Translation, Mastery, and Ground; or, Overcoming Some Hermeneutic Fictions

ABSTRACT

Comparative philosophy is dependent upon translation, often translations that will help preserve some fundamental commitments: to linguistic mastery, to the recovery or preservation of an original, and to the protection of an authenticity that will ground these commitments. Such a view can sometimes obscure a nostalgia for questionable causes. Comparative philosophy, especially with continental affinities, often relies on two moves: first, a boundary must be found (or produced) between philosophy itself and other forms of writing (literature or fiction, say), to ensure proper grounding. Second, it must be understood that this boundary depends upon an underlying philosophy of language: language speaks us, it speaks Being; to dwell in a different language is to dwell in a different house of being (Martin Heidegger). But how might this project – its historiography of return and grounding, and its mythologizing of linguistic and ontological recovery – be challenged by the very practice of translation itself? Perhaps this challenge is one of translation’s philosophical benefits.

KEYWORDS:

• Translation
• comparative philosophy
• linguistic mastery
• ground
• pragmatism

Acknowledgments

A debt is owed to Berndt Clavier, Graham Parkes, Roger Ames, Jason Wirth, Louis Ruprecht, Walter Brogan, and David Jones for their implicit and explicit contributions to this essay. One also continues to negotiate with the dead, as Margaret Atwood puts it: still present are Richard Rorty, Iris Murdoch, Jacques Derrida, Douglas Templeton, John Llewelyn, and Harold Bloom, with belated gratitude.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 I want to thank Steve DeCaroli, Adam Lobel, and Jessica Locke for their presentation, “Agamben Reads Buddhism,” at the Comparative Continental Philosophy Circle, Bogotá, Colombia, May 2023, where their email exchange with Agamben was made available, and which provoked this present discussion. Excerpts from an interview with Giogio Agamben on Buddhism, 2022.

2 Heidegger (1959, 12). My translation, unfinished though it must remain . . .

3 Danto (1985, 64).

4 This reflects an appreciation for the value of Goodman’s (1978) Ways of Worldmaking.

5 Richard Rorty (1982, 90–109).

6 William Gass (1972, 3–26).

7 See also Wirth’s (2016) exquisite Commiserating with Devastated Things: Milan Kundera and the Entitlements of Thinking.

8 For an exploration of this concern, see Apter (2013).

9 Walter Benjamin’s “The Task of the Translator” (first printed as an introduction to a Baudelaire translation, 1923), can be found in Illuminations, and also in Venuti (2000).

10 See Adina Rosmarin’s (1985) very instructive The Power of Genre.

11 Parkes also cites Georges Liébert’s Nietzsche and Music (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004) as an excellent study of this context.

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Notes on contributors

Timothy H. Engström

Timothy Engström is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the Rochester Institute of Technology. He publishes in the areas of meta-philosophy, comparative Continental and Anglo-American, aesthetic theory, rhetorical theory, and philosophy of technology.