Many Languages, a Common Passion

[Dave Monroe]

>From Reed Johnson, "Many Languages, a Common Passion,"
LA Times, Friday, April 12th, 2002 ...

High-rolling Las Vegas casino executives, Nobel
Prize-winning fiction writers and bad-boy French
literary theorists don't always have a lot to say to
each other. Which may account for why a new
collaboration at UC Irvine involving, among others,
Glenn Schaeffer, the president and chief financial
officer of Mandalay Resort Group, Wole Soyinka, the
Nigerian playwright and poet, and Jacques Derrida,
founding godfather of deconstructionist criticism and
a UCI philosophy professor, isn't easy to put into
words.

Actually, the question of how things get put into
words, and how words from one language get put into
another language, is the raison d'etre behind the
university's new International Center for Writing and
Translation. Officially established last July and
formally inaugurated last week....

[...]

Soyinka and Bei emphasized practical issues of
translation--how to get more books published by
non-American and non-European authors, how to redress
the balance of what Soyinka called the current
"lopsided" global cultural exchange. Derrida, 71, a
UCI faculty member since 1986 and author of more than
50 books on literature, Marxism, psychoanalysis and
other subjects, elaborated some of his philosophical
concerns with converting one language into another.

These stem from his influential theories about
language in general, about the ultimate indeterminacy
of what words mean. Of the hundreds of thousands of
words he has written, Derrida's most famous
undoubtedly are contained in his assertion that "there
is nothing outside the text." That is, the words, and
hence the meaning, of any given text--a book, a poem,
a recipe, a computer manual--are, in a sense,
self-contained and hermetically sealed. They can only
be properly said to refer to themselves, not to the
"things" in the outside world they supposedly refer
to.

Translation, like any form of literary interpretation,
is subject in Derrida's view to manipulation and
"contamination" by foreign values and biases, whether
by intention or subconsciously. Vladimir Nabokov
memorably satirized this sometimes comically
convoluted process in his novel "Pale Fire," in which
a fawningly envious foreign-born editor willfully
misconstrues a famous American poet's work. At the
same time, Derrida has said, the only people who truly
"know how to read and write are translators."

[...]

The paradox of translation, Derrida said, is that the
translator must strive to be as faithful as possible
to the original author's style and intent, while at
the same time recognizing that it's impossible to
reconstitute the unique meaning of the original words.
The alchemy of translation, he said, occurs precisely
at that point where an essentially new work is
created. "A translator is a creative writer," Derrida
said. "You have to find the best way to be untrue to
the original, to perjure in the best way. This is the
double bind."

[...]

As an example of the need for good translation in the
modern, high-speed world, several people mentioned the
videotape that was released last fall by Osama Bin
Laden, sending Western news organizations, politicians
and military strategists scrambling to obtain reliable
versions in their languages.

http://www.latimes.com/features/lifestyle/la-000026014apr12.story?coll=la-headlines-living-manual

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