I think David Wills' translations of Derrida are usually very solid. They have a vivacity and a sort of "right on the mark" feeling to them that just seems to fit perfectly with the particular texts he translates. For example, Donner la mort, or L'animal que donc je suis: they both are a bit "heavier" in consistency. By this I mean that both texts have many direct and visible ramifications, but of a deep nature: they don't have their relevance exactly in the more immediate sphere of politics, but in religious and ethical issues. They therefore require a lot of serious choices which have to dispense with a lot of other possible, but meaningful alternatives. And they have to do this constantly, sacrificing a lot. Wills manages this heavy demand very well, I think.But sometimes he just makes the weirdest choices! Here are two that have been really bugging me lately. First, "The Gift of Death" for the title Donner la mort--and I just mean the title, as Wills is usually good at sliding between the different senses of the phrase throughout the text. Now, I'm not really one to judge about French. But I do think I know a little about what Derrida is up to, because I've worked a lot with the texts. Wouldn't it just have been better to translate the title as "Putting to Death?" Here Wills displays the sort of strength or solidness I praise him for above, but I just think it is going too far. Why? Because the solution Wills comes up with really turns the shifting or modulating between the transitive and intransitive senses of the phrase into the work of what is, effectively, a noun.
At least that's how people hear the phrase, I think. No one takes his advice (which he offers in a note before the text) and hears "kiss of death" behind "the gift of death," even though this actually really is an elegant and somewhat formally identical (if people actually heard it that way) way of getting the phrase across. The little project fails--no doubt because even "kiss of death" is just too weak in comparison with the "putting to death," combined with the fact that it's just used much more rarely whereas the phase in French is much more common--and all we get is some idea that there is a gift out there, when what the French is saying is that there's something, a process, going on.
But what gets me is that Wills knows the audience Derrida has in English speaking countries: they love to turn something like supplement into a thing they can point at, a sort of handy reified concept that they don't really need to think any more about but can just use everywhere. They did this with deconstruction, they did this with hymen, they did this with the crazy Greek word parergon, for crying out loud. They even did this with differance, a word that is actually extremely amenable to being used legitimately as a noun: you can legitimately say, a differance between x and y... but people here (unbelievable!) say, instead, there we find differance--as if it were not a differance but the differance, it itself! They reified what could already be used as a noun! Go figure. The point is, though that this should make it apparent that you should really emphasize the active here. Instead, Wills' solution is to let the phrase sound like "the kiss of death," and let it get its activity from that. A good way out of the problem, especially considering how the phrase gets used in the rest of the text, but not a good translation: the two are different things, as the problems of translation are different than the translation itself. "Giving death," which gets used in the main body of the text much more than "the gift of death"--much more--would have been almost just as good. There is an odd concession to the fact that a gift needs to be thought of as a thing, as some distinct entity, and in fact as a sort of concept, as the gift, in general. That is what is disturbing to me about that, for the concession isn't really merited by the text.
But I don't have as much beef with that--people are just going to keep looking for a cheap conceptual bauble that can make them look good in class or even an article some day instead of reading what Derrida says--as I do with the next translation, more recent, in the new edition of The Gift of Death. The phrase that begins "Literature in Secret"--the essay included in the new edition that Derrida released in 1999--Pardon de ne pas vouloir dire, gets translated as "Pardon for not meaning (to say)." What's wrong with the more simple phrase, which is much more accurate--if I know my French right (not so much via my French but via my Latin)--"forgive for not meaning (to say)?" Forgiveness is so much more crucial in the context of the essay than pardoning, which is way too harsh and doesn't really get at the phenomenon (or non-phenomenon; or, as a friend and I recently quipped, a phenonmenon) that Derrida is trying to outline. What the odd concern about grammar here? Or propriety? Or whatever the odd concern that is making Wills change the sense of forgiveness into the sense of pardoning, which he goes on about in the following? "Consideration of Derrida's attention to the gift (don) and forgiveness (le pardon) recommends translating pardon de ne pas vouloir dire using "forgive" rather than "pardon." However, English would then require a personal pronoun (e.g., "forgive me for not saying"), which would anchor the phrase more than Derrida seems to want here. The reader [like he does with hearing "the kiss of death" for "the gift of death"] should therefore hear "pardon" in the sense of "forgive."" Okay, fine, I sympathize a little with the anxiety here. But how does English "require" that we hear "me" after "forgive?" That is, why does this appear to Wills as a stricture, and not as something that just adds to the complexity of the phenomenon that Derrida is getting at? For I do think the French--even though yes, Derrida doesn't want to anchor it, as Wills says--has this "requirement" in it also. The implication, I think, is that Wills doesn't think he can get away with just saying "forgive" in English, without also adding "me." That is, he thinks the phase would appear ungrammatical or something. But why this anxiety here--when you are already using a way (albeit traditional) of rendering vouloir dire that is, at best, a clunky typographical fix-up?
What I don't like about this is not so much the translation as the failure of that sort of strength or solidness that Wills usually brings and which I outlined above. For what this does is produce a text that is willing to say "fuck you" at certain points to the sort of settled way of translating various phrases of Derrida that has accumulated since the 60's. It was an exciting time when this vocabulary was still being developed: this is the one--and only--thing that makes Barbara Harlow's absolutely criminally abominable translation of Spurs (someone please, please retranslate this text!) somewhat tolerable. One gets the sense that there aren't exactly set ways in English to render certain phases of Derrida's, and this makes it a bit exciting. The better example of this is, of course, Of Grammatology. I can live with the translation of Il n'y a pas de hors- texte as "there is nothing outside the text," instead of the more accurate and interesting "there is [and I'd like to throw in parentheses here (es gibt), to get the allusion to Heidegger always operative when Derrida is talking like this] no outside-text," simply because Spivak is creating a huge set of words and concepts almost from scratch. But this all gets stale every once and a while: there get to be really clear formulas for how to render a particular phrase in Derrida and, well, all you have to do is mark the phrases that don't really conform to this code, or are, as the translations always note, "colloquial." Wills--especially with Donner la mort, which is so crucial for messing up a lot of presuppositions about Derrida that had accumulated at that time, even with his style--brings you back to the freshness of the phrasing somehow by not caring exactly how things are rendered. Again, the sheer virtuosity of the text--its sort of offhand manner, its quickness (it has been postulated that it was written on the way to the conference, and I could see that, and the result is in fact better than if it had been calculated: it is almost more calculated)--forces Wills to do this, but he also is good at being very receptive to it. Here Wills just gives into overthinking things a bit, and the result is very weird and in fact worse than if it had just been translated with the accumulated, "standard edition" vocabulary. I'll note that use this phrase because I want this post to join up with another I am writing on Freud and Strachey, but also to mark the real virtues of Wills when he is working: he resists the real danger, that I think will only become more crucial in the next decade or so, to turn the words of Derrida into a standard vocabulary, further reifying (and with him--and this is Derrida's true uniqueness--this is the direction in which the reification works) the words of his texts into concepts.
Now, again, the texts here are really, really complex, and many other problems abound in them. For example, the really tricky translation of apprendre, which means to teach, but also has the valence, philosophically, of grasping--as you would a phenomenon in phenomenology. And that odd phrase tout autre est tout autre. And in L'animal... there is the constant work going on with the "therefore," donc, that is quite complex, along with the amazing pun on ani-mal, which you have to hear running through it to get the fact that it is also a meditation on how philosophers (most significantly, Lacan) treat evil (a problematic that connects up--concerning Heidegger--with the work in Of Spirit). But, again, Wills is up to the task in most of these cases (in the latter, he smartly uses more footnotes--which would actually be a little wrong in Donner la mort, I feel, for some reason). I do suggest looking back at the French when reading Donner la mort, though, to compare, because it especially is a delicate work, more delicate I think than all the others in Derrida's entire corpus, and especially those in which there are puns and things, homonyms, etc., perhaps excepting Glas.
5 comments:
I'm thinking of your previous post RE: the bastardization of what is called deconstruction. Personally, I have always hated to the translation of "Il n'y a pas de hors- texte" as "there is nothing outside the text." Or, rather, I should say that I have always hated the way in which this phrase has been reified, or, rather, the way it has been construed as a concept. People use it in the sense of "there is nothing outside textuality." Or, perhaps worse,something like, "everything is textuality."
This rendering has always deprived "there is nothing outside the text" of its literal (and, I think, Heideggerian) meaning. That is the sense of emphasis on the "is," as in, "there is nothing outside the text." Or, as I've sometimes thought of it, "there is a 'something' called nothing outside the text." In other words, nothing "is" the condition of textuality. The no-space of the margins, as it were.
Don't you think that the semantic content of giving in "donner" is more important than the question of transitivity or intransitivity? That's why I consider "The Gift of Death" a decent title, because it seems to me that "putting to death" fails to encompass the question of the ethical relationship involved, that is, the question of what we think (or fail to think) of ourselves as doing to the other.
As for "il n'y a pas de hors-texte," I've always thought that "there is nothing free from textuality" would be a perfectly simple account, the concept of "free" being here modeled after the French hors-taxe, "duty free." I think "there is nothing free from textuality" neatly encompasses what Derrida is saying about the relation of knowing to language without offering room (as the Spivak translation does) for the insipid misreading that Derrida is suggesting that nothing is real or true and that everything is a piece of literature.
That said, I agree with you fully Mike that Spivak definitely deserves significant credit for basically producing a brand new critical vocabulary from thin air and with no critical context to draw on (without getting too romantic about the solitary artist in the garret, she was doing this work in Iowa essentially by herself). She invented the word "post-structuralism," for God's sake!
Eddy: First, I wouldn't necessarily call it a bastardization... there is a great book out by David Krell on Derrida that is precisely called The Purest of Bastards! But thats not a real problem. Second, I like your rendering of the phrase... but I'd also stress that its somewhat half right as you put it here: there is a something that is nothing outside of the text--that is, there *exists* only nothing outside textuality, when you conceive it as generalized--but also (and this is the only way in which the first part of this can be legitimately be said) there also is no *is* outside the text--which means, not that there exists nothing outside the text but that nothing *exists* outside the text: that is, there isn't even a something outside the text that is nothing (the fact that something is nothing doesn't cancel out the "is," by virtue of its being nothing--see Hegel's Science of Logic), because not even nothing can be said to exist, outside some event of textuality. In short, its not just beings (entities) that don't exist, but being. Textuality is beyond being, or is otherwise than being--this is why it has to be generalized.
This is why I like putting it as, "there is no outside-text," or, even better--which captures something nice about the desire or motivation involved in asserting that there is something--"there is no pre-text," with emphasis on the *is,* again.
Or in Sand's way, which I also like: I never thought about it as duty-free... that's awesome. It again also gets at bastardization/contamination, which is good, but also the economic way of putting things: this is a general economy, or rather, one that moves always towards the general from the restricted.
With that smooth transition into Sand's comment, lemme just say you're right, I'd like to keep the semantic content. I just fantasize about how different the reaction to the text would be with that weird title. But still, why not translate like "Given Time," and call it, "Given Death?" Or "Death Given?" Not "The Gift"--that's so heavy, though it sounds more magisterial and interesting and less awkward than those other solutions. I guess I want more qualification from Wills in his little note prior to the text, more than anything. Especially because throughout the text he rarely uses the phrase "the gift of death:" its modified so much--why not reflect that more than the fact that the gift is the gift, which seems to be going on in the title?
And PS, if its not clear, I totally agree with Sand's comment about Spivak in Iowa (Jesus, that sounds like a weird Neil Simon play)--I'm getting very disturbed at how people are correcting that phrase... It's like they really want to erase Spivak by doing it--it comes with this tone not of correction, but aggression, directed at her. It's very weird. And lord knows, I don't consider that a really great translation in general, but its not the worst one out there--and, as I've remarked in that huge post of mine a while ago (http://mikejohnduff.blogspot.com/2008/07/hesitancies.html) there are more significant problems with it than that one little sentence, if you are indeed going to focus on the problems... I don't know if you're hearing that around too... but I am a little, and it's odd...
I think the only question remaining is - who would play the title role in Neil Simon's Tony-award-winning production "Spivak in Iowa"?
Actually, Neil Simon is just one possibility. I could equally see it as a Philip Glass opera ; )
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