Theses on Translation

This chapter co-authored by Antonio Anguilera y Esperança Bielsa was republished with the kind authorization of Ediciones del Subsuelo.

1. If it ever existed, the loss of the general or pure language – the Adamic tongue or that which is nearest to truth – is a blessing granted by the abundance that the many thousands of languages spread across the whole Earth; but translation is needed to propel them beyond their own self-absorption.
2. The multiplicity of languages without any kind of unification or hierarchy makes it possible to climb all the way to the top of the tower of Babel, whose stairs are the steps of translation. No Esperanto or any kind of dominant language is able to achieve what translation can: the interaction of multiple languages. Not even the language of science or of knowledge purified of the admixture of words and tongues has achieved a universal language, which, since the Cartesian and Leibnizian project – still faintly alive – appears as a metaphysical dream. No kind of metalanguage makes it possible to get rid of translation. That longed-for fluency, clarity and lucidity can only mean a radical distancing from experience, its impoverishment in order to win mastery over the world, which may lead to the destruction of the human.
3. Translation is word-work that recovers both the meaning the translated word indicates, and the change that occurs in another language, but it does so by kneading words not meanings. To translate is to arrange one signifier after another before the mirror of the other language’s signifiers, never a transfer of meanings. It is saying fearlessly what cannot be said, in the always-failed persistence of joining that which cannot be fused together with the glue of meaning.
4. Translation points towards a textuality or an orality that springs from the thing itself, as though it were that which speaks or writes. This is what connects it with photography and separates it from drawing or painting, and also from literature. Because translation is not just literature, despite the fact that, like literature, it must breathe through language. It strains with limitless effort to make words that throb with the same impulses as that which it translates.
5. Even the translation most codified by habit and by already established knowledge requires a subject who can confront signifiers one after another, not meanings. Beyond the automatism which, through artificial intelligence, links together millions of signifiers to find the appropriate phrase, translation demands of the speaker or the writer, with their linguistic body, that they select the best concatenation of words, which is forever woven with their experience.
6. Translation is not reproduction nor mere stimulus for improvisation. Translation reduced to placing one word after another drawn from dictionaries or databases is not well-judged. Nor does it do justice to the translated text when someone takes an original as a pretext and rewrites it with complete freedom as though it had ceased to exist or had become a vague memory. Not fidelity nor licence, translation is carried by the care which allows the thing itself to be expressed in the translated text.
7. Translation establishes a connection between the living and the dead, that which they left inscribed in the language the living use. Because of this, translation has a history as long as truth or knowledge, history striates it right down, but not in a way that means it is not updated day by day, even if microscopically.
8. Translation is just as imbued with sexuality as language or the whole culture, understood as forms of sublimation. It is part of the leap or the bolt that is shed by contact between the bodies of the different tongues from which pleasure or new life might equally emerge.
9. At least two languages are entwined with love and hate in translation, those lovers who answer the cries and caresses of the other, but each in search of their own delight. It is not onanism, nor linguistic autism; it calls for careful attention to the other, to the other language, to reply in the translated tongue. Translation might make it possible to make love instead of war, even when it allows fearlessly for indifference. Translation is the matchmaker of those repressed by monolingual narcissism. That is why the conflict it stages between tongues is a war waged for eternal peace.
10. Translation gathers the not-language of things, the muteness of nature. In the interplay between languages, it recovers the Adamic language that was only ever a myth. It gestures towards that paradise always lost and forever being made by seeking the happiness of the living. As such, translation substitutes the impossible dream of a universal language for a living tradition that is passed down, in place of a humanity that does not yet exist, and which might materialize the desire for eternity through the immortality that sparks between mortals.
11. Only translation can bring the dead and the living into a fruitful relation with nature, in the multiplicity of worlds to which human languages open up. And perhaps it can usher in a new way of doing politics, held up by a radical democracy that cares for a translation which respects that which it translates.