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PRISMATIC TRANSLATIONAnnual workshop of the AILC/ICLA Research Committee on Literary Theory
University of Vienna
25–26 July 2016 (tbc)
Organised by: Sowon S Park, Oxford University
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CALL FOR PAPERS
Walid Hamarneh, Sowon S Park, Matthew Reynolds, Stefan Willer
Translation can be seen as producing a text in one language that will count as equivalent to a
text in another. It can also be seen as a release of multiple signifying possibilities, an opening
of the source text to Language in all its plurality. The first view is underpinned by the regime
of European standard languages which can be lined up in bilingual dictionaries, by the
technology of the printed book, and by the need for regulated communication in political and
legal contexts. The second view attaches to contexts where several spoken languages share
the same written characters (as in the Chinese scriptworld), to circumstances where language
is not standardised (e.g., minority & dialectal communities & oral cultures), to the fluidity of
electronic text, and to literature, especially poetry and theatrical performance. The first view
sees translation as a channel; the second as a prism.
The prismatic view of translation has yet to be fully theorised. For instance, a historical
and intercultural glimpse at translation practices reveals a highly varied relationship between
‘original’ and ‘copy’ that demands further examination. Papers of the 2016 committee
meeting could study the pragmatic requirements of translations (e.g., the function of dominant
languages, the precarious prestige of specialised vernaculars, shifts in audiences, the situated
behavior of authors), their concrete realisation in the individual transformation of documents
(i.e., in multilingual groups of texts consisting of originals and translations), and their impact
on the history of language and literature.
This approach would develop the line taken in the key recent intervention in the study
of translations, the Vocabulaire européen des philosophies : dictionnaire des intraduisibles by
Cassin et al., itself translated as Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon.
Despite its catchy subtitle or title, the volume in fact tends to deconstruct the binary
translatable / untranslatable, revealing instead what Benjamin called ‘Ubersetzung bis zu
einem gewissen Grade’ (‘the translatable to some degree’). Such degrees of translation require
standard ideas such as ‘equivalence’, ‘fidelity’, and the binary of ‘foreignising’ and
‘domesticating’ to be rethought. Attention to non-European languages and translation
traditions is likely to be crucial to this endeavour.
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PROGRAMME
Monday 25th July
9am Introduction (Sowon Park)
A 9.03 – 10.30 (Chair: Walid Hamarneh)
Matthew Reynolds, ‘Variorum Translations’
Robert J. C. Young, ‘Translation through the Lens of Language’
Sowon Park, ‘Ideographic Translation’
B 11 – 12.30 (Chair: Stefan Willer)
Yvonne Howell, ‘Translating Happiness’
Walid Hamarneh, ‘Translation and the (Un-)making of Meaning Value’
Michel Chaouli, ‘Translation, Interpretation, Orientation’
Lunch
C2 – 3.30 Invited Guest Speaker, Francesca Orsini, SOAS (Chair: Robert J. C. Young)
‘Language-stretching, Parallel Aesthetics and Poetic Equivalence: Poetic Idioms in a
Multilingual Literary Culture’
D 4 – 5.30 (Chair: Eva Horn)
Kyohei Norimitsu, ‘From Space to Event: The Development of Yuri Lotman’s Concept of
Translation’
Vladimir Biti, ‘What Remains Untranslated in translatio imperii? Translation as a Political
Operation’
Jernej Habjan, ‘Cultural Translation, or, the Political Logic of Prismatic Translation’
7 – late. Conference Dinner
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Tuesday 26th July
E 9 – 10.30 (Chair: Vladimir Biti)
Monika Schmitz-Emans, ‘Literary Dictionaries as Meta-poetical Projects’
Robert Stockhammer, ‘The (Un-)translatability of Welt’
Rahilya Geybullayeva, ‘Translation or Itinerary? Tracing the Path of Azerbaijani Literary
Terms’
F 11 – 12.30 (Chair: Robert Stockhammer)
Hitoshi Oshima, ‘Prismatic Effects Made by Translations of Haiku’
Péter Hajdu, ‘The Hungarian Spectrum of Petronius’ Satyricon’
Stefan Willer, ‘“Originalmäßig”: Goethe/Retranslation/Diderot’
Lunch
G 2 – 3.30
Discussion led by Matthew Reynolds
F 4 – 7. Business Meeting
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ABSTRACTS
What Remains Untranslated in translatio imperii? Translation as Political Operation
Vladimir Biti, University of Vienna
As if by definition, translation lays claim to continuity, refusing to accept any substantial
break between its states of departure and arrival. The latter declares fidelity to the former,
suppressing the betrayal which is being committed. The same repudiation characterises the
operation of translatio imperii carried out along an irreversible historical axis, even if it
transfigures political rather than linguistic states into one another. Inasmuch as the asymmetry
between the internal structures of these states underlies the same denial in both translatio and
translation, the analogy between the political kernels of these two seemingly fully
heterogeneous transitions appears to be illuminating. Although their states of departure and
arrival are both discontinuous and dislocated with regard to one another, the successor erases
this an-archic and ec-static relation with the model. It refuses to acknowledge the latter
because this peculiar conjoining disjuncture would prevent both its complete melting into and
its clear separation from the model. In such manner, neither of the paths to the successor’s
sovereignty would be available. The successor can only legitimate its claim to inheritance if
the sovereignty of both relates is guaranteed.
Interpreting translatio(n) as the successor’s self-asserting reaction to the ‘spectral’
address of the model, I, on the contrary, intend to question both the model’s and the
successor’s sovereignty. The model, inasmuch as the successor’s unequal constituencies
experience it, turns out to be a conflict-ridden constellation rather than sovereign. However, if
the successor’s constituencies cannot respond to the model’s uncertain address without
competing with other internal constituencies, their sovereignty is equally questionable. It is
precisely translatio(n) as a camouflaged self-establishment which the successor’s constituency
needs to become sovereign. What dismantles translatio(n) as a sovereignty-warranting
undertaking at the expense of others, is that it only promotes the constituency that authors it to
the status of agency, while relegating other constituencies to the status of its enablers. This
constitutive bifurcation points to an apocryphal untranslated residue amid the publicly
translated state, uncovering the possibility of different translatio(n)s. Leaving this residue
untranslated means sentencing it to a state of anonymity. Liberating its suppressed zone of
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potentiality means retranslating the official outcome of translatio(n). This is why I argue for
understanding translatio(n) as a stubbornly recommencing politics instead of taking it for
granted as the state that covers its policing.
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Translation, Interpretation, Orientation
Michel Chaouli, Indiana University
‘“Interpretation”,’ Harold Bloom writes at one point, ‘once meant “translation,” and
essentially still does’ (A Map of Misreading, 1980, 85). If his proposition has merit, then it
encourages us to think of translation on a scale of complexity that we ordinarily reserve for
the idea and practice of interpretation. But do we know how to think of interpretation? How
might we conceive of this idea so that it is apt to enrich, rather than diminish, the notion of
translation?
The most entrenched notion of interpretation, developed in ancient times as part of the
practice of turning religious and legal codes into canonical texts, relies on a semantic model
that is essentially substitutive: the interpretation comes to take the place of the religious or
legal text. We often think of interpretation as being parasitic on the text to be interpreted, but
in this classical model, the interpretation stands in for the law, in effect becoming the law. If
we follow this model, translation will look like a process of substituting one set of words (in
one language) for another set of words (in another).
Yet there are other models of interpretation that we might use as our point of departure.
What if we thought of interpretation not as a way of substituting one set of meaningful signs
for another, but as a mode of comportment? It would be a way of knowing what I must do in a
certain situation (rather than figuring out what someone else is saying). Using Wittgenstein’s
language (without taking on all of his philosophical baggage), we might say that interpretation
would involve ‘knowing what to do next’, moving about a new world, learning to orient
oneself in it. Depending on the signs I set out to interpret and depending on my mood, the
ways I orient myself may be narrow or they may leave great latitude, but they would have to
be understood as being constrained, for without constraints the notion of learning to orient
oneself in a world would have little sense. In my talk, I hope to develop the idea of
interpretation as a form of orientation and what promise it might hold for the notion of
translation.
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Translation or Itinerary? Tracing the Path of Azerbaijani Literary Terms
Rahilya Geybullayeva. Baku Slavic University
Words, like peoples, travel their own evolutionary path, which can be retraced in one way or
another. Like families and tribes, the words crossbreed in fresh soil with other interpretations,
acquiring new shades of meaning. These shades then spill out into new words which, at first
glance, have nothing in common with the previous meaning of their progenitor; for example,
the lexical series – semeni-sema-semela-zemlya – where each word appears to be original.
Interpreting individual words in translation without any knowledge of their
culturological context leads to contradictions. For example, how should we understand the
ban on wine in the Holy Scriptures (sherab) and the praise of wine (sherab) in classical
Islamic poetry of the same era? How did wine come to be divided into both drink and symbol
in one and the same culture and historical period? Why do the Azerbaijani and Turkish
languages have two words to mean the same drink wine (the semiotics of the word Russian
vino [вино – wine] go back to the semiotics of the word of the same root vina [вина – sin]):
sherab and chakhir, which are different from one another in terms of their lexical roots?
Searches for an answer to these questions lead to the distant past (relatively) of the primary
semiotics of sacred drinks, which through interpretation and translation enter different
cultures in new semiotic dimensions.
In this work we suggest retracing the path of several literary terms of Azerbaijani and
Turkish literature studies such as ədəbiyyat, tarikat, kitab, namə, xəmsə and also figures and
images such as aşuq, ozan, Dədə, məcnun, saqi and şərab which are not mentioned (as well as
other appropriate terms from other eastern cultures) in the Western textbooks and in Oxford
Dictionary of Literary Terms by Chris Baldick. They are traditionally considered to have been
borrowed from classical Islamic poetry in the Middle Ages by peoples newly converted to
Islam. To restore their contemporary interpretation the medieval period is accepted as their
point of origin. Although the question of the beginning of (primary) meaning, of the starting
point or origin, is relative, like the beginning of national literature and culture of a nation or
people. Parallels with, and divergences from, earlier cultures, cultures that are geographically
close and not so close, can be found in these literary terms. They existed in the pre-Islamic
period in other neighbouring cultures. Study of this path allows cultural matrix to be
determined which reveal common names for different phenomena, different names for
common phenomena or elements of so-called prismatic translation.
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Cultural Translation, or, the Political Logic of Prismatic Translation
Jernej Habjan, Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts
In political terms, the transition from translation as channelling of equivalences to translation
as refraction of differences can be viewed as part of the shift from consensual translation to
cultural translation. Arguing for consensual translation, Jürgen Habermas speaks of a process
of returning excluded individuals into the community by translating their pathological private
languages into public communication. On the other side, Homi Bhabha’s and Judith Butler’s
cultural translation is a process of universalising the very sphere of public communication by
making it recognise its excluded other. Both Butler and Bhabha have convincingly criticised
Habermas’s therapeutic essentialism, which shares much of its flaws with the channelising
translation as compared to prismatic translation. Like channelising translation, Habermas’s
universal pragmatics subsumes otherness under equivalence, and only Butler’s and Bhabha’s
proposals of cultural translation grant otherness the status of difference. However, according
to the Viennese collective eipcp, and notably Boris Buden, Butler’s and Bhabha’s models of
translation are prone as much as Habermas’s to the post-political ideology of balancing the
impossibilities instead of facing the impossibility of balancing. In my paper, I will focus on
Butler’s proposal of cultural translation as an endless process of translating identities
excluded from the legal notion of universality back into this notion, which is thereby itself
retroactively universalised. I will argue that Butler’s proposal rests on a misreading of
(Derrida’s misreading of) Austin’s speech act theory, and try to show how such a reification
of performativity could be avoided in the shift from channelising translation to prismatic
translation.
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The Hungarian Spectrum of Petronius’ Satyricon
Péter Hajdu, Hungarian Academy of Sciences
I would like to test the metaphor of translation as prism in the Hungarian translations of
Petronius. It is always a challenge to translate Latin texts into non-Indo-European languages,
which have completely different structure, and very probably different ideas about artistic
merits of a text. The situation is especially delicate with Petronius for two reasons. On the one
hand, the text does not everywhere fit in with the traditional standards of Latin, which is
taught in schools and for which a canon of translation strategies have been developed. On the
other, Petronius' work started being regarded as a novel in the 20th century, which solicited
translators use free, creative strategies to apply the text to the expectations of novel readers.
There are three Hungarian translation sf the work. István Székely (1910) and József Révay
(1920) translated only the single long continuous fragment, Trimalchio's dinner, then István
Károly Horváth (1963) all the available fragments. All the three translators can be regarded as
professionals, since they translated a lot. Székely was a secondary school teacher, who
translated several books from German and some from Latin. He produced the most innovative
prose translation from Latin in his age. Interestingly enough he regarded the literary piece a
xenophobic fable. Révay in that period of his life was a freelance translator and writer. He
was not allowed to teach between 1920–45, so he translated from Latin, Greek, Italian and
French, and wrote several informative books on ancient cultural history, but also a lot
historical fiction. He rather standardised the Hungarian Petronius. Horváth was a university
teacher and a talented scholar, who loved to do research in texts that he regarded as examples
of ancient popular realism. His Petronius is a realist writer. These three translations offer three
rather different images of the Satyricon.
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Translation and the (Un-)making of Meaning Value
Walid Hamarneh, University of Richmond
During the past two decades scholars have been engaged in studying the role of translation in
the different and diverse processes that helped universalise the western ‘modern’ and its
spread in different societies and cultures especially during the historical moments of
colonialism and globalisation. These two historical moments, highly controversial and
difficult to disengage temporally, have been moments of interaction and strife, contact and
confrontation, encountering and countering, sharing and separation, or at least attempts at all
that. The, by now accepted, central role that translation played in these complex processes has
been difficult to theorise due to the different historical conditions and cases that were studied.
Most theoretical pronouncements depended on particular cases or cases from contiguous
areas.
The global circulation of signs and the ways their meaning values are made and unmade
problematise further the issues of equivalence and reciprocity of meaning that have been
central to theories of translation. This is especially the case when we are confronted with
cases where reciprocity becomes a problem in trans-lingual and trans-cultural exchanges
where predominantly unequal forms of global exchange characterise the material and
intellectual conditions of that exchange. Such en-counters become more interesting when they
are performed with the pretext of ‘authenticity’ envisioned under these conditions of unequal
exchange.
To examine some theoretical aspects of such processes, I have chosen two cases, one
from Egypt (Mujstafa Lutfi al-Manfaluti 1876–1924) and one from China (Lin Shu 1852–
1924). The two were contemporaries who had no or little command of any foreign language
and were proponents of the resuscitation of classical modes of literary discourse. Yet both
worked mostly in ‘translation’. They translated works from the western cannon, especially
novels, and from languages they did not know. However, their ‘translations’ were very
popular to the extent that they became a part of the canon in their respective cultures.
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Translating Happiness
Yvonne Howell, University of Richmond
It has long been noted that words for ‘happiness’ (Freude, Glücklichkeit, schastie, radost,
bonheur, raha, etc.) do not translate seamlessly across even closely related languages. The
etymological roots of words that designate happiness – presumably a highly subjective state
that is, nevertheless, a universal human capacity – point to intriguingly different cultural and
philosophical notions of what ‘happiness’ entails. This paper will examine recent attempts to
theorise cross-cultural notions of ‘happiness’ and look more closely at the words used to
designate (and translate) the concept in several different literary traditions.
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From Space to Event: The Development of Yuri Lotman’s Concept of Translation
Kyohei Norimatsu, University of Tokyo
Yuri Lotman (1922–93), the leading scholar of Soviet semiotics, in his later years focused his
attention on translation and dialogue between various semiotic systems. This enabled him to
escape the limitation of static description inherent in a given sign system and to describe and
clarify the dynamic process of production of new meanings. In this sense, his notion of
translation was highly prismatic. At the same time, Lotman developed the concept of the
‘semiosphere’, which embraces various semiotic systems and functions as the basis for
translation between them. This virtual space which precedes any semiotic systems and
supplies the precondition for prismatic translation, is reminiscent of the imperial space that
was the Soviet Union, uniting various nations and cultures. In the last few years of his life,
however, Lotman moved away from this ‘imperial’ view of translation, reconceptualising it as
‘explosion’; he now described the production of new meanings through translation as an
unpredictable event in time. Referring to other contemporary Russian cultural theories on
translation and dialogue, this paper examines the shift in Lotman’s view and thus explores
problematics of prismatic translation.
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Language-stretching, Parallel Aesthetics and Poetic Equivalence:
Poetic Idioms in a Multilingual Literary Culture
Francesca Orsini, University of London
One would expect that in a multilingual literary culture there would be a great many
translations – isn’t that one way newness enters a literature? But my experience with early
modern literary culture in north India is that formal translations were, in fact, remarkably few.
From what we can glean from the texts we have and the relatively few multilingual traces in
the mostly monolingual archives, the multiple poetic tastes and idioms that existed and were
cultivated did not travel through translation. How did they travel, then? Using examples from
courtly and devotional Persian, Hindi and Urdu texts, I will argue that either the differences
between the poetic idioms were stressed and these were consciously cultivated in parallel
from each other, or else it was poetic ideas, images and expressions – rather than whole texts
– which travelled from one language to the other. The result was either the setting up of poetic
equivalences (X image in Persian is equivalent to Y image in Hindi), the conscious mixing of
poetic images and key terms in a macheronic idiom, or language-stretching – the introduction
of new words or ideas or stretching old ones to new meanings. Another outcome was that
poets and audiences in the various languages became familiar with the different poetic idioms
and repertoires even in the absence of formal translations and of widespread literacy, given
the oral-performative contexts of much of this poetry. The Indian example, then, helps us
think about the ‘carrying over’ of poetic ideas and significant terms beyond formal
translation.
And while modern language ideologies taught people to believe that ‘Persian and Urdu
belong to Muslims’ and ‘Hindi is the language of the Hindus’, not just pragmatic language
use but also poetic tastes were and remained eclectic longer after those ideological
pronouncements.
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Prismatic Effects Made By Translations of Haiku
Hitoshi Oshima, Fukuoka University
‘Haiku’, a Japanese poetic genre, used to be a part of ‘renku’, chained short poems. Renku
was a game played by several poets, each one of whom composed a phrase to make a whole
following the principle of association of ideas and some established rules. What we call haiku
today was just one of the phrases that composed the whole. This fact is important when we
think of prismatic effects made by translation. For translation is interpretation and prismatic
effects are made when interpretations are superimposed with multiplicity. Each poet
participating in a collective game of renku interpreted the phrases composed by other
participants before creating a new one. It was like a creative translation. With the addition of
the new phrase, the whole was to gain another colour, another dimension.
The play called renku was born in the 17th century, but the spirit of the play was born
earlier with what was called ‘kagaku’, science of songs. The science developed a lot in the
12th and the 13th centuries; it was taught from generation to generation in order to keep the
tradition of poetry safe and sound. It taught not only the ancient songs considered ‘classics’
but also the totality of the existing interpretations of them. It was a whole of texts and
interpretations or better to say translations. Lerners of it surefly discovered a world of
prismatic effects.
As for the translation of haiku in other languages than Japanese, we can consider it as a
creation of a new dimension added to the world of Japanese traditional poetry. Many of the
translations are surely made without any reference to renku or kagaku, yet we can still
consider them as continuations of the whole collective play of making short poems. The
addition of the dimension increase prismatic effects, of course.
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Ideographic Translation
Sowon S Park, Oxford University
Writing systems are typically accepted as transparent tools for transcribing spoken languages.
This view is encouraged by phonetic alphabetic writing, whether that be Greek, Hebrew or
Roman, which encodes the sound of speech. Yet the relations between writing and speech are
complex. Speech is at times simply an intermediary between thought and writing; at times it is
the immediate manifestation of thought from which writing derives; at others, speech and
writing are quite separate. The relations between writing and speech are also as various as the
different script systems. Translating literature written in one script system to another might be
precisely where the variation would be most evident. Yet translation theories have been
notably uninterested in how script shapes meaning, focusing almost entirely on the differences
between spoken languages. This phonocentric approach to translation critically neglects the
gap between speech and writing, as if speaking and writing are more or less approximate. By
being unaware of the range of script systems and naturalising the specific convention that is
phonetic writing, we limit our perspective to this one kind of written language – ‘speech for
the eyes’ – instead of seeing the full spectrum. This paper examines writing from a more
visually inclined prism and brings into focus ‘ideographic’ translation, which bypasses sound
and operates directly from visual image to meaning.
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Variorum Translations
Matthew Reynolds, Oxford University
There are various partial and competing theoretical paradigms for thinking about multiple
translations. They can be seen in terms of ‘reception’, ie as manifestations of historical and
cultural difference; as indexes of period or personal styles; as eruptions of the signifying
potential of the source text. This paper will begin by reaching back to classic 1970s and 80s
work on texts and interpretation by Fish and de Man to ground a more comprehensive
theorisation in terms of an agonistic and yet generative relationship between the many and the
one.
Variorum editions display a range of variants as evidence for the selection of a ‘best
text’ while at the same time eroding confidence in that text by revealing the many different
choices that have been made in the past. Each branch of the paradox is reliant on the other: the
‘best text’ conjures into being a crowd of less good readings that it is being preferred to; while
the idea of the ‘variant’ assumes the existence of a unitary text that it varies from. In many
respects, the same tensions are generated by multiple translations.
The paper will go on to ask how much this state of affairs owes to a particular set of
institutional assumptions, the regime of standard languages and the technology of the book.
Here, it will draw on Matthiessen’s 2013 argument about the relevance to translation of
‘agnation’, ie the shadowing of texts by innumerable possible alternative expressions. It will
consider whether new ways of presenting prismatic translations, both in print and in electronic
media, might move on from the example of the variorum so as to nourish new reading
practices and point towards fresh ideas about textuality and meaning.
Other points of reference are likely to include multiple translations of Dante, Inferno 33
into English and of Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre into French and Italian; Peter Robinson
Poetry and Translation: The Art of the Impossible; new media artworks by John Cayley; the
2015 Prismatic Translation conference at OCCT (Oxford).
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Literary Dictionaries as Meta-poetical Projects
Monika Schmitz-Emans, Ruhr University Bochum
According to the linguist Mario Wandruszka (‘Interlinguistik’), we are multilingual within the
realms of our own language, using different languages corresponding to diverse practical
contexts of living. Languages are no monosystems, and thus there is only a relative difference
between the speaking of the different idioms any language is consisting of and real
multilingualism. Moreover, we never master our native language perfectly; it remains, at least
partially, a foreign language for us. – Examples of experimental poetic writing have been
interpreted as intralingual translation projects ponting to the relativity of this difference and
revealing strange and unexplored dimensions within the seemingly familiar everyday
language. Especially with regard to the French poet Michel Leiris, but also to Edmond Jabès
and Georges Perec, the writer and literary criticist Felix Philipp Ingold has stressed the
significance of what he (also) calls intra-lingual translation as a basic poetical strategy. To his
opinion, a closer and more systematical investigation on this topic would lead to important
discoveries concerning the theory of translation as well as of literature. Intralingual
translation, to Ingold’s opinion, is dominating large, though peripherical areas of poetical art,
including phenomena as anagrammatical texts, palindroms, phonetical readings, and other
kinds of experiments based the language- and letter-‘materials’.
In literature, the dictionary can be regarded as an important reflection model that points
to a fundamental self-referential interest of literary writing in the nature and the potentials of
language. It can firstly be modelled in its function as a device to foster communication and
understanding, even with regard to the world of nonverbal things. But it can secondly also be
viewed as a device of questionable value, as far as the ‘other’ in whatever respect is
concerned. Literary dictionaries of invented languages are paradoxical object reflecting the
borders of translation. Similarly, dictionaries containing unfamiliar words or proposing
deviant explications stimulate reflection both about language itself and about the tension
between the comprehensible and the incomprehensible.
From a comparative perspective, different poetical ‘Dictionaries’ shall be presented –
selected lyrical texts by the Austrian writer Ernst Jandl as well as by the Japanese (and also
German writing) poet Yoko Tawada (‘Ein Chinesisches Wörterbuch’; ‘A Chinese
Dictionary’). Michel Leiris’ text ‘Glossaire j’y serre mes gloses’ is already by its title and
structure quoting the concept translation. (Ingold has not only commented this linguistic-
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poetical experiment on the borderline between obvious and hidden ‘meanings’, but he has as
well translated the ‘Glossaire’ into a German version. It is obvious that there can’t be any
word-to-word-translation.) The strangeness of language in theses examples points to the
unknown potentials and possibilities of everyday language; poetical language may be
regarded as foreign language because it shows us the hidden reverse of familiar words and
expressions. It is the fictitious character of these translations which provides for their function
as a reflection model – they are meaningful not though, but because they are ‘false’.
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The (Un-)translatability of Welt
Robert Stockhammer, Ludwig Maximilians University Munich
Paradoxically enough, there doesn’t exist a worldwide concept of world. Its translatability
cannot even be guaranteed with respect to the three official languages of the ICLA conference
in Vienna, 2016. Neither does the Vocabulaire européen des philosophies: Dictionnaire des
intraduisibles contain an entry on monde, nor the Dictionary of Untranslatables: A
Philosophical Lexicon an entry on world – both of them confine themselves on near-
equivalent signifiers from other languages, olam (Hebrew), mir (Russian), and Welt
(German). Leaving, with regard to my competences, Hebrew and Russian aside, even the
equivalence of the English and German words, despite of their obvious etymological relation,
cannot be taken for granted. It seems that the German signifier implies a philosophical dignity
which is not always realised in the world wide web: ‘die Bezeichnung einer in sich sinnvoll
gegliederten Ganzheit, einer intern strukturierten Vielfalt’ (to quote the Historisches
Wörterbuch der Philosophie which heavily relies on the impressive entry on Welt in Grimm’s
Deutsches Wörterbuch). German is a language especially presumed to make sense (see also
Weltweisheit or Weltanschauung, composites without satisfactory equivalents in other
languages – but there are similar, albeit less acknowledged problems if Weltliteratur is hastily
translated as world literature). At the same time, however, the entries on Welt in Grimm’s
Wörterbuch and in the Dictionnaire des intraduisibles make it plausible that the German word
has, in its turn, developed its semantic abundance via the incorporation of related signifiers
from other languages (Kant’s use of the German word, for example, is explicitly influenced
by connotations of monde). In other words: At least some problems of (un-)translatability are
produced, not so much by linguistic or cultural uniqueness (by the Greek or the German way
of talking and thinking), but rather by prismatic refractions of earlier translations. Perhaps,
Welt has been always already translated. My contribution will try to test this hypothesis,
specifically via readings of the above mentioned dictionary entries as texts in their own right.
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‘Originalmäßig’: Goethe/Retranslation/Diderot
Stefan Willer, Center for Literary and Cultural Research Berlin
Denis Diderot’s philosophical dialogue Le neveu de Rameau, written probably in the 1760s,
remained unpublished until the beginning of the 19th century. In 1804, a handwritten copy
was forwarded to Johann Wolfgang Goethe, who almost immediately started to translate the
text. After this German version had been released in 1805, the French copy seems to have
disappeared. However, some fifteen years later, in 1821, Le neveu de Rameau was published
in the French edition of Diderot’s collected works – for which the editors, in lack of any copy
of the original text, had tacitly re-translated Goethe’s German version. (It was only in 1890
that a copy from Diderot’s own hand was discovered.) In my talk I will reconstruct the story
of this complex circulation of copies whithout originals. For this purpose, I will elaborate on
Goethe’s own account of the matter, which he published in 1824. This essay comprises
several (translated) documents of the case in question, e.g., a letter in which the French editor
praises the fidelity of Goethe’s translation by means of which Diderot’s work could be
restored ‘originalmäßig’ (= in the mode, shape, or measure of the original). This case story
can be regarded as an inquiry into the predicament, but also the potential, of prismatic
translation.
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Translation through the Lens of Language
Robert J. C. Young, New York University
While much attention has been directed towards the role of translation in its relation to the
range of differences between source and target languages, comparatively little thought is
given to its relation to the ways in which language itself is conceptualised in such
transactions. In this paper I shall argue that it makes little sense to conceptualise translation
without first asking ‘what is a language?’ Since this is quite possibly an unanswerable
question, this in turn causes difficulties for any concept of translation. What becomes clear is
that translation, in its modern understanding, is founded on a particular concept of language,
which is rarely articulated and when it is, can be seen to be profoundly problematic from a
conceptual and practical point of view. As a result, it might be said that far from mediating the
differences between languages, it is translation that produces them
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