Language, history, and the university: de Man on translation

Pence is a doctoral student at Temple University, currently working on a dissertation on the technologies and forms of public and private memory.

The English profession has long depended on translation; however, until recently, its role was decidedly supplementary to the more central work of teaching and producing criticism. Even within university departments that are affiliated with creative writing programs, such as Temple, my own institution, translation practica have generally been ancillary courses, offered every third or fourth semester while prose and poetry workshops are recycled regularly. It is thus not surprising that translating has also typically been among the less rewarded activities of academics: professional lore (the curriculum vitae) and material practice (contracts, promotions) continue to endorse "original" or selfauthored products over the "secondary" or other-authored works of translation. Several strands of the legacy of Romanticism have contributed to the subordination of translation: the emphasis on originality and individual genius are obvious factors. Yet while these aesthetic concepts have been under assault for at least a generation, another bequest of the nineteenth century, the emphasis on a national language, has not (see Lefevere 1987, 28). Indeed, monolingualism was, and remains, the minimal requirement for the institutionalization of humanistic study as promulgated by Matthew Arnold: the reproduction and enforcement of a common national culture, embodied in the English Department, by means of the English language and literature.

The paradox of translation's marginalized status has been the academy's absolute dependency on the practice. To an extent which should not be underemphasized, recent transformations in the theory and practice of cultural study have been enabled by the translation of European critical theory into English. Without this thriving cross-cultural trade, the most prestigious of contemporary critical practices (Foucauldian discourse analysis, Lacanian psychoanalysis, Frankfurt School cultural criticism, Poststructuralism) would simply not be possible outside of foreign language departments. At a minimum, translation has operated as a servant to recent developments in cultural studies, and therein lies the key to its undervaluation.

From a Hegelian perspective, the simultaneous need for and denigration of translation are not surprising. Dependency is a two-way street: the master despises the subaltern who exposes the former's inadequacies. This exposure has two facets in the present case. Besides their embodiment as translated alien texts, many recently imported theories are also crucially and explicitly concerned with translation itself; their content has made it impossible for scholars to ignore this practice. But translation is becoming more than simply a new topic of discussion. The Hegelian dialectic of dominance provides a map for understanding the contemporary inversion or, more properly, confusion of translation's customary situation. The dynamic relation of dependency produces a debt or a lack on the part of the dominant which cannot be paid or concealed through denigration; eventually, if only momentarily, the polarity is reversed and the subordinate becomes the master. This new dispensation reveals a contemporary destabilization of hierarchical relations between primary and secondary works. Appropriately, as Derrida points out, "confusion" is also the double connotation of the proper name of the Tower of Babel, the mythic site of linguistic unity (fused together) and fragmentation (against fusion). Translation continuously plays out this undecidable differance, offering what it knows to be unavailable (soteriologically, "translation" to the beyond without death or loss) in spite of that knowledge. In this sense, translation epitomizes many of the key vectors of contemporary critical work. If, as I believe, Eve Tavor Bannet is correct when she writes that "Translation has moved from the periphery to center stage, where it serves as a metaphor for the work of the academy" (Bannet 578), that work can be characterized along the lines of Derrida's description of translation's imperative: "necessary and impossible" (Derrida 170).

A key example of translation's new preeminence is Paul de Man's essay "Conclusions: Walter Benjamin's `The Task of the Translator,"' which occupies the privileged final position in his influential collection The Resistance to Theory (1986). The positioning of "Conclusions" is explained by de Man at the outset as a kind of self-validation. Without a reference to Benjamin's views on translation, he seems to suggest, the rest of his text might be considered marginal in the extreme: "in the profession you are nobody unless you have said something about this text"(de Man 73). In reality, the aim of de Man's excursus is to redefine precisely which statements about translation ensure that one is not a professional "nobody." For those familiar with the body of de Man's work, and the controversies surrounding his personal history, the view of translation which emerges from his reading of Benjamin will be familiar. De Man's poststructuralist skepticism about the intralingual equivalence of signifier and signified finds a material correlative in the problem of interlingual translation. The political consequences of de Man's work-an often interrogated subject-are more problematic as he attempts to portray Benjamin as an ally. The complexity of Benjamin's career and canon have enabled theorists to position him in markedly divergent ways: Scholem's Jewish mystic, the German Democratic Republic's Marxist culture critic, postmodern media theory's flaneur. Such selective portrayals inevitably distort those features of Benjamin's writing which contradict them. De Man's Benjamin is particularly problematic, as Benjamin's commitment to social emancipation and the allegorical recognition (neither recovery nor refusal) of history are both eviscerated in the service of linguistic fundamentalism and an ultimate and ironic political nihilism.1