Introduction

Author(s): Lawrence Venuti

Source: Critical Inquiry , Winter, 2001, Vol. 27, No. 2 (Winter, 2001), pp. 169-173
Published by: The University of Chicago Press

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/1344246

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 Introduction

Lawrence Venuti

"What Is a 'Relevant' Translation?" is an English version of a lecture that

Jacques Derrida delivered in 1998 at the fifteenth annual seminar of the
Assises de la Traduction Litteraire ' Arles (ATLAS). A French organi-
zation with approximately eight hundred members, ATLAS works t
promote literary translation and to protect the status of the literary trans-
lator. About two hundred people heard Derrida's lecture, which was sub-
sequently published in the proceedings.' As might be expected from an
audience composed primarily of professional translators, the response
was mixed, a range of variations between two extremes: on the one hand
the feeling that the lecture was provocative but too theoretical to be o
practical value; on the other hand, the feeling that it was accessible and
pertinent, indeed, an illuminating treatment of translation practices.
Derrida anticipated such responses by acknowledging his audience
in diverse ways. Not only does he open with an elaborate apology fo

I would like to thank Richard Sieburth of the Department of Comparative Literature

at New York University for a painstakingly close reading that greatly helped to improve the
translation. Eric Keenaghan of the English Department at Temple University assisted by
checking some references. Dilek Dizdar and Dieter Huber of the Faculty of Applied Lin-
guistics and Cultural Studies at Gutenberg University (Germersheim) invited me to partici
pate in a seminar that Derrida conducted on his lecture, thus creating the occasion that
initiated this project. Kristin Casady copyedited the text of the translation with care an
sensitivity. Derrida generously answered my queries and encouraged some experiment
renderings.
1. Jacques Derrida, "Qu'est-ce qu'une traduction 'relevante'?" Quinziemes Assises de la
Traduction Littiraire (Arles 1998) (Arles, 1999), pp. 21-48.

Critical Inquiry 27 (Winter 2001)

? 2001 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/01/2701-0009$02.00. All rights reserved.

169

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170 Lawrence Venuti Introduction

speaking about translation to experienced translators, but he avo

purely philosophical presentation of his ideas. Although he h
quently addressed the issue of translation, his approach has tend
take the form of speculation or a commentary on a key text.2 H
addresses themes in the history of translation theory, notably the ant
sis between "word-for-word" and "sense-for-sense" translation that occu-
pied such writers as Cicero and Jerome. Yet he grounds his remarks in
an incisive interpretation of the role of translation in Shakespeare's The
Merchant of Venice (a text that also formed the basis of a seminar on for-
giveness and perjury that he taught the year of the lecture). Derrida's
effort to give specificity to his ideas, to locate suggestive applications, is
perhaps most striking in his exploration of particular translation prob-
lems, especially those in which we get a glimpse of him as translator. He
proposes a French version for a line in Portia's speech on "mercy" and
recalls his own French rendering of a central concept in Hegel's dialectics,
the Aufhebung. As a result, this lecture can be considered Derrida's most
direct intervention to date into that fledgling discipline that in Europe
and elsewhere is known as "translation studies." What contribution does
it make, then, to the study of translation?
The idea of a "relevant" translation is not new in translation theory,
even if it has been subject to varying formulations, particularly over the
last three centuries. In 1813, for instance, Friedrich Schleiermacher took
up this idea when he questioned the translator who "leaves the reader
in peace, as much as possible, and moves the author toward him."" For
Schleiermacher, relevance was questionable because it meant assimilation
or domestication, an erasure of the foreignness of the foreign text by

2. See, for example, Derrida, The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation,
trans. Peggy Kamuf, ed. Christie V. McDonald (New York, 1985) and "Des Tours de Babel,"
in Difference in Translation, trans. and ed. Joseph Graham (Ithaca, N.Y., 1985), pp. 165-248.
It is also worth keeping in mind that Derrida's first book was a translation of Edmund
Husserl's L'Origine de la geometrie (Paris, 1962). He alludes to this "first attempt" at the begin-
ning of his lecture.
3. Friedrich Schleiermacher, "On the Different Methods of Translating," in Translation/
History/Culture: A Sourcebook, trans. and ed. Andre Lefevere (London, 1992), p. 150.
Schleiermacher's ideas inform the translation ethics developed by Antoine Berman: see Ber-
man's The Experience of the Foreign: Culture and Translation in Romantic Germany, trans. S. Hey-
vaert (Albany, N.Y., 1992), and La Traduction et la lettre ou l'auberge du lointain (Paris, 1999). A
synthesis of Schleiermacher, Berman, and Ezra Pound underlies the formulation of "for-
eignizing strategies" in my study, The Translator's Invisibility: A History of Translation (Lon-
don, 1995).

Lawrence Venuti's latest publications are The Scandals of Translation:

Towards an Ethics of Difference (1998), The Translation Studies Reader (2000),
and the translation of Juan Rodolfo Wilcock's The Temple of Iconoclasts
(2000). He is professor of English at Temple University.

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 Critical Inquiry Winter 2001 171

rewriting it in the terms of the receiving language and culture. In the

twentieth century, however, relevance came to dominate translation the-
ory and practice. Eugene Nida, a theorist who has exercised an interna-
tional influence on translator training since the 1960s, championed the
concept of "dynamic equivalence" in which the translator "aims at com-
plete naturalness of expression, and tries to relate the receptor to modes
of behavior relevant within the context of his own culture."4 More re-
cently, the branch of linguistics known as pragmatics has spawned an ap
proach wherein the relevant translation communicates an interpretation
of the foreign text through "adequate contextual effects" that take into
account the receptor's "cognitive environment" and therefore require
minimal "processing effort."5
Like Schleiermacher, Derrida questions relevant translation. He calls
attention not only to its ethnocentric violence but also to its simultaneou
mystification of that violence through language that is seemingly trans-
parent because univocal and idiomatic. This view is based on his critique
of the sign. The relevant translation, he writes, "presents itself as the
transfer of an intact signified through the inconsequential vehicle of any
signifier whatsoever." Yet the fact is that any translating replaces the signi-
fiers constituting the foreign text with another signifying chain, trying to
fix a signified that can be no more than an interpretation according to
the intelligibilities and interests of the receiving language and culture.
Unlike Schleiermacher, Derrida sees this practice as inevitable insofar as
every translation participates in an "economy of in-betweenness," posi-
tioned somewhere between "absolute relevance, the most appropriate,
adequate, univocal transparency, and the most aberrant and opaque ir-
relevance." He is acutely aware, moreover, of the cultural and political
implications of relevant translation. His reading of Shakespeare's play
gains enormous interrogative power from his view that "everything in
[it] can be retranslated into the code of translation and as a problem of
translation." Thus he shows how Portia aims to translate Shylock's Judaic
discourse of "justice" into the "merciful" discourse that underwrites the
"Christian State."
Derrida's reading enables-even if it nowhere articulates-an im-
portant insight into the social function of translation strategies. In the
history of Western translation, Christianity has favored free domesticat-
ing strategies that render the "sense" or "spirit" of the foreign text,
whereas Judaism has been stereotypically associated with literalizing
strategies that render the "word" or "letter." In 1789, when domestication

4. Eugene Nida, Towards a Science of Translating, with Special Reference to Principles and
Procedures Involved in Bible Translating (Leiden, 1964), p. 159.
5. For the linguistic theory, see Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, Relevance: Communi-
cation and Cognition (Cambridge, Mass., 1986), esp. pp. 13-14, the source of the quotations
in this sentence. For the application of this theory to translation, see Ernst-August Gutt,
Translation and Relevance: Cognition and Context (Oxford, 1991).

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172 Lawrence Venuti Introduction

had already achieved canonicity in English-language translating,

Campbell's commentary on his version of the Gospels drew this d
tion and revealed its anti-Semitic burden: "A slavish attachment to the
letter, in translating, is originally the offspring of the superstition, not of
the Church, but of the synagogue, where it would have been more suit-
able in Christian interpreters, the ministers, not of the letter, but of th
spirit, to have allowed it to remain."' True to the stereotype, Shylock in
sists on a literal translation of the contract, demanding a pound of fles
for the unpaid debt while refusing the free "merciful" translation th
would absolve his debtor. Yet the Christians adopt an even more rigorou
literalism when Portia insists that, according to the wording of the con
tract, Shylock can't shed one drop of blood in carving out the pound o
flesh. It is this unexpected Christian rendering of the letter that compe
the Jew to submit to the translation of the hegemonic discourse, Chris
tianity itself.
Thus, no translation strategy can be linked deterministically to a tex
tual effect, theme, cultural discourse, ideology, or institution. Such link
ages are contingent upon the cultural and political situation in which th
translation is produced. Literalizing strategies have actually been put t
contrary uses in the history of translation. Among German Romantic
like Schleiermacher, such strategies, while preserving the foreignness o
foreign texts, were intended to construct a homogeneous cultural identit
at home; they served a Prussian nationalist agenda during the Napole-
onic wars.' In the twentieth century, Antoine Berman saw the same strat
gies in ethical terms, as a discursive gesture of respect for the foreign that
introduces a difference into the translating language and culture.8
Derrida remains unsure about whether to apply the term translation
to his rendering of Portia's line, "when mercy seasons justice." I want t
suggest that it is indeed a translation, although one that exemplifies wh
Philip Lewis, influenced by Derrida's thinking, has called "abusive fidel-
ity."9 This translation practice, Lewis observes, "values experimentation
tampers with usage, seeks to match the polyvalencies and plurivocities o
expressive stresses of the original by producing its own." It is demande
by foreign texts that involve substantial conceptual density or comple
literary effects, namely, works of philosophy and poetry, including Derri-
da's own writing. This kind of translating is abusive in two senses: it resists
the structures and discourses of the receiving language and culture, esp
cially the pressure toward the univocal, the idiomatic, the transparent
and in so doing, it interrogates the structures and discourses of the for

6. George Campbell, The Four Gospels, Translated from the Greek: With Preliminary Disserta-
tions, and Notes Critical and Explanatory (London, 1789), pp. 456-57.
7. This critique is presented in Venuti, The Translator's Invisibility, pp. 99-118.
8. See Berman, La Traduction et la lettre, pp. 69-78.
9. Philip E. Lewis, "The Measure of Translation Effects," in Difference in Translation
pp. 31-62.

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 Critical Inquiry Winter 2001 173

eign text, exposing its unacknowledged conditions. Thus, Derrida's ren-

dering of the Hegelian Aufhebung as relive turned the French word into a
technical philosophical term and highlighted the contradictions in the
dialectical movement of thinking, "the double motif"-as he puts it-
"of the elevation and the replacement that preserves what it denies or
destroys."' 0 Similarly, by using relive to render Portia's verb "seasons," Der-
rida at once deviates from accepted French versions of Shakespeare and
indicates the assimilative violence involved in translating Shylock's de-
mands into the Christian discourse of mercy.
In translating Derrida's lecture I sought to implement his reflections
on translation, as well as the concepts and practices that those reflections
have inspired in the work of other theorists and translators. This meant
adhering as closely as possible to his French, trying to reproduce his syn-
tax, lexicon, and typography by inventing comparable textual effects-
even when they threaten to twist English into strange new forms. The
possibilities, however, are always limited by the structural and discursive
differences between the languages and by the need to maintain a level of
intelligibility and readability, of relevance, for my English-language read-
ers. Many of these readers will be accustomed to reading Derrida in En-
glish and will expect to confront a page punctuated by foreign words
and annotations. I have taken advantage of this expectation by inserting
Derrida's French within square brackets where a particular effect could
not be easily achieved in an English rendering. Because this is a lecture
about translation that addresses the question of polylingualism and is it-
self polylingual to some extent, effectively turning its audience into trans-
lators, I have also kept certain words in the original French or German.
Key terms like relive, which Derrida describes as untranslatable, have re-
mained untranslated in most passages. But because releve is the object of
a richly detailed interpretation, I have rendered it expansively in some
instances, making explicit the range of meanings that it accumulates in
Derrida's discussion. Whether my translation is finally relevant, abusive,
or some gradation between, I leave to my readers to consider.

10. See Alan Bass's illuminating comments on Derrida's translation in Derrida, Mar-
gins of Philosophy, trans. Bass (Chicago, 1982), pp. 19-20 n. 23.

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