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The notion of ‘translating lives’ (Besemeres and Wierzbicka, eds 2007), marked by a clearly processual suffix referring both to the everyday business of code-switching as well as autobiographical accounts thereof, remains stubbornly referential. By contrast, however, the poetic implementation of metaphoric notions of translation, as in Rushdie’s famous ‘we are translated men’ (1992: 16) or Steiner’s (2009) ‘translated people’, with its substantializing suffix, when in turn translated into the work of scholarly analysis, has raised the hackles of many scholars committed to clear disciplinary demarcations. Using ‘translation’ as a figure to explain the ‘intertextual’ genealogies of architectural spaces (Kanekar 2015), for example, is seen as simply taking this too far. Berman (1985: 42-3), who will be a central figure in later stages of this book, criticizes an ungrounded ‘dépassement de sens’ [‘going beyond the limits of meaning’] in theories of a ‘traduction généralisée’ [‘generalized translation’] that he sees abusing a ‘une métaphorisation indue’ [‘an excessive metaphorization’] that slides over into a dangerously metonymic ‘vagabondage conceptuel’ [‘conceptual drifting’]. Sallis (2002: xi, 2-3) objects to the ‘excessive drift of the sense of translation’: ‘one may, with some legitimacy … insist on limiting the drift of translation, on restricting the sense of the word such that it applies only to certain linkages between signifiers in different languages and perhaps also between signifiers in a single language.’

What is strongly evident in such condemnations is a reactionary backlash against to the translations undergone by the very term of translation. What Jakobson (1959: 233) called ‘translation proper’, a term that is reiterated again and again in theoretical texts on translation (e.g. Eco 2003: 2), becomes a punitive conceptual instrument to be wielded against improper uses of the term. The business of assessing translation ‘fidelity’ or ‘equivalence’, core preoccupations of older versions of comparative translation studies (e.g. Nida 1964), is turned here against the term itself, so that only interlinguistic translation is judged worthy of the name. Other translation of the term may be conceptually ‘beautiful’—even seductive, or intellectually ‘sexy’—but not strictly ‘faithful’, to pirate a well-known and overtly sexist proverb. This underlying suspicion of conceptual promiscuity is applied to translation itself, that most promiscuous of cultural practices, in a fundamentally misogynistic gesture that seeks to contain conceptual generativity.

Such efforts at containment may be doomed from the outset, undermining their own undertaking because the weapons they employ are contaminated by the evil they seek to extirpate. There is a flagrant performative contradiction at work here. Pym (2010: 159) points out that ‘translation’ or ‘Übersetzen’ are already ‘metaphors’, to the extent that they are spatial rather than temporal terms. In their everyday life in the public realm, translations generally exist within a diachronic relationship to each other, gesturing back towards a precursor already out of sight; only very rarely are they placed in a synchronic relationship for the purposes of academic comparative analysis. Thus, the spatializing tenor of ‘translation’ or ‘Übersetzen’ means that these terms are in fact misleading metaphors. To that extent, ‘translation proper’ would be an instance of a metaphor denying its own metaphoricity, repressing its own irreducible contagion through translation-by-metaphor. In similar manner, Sallis’ (2002: xi, 2-3) condemnation of improper ideas of translation as a purely metaphorical operation depends upon a metaphor of transfer itself (‘drift’). And in Berman’s critiques of ‘vagabondage’ [‘drifting’, ‘wandering’] one might perhaps detect a repressed acknowledgement of the joyful freedom and creativity of translation, embedded in the ‘metaphoricity’ (i.e., the replacement of one term by another) without which even the most rudimentary theories of translational equivalence cannot function. Indeed, it would seem that translation theory, all through its history, from the most elementary beginnings to the most recent, highly sophisticated models, is hopelessly riddled with vital and enabling, perhaps even indispensable metaphors of its own nature and activity (St. André, ed. 2014).

Proceeding from these fundamentally self-defeating attempts to limit the ‘transfer’ of ‘translation’, I wish to interrogate that gesture of limitation in the rest of this book. This interrogation does not involve reading ‘translation proper’ against the grain (as I have just done in a deconstructive gesture) so much as allowing its repressed dynamism to seek its own paths. According to that autopoetic logic of exploration, the curtailed creativity of translative ‘catachresis’ will come to the fore below, at the moment at which terms coined by Berman such as ‘traduction généralisée’ or ‘vagabondage conceptuel’ re-emerge as positive concepts.

Something like this is already visible, for instance, in Duarte’s (2008: 179, 181) critique of the way ‘a metáfora de tradução’ [‘the metaphor of translation’] generates a creeping progress of displacement: ‘de catacrese em catacrese, a tradução vai sendo sistemmaticamente colocada lado a lado com aquilo que parece ser uma série de sinónimos’. In this extraordinary sentence, a succession of catachresis means that translation finds itself ‘systematically’ shoved to one side or the other (‘colocada lado a lado’) by what appears to be a succession of synonyms (‘uma série de sinónimos’: negotiation, dislocation, rearticulation, transmutation, dissemination, differentiation, transvaloration, etc). The dislocation that Duarte disqualifies as a version of translation at the end of the sentence has, however, already contaminated the sentence from the outset as he seeks for a roughly physical metaphor (‘pushing to one side’) to express the damage done by these inadequately rigorous (but clearly muscular) concepts. And while he condemns metaphors of translation, it is in fact the metonymic process of ‘shoving to one side’ (i.e. displacement) and the ‘series of synonyms’ (the metonymic chain of signifiers) that does the shoving he condemns: what he would like to preserve is the referential copula of a ‘proper’ meaning of translation (translation=translation) that is in reality characteristic of the link between tenor and vehicle in metaphor. It would seem that Duarte needs metaphor as much as he disdains it. Most interestingly, he registers—and implicitly condemns—the concept of ‘catachresis’ as productive strategy (indexed by the doubling of the term itself in ‘de catacrese em catacrese’) working along the lines of metonymy (as indexed by the ‘de … em’ and the syntactic seriality of the doubling). Catachresis means the misuse of a term to produce different conceptual effects from those originally intended in the context of prior implementation. Catachresis is thus a very accurate way of describing translation, and not, as Duarte thinks, a symptom of the corruption of the notion of translation—that is, a dangerously inaccurate abuse of a spurious descriptor. By extension, catacresis therefore neatly characterizes the ‘abusive translation’ of translation—and thus what Lewis (1985) famously calls an ‘abusive fidelity’ to a term such as ‘translation’. Such ‘abusive fidelity’ works, in such a context, as a method for ‘developing a vigilance for systemic appropriations of the social capacity to produce a differential’ (Spivak 1990: 228). Catachresis is a form of conceptual recycling that in fact might describe, if we were to perform catachresis up on the concept of catachresis itself, the basic dynamic of life—whether social or natural—as life: a series of encounters at points of difference that produce, within a broad framework of invariability, the variations that keep life, as it were, going—that is, that keep life alive. To this notion of translation as enlivening catachresis I will return again and again in this book.