Barbara Cassin devoted many years to compiling a dictionary, A Philosophical Lexicon, of what she calls "untranslatable terms": "not those that we don't translate, but those that we never stop – not – translating".1 These words are symptomatic2 and force translators to perform a Sisyphean task, always starting over.
Reading her essay, Éloge de la traduction [In Praise of Translation], led me to wonder whether translation is not always a matter of untranslatable words. In translation, is it not always a question of the impossible to translate?
Even where the words seem to correspond, even where we can sometimes be satisfied with a word-for-word translation, is there not always a certain "Lost in translation"? This "lost" is Möbius-like: it is an effect of translation, and, at the same time, it lies at the very heart of the act of translating. Coming to terms with what has been lost in the translations is a necessary condition for any act of translation. It is, in itself, the lever of translation. It is impossible to translate without accepting this loss.
Bilingualism allows you to experience the choice of words. In fact, when translating, you always realise that there are sentences that are "difficult to say" in the other language, meaning that the resonance will not be the same… Loss, Lost in translation. Hence Picasso's sublime example of translation: "If I think in one language and write 'the dog runs after the hare in the woods' and want to translate it into another, I have to say 'the white wooden table sinks its legs into the sand and almost dies of fear at knowing how foolish it is'."3
It is the choice, the style of the translator – understood as the way of inhabiting a language – that will determine how closely we can convey what is so easily said in another language, but which scrapes, scratches and clashes with the usage of a language when it has to be translated.
As a result, with each text to be translated, the experience of the hole in the symbolic that inhabits a language becomes apparent.
It is through translation that we can experience the hole inherent in the symbolic. If there is no "universe of discourse" that allows for an exact word-for-word translation in all languages, it becomes clear that the language we speak is also lacking, it has holes. If there is no correspondence between languages, there is also no relation between signifier and signified within the same language. We are all condemned to the "monologue of l'apparole"4!
We devoted several months to this experience of translation in preparing the Blog for the upcoming WAP Congress.
The Lacanian aphorism that summons us is no exception! Between Spanish and French, between "rapport" and "relación" or "rapport" and "relation", there is a gap!
[1] Cassin B., Éloge de la traduction. Compliquer l'universel, Paris, Fayard, 2016, p. 24.
[2] Cf. ibid., p. 64.
[3] Picasso P., Écrits. Paris, Gallimard, 2021, p. 30.
[4] Miller J.-A., "The Monologue of L'Apparole", trans. M. Downing Roberts, in Qui Parle, Vol. 9, Issue 2, University of Nebraska Press, 1996, pp. 160–182.
