Tuesday, December 4, 2007

Le gai savoir

I'm still not sure how to translate Nietzsche's fröliche Wissenschaft, so for now I'll pose the question of translation by deferring it. This deferral follows a logic, the logic of translation itself, which always seems (especially if we follow Nietzsche himself: Die fröliche Wissenschaft also has a title in Italian on its title page) to ask another question that Jacques Derrida brings up:

How to translate a text written in several languages at once? How is the effect of plurality to be "rendered?" And if one translates with several languages at a time, will that be called translating?
-"Des tours de Babel," in Psyche

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