Translation of the Untranslatable: A Performative Paradox?
Translating the untranslatable — is this not a performative paradox? From a philosophical point of view, it is an extraordinarily demanding task. Such a challenge could deter anyone looking at this impregnable rock from the outside. For if taken literally, “untranslatables” prohibit translation. Strictly speaking, this pedantic view still keeps some people at a distance even now. The long absence of a translation risked distorting the interpretation of the Dictionary. It could have appeared as a museum of exotic curiosities intended for polyglots. The praises of erudites could have isolated it and severed its connection with the Dictionary’s political project. If one notices only its first version, it is easy to miss the essential dimension of the original. French became the metalanguage of the original. Yet it does not lock within itself all the foreign words gathered in it. French as a metalanguage opens new spaces for other metalanguages. Its “genius” passes on the baton. French becomes the first among equals of metalanguages not in a hierarchical sense, but in a chronological one. In 2004, at the very moment of the Dictionary’s first publication, this was not obvious to many readers and even to some of its authors. What could be the most striking philosophical argument capable of making this implicit idea explicit? The argument of the possibility and necessity of translating the Dictionary of Untranslatables. The practice of the new translation opened a new philosophical perspective. I proposed that the new metalanguage should reveal the implicit possibilities of the French Dictionary.
This first philosophical dimension is inseparable from the second — the political one. The new type of relationship between “small” and “large” metalanguages offers an original European model. And herein lies the profound meaning of the Dictionary’s title — “European”. It is precisely its practical realisation that reveals the Ukrainian translation in the role of another metalanguage. And then the Romanian one in the role of a metalanguage. In the role later performed by English or Spanish. Not as “great” languages among lesser ones, but as worthy languages among other worthy languages of humanity. And this constitutes the key proposal of the European model for the entire human family. A clear understanding of the essence of this proposal protects against a distorted reading of the Dictionary’s title. It describes a European paradigm without being limited to the circle of languages of a single continent. For this paradigm, translations into the languages of Africa, Asia, or Latin America are direct and natural extensions of all the previous translations, beginning with the first and continuing step by step through the work of specific translators. Such an emancipatory philosophy of new relations between languages was not meant to slumber for long within the original masterpiece published in Paris in the autumn of 2004.
It was awakened by Barbara Cassin, who breathed new life into Umberto Eco’s thesis: “The language of Europe is translation.” This means turning over all the former imperial pages with their phantasms. From a new page we write the relations between equal languages and cultures.
Now the third — historical — dimension illuminates the meaning of the first two: the philosophical and the political.
We did not speak much about it during the first decade of work on the French original of the Dictionary. But for me the decisive historical moment of our project was the period after the fall of the Berlin Wall and after the collapse of the Tower of Babel named the Soviet Union.
As you remember, George Orwell’s book 1984 contains a special section on “Newspeak”. The wooden Soviet language washed the brains of the average Homo sovieticus. The newspaper Pravda occupied the summit of the Soviet media pyramid. This symbol of the Soviet Babylonian system entered your language. Ironically, you thought that the word “pravda” meant truth, but the Russian Babylon used it to deceive everyone and everything. For the Dictionary of Untranslatables I wrote the article “Pravda”. It was meant to recall the original meaning of “right” and “justice”, beginning with the 11th-century legal code that bore the same root name Pravda.
In the editorial team of the Dictionary I was responsible for the Slavic languages and I brought in excellent colleagues from Kyiv and other cities of the “Other Europe”. For our generation, the decisive historical experience was the defeat of the Soviet empire in the Cold War. I began teaching philosophy in Paris in 1991, after the collapse of the empire that had, until the very end, erased the truth about the millions of victims of the Holodomor, the Gulag, and Chernobyl. When I hear the expression Babel heureuse, contrary to some possible reminiscences, it does not shock me. Together with my fellow citizens I carry the concrete historical experience of life after the defeat of the Soviet Babylonian empire and the joy of liberation. The mirage of Soviet “happiness” has vanished. How can this be described? Precisely with untranslatable words. Volya. Freedom. Maidan.
The largest colonial “prison of nations” — the USSR — has fallen. As it seemed to us, it was the “last Bastille”; now “people are dancing here”.
We saw the abyss at our feet in the official statement of the leader of the KGB clan who brought Putin to power in the Kremlin: “the disappearance of the Soviet Union is the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century”.
Such a view of the 20th century shocks you — a century that witnessed two world wars, the Shoah, the Gulag and other catastrophes. In essence, this statement announced a claim to a new imperial Babylon. The silenced tower of the Stalinists began to be built upon by the floors of the Putinists. The language of this neo-imperial project was succinctly marked on the tower by the letter Z.
The language of Z and the dictionary of Z.
But we have not forgotten the original intuition that we have followed for the last twenty years: to translate more than one language.
Our publishing house in Kyiv, Dukh i Litera, functions — in its modest way — as L’auberge du lointain according to Antoine Berman’s formula. With the help of translation we continue the difficult conversation with the most distant, drawing on the resources of Francophonia. Every article in the Dictionary of Untranslatables sets concrete limits to the phantasm of an absolute and total language of empire. Any language is finite, and its means of describing its own or foreign realities are limited. There is no single total metalanguage on earth. Alternatives to it are indicated by the numerous points of resistance offered by untranslatable words.
Such an army of verbal ants is necessary for the life of the European savoir-faire avec les différences.
In this mirror, how does the archaic model of an empire that claims to have a centre and no borders appear? Expansion and the violation of any borders leaves it without language, because by definition languages without borders do not exist.
By contrast, this reminds us that the European Union is precisely not an empire. Its borders — and the limits of its project — are clearer now than ever; its multilingualism and legal nature will never leave translators without work. No matter which language we use to translate the European Dictionary, we are saying “no” to any form of imperialism.
To decipher foreign and one’s own untranslatable words is the micro-level of decolonial practices. Liberation from the gravity of the Tower of Babel opens to people of any profession a clearing of Meaning.