ABSTRACT
In the brief but provocative essay “Translating” (1971), Blanchot inverts the conventional hierarchy wherein “the original” is superior to the translation. He considers the foreign text, not as the unchanging cultural monument in relation to which the translation must forever be an inadequate, ephemeral copy, but as a text in transit, “never stationary,” living out “the solemn drift and derivation [dérive] of literary works,” constituting a powerful self-difference which translation can release or capture in a unique way (Blanchot 1990: 84). This assumes the foreign text to be derivative, dependent on other, preexisting materials (a point made by Sieburth’s decision to render “dérive” as two words, “drift and derivation”), but also dependent on the translation:
a work is not ready for or worthy of translation unless it harbors this difference within itself in some available fashion, whether it be because it originally gestures toward some other language, or because it gathers within itself in some privileged manner those possibilities of being different from itself or foreign to itself which every living language possesses.
