ABSTRACT

The ‘original’ is eternal, the translation dates. The ‘original’ is an unchanging monument of the human imagination, transcending the linguistic, cultural, and social changes of which the translation is a determinate effect. Insofar as this vanishing act must be performed in language, it coincides with the dominance of a specific discursive strategy in contemporary translation. Poststructuralism has in fact initiated a radical reconsideration of the traditional topoi of translation theory. Largely through commentaries on Walter Benjamin’s essay ‘The Task of the Translator,’ poststructuralist thinkers like Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man explode the binary opposition between ‘original’ and ‘translation’ which underwrites the translator’s invisibility. Alternative translation practices that can effect such a deterritorialization have been appearing in the wake of poststructuralist textual theory. ‘Translation,’ writes Blanchot, ‘is the sheer play of difference: it constantly makes allusion to difference, dissimulates difference, but by occasionally revealing and often accentuating it, translation becomes the very life of this difference.’