There is no such thing as a perfect substitute in translation. There are instead, displacements and interpretations, which remain nevertheless within the limits of the text. But beyond this, translations can, in their more radical instance,
release a surplus. This surplus of translation is neither solely of the original nor of the context of its destination, and not even of their differences. It is brought about by the excess in translation itself — through over-interpretation — in order to supplement what is left out from the text(s). The surplus has a life of its own beyond the binarism of translation. It is a bypass, a detour, for saying the things that cannot be said otherwise.

The surplus is the braking of translation into excerpts, extending it to unsought relations. These passages diverging from translation may come to occasion the voicing of things
other than that which the initial translation sought to speak of; they may come to engender desires, contradictions and struggles that make up the social to re-enter language.

Ever since the introduction of modernity in Iran, translation has played a very significant role in various social and cultural fields. In recent years however, translation has become the subject of intense debates among Iranian intellectuals, in regard to both its historical and political significance. The fact that translation is and has always been intrinsic to the Iranian experience of modernity — as in many non-Western countries — not only hints to the mode and the complexity of this experience, but also why discussions about translation cannot be limited to a mere transfer or
exchange of meanings and concepts. Such an approach would disregard the critical and the political ‘space’ that translation can engender. The surplus of translation is its release from any fidelity to either contexts of the target or
the source of the translation. With the political induced in translation, the question of cultural exchange and cultural translation become immediately problematic. Instead, translation then becomes a practice from within the conflict zone of the cultural and the social. The question is then not so much of how I translate the ‘Other’ into my own culture or vice-versa, or how I integrate into the global or let the global define my own place — but rather how translation can offer an instance of subversion, transgression, and political agency in my own immediate surrounding.

Having experienced, each time anew, some of the challenges of translation with Pages’ previous issues, it seemed inevitable that we dedicate an edition to this topic. We often
need to struggle with certain references in a text that are too specific to the context of the text or too alien for the reader of the translation, that even when clarified in footnotes or between brackets, still serve to break the flow of the text.
The dilemma is that the more you clarify these references the more you displace them. But again isn’t this surplus of translation — the in between brackets or in footnotes — an instance of questioning and negotiating the very
conditions — political and cultural — in which translation is pursued? What has made translation a unique experience for us in the last few editions of Pages, is not so much because of the ‘differences’ or the ‘similarities’ that we encounter between the conditions of the two languages. Translation on the contrary undermines articulating conditions in these very terms. Rather, with translation one gets closer to understanding the potentiality and the eventualities of each condition.

In this issue, we have put together articles and
argumentations that address some of the specifics of the surplus of translation. As it is the costume with Pages, there is on the one hand, the focus on the Iranian context, with its
current discussions and concerns about the historical and political implications of translation. The Iranian experience tells us about the potentialities of translation in engendering, however precarious, an emancipatory space and practice.

On the other hand, there are readings of practices of ‘translation’ that exactly due to their operation within the excess of translation, retain an extra-geographical and cultural disposition, which make them political instances of translation. From the editorial point of view, this issue is an attempt, in raising the critical notions of translation, asking
how is translation a dispositif for the political?

“For the dream may perhaps have another interpretation as well, an ‘overinterpretation,’ which has escaped him.”— Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams

Pages — March 2009
::

I’d like to begin by saying that this is the first time I have lectured in a foreign language (and who knows, it may be the last).I also think this is the first time you have listened to someone who wants to lecture for the first time is a foreign language, and as they say in English, “we don’t speak the same language”, perhaps this is a new experience for both the lecturer and audience; for as Lacan said, every understanding is inevitably a misunderstanding. I want to appreciate this striking situation.

I’d like to begin by drawing your attention to two familiar sentences in English and will attempt to take them literally and in a way translate them word for word to understand them as exactly as I possibly can.

I don’t feel at home in English.
I don’t feel at home with English.

To be or feel at home means “to be comfortable” and to not feel at home means “to feel worried”. When I say I don’t feel at home in English  I mean I don’t have the right skills or adequate experience to communicate or express what I want to express, or to express what I have in mind in the manner I would wish. It is as if I cannot catch hold of my expression, my sentences, and as if every minute I should come to grips with myself. At any moment, it could be possible that some rupture or inner interruption takes place within my speech which causes me to lose control and even lose my way…

And when I say I don’t feel at home with English, I would consider English, a foreign language, as a man with whom I’m not comfortable, I treat English as the Other whom I cannot take in – a stranger who could induce some split in the form of silence – who could induce the inability to express myself, within myself, within my existence in that the existence is to stand outside, to stand under the gaze of the Other; and the Other in the guise of a foreign language stares at me, stares me into silence, stares me down, stares me out…




      

Question by Pages:

Certainly translation has played an important role in modern Iran, if not as part of the condition of modernity itself. What is it that has made translation in today’s Iran, into an experience beyond the mere transfer of meaning? Can translation induce a space and a occasion for a different discourse and experience of our present time and place; a discourse and experience different than which the dominant local and global condition has been and is capable of generating?

Reply one by Hamed Yousefi:

Not taking into account the (mostly hermeneutic ) philosophical thought concerning translation in contemporary Iran, in the realm of the act of translation, one can find many translators who translate with the intention of directly intervening in the external world. Though there is no considerable philosophical formulation that I know of such an approach, from the time of the first serious Persian contemporary translation, i.e. Mirza Habib’s translation of The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan by James Morier, I can trace the social idea (however philosophically unarticulated) that translating works by writers of ‘progressed nations’ can be a way out of our situation. This is an idea that has encouraged prominent translators in their work and from the first step, it has most certainly led to the creation of, in your words, “an occasion and space for a different conception and experience”.  In the course of Constitutional Revolution (1905-1911) and before, and in the last years of the reign of the Qajars, several works were translated into Persian whose translators can be considered activists due to their position as translators. On the contrary, there are activists whose greatest achievement is probably their translations into Persian.  Politician/translators as well as translator/politicians such as Ali Akbar Dehkhoda, the writer for the Soor Esrafil newspaper and translator of Montesquieu’s The Spirit of Laws, will have their own place.
    But beyond practical politics, before engaging a philosophical evaluation of the possibility whether translation is able to create today, beyond the communication of meaning, a new way of Being, we should take an historical glance over what translation has done for us up to now and what it is currently doing. If a comparison can be made between this century’s current of active translation and translations n the Abassid period, I think nobody will conclude that similar to how the so-called ‘movement’ during the Abassid period led to a different conception “of our current time and location”, the same is at work in the present struggle. The highest achievement that recent translations have brought us in practice is an awareness of the validity of certain civil rights in other parts of the world. Of course, ‘translation’ in the widest sense has made us consider a cosmopolitan being for ourselves, of which this legal/juridical awareness is a part. However, one can hardly consider this very self-consciousness a new achievement. Four hundred years ago cosmopolitanism was the last essential sparks (‘sublime wisdom’) resulting from the previous translation movement, which – coincidentally? – parallel to the introduction of colonial modernity to Iran (some say) lit up the house or (as others say) suddenly went out. That movement had truly succeeded in creating, again in your words, “an occasion and space for a different conception and experience of our current time and location; an experience and conception different from what the dominant local and global condition has been and is able to generate”, a totally unique Being.
    However, in the absence of ‘social institutions of thought’, translation in Iran consists of publishing “certain meaningless texts”:  ‘certain’, because these texts are piled up on one another creating a heap, yet without any vivid connection with one another or the world ; ‘meaningless’, because it is impossible to relate to them. Although the social institution of thought (I exactly mean a set of universities, research bureaus and periodicals) is not a home for thought, although it is not a subject itself, but the raw material of thought without it cannot turn into a possibility for going beyond oneself; cannot become available to the subject and thus remains raw. The familiar complaint about the huge number of meaningless translated books and articles published in recent years, although justified from an objective perspective, does not lead anywhere because it identifies the source of the problem in a malfunction of the process of communicating meaning (due to the unfamiliarity of translators with the language of origin and in certain cases, in their lack of mastery of the destination language), as if were there good translators thought would subsequently flourish.  A quick glance over the contemporary publications in Persian shows that, contrary to the popular belief, communicating meaning is not such an abandoned quest. There are those who work within the ideal of encyclopaedic translation, others within the ideal of translating texts for universities, and still others with the aim of translating a collection of works that represent a special thought and all this is parallel to a large number of translators who translate ‘single books’, as it were – all are successfully engaged in communicating meaning.  However, the problem is that translation, when it is supposed to make possible the transgression of present time and location, is not at all about communicating meaning. It is to ‘speak in a different language’. With translation, we learn not other meanings, but another language for speaking and making sense of things. And this is meaningless in the absence of social institutions of thought. In such conditions, translation is either the creation of a language without a ‘community of speakers’ (any language without a community of speakers is meaningless even if numerous texts, all grammatically correct, are generated out of nothing in that language) or adding to the existing texts of the previous language, which, in this case, is not translation in the proper sense of the word, for translation must be able to create a new language for us and lead us to a new way of Being. In fact, without universities, research bureaus and periodicals, that is, without the social institute of thought that can create speakers in a new language, even if real translation is done, there will be no ‘community’ to relate to it: to speak in the language of the texts produced making them understandable and meaningful. This is why translation in Iran today is practically nothing but publication of certain ‘meaningless’ texts.
    In the given conditions, the only function of translation is fattening the existing language through adding to its metaphorical potential. In doing their true job, our current thinkers, i.e. our ‘good’ translators, have uttered ‘meaningless’ expressions in an unfamiliar languages, and thereby do nothing but making use of other thinkers’ catchwords in order to make metaphorical expressions in the Persian language; metaphors in which ancient proverbs and idioms are replaced by keywords borrowed from contemporary thinkers within the humanities. Thus what in contemporary Iran is called philosophical thought (or at least resembles it) is nothing but a common sociology  which previously analogized events and phenomena to tales and memories, analogizing them today to the catchwords of philosophers. Since the analogy comes from a different language, that language has actually helped creating new analogies in the existing language. But as we all know, familiar expressions such as “if we see it from a Lacanian perspective …”or “If we look at it from a Derridean point of view…” or “As mentioned by Foucault in segregating biological power from the power of the sword …” (expressions which are, at best, used ‘correctly’) is not thought, or even translation, never mind being “a different conception and experience from the current time and location” or, even better, “speaking in another language.”

Footnotes:
1 Morad Farhadpoor, to whom the best known hermeneutic articulation of translation belongs (the phrase “translation as thought” appearing in the preface to The Depressed Reason: Mediations on Modern Thought, Tehran: Tarh-e-Now, 1999), has in recent years turned towards a Lacanian understanding of Hegel for giving translation a more direct signification in practice. However, when speaking of philosophical thought regarding translation a meditative understanding of translation is still the dominant way of thinking translation in contemporary Iran.
  Although the social force of The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan results from a more complicated procedure, the publication of this novel became influential due not only to “seeing oneself from the viewpoint of the blaming eye of the Other” but rather, the idea that the book was an authorship published under the disguise of translation. (See Hamid Dabashi’s analysis of the publication of the Persian translation of The Adventures of Hajji Baba, in his first chapter of the book, Iran: A People Interrupted.)
  Among interesting examples of such texts are the principles known as “the rights of nation” in the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
  It is the subject who realizes this vivid connection between texts or between texts and the outer world.
  If this be true, then it testifies to the fact that the deficiency must rely elsewhere, for, after all these struggles, productions and gaining ‘market’, the first step, i.e. educating knowledgeable translators, is still not achieved.
  I bring in Reza Seyyed Hosseini as an example for the first, Arghanoon Quarterly for the second, Rokhdaad Circle for the third and Ezzatollah Fooladvand for the fourth group.
  Common, as used in the term ‘common proverbs’. Common sociology in this sense has a long history. Principally, proverbs emerge and last due to their application in this kind of sociology. Every proverb has the power to subsume under itself and analyse numerous events as sociological events without having its analyses based on objective sociological studies.

Hamed Yousefi is a cultural critic based in Tehran. He has studied Aesthetics and Cultural Theory both in Iran and the UK.


   
 

      

...

Spamsoc consists of the derivative translations of synopses, credits, legal disclaimers, special features lists and other components of DVD covers produced in China. The production of Spamsoc follows diverse
logics: some texts are made in complete look-a-like English; others earnestly translate some weirdo action film plots to conform to Confucio-socialist morals or historico-materialist sensibilities, others copy Wikipedia entries, or simply use Babelfish to create their blurbs. Similar languages exist on some Mexican and South-Asian DVD releases. Wherever DVD piracy exists, a form of Spamsoc comes into being.

...