one’s own linguistic dwelling completely to the incoming Other, to the point where there is no host at home at all to receive a guest in the first place. This capitulation can lead to supine servility to an overwhelming or oppressive Other. To avoid the two dialectical extremes—of either linguistic hegemony or humiliation—one may take a middle road of linguistic hospitality where one honors the host and guest languages equitably. Paul Ricoeur spells out the far-reaching implications of such linguistic hospitality in On Translation—implications that range from the literary and ontological to the ethical and religious:

Translation sets us not only intellectual work … but also an ethical problem. Bringing the reader to the author, bringing the author to the reader, at the risk of serving and of betraying two masters: this is to practice what I like to call linguistic hospitality. It is this which serves as a model for other forms of hospitality that I think resemble it: confessions, religions, are they not like languages that are foreign to one another, with their lexicon, their grammar, their rhetoric, their style which we must learn in order to make our way into them? And is Eucharistic hospitality not to be taken up with the same risks of translation-betrayal, but also with the same renunciation of the perfect translation.¹

A crucial step in resisting the lure of the Perfect Translation is to observe a delicate balance between proximity (welcoming the stranger into our midst) and distance (accepting that something is always lost in translation: the other’s meanings and allusions are never completely ours). We can aim for the most approximate equivalences and correspondences, but we can never assume these to be adequate. Translation is always an endless task. It is a “working through”—analogous to a psychoanalytic Durcharbeitung—where the labor of translation between one linguistic world and another involves some element of mourning: a letting go of the egocentric drive to reduce the alterity of the guest to our own fantasies. Such fantasies are based on the falsehood that, in translation, there exists only one true language: one’s own.

But as Ricoeur repeatedly insists, there is no such thing as language, only languages. Linguistic hospitality is always in the plural. Or as the old adage goes, Traditore, tradutore: to translate is always in some sense to betray—meaning we all live “after Babel.” And this is no bad thing. Our linguistic fallenness marks a basic finitude that saves us from the illusion of returning to some prelapsarian logos (where we play God speaking a language with a perfect word for a perfect thing). And it also deflates the lure of a perfect logos of the future—such as the enlightenment dream of a caracteristica universalis or a pan-European Esperanto. The translation paradigm of hospitality resists such delusions and resists historical projects to impose a single language of Empire—Greek, Latin, French, Spanish, English—on a multiplicity of diverse vernaculars. It is the right of every living language to be translated into another language while also retaining certain untranslatable intimacies and opacities. Every tongue has its secrets. All speech casts a shadow. Whence the legitimate double injunction of every guest language when faced with a host: “Translate me! Don’t translate me!” Render me, but not completely. Good translation is transfusion, not fusion. It signals a transition between two, never a reduction to one. It is a dialogical welcoming of difference (dia-legein), offering a passageway between the Scylla of abstract universalism and the Charybdis of narrow parochialism.

Good translation renounces the claim to self-sufficiency, acknowledging that we share words as we share clothes. To paraphrase Ricoeur, we are called to make our language don the garments of strangers while simultaneously inviting strangers to step into the fabric of our speech. Translation is transvestitude from the word go, from Babel on. In the beginning was hermeneutics—namely, the interpretation of diverse meanings, tongues, intentions, and lexicons. In principio fuit interpres. There is no pure pristine logos, unless it is God’s, and we are not gods. To be human is to interpret and to interpret is to translate. There never was a human being without an Other, a host without a guest. Adam had Eve and Eve had Adam. In the beginning was hospitality—and, as we shall see, hostility.

Thus understood, translation involves a recognition of our human fallibility, keeping us open to the never-ending task of more translation, again and again. The only criterion of a good translation is another translation. Which is why the great classics are both untranslatable and infinitely translatable. (There are never enough renditions of Homer or Shakespeare.) We are dealing with a drama of fragile hospitality. Ricoeur puts it well: “Despite the conflictual character which renders the task of the translator dramatic, he or she will find satisfaction in what I would like to call linguistic hospitality. Its predicament is that of a correspondence without complete adhesion. This is a fragile condition, which admits of no verification other than a new translation … to translate afresh after the translation.”² And, Ricoeur adds, extending the paradigm of translatability to narrativity in general: “Just as in a narration it is always possible to tell the story in a different way, likewise in translation it is always possible to translate otherwise, without ever hoping to bridge the gap between equivalence and perfect adhesion. Linguistic hospitality is the act of inhabiting the word of the Other paralleled by the act of receiving the word of the Other into one’s own home, one’s own dwelling.”³ But the host can never capture the guest in its house. The guest must sometimes take leave in order to remain a guest. And the host must sometimes release the guest in order to remain a host. There is an “untranslatable kernel” in every translation that reminds us that host and guest languages are never the same—and never should be.

While this acknowledgment of irreducible linguistic difference entails a therapeutic dissolving of the fallacy of fusion, it opens up the challenge of plurality and natality. (For natality read: wonder, surprise, the shock of the new—a point that will be further elaborated in Part II.) It is precisely when two distinct tongues cross that a third may be born. And this birthing can be multiple, we noted, in the countless translations of the great classics—Greek, Sanskrit, Latin, Hebrew—into numerous languages and then further versions of each vernacular language. We do not lament the serial renditions of Virgil or Proust, for example; we celebrate them. And the same goes for a text like the Bible, running from the Septuagint translation from Hebrew into Greek to Jerome’s translation into Latin, and the great vernacular of King James into English, of Luther and Buber into German, of Chouraqui into French, and so on. With each translation, a “semantic surplus” is created by the fertile collision of separate language. Something new is born that is mutually enhancing for both cultures. Think of how, for instance, in the Septuagint translation of Exodus 3:15—“I am who may be”—the Greek ontological notion of being (ontos on) as formal and material substance is radically transformed by the Hebrew notion of God as a promise of historical and eschatological becoming. And vice versa. So by the time Maimonides is writing his Hebraic-Hellenic metaphysics in Guide for the Perplexed, both Greeks and Jews are reinterpreting their respective notions of what it means to be in the world—a bicultural crossing that opens radically novel ways of rethinking personhood, time, eternity, relation, finitude. After the babel of multiple translations, we may say with James Joyce that “Greekjew is Jewgreek.” Athens and Jerusalem are never the same again. And a similar point could be made about Paul’s translations from Hebrew and Aramaic into Greek in his Epistles or the early Church Fathers in their mystical theologies of “being beyond being.” Christian Neoplatonism and Patristic mysticism offer new hermeneutic wagers regarding the meaning of existence. (This argument extends, of course, beyond the Abrahamic-Hellenic traditions to the great translations of the Upanishads or the Buddhist Heart Sutra or other wisdom literatures.)

But let’s be careful: translation is not always on the side of the angels. Each transition between self and stranger involves the possibility of mistranslation. All understanding contains misunderstanding, as the hermeneutic adage goes. Hostility to the Other is as real an option as hospitality. Not to mention ordinary mortal mistakenness. Emile Benveniste observes in Language and Indo-European Society that hospitality and hostility share the same root, hostis, which can mean both host and guest, both friend and enemy.⁴ Hence, the notion of translation as a dramatic event—a task, a risk, a wager between hostility (reducing the guest to the same) and hospitality (acknowledging the irreducible gap between oneself and another). This is why Antoine Berman speaks of translation as “l’épreuve de l’étranger”—an existential testing or trial of the stranger.⁵ This notion of épreuve calls in turn for a special kind of practical wisdom or judgment (phronesis): namely, the ability to discern between varying calls and demands of the stranger—as foreigner or immigrant, as alien or refugee, as adversary or invader. Hence the constant wagering between hostility and hospitality, between vigilance and welcome: an oscillation that Derrida names with the neologism “hostipitality.” Moreover, the capacity to navigate between distinct persons and perspectives is something that operates not just interlinguistically (between a native and foreign tongue) but also intralinguistically (between speaking beings within the same tongue). The mother tongue has many infants. Indeed, as psychoanalysis shows, translation is often at work between our conscious and unconscious selves. We frequently find ourselves foreigners within our own langue maternelle—and within the depths of our own psyches. We are, deep down, as Kristeva reminds us, strangers to ourselves.⁶

Jacques Derrida makes a radical point here about the “impossibility” of pure hospitality. Every translation, he argues, risks some degree of hostility toward the other in so far as it asks the Other to render itself in terms of one’s own projects, prejudices, and perspectives. We naturally read every stranger with respect to our lifeworld of cultural horizons. As soon as I, qua host, ask, “Who are you?” my guest is obliged to respond in my terms. All hermeneutics in practice is a mixed act of “hostipitality”—welcoming the other at the same time as one translates its alterity into someone “like me”: a self I can recognize and identify. Though Ricoeur interprets this “like” in term of someone similar (semblable) rather than someone the same (même) as myself, Derrida holds the deconstructive line that any need for similarity is already a compromising of the strangeness of the Stranger. (This, by Derrida’s own admission, is a radicalization of Husserl’s phenomenological analysis of knowing others in his Fifth Cartesian Meditation.)

So we might sum up the difference between Ricoeur and Derrida thus: where the hermeneutics of translation practices conditional hospitality (which involves some interpretive judgment regarding mixed bags of “hostipitality”), deconstruction calls for unconditional hospitality where I accept the Other regardless of its origin or identity—human, animal, or divine. Pure hospitality, Derrida insists, does not ask for IDs or passports; it is not concerned with border controls or contracts but invites pure exposure to alterity, welcoming the stranger “without why.” If there is a knock at the door, you open it without asking if it is a messiah or a monster. Once you put hospitality into laws, rules, and norms, you take the risk out of it, you compromise the radical daring of undecidability, the yes to all that comes. Derrida is undaunted. “Let us say yes to who or what turns up,” he writes in Of Hospitality, “before any determination, or anticipation, whether or not it is to do with a foreigner, an immigrant, an uninvited guest, or an unexpected visitor, whether or not the new arrival is the citizen of another country, a human, animal or divine creature, a living or dead thing, male or female.”⁷ In short, absolute hospitality welcomes the stranger independently of all legal, political, or epistemological conventions, calling for a pure leap of faith toward the “absolutely other.” Or, as Derrida puts it in his inimitably hyperbolic way, “every other is absolutely other” (tout autre est tout autre). The stranger is always, at bottom, absolutely strange. And no stranger is excluded.

Now, most would agree that such “pure” hospitality is not possible in terms of everyday practice—where the only feasible form of welcome is always contingent upon this or that set of conditions. Absolute unconditional hospitality is “impossible,” but it is, Derrida insists, no less “desirable” for all that; although to most people it may seem “blind,” “mad,” or “mystical”—a mere “dream.”⁸ Any attempt to make the impossible possible is already a matter of betrayal, compromise, and contagion. Where hermeneutic hospitality speaks of conversion between host and guest, deconstructive hospitality speaks of contamination. This explains Ricoeur’s confession that the difference between the two approaches is that between the words “difficult” and “impossible.”⁹

There is, I think, a fundamental tension at work here between a phenomenology of alterity (Levinas and Derrida) and a hermeneutics of empathy (Ricoeur). The first insists on the absolute, irreducible difference of the Other—and implies that any reduction to “sameness” or even a positing of “similarity” is by definition unjust. The second proposes the development of sympathy and imagination through listening to the other’s story and identifying with it. This is exacerbated by a further tension between the call for justice (here I stand) on the one hand, and the call for openness and endless translatability (there is always something more) on the other. To some extent, this has been a crucial tension at the heart of continental philosophy for much of the twentieth century, one that I have endeavored to address in previous works like Strangers, Gods, and Monsters and that is evidenced in the two parts of this volume: Part I on the side of a hermeneutics of narrative empathy, Part II on the side of an alterity of rupture.

This tension raises the following complex question: Is any version of similarity between self and other always a mode of hostility? And is it really credible to claim that the stranger is always absolutely and unknowably strange? Are there not many kinds and degrees of strangeness, which we need to tactfully and carefully acknowledge? Indeed, might not the claim that the other is truly absolutely other—sharing nothing in common with me at all—even function as a form of hostility, if taken too far? I think it unwise to assume that any form of similarity is necessarily more hostile than any form of difference, as Levinas and Derrida seem to insist. Xenophobia, for example, often arises out of an obssession with the stranger’s otherness, giving rise to hostility and violence. A fear that may be sometimes overcome by realizing that the other actually shares many similar hopes, dreams, fears as myself—which becomes evident, for example, through reading narratives from other cultures. This recognition of the other as someone like myself, who shares important things in common with me, does not necessarily result in appropriating or colonializing moves—but often the contrary. Much of colonialism has been undergirded precisely by the presupposition that the colonized were thoroughly other than their conquerors. This is the infamous lure of “Orientalism.”

I would argue that empathy always requires some sense of “likeness,” some feeling “with” (sym-pathein) that assumes at least a basic minimum of similarity between me and the other. A sense that—as I hear the story of the other—some part of me can say, “That is my story too.” (I return to this in the next chapter, and it will be further addressed in Part II through the lens of Arendt.) In such instances of linguistic sharing, my translation of the other’s words is not seen as a form of hostility, but the opposite. Translation—as mutual transfer between different minds—involves some element of appropriation: namely, receiving the other as a self like me in some respects, while remaining other than me in other respects. Empathy is vital to community, even if one must be wary of empathizing too much—to the point of believing one is the other and can see things precisely as they do, denying the unique singularity of their experience. Language hinges on some assumed common ground—and without it, there is no communion. If you cannot empathize with the suffering of the dispossessed, what hope is there for any ethics worthy of the name?

Last, a scruple about the claim for infinite translatability. One has to admit that there is no guarantee that having as many interpretations as possible will, of itself, necessarily result in a more ethical attitude (though it is a possibility). And, more troubling still, if there are endless more or less equal ways of retelling the stories and if this diversity were to be applauded for its own sake, it would be hard to claim any better or worse translation at all. Some critical nuance is called for here—a middle way between translatability and untranslatability, that is, between hospitality understood as empathic conversation on the one hand and as endless dissemination of readings, on the other. In what follows we will be seeking to turn ostensible contradictions into fertile tensions, applying the middle way of hospitality to a series of examples drawn from contemporary culture and politics.