Radical Translation and Interpretation
Radical Translation and Interpretation
Cluj, Romania
Email: [email protected]
Abstract: The present essay addresses the ideas of radical translation and
radical interpretation advanced by celebrated analytic philosophers such as W. V. O.
Quine and D. Davidson, attempting to show their relevance for translation theory
and, more broadly, for the corpus of literary theory. I aim to reassess the debate over
the translatability or untranslatability of a literary or cultural text, taking it beyond
the politics of translation and multicultural studies and placing it within the
framework of hermeneutic theory. Here, one should take into account the specifier
“radical” associated with “interpretation,” which challenges the too rigid
interpretable/uninterpretable dichotomy. The comparative reenactment of notions
such as “untranslatability,” “radical translation” and “radical interpretation” may lead
to a mutual critique of their interpretative power and limits. I also reconsider the
concept of “charity” in connection to the translator as an interpreter, in the context
of Davidson‟s arguments on “radical interpretation.” The rather dry rationale
underlying a theory of truth and interpretation, as upheld by analytic philosophers,
can gain in conceptual liveliness and even in literary relevance if one privileges an
ethical/anthropological approach to the translator‟s “charity” towards his/her reader,
as well as towards the delegated authority of the author.
Keywords: radical translation, radical interpretation, truth-for-the-alien,
charity, apparatus, W. V. O. Quine, Donald Davidson
The Role of Conceptual Personae: James Joyce and the Radical Interpreter
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“As we, his listeners or readers, become familiar with the devices he has
made us master, we find ourselves removed a certain distance from our
own language, our usual selves, and our society. We join Joyce as outcasts,
temporarily freed, or so it seems, from the nets of our language and our
culture” (Davidson 1991, 11).
We are supposed, then, to “join” the novelist in this linguistic and anthropological
type of adventure, as radical translators (to use Quine‟s notion, which inspired
Davidson) and radical interpreters, by plunging into a totally other language and by
facing our somewhat alien selves in the process. We are, thus, made to assume
Joyce‟s linguistic chaosmos,1 as Eco famously described it, as exiles or outcasts.
Moreover, we are challenged to interpret Finnegans Wake‟s linguistic and fictional
alterity, whereby we can actually translate ourselves into an entirely new language
and into a radically different worldview. This whole argumentative narrative about
1 See, in this respect, Umberto Eco, The Aesthetics of Chaosmos: The Middle Ages of James Joyce,
translated from the Italian by Ellen Esrock, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989. For Eco,
the possible worlds of Joyce‟s novels comprise their own poetics, and Finnegans Wake actually
performs and accomplishes a “continuous poetics of itself.” (p. 62).
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how we are “temporarily freed” needs further analysis, which I will resume a little
later.
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2 The following excerpt is relevant for Quine‟s theory of “radical translation,” based on the notion of
the indeterminacy of translation (and also the inscrutability of reference): “We saw in our
consideration of radical translation that an alien language may well fail to share, by any universal
standard, the object-positing pattern of our own; and now our supposititious opponent is simply
standing, however legalistically, on his alien rights. We remain free as always to project analytical
hypotheses and translate his sentences into canonical notation as seems most reasonable; but he is no
more bound by our conclusions than the native by the field linguist‟s.” See Willard Van Orman Quine,
Word & Object (1960), new edition, foreword by Patricia Smith Churchland, preface to the new edition
by Dagfinn Fǿllesdal, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2013, p. 224.
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“What he must do is find out, however he can, what sentences the alien
holds true in his own tongue (or better, to what degree he holds them
true). The linguist then will attempt to construct a characterization of
truth-for-the-alien which yields, so far as possible, a mapping of
sentences held true (or false) by the alien on to sentences held true (or
false) by the linguist. Supposing no perfect fit is found, the residue of
sentences held true translated by sentences held false (and vice versa) is
the margin for error (foreign or domestic).” (Davidson 2001, 26)
There are at least two threads of his rich argument about the “truth-for-the-alien”3
that deserve a deeper exploration. One is the apparent presence of the interpreter and
of the speaker in the same time and place, the presentness and immediacy of their
flux of shared experience. Once we accept, beginning with the turning point of
“James Joyce and Humpty Dumpty,” that Joyce “takes us back to the foundations and
origins of communication,” this privileged and somehow strange situation we are
driven into becomes a particular experience in between, say, Joyce and us, evincing a
back-and-forth dynamics or a feedback loop of mutual exile and self-distancing.
Hence, this is first and foremost an experience lived by us, one that belongs to us, the
readers and interpreters of his literary and linguistic alterity and of our own remote
position towards our old, “usual selves.” A whole narrative about this adventure gains
shape, based on the anthropological experience of becoming another self, almost an
alien one, which might be called a self-for-the-other. It is an act of interpreting the
other and oneself altogether, a process that is pervaded by a certain degree of verbal
and nonverbal performativity. On the other hand, the already mentioned conceptual
construction that Davidson calls “truth-for-the-alien” is to be reached, as he
contends, due to a “principle of charity.” This notion implies such a dense knot of
3The alien character of the linguist was also highlighted by Quine. It is to be understood in connection
with his theory on the indeterminacy of translation and with his notion of ontological relativity. As
Roger F. Gibson points out, Quine‟s thesis “is not that successful translation is impossible, but that it is
multiply possible. The philosophical moral of indeterminacy of translation is that propositions,
thought of as objectively valid translation relations between sentences, are simply non-existent.” See
Roger F. Gibson. “Chapter 29: Quine,” in Robert L. Arrington, ed. The World’s Great Philosophers,
Malden & Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003, p. 258.
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The idea that radical translation and radical interpretation require the
acceptance of a “principle of charity” is actually what makes Davidson‟s arguments go
beyond a truth-semantics, as well as beyond a philosophy of language. Once the
interpreter is seemingly endowed with “charity,” radical interpretation comes to be
associated with different other theoretical stances: a hermeneutic theory, an ethical
theory, and an anthropological approach on the intelligibility of the other, on his/her
more than linguistic, I would say, otherness. Such an otherness encompasses the web
of alien, estranged beliefs and meanings, be they individual or communal. All of these
are nevertheless embedded into an aesthetic, perceptual perspective on the speech of
the other. Both the speaker and the interpreter perform linguistic statements and
have reversible authority positions in relation to one another. In “A Nice
Derangement of Epitaphs,” for instance, an essay from 1986, the posture of the
speaker and his/her expectations from the part of the interpreter are as important as
the capacity of the hearer to “translate” his/her utterances. A speaker, then, is
supposed to “have the interpreter in mind,” since “there is no such thing as how we
expect, in the abstract, to be interpreted” (Davidson 1986, 170). Moreover, in his book
Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective, the philosopher argues for a specific
“requirement of learnability [of a language], interpretability” (Davidson 2001, 28),
which conveys the social factor of the encounter, on the basis of a shared intelligible
agreement. Such a requirement is what enables the interpreter to avoid “Humpty
Dumpty” meanings, e.g. those utterances that, as in the case of Lewis Carroll‟s
character Humpty Dumpty from Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found
There, mean, whatever he intends them to, without taking into account Alice‟s own
intentions to “read” his mind. Humpty symptomatically pretends that “glory” would
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mean “a nice knockdown argument,” and no wonder that his extravagant verdict
leaves Alice quite bewildered.
Still, interpretability is intrinsic to the principle of charity, which “prompts the
interpreter to maximize the intelligibility of the speaker, not sameness of belief”
(Davidson 2001, XIX) and opens up the hermeneutic stance towards an ethical
theory. The interpreter comes to acknowledge, in the proximity of the translatable
text or speech, the set of values and beliefs of the other. To perform charity towards
the meanings and the self-consistency of the other can be a paradoxical task for the
radical translator as interpreter:
4 Literary theorist Gerald L. Bruns has taken on the task of demonstrating that Davidson‟s philosophy
of language is convergent with Continental thinking and with the literary turn in philosophical
discourse. He discusses the conditions which allow two languages to displace each other, so the
principles of radical interpretation and of charity are necessarily invoked: “It might seem an open
question as to whether any two natural human („earthly‟) languages meet the standard of mutual
alienation that the word „radical‟ is meant to suggest, but Davidson thinks that because we speakers of
the same language each have our own unique way of speaking it (each our own idiolect, each evidently
his or her rich repertoire of such things), we are sufficiently alien to one another for the principles of
radical interpretation (e. g., the principle of charity) still to apply.” See Gerald L. Bruns, “Donald
Davidson among the Outcasts,” in Tragic Thoughts at the End of Philosophy. Language, Literature,
and Ethical Theory, Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1999, p. 42.
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“In radical interpretation we are able to break into this circle, if only
incompletely, because we can sometimes tell that a person accedes to a
sentence we do not understand.” (Davidson 2001, 26)
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his/her access to sentences and contents that are not always transparent for us.
Reading the other from the liminal position of outcasts, as made exemplary by
Joyce‟s language, entails following him into a “world of verbal exile.”5
Beyond the dual assessment of what is translatable and interpretable, on the
one hand, and what otherwise seems untranslatable or alien to us, the role of the
translator as interpreter undergoes a certain relativization, as it is not based on a
claim of power and authority, but grounded in the very principle of charity. The term
“radical” itself is set under critical scrutiny and somehow relativized through
“charity.” To abide by a principle of charity is to always question, from the point of
view of the interpreter/reader/listener, the conditions of translatability of cultural
identities, ideas and discourses. Translation seen as performance of charity probably
contains a key to how one could engage in a hermeneutic experience, as well as in an
anthropological rite of passage. To act charitably towards the inhabitant of a
distanced cultural community means realizing that his or her presumably
untranslatable words and notions – in fact, those “truths-of-the-alien” – operate
beyond their discursive status and that they pertain to the communal traditional
beliefs, as well as to the web of aesthetic energies which pervade them.
The reader of Davidson‟s text on interpretation can promptly associate his idea
of charity with some of the claims of European moral philosophy, namely with the
ethics of responsibility towards alterity, formulated by Emmanuel Lévinas. Still, I
prefer to invoke another concept derived from the Continental body of thinking, in
order to pass as through a more familiar filter Davidson‟s theories: “le dispositif”
(Michel Foucault), or apparatus, which I have briefly mentioned in the beginning of
this essay, a concept that I would adopt, albeit in light of its reinterpretation by
Giorgio Agamben. Thus, it is not so much disciplinary or power-oriented “dispositifs”,
5 The verbal exile that Joyce provokes, through the displacement of familiar languages, is once again a
metonymy for the process defined by Davidson as radical interpretation: “…Joyce provokes the reader
into involuntary collaboration, and enlists him as a member of his private linguistic community.
Coopted into Joyce‟s world of verbal exile, we are forced to share in the annihilation of old meanings
and the creation ‒ not really ex nihilo, but on the basis of our stock of common lore ‒ of a new
language”. See “James Joyce and Humpty Dumpty,” in Philosophy and the Arts, p. 11.
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6 Here is a significant part of Agamben‟s all-encompassing definition of apparatus: “…I shall call an
apparatus literally anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept,
model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings. Not only,
therefore, prisons, madhouses, the panopticon, schools, confession, factories, disciplines, judicial
measures, and so forth (whose connection with power is in a certain sense evident), but also the pen,
writing, literature, philosophy, agriculture, cigarettes, navigation, computers, cellular telephones and--
why not--language itself, which is perhaps the most ancient of apparatuses-one in which thousands
and thousands of years ago a primate inadvertently let himself be captured, probably without realizing
the consequences that he was about to face.” See Agamben, “What is an Apparatus?,” in What is an
Apparatus? And Other Essays, translated by David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella, Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2009, p. 14.
7 Agamben refers here to a disciplinary society, as conceived by Foucault, in which the apparently
“free” identity belongs to subjects caught up “in the very process of their desubjectification.” See
Agamben, “What is an Apparatus?” p. 20.
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Davidson‟s surprising option for the free practice of speech and for the
continuous revision of prior theories and linguistic regulations, for acknowledging
the particularities and the context of every singular utterance, creates a sort of
flexible “dispositif" of interpretation. Understanding and communication between a
speaker and an interpreter or hearer should not be based solely on linguistic
conventions and rules: they should also rely on the clues given by speakers to
interpreters, on the convergence between their intelligible ways of uttering true
sentences, and on the plausible “passing theory” improvised by the receiver. The
passing theory is therefore situated beyond power positions and it is clearly open to
the “principle of charity.” Literary theorist Gerald L. Bruns argues that, “instead of
multiplying languages, Babel-like, Davidson buries the idea of language in the
everyday, second-to-second practice of constructing passing theories.” (Bruns 1999,
51).
The question of translatability and that of mutual interpretability are linked,
for Donald Davison, with an adaptable, performative apparatus for everyday speech,
which conveys “the ability to converge on passing theories from utterance to
utterance.” (Davidson 1986, 172-173). His dynamic – philosophical and
communicational – “passing” “dispositif" exposes several conceptual personae, such
as the radical interpreter or Joyce himself, who is regarded as a metonymical master
figure that makes us feel estranged, for a while, from our own language and from “our
usual selves.” And this is exactly “the perspective of someone who is an alien or exile,”
a paradoxically charitable posture. Since we have no other choice but to “join Joyce as
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outcasts,” this means both a hermeneutic and an ethical stance, which he acts out in
front of us and for us.
References
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