TRANSLATION STUDIES

READER
EDITED BY LAWRENCE VENUTI
ADVISORY EDITOR: MONA BAKER

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C h a p t e r 21

Antoine Berman

TRANSLATION AND THE TRIALS OF

THE FOREIGN

Translated by Lawrence Venuti

T
H E G E N E R A L T H E M E o f my essay will be translation as the trial o f the
foreign (comme épreuve de l’étranger). “ Trial of the foreign” is the expression
that Heidegger uses to define one pole of poetic experience in Hölderlin (Die
Erfahrung des Fremden). N ow , in the poet, this trial is essentially enacted by
translation, by his version of Sophocles, which is in fact the last “ w ork” Hölderlin
published before descending into m adness. In its own time, this translation was
considered a prime m anifestation of his m adness. Yet today we view it as one of the
great moments of western translation: not only because it gives us rare access to the
Greek tragic Word, but because while giving us access to this Word, it reveals the
veiled essence of every translation.
Translation is the “ trial of the foreign.” But in a double sense. In the first
place, it establishes a relationship between the Self-Same (Propre) and the Foreign
by aim ing to open up the foreign w ork to us in its utter foreignness. Hölderlin
reveals the stran gen ess o f the G reek tragic W ord, w hereas m ost “ c la ssic ”
translations tend to attenuate or cancel it. In the second place, translation is a
trial fo r the Foreign as well, since the foreign w ork is uprooted from its own
language-ground (sol-de-langue). And this trial, often an exile, can also exhibit
the m ost singular pow er of the translating act: to reveal the foreign w ork’s m ost
original kernel, its m ost deeply buried, m ost self-same, but equally the m ost
“ distan t” from itself. Hölderlin discerns in Sophocles’ w ork— in its language—
tw o opposed principles: on the one hand, the im m ediate violence of the tragic
Word, what he calls the “ fire of heaven,” and on the other, “ holy sobriety,” i.e.,
the rationality that comes to contain and m ask this violence. For Hölderlin,
translating first and forem ost means liberating the violence repressed in the w ork
through a series of intensifications in the translating language— in other w ords,

1985
 T R A N S L A T I O N A ND T HE T R I A L S OF T HE F O R E I G N 285

accentuating its strangeness. Paradoxically, this accentuation is the only way of

giving us access to it. Alain addressed the topic of translation in one of his
rem arks on literature:

I have this idea that one can alw ays translate a poet— English, Latin,
or G re e k — e x a c tly w o rd fo r w o rd , w ith o u t a d d in g an yth in g,
preserving the very order o f the w ords, until at last you find the meter,
even the rhymes. I have rarely pushed the experim ent that far; it takes
time, I m ean, a few m onths, plus uncom m on patience. The first draft
resembles a m osaic of barbarism s; the bits are badly joined; they are
cemented together, but not in harmony. A forcefulness, a flash, a
certain violence rem ains, no doubt more than necessary. It’s more
English than the English text, m ore Greek than the Greek, more Latin
than the Latin [...]
(Alain 1934:56-7)

Thanks to such translation, the language of the original shakes with all its liberated
might the tran slatin g lan guage. In an article devoted to Pierre K lo sso w sk i’s
translation of the Aeneid, M ichel Foucault distinguishes between tw o m ethods of
translation:

It is quite necessary to admit that two kinds of translations exist; they do

not have the sam e function or the sam e nature. In one, something
(meaning, aesthetic value) m ust remain identical, and it is given passage
into another language; these translations are good when they go “ from
like to sam e” [...] And then there are translations that hurl one language
against another [...] taking the original text for a projectile and treating
the translating language like a target. Their task is not to lead a meaning
back to itself or anywhere else; but to use the translated language to
derail the translating language.
(Foucault 1969:30)

D oesn ’t this distinction simply correspond to the great split that divides the entire
field of translation, separating so-called “ literary” translations (in the broad sense)
from “ non-literary” translations (technical, scientific, advertising, etc.)? W hereas
the latter perform only a semantic transfer and deal with texts that entertain a
relation o f exteriority or instrum entality to their lan guage, the form er are
concerned with w orks, that is to say texts so bound to their language that the
tran slatin g act inevitably becom es a m an ipulation o f signifiers, where tw o
languages enter into various form s o f collision and som ehow couple. This is
undeniable, but not taken seriously. A superficial glance at the h istory of
translation suffices to show that, in the literary dom ain, everything transpires as
if the second type of translation came to usurp and conceal the first type. As if it
were suddenly driven to the m argins of exception and heresy. As if translation,
far from being the trials o f the Foreign, were rather its negation, its acclim ation,
its “ naturalization.” As if its m ost individual essence were radically repressed.
Hence, the necessity for reflection on the properly ethical aim o f the translating
286 ANTOINE BERMAN

act (receiving the Foreign as Foreign). Hence, the necessity for an analysis that
shows how (and why) this aim has, from time im m em orial (although not always),
been skewed, perverted and assim ilated to som ething other than itself, such as
the play of hypertextual transform ations.

T h e an alytic o f tran slatio n

I propose to exam ine briefly the system of textual deform ation that operates in
every translation and prevents it from being a “ trial of the foreign.” I shall call this
examination the analytic o f translation. Analytic in two senses of the term: a detailed
analysis of the deform ing system, and therefore an analysis in the Cartesian sense,
but also in the psychoanalytic sense, insofar as the system is largely unconscious,
present as a series of tendencies or forces that cause translation to deviate from its
essential aim. The analytic of translation is consequently designed to discover these
forces and to show where in the text they are practiced— som ew hat as Bachelard,
with his “ psychoanalysis” of the scientific spirit, wanted to show how the materialist
im agination confused and derailed the objective aim of the natural sciences.
Before presenting the detailed exam ination of the deforming forces, I shall m ake
several remarks. First, the analysis proposed here is provisional: it is form ulated on
the basis of my experience as a translator (primarily of Latin American literature
into French). To be systematic, it requires the input of translators from other domains
(other languages and works), as well as linguists, “ poeticians” a n d .p sy ch o an aly sts,
since the deform ing forces constitute so m any censures and resistances.
This negative analytic should be extended by a positive counterpart, an analysis
of operations which have alw ays limited the deform ation, although in an intuitive
and unsystematic way. These operations constitute a sort of counter-system destined
to neutralize, or attenuate, the negative tendencies. The negative and positive
analytics will in turn enable a critique o f translations that is neither simply
descriptive nor sim ply norm ative.
The negative analytic is prim arily concerned with ethnocentric, annexationist
translations and hypertextual translations (pastiche, im itation, adaptation, free
rew ritin g), w here the p lay o f d eform in g forces is freely exercised. Every
translator is inescapably exposed to this play o f forces, even if he (or she) is
anim ated by another aim . M ore: these unconscious forces form part o f the
tran slator’s being, determining the desire to translate. It is illusory to think that
the translator can be freed merely by becoming aware of them. The tran slator’s
practice m ust subm it to analysis if the unconscious is to be neutralized. It is by
yielding to the “ con trols” (in the psychoanalytic sense) that translators can hope
to free themselves from the system of deform ation that burdens their practice.
This system is the internalized expression o f a two-millennium-old tradition, as
well as the ethnocentric structure o f every culture, every language; it is less a
crude system than a “ cultivated lan guage.” Only languages that are “ cultivated”
translate, but they are also the ones that put up the strongest resistance to the
ruckus of translation. They censor. You see w hat a psychoanalytic approach to
lan gu age and lin guistic system s can contribute to a “ tra n sla to lo g y .” This
 T R A N S L A T I O N A ND T HE T R I A L S OF T HE F O R E I G N 287

approach m ust also be the w ork of analysts themselves, since they experience
translation as an essential dim ension o f psychoanalysis.
A final point: the focus below will be the deform ing tendencies that intervene in
the dom ain o f literary prose— the novel and the essay.
Literary prose collects, reassem bles, and intermingles the polylingual space of a
community. It mobilizes and activates the totality of “ lan guages” that coexist in
any language. This can be seen in Balzac, Proust, Joyce, Faulkner, Augusto Antonio
R oa Bastos, Jo a o Guim arães R osa, Carlo Em ilio G adda, etc. Hence, from a form al
point of view, the language-based cosm os that is prose, especially the novel, is
characterized by a certain shapelessness, which results from the enorm ous brew of
languages and linguistic systems that operate in the work. This is also characteristic
of canonical w orks, la grande prose.
Traditionally, this shapelessness has been described negatively, that is, within
the horizon of poetry. H erm an Broch, for exam ple, rem arks of the novel that “ in
contrast to poetry, it is not a producer, but a consum er of style. [...] It applies itself
with much less intensity to the duty of looking like a w ork o f art. Balzac is of
greater weight than Flaubert, the formless T hom as Wolfe more than the artistic
Thornton Wilder. The novel does not subm it, like proper poetry, to the criteria of
art” (Broch 1966:68).
In effect, the m asterw orks of prose are characterized by a kind of “ bad w riting,”
a certain “ lack of control” in their texture. This can be seen in Rabelais, Cervantes,
M o n taig n e, Saint-Sim on , Sterne, Je a n Paul Richter, B alzac, Z o la , Tolstoy,
Dostoevsky.
The lack of control derives from the enorm ous linguistic m ass that the prose
writer m ust squeeze into the w ork— at the risk of m aking it form ally explode.
The m ore totalizing the w riter’s aim , the more obvious the loss o f control,
whether in the proliferation, the swelling of the text, or in w orks where the m ost
scrupulous attention is paid to form, as in Joyce, Broch, or Proust. Prose, in its
m ultiplicity and rhythmic flow, can never be entirely m astered. And this “ bad
w riting” is rich. This is the consequence of its polylingualism . D on Q uixote, for
exam ple, gathers into itself the plurality o f Spanish “ lan g u ag es” during its
epoch, from popular proverbial speech (Sancho) to the conventions o f chivalric
and p a sto ra l rom an ces. H ere the lan gu ages are intertw ined and m utually
ironized.
The Babelian proliferation of languages in novels pose specific difficulties for
translation. If one o f the principal problem s of poetic translation is to respect the
polysem y of the poem (cf. Shakespeare’s Sonnets), then the principal problem of
translating the novel is to respect its shapeless polylogic and avoid an arbitrary
homogenization.
Insofar as the novel is considered a lower form of literature than poetry, the
deform ations of translation are m ore accepted in prose, when they do not pass
un perceived. F o r they op erate on p oin ts th at do n ot im m ediately reveal
themselves. It is easy to detect how a poem by H ölderlin has been m assacred. It
isn’t so easy to see w hat w as done to a novel by K afk a or Faulkner, especially if
the translation seems “ g o o d .” The deform ing system functions here in complete
tranquillity. This is why it is urgent to elaborate an analytic for the translation
of novels.
288 ANTOINE BERMAN

This analytic sets out to locate several deform ing tendencies. They form a
system atic whole. I shall mention twelve here. There m ay be more; some combine
with or derive from others; some are well known. And som e m ay appear relevant
only to French “ classicizing” translation. But in fact they bear on all translating, at
least in the western tradition. They can be found just as often in English translators
as in Spanish or Germ an, although certain tendencies m ay be more accentuated in
one linguistic-cultural space than in others. Here are the twelve tendencies in
question:

1 rationalization
2 clarification
3 expansion
4 ennoblement and popularization
5 qualitative impoverishment
6 quantitative impoverishment
7 the destruction of rhythms
8 the destruction of underlying networks o f signification
9 the destruction of linguistic patternings
10 the destruction of vernacular networks or their exoticization
11 the destruction of expressions and idiom s
12 the effacement of the superim position of languages

R atio n alizatio n

This bears prim arily on the syntactical structures of the original, starting with that
m o st m ean in g fu l an d ch a n g e a b le elem en t in a p ro se te x t: p u n c tu a tio n .
R ationalization recom poses sentences and the sequence of sentences, rearranging
them according to a certain idea of discursive order. W herever the sentence
structure is relatively free (i.e., wherever it doesn’t answ er to a specific idea of
order), it risks a rationalizing contraction. This is visible, for instance, in the
fundam ental hostility with which the French greet repetition, the proliferation of
relative clauses and participles, long sentences or sentences without verbs— all
elements essential to prose.
Thus, M arc Chapiro, the French translator o f the Brothers Karam azov, writes:

The original heaviness of D ostoevsky’s style poses an alm ost insoluble

problem to the translator. It w as im possible to reproduce the bushy
undergrowth of his sentences, despite the richness of their content.
(cited by Meschonnic 1973:317)

This signifies, quite openly, that the cause of rationalization has been adopted. As
we have seen, the essence of prose includes a “ bushy undergrow th.” M oreover,
every form al excess curdles novelistic prose, whose “ im perfection” is a condition
of its existence. The signifying shapelessness indicates that prose plunges into the
depths, the strata, the polylogism o f language. R ationalization destroys all that.
 T R A N S L A T I O N A ND T HE T R I A L S OF T HE F O R E I G N 289

It an nih ilates an oth er elem ent o f prose: its drive to w ard co n creten ess.
R ationalization m eans abstraction. Prose is centered on the concrete and even
tends to render concrete the num erous abstract elements bobbing in its flood
(Proust, M ontaigne). R ationalization m akes the original pass from concrete to
abstract, not only by reordering the sentence structure, but— for exam ple— by
tran slatin g verbs into su bstan tives, by ch oosin g the m ore general o f tw o
substantives, etc. Yves Bonnefoy revealed this process with Shakespeare’s w ork.
This rationalization/abstraction is all the more pernicious in that it is not total.
It doesn’t mean to be. It is content to reverse the relations which prevail in the
original between form al and inform al, ordered and disorderly, abstract and
concrete. This conversion is typical of ethnocentric translation: it causes the w ork
to undergo a change of sign, o f status— and seemingly without changing form and
meaning.
To sum up: rationalization deform s the original by reversing its basic tendency.

C larificatio n

This is a corollary of rationalization which particularly concerns the level of

“ clarity” perceptible in w ords and their meanings. Where the original has no
problem moving in the indefinite, our literary language tends to im pose the definite.
When the Argentine novelist R oberto Arlt writes: “ y los excesos eran desplazados
por desmedimientos de esperanza” (the excesses were displaced by the excessiveness
o f hope; A rlt 1 9 8 1 :3 7 ), French does not tolerate a literal rendering because
everywhere, in this passage from L o s Siete Locos, excess is still in question. French
asks: an excess of what?
The sam e goes for Dostoevsky. Chapiro writes: “ To render the suggestions of a
R ussian sentence, it is often necessary to com plete it” (cited by M eschonnic
1973:317-18).
Clarification seems to be an obvious principle to many translators and authors.
Thus, the American poet G alw ay Kinnell writes: “ The translation should be a little
clearer than the original” (cited by G resset 1983:519).
O f course, clarification is inherent in translation, to the extent that every
translation com prises some degree o f explicitation. But that can signify tw o very
different things:
(1) the exp licitation can be the m an ifestation o f som ething that is not
apparent, but concealed or repressed, in the original. Translation, by virtue of its
own m ovement, puts into play this element. H eidegger alludes to the point for
philosophy: “ In translation, the w ork of thinking is transposed into the spirit of
another lan guage and so undergoes an inevitable tran sform atio n . But this
transform ation can be fecund, because it shines a new light on the fundam ental
position of the question” (Heidegger 1968:10).
The pow er o f illum ination, o f m anifestation, (1) as I indicated ap rop os
H ölderlin, is the suprem e pow er o f translation. But in a negative sense, (2)
explicitation aim s to render “ clear” w hat does not wish to be clear in the
original. The movement from polysem y to m onosem y is a m ode of clarification.
290 ANTOINE BERMAN

Paraphrastic or explicative translation is another. And that leads us to the third

tendency.

Expansion

Every translation tends to be longer than the original. George Steiner said that
translation is “ inflationist.” This is the consequence, in part, of the tw o previous
tendencies. Rationalizing and clarifying require expansion, an unfolding of what,
in the original, is “ folded.” N ow , from the viewpoint of the text, this expansion
can be qualified as “ empty.” It can coexist quite well with diverse quantitative
forms of impoverishment. I mean that the addition adds nothing, that it augments
only the g ro ss m ass o f text, w ith out augm entin g its w ay o f sp eak in g or
signifying. The addition is no more than babble designed to muffle the w ork’s
own voice. Explicitations m ay render the text more “ clear,” but they actually
obscure its own m ode o f clarity. The expansion is, moreover, a stretching, a
slackening, which im pairs the rhythmic flow of the w ork. It is often called
“ overtranslation,” a typical case of which is Armel Guerne’s translation of M oby
D ick (1 9 5 4 ). E x p an d ed , the m ajestic, oceanic novel becom es bloated and
uselessly titanic. In this case, expansion aggravates the initial shapelessness of
the w ork, causing it to change from a shapeless plenitude to a shapeless void or
hollow. In Germ an, the Fragm ents of N ovalis possess a very special brevity, a
brevity that contains an infinity of m eanings and som ehow renders them “ lon g,”
but vertically, like w ells. T ran slated by the sam e Guerne (1 9 7 3 ), they are
lengthened im m oderately and sim ultaneously flattened. E xp an sio n flattens,
horizontalizing w hat is essentially deep and vertical in N ovalis.

Ennoblem ent

T his m ark s the cu lm in ating p oin t o f “ c la ssic ” tran slatio n . In poetry, it is

“ poetization .” In prose, it is rather a “ rhetorization.” Alain alludes to this process
(with English poetry):

If a translator attem pts a poem by Shelley into French, he will first

spread it out, follow ing the practice of our poets who are m ostly a bit
too oratorical. Setting up the rules of public declamation as his standard,
he will insert their thats and whichs, syntactical barriers that weigh
upon and prevent— if I can put it this w ay— the substantial w ords from
biting each other. I don ’t disdain this art of articulation. . But in the
end it isn’t the English art of speaking, so clenched and compact, brilliant,
precise and strongly enigmatic.
(Alain 1934:56)

R hetorization consists in producing “ elegan t” sentences, while utilizing the

source text, so to speak, as raw m aterial. Thus the ennoblem ent is only a
 T R A N S L A T I O N A ND T HE T R I A L S OF T HE F O R E I G N 291

rewriting, a “ stylistic exercise” based on— and at the expense of— the original.
This procedure is active in the literary field, but also in the hum an sciences,
where it produces texts that are “ readable,” “ brilliant,” rid of their original
clum siness and com plexity so as to enhance the “ m ean in g.” This type of
rewriting thinks itself justified in recovering the rhetorical elements inherent in
all prose— but in order to banalize them and assign them a predom inant place.
These elements— in R ousseau, Balzac, H ugo, Melville, Proust, etc.— restore a
certain “ o ra lity ,” an d this o rality effectively p o sse sse s its ow n norm s of
nobility— those o f “ good speaking,” which m ay be popular or “ cultivated.” But
good speaking in the original has nothing to do with the “ rhetorical elegance”
extolled by the rew riting that ennobles. In fact, the latter sim ultaneously
annihilates both oral rhetoric and formless polylogic (see above).
The logical opposite o f ennoblement— or its counterpart— occurs in passages
judged too “ p op u lar” : blind recourse to a pseudo-slang which popularizes the
original, or to a “ spoken” language which reflects only a confusion between oral
an d spoken. The degenerate coarseness of pseudo-slang betrays rural fluency as
well as the strict code of urban dialects.

Q u alitative im poverishm ent

This refers to the replacement of terms, expressions and figures in the original with
terms, expressions and figures that lack their sonorous richness or, correspondingly,
their signifying or “ iconic” richness. A term is iconic when, in relation to its referent,
it “ creates an im age,” enabling a perception of resemblance. Spitzer alludes to this
iconicity: “ A w ord that denotes facetiousness, or the play o f w ords, easily behaves
in a whimsical manner— just as in every language worldwide, the terms that denote
the butterfly change in a kaleidoscopic m anner” (Spitzer 1970:51).
This does not mean that the word “ butterfly” objectively resembles “ a butterfly,”
but that in its sonorous, physical substance, in its density as a w ord, we feel that it
possesses something of the butterfly’s butterfly existence. Prose and poetry produce,
in their own peculiar w ays, w hat can be called surfaces o f iconicity.
When translating the Peruvian chuchumeca with pute (whore), the meaning can
certainly be rendered, but none o f the w ord’s phonetic-signify ing truth. The same
goes for every term that is commonly qualified with savoureux (spicy), dru (robust),
v if (vivid), coloré (colorful), etc., epithets that all refer to the iconic physicality of
the sign. And when this practice of replacement, which is m ost often unconscious, is
applied to an entire w ork, to the whole of its iconic surface, it decisively effaces a
good portion of its signifying process and mode of expression— what m akes a work
speak to us.

Q uan titative im poverishm ent

This refers to a lexical loss. Every w ork in prose presents a certain proliferation of
signifier s and signifying chains. G reat novelistic prose is “ abu n dan t.” These
292 ANTOINE BERMAN

signifiers can be described as unfixed, especially as a signified m ay have a

multiplicity of signifiers. For the signified visage (face) Arlt employs semblante,
rostro and cara w ithout justifying a particular choice in a particular sentence. The
essential thing is that visage is m arked as an im portant reality in his w ork by the
use of three signifiers. The translation that does not respect this multiplicity renders
the “ visage” o f an unrecognizable w ork. There is a loss, then, since the translation
contains fewer signifiers than the original. The translation that attends to the lexical
texture of the work, to its mode of lexicality— enlarges it. This loss perfectly coexists
with an increase o f the gross quantity or m ass of the text with expansion. For
expansion consists in adding articles and relatives (le, la, les, qui, que), explicative
and decorative signifiers that have nothing to do with the lexical texture of the
original. The translating results in a text that is at once poorer and longer. Moreover,
the expansion often w orks to m ask the quantitative loss.

T h e destruction o f rhythm s

I shall pass rapidly over this aspect, however fundam ental it m ay be. The novel is
not less rhythmic than poetry. It even comprises a multiplicity of rhythms. Since the
entire bulk of the novel is thus in movement, it is fortunately difficult for translation
to destroy this rhythmic movement. This explains why even a great but badly
translated novel continues to transport us. Poetry and theater are more fragile. Yet
the deforming translation can considerably affect the rhythm— for example, through
an arbitrary revision of the punctuation. M ichel Gresset (1983) shows how a
translation of Faulkner destroys his distinctive rhythm: where the original included
only four m arks of punctuation, the translation uses twenty-two, eighteen of which
are com m as!

T h e destruction o f underlying n etw orks o f signification

The literary w ork contains a hidden dimension, an “ underlying” text, where certain
signifiers correspond and link up, forming all sorts of networks beneath the “ surface”
of the text itself—the m anifest text, presented for reading. It is this subtext that
carries the netw ork o f w ord-obsessions. These underlying chains constitute one
aspect o f the rhythm and signifying process of the text. After long intervals certain
words m ay recur, certain kinds of substantives that constitute a particular network,
whether through their resemblance or their aim , their “ aspect.” In Arlt you find
words that witness the presence of an obsession, an intimacy, a particular perception,
although distributed rather far from each other—sometimes in different chapters—
and without a context that justifies or calls for their use. Hence, the following series
of augm entatives:
portalón alón jaulón portón gigantón callejón
gate wing cage door/entrance giant lane/alley

which establishes a network:

 T R A N S L A T I O N A ND T HE T R I A L S OF T HE F O R E I G N 293

gate cage

giant d o o r/e n tran c e

lan e/alley

This simple netw ork shows that the signifiers in themselves have no particular
value, that what m akes sense is their linkage, which in fact signals a m ost im portant
dimension of the work. Now, all of these signifers are augmentatives, appropriately
enough , as A rlt’s novel L o s Siete L o c o s co n tain s a certain dim en sion o f
augm entation: gates, wings, cages, entrances, giants, alleys acquire the inordinate
size they have in nocturnal dreams. If such networks are not transmitted, a signifying
process in the text is destroyed.
The misreading of these networks corresponds to the treatment given to groupings
o f m ajor signifiers in a work, such as those that organize its m ode of expression. To
sketch out a visual dom ain, for exam ple, an author might employ certain verbs,
adjectives and substantives, and not others. V.A .Goldsm idt studies the w ords that
Freud did not use or avoided where they might be expected. N eedless to say,
translators have often inserted them.

T h e destruction o f lin gu istic pattern in gs

The system atic nature of the text goes beyond the level of signifiers, m etaphors,
etc.; it extends to the type of sentences, the sentence constructions employed. Such
patternings m ay include the use o f time or the recourse to a certain kind of
subordination (Gresset cites Faulkner’s “ because” ). Spitzer studies the patterning
system in Racine and Proust, although he still calls it “ style” . Rationalization,
clarification, expansion, etc. destroy the systematic nature of the text by introducing
elements that are excluded by its essential system. Hence, a curious consequence:
when the translated text is more “ hom ogeneous” than the original (possessing more
“ style” in the ordinary sense), it is equally m ore incoherent and, in a certain way,
more heterogeneous, more inconsistent. It is a patchw ork of the different kinds of
w ritin g e m p lo y e d by the tr a n s la to r (like co m b in in g en n o b lem e n t w ith
popularization where the original cultivates an orality). This applies as well to the
position of the translator, w ho basically resorts to every reading possible in
translating the original. Thus, a translation alw ays risks appearing hom ogeneous
an d incoherent at the sam e time, as M eschonnic has shown with the translation of
Paul Celan. A carefully conducted textual analysis of an original and its translation
demonstrates that the writing-of-the-translation, the-discourse-of-the-translation is
asystem atic, like the w ork of a neophyte which is rejected by readers at publishing
houses from the very first page. Except that, in the case o f translation, this
294 ANTOINE BERMAN

asystem atic nature is not apparent and in fact is concealed by what still remains of
the lin gu istic p attern in g s in the o rigin al. R ea d ers, how ever, perceive this
inconsistency in the translated text, since they rarely bestow their trust on it and do
not see it as the or a “ true” text. Barring any prejudices, the readers are right: it is
not a “ true” text; it lacks the distinguishing features o f a text, starting with its
system atic nature. H om ogenization can no m ore conceal asystem aticity than
expansion can conceal quantitative impoverishment.

T h e destruction o f vern acu lar netw orks or their exoticization

This dom ain is essential because all great prose is rooted in the vernacular language.
“ If French doesn’t w ork ,” wrote M ontaigne, “ G ascon w ill!” (cited by M ounin
1955:38).
In the first place, the poly logic aim of prose inevitably includes a plurality of
vernacular elements.
In the second place, the tendency tow ard concreteness in prose necessarily
includes these elements, because the vernacular language is by its very nature more
physical, more iconic than “ cultivated” language. The Picard “ bibloteux” is more
expressive than the French “ livresque” (bookish). The Old French “ sorcelage” is
richer than “ sorcellerie” (sorcery), the Antillais “ dérespecter” more expressive than
“ m anquer de respect” (to lack respect).
In the third place, prose often aim s explicitly to recapture the orality of
vernacular. In the twentieth century, this is the case with a good part— with the
good part— of such literatures as Latin Am erican, Italian, R ussian, and N orth
American.
The effacement o f vernaculars is thus a very serious injury to the textuality of
prose w orks. It m ay be a question of effacing diminutives in Spanish, Portuguese,
Germ an or R ussian; or it m ay involve replacing verbs by nom inal constructions,
verbs of action by verbs with substantives (the Peruvian “ alagunarse,” s’enlaguner,
becomes the flat-footed “ se transform er en lagune,” “ to be transform ed into a
lagoon ” ). Vernacular signifier s m ay be transposed, like “ porteño,” which becomes
“ inhabitant of Buenos A ires.”
The tra d itio n a l m eth od o f p reservin g v ern acu lars is to exoticize them .
Exoticization can take tw o form s. First, a typographical procedure (italics) is used
to isolate w hat does not exist in the original. Then, more insidiously, it is “ added”
to be “ more authentic,” emphasizing the vernacular according to a certain stereotype
of it (as in the popular w oodcut illustrations published by Épinal). Such are
M ard ru s’s over-Arabizing translations of the Thousand an d One N ights and the
Song o f Songs.
Exoticization m ay join up again with popularization by striving to render a
foreign vernacular with a local one, using Parisian slang to translate the lunfardo
of Buenos Aires, the N orm andy dialect to translate the language of the Andes or
Abruzzese. Unfortunately, a vernacular clings tightly to its soil and completely
resists any direct translating into another vernacular. Translation can occur only
between “ cultivated” languages. An exoticization that turns the foreign from abroad
into the foreign at home winds up merely ridiculing the original.
 T R A N S L A T I O N A ND T HE T R I A L S OF T HE F O R E I G N 295

T h e destruction o f exp ression s and idiom s

Prose abounds in im ages, expressions, figures, proverbs, etc. which derive in part
from the vernacular. M o st convey a m eaning or experience that readily finds a
parallel im age, expression, figure, or proverb in other languages.
Here are tw o idiom s from C on rad ’s novel Typhoon:

H e did not care a tinker’s curse

Dam m e, if this ship isn’t worse than Bedlam !

Com pare these tw o idiom s with G ide’s am azingly literal version:

II s’en fichait comme du juron d ’un étameur

(He didn’t give a tinker’s curse)

Que diable m ’emporte si l’on ne se croirait pas à Bedlam !

(The Devil take me if I didn’t think I w as in Bedlam !)
(cited by M eerschen 1982:80)

The first can easily be rendered into com parable French idiom s, like “ il s ’en
fichait comm e de l’an quarante, comme d ’une guigne, etc.,” and the second
invites the replacement o f “ Bedlam ,” which is incomprehensible to the French
reader, by “ Charenton” (Bedlam being a fam ous English insane asylum ). N ow it
is evident that even if the m eaning is identical, replacin g an idiom by its
“ equivalent” is an ethnocentrism. Repeated on a large scale (this is alw ays the
case with a novel), the practice will result in the absurdity whereby the characters
in Typhoon express themselves with a network o f French im ages. The points I
signal here with one or tw o exam ples m ust alw ays be m ultiplied by five or six
thousand. To play with “ equivalence” is to attack the discourse of the foreign
w ork. O f course, a proverb m ay have its equivalents in other lan gu ages,
bu t...th ese equivalents do not translate it. To translate is not to search for
equivalences. The desire to replace ignores, furthermore, the existence in us of a
proverb consciousness which im m ediately detects, in a new proverb, the brother
of an authentic one: the w orld of our proverbs is thus augm ented and enriched
(Larbaud 1946).

T h e effacem ent o f the su p erim po sition o f lan guages

The superim position of languages in a novel involves the relation between dialect
and a com m on language, a koine, or the coexistence, in the heart of a text, o f two
or more koine. The first case is illustrated by the novels of G adda and Günter
G rass, by Valle-Inclan’s Tirano Banderas, where his Spanish from Spain is decked
out with diverse Latin American Spanishes, by the w ork of Guim arães R osa, where
classic Portuguese interpenetrates with the dialects o f the Brazilian interior. The
second case is illustrated by Jo sé M aria Arguedas and R oa Bastos, where Spanish is
m odified profoundly (syntactically) by tw o other languages from oral cultures:
296 ANTOINE BERMAN

Q uechua and G uarani. And there is finally— the limit case—Jo yce’s Finnegans
Wake and its sixteen agglutinated languages.
In these tw o cases, the superimposition of languages is threatened by translation.
The relation of tension and integration that exists in the original between the
vernacular language and the koine, between the underlying language and the surface
language, etc. tends to be effaced. H ow to preserve the G uarani— Spanish tension
in R oa Bastos? O r the relation between Spanish from Spain and the Latin American
Spanishes in Tirano Banderas? The French translator of this work has not confronted
the problem ; the French text is completely hom ogeneous. The sam e goes for the
translation of M ario de Andrade’s M acum aïm a, where the deep vernacular roots of
the w ork are suppressed (which does not happen in the Spanish version o f this
Brazilian text).
This is the central problem posed by translating novels— a problem that demands
m axim um reflection from the translator. Every novelistic w ork is characterized by
linguistic superim positions, even if they include sociolects, idiolects, etc. The novel,
said Bakhtin, assembles a heterology or diversity of discursive types, a heteroglossia
or diversity of languages, and a heterophony or diversity of voices (Bakhtin
1982:89). Thom as M an n ’s novel The M agic M ountain offers a fascinating example
of heteroglossia, which the translator, M aurice Betz, w as able to preserve: the
dialogues between the “ heroes,” H ans Castorp and M adam e Chauchat. In the
original, both comm unicate in French, and the fascinating thing is that the young
G erm an’s French is not the sam e as the young Russian w om an’s. In the translation,
these tw o varieties of French are in turn fram ed by the translator’s French. M aurice
Betz let Thom as M an n ’s Germ an resonate in his translation to such an extent that
the three kinds of French can be distinguished, and each possesses its specific
foreignness. This is the sort of success— not quite im possible, certainly difficult— to
which every translator o f a novel ought to aspire.
The analytic of translation broadly sketched here must be carefully distinguished
from the study of “ norm s” — literary, social, cultural, etc.— which partly govern the
translating act in every society. These “ n orm s,” which vary historically, never
specifically concern tran slation ; they apply, in fact, to any w riting practice
whatsoever. The analytic, in contrast, focuses on the uni ver sais of deform ation
inherent in translating as such. It is obvious that in specific periods and cultures
these universals overlap with the system of norms that govern writing: think only of
the neoclassical period and its “ belles infidèles.” Yet this coincidence is fleeting. In
the twentieth century, we no longer submit to neoclassical norms, but the universals
of deform ation are not any less in force. They even enter into conflict with the new
norm s governing writing and translation.
At the sam e time, however, the deform ing tendencies analyzed above are not
ahistorical. They are rather historical in an original sense. They refer back to the
figure of translation based on Greek thought in the West or more precisely, Platonism.
The “ figure of tran slation ” is understood here as the form in which translation is
deployed and appears to itself, before any explicit theory. From its very beginnings,
western translation has been an embellishing restitution o f meaning, based on the
typically Platonic separation between spirit and letter, sense and word, content and
form, the sensible and the non-sensible. When it is affirm ed today that translation
(including non-literary translation) must produce a “ clear” and “ elegant” text (even
 T R A N S L A T I O N A ND T HE T R I A L S OF T HE F O R E I G N 297

if the original does not possess these qualities), the affirm ation assumes the Platonic
figure o f translating, even if unconsciously. All the tendencies noted in the analytic
lead to the same result: the production of a text that is more “ clear,” more “ elegant,”
more “ fluent,” more “ pure” than the original. They are the destruction of the letter
in favor o f meaning.
Nevertheless, this Platonic figure of translation is not something “ false” that can
be criticized theoretically or ideologically. For it sets up as an absolute only one
essential possibility of translating, which is precisely the restitution of meaning. All
translation is, and m ust be, the restitution of meaning.
The problem is knowing whether this is the unique and ultimate task of translation
or whether its task is something else again. The analytic of translation, insofar as
the analysis of properly deform ing tendencies bears on the translator, does in fact
presuppose another figure o f translating, which m ust necessarily be called literal
translation. Here “ literal” m eans: attached to the letter (of w orks). L ab or on the
letter in translation is more originary than restitution of meaning. It is through this
labor that translation, on the one hand, restores the particular signifying process of
w orks (which is more than their meaning) and, on the other hand, transform s the
translating language. Translation stimulated the fashioning and refashioning of the
great western languages only because it labored on the letter and profoundly
m odified the translating language. As simple restitution of m eaning, translation
could never have played this formative role.
Consequently, the essential aim of the analytic o f translation is to highlight this
other essence o f translating, which, although never recognized, endowed it with
historical effectiveness in every dom ain where it w as practiced.