Translating – Reading, Writing Otherwise (Schleiermacher, Derrida, Gardi, etc.)
Keywords:
translation, reading, ‘mother’-tongue, language of the other, foreign words, difference in translationAbstract
Starting from the notion of translation as the reading of a text, the article focuses on the difference within translation. In contrast to conventional notions of translation, which conceive it as translation from one homogeneous, self-contained language into another, I foreground the multilingualism of the language I am writing in. Consequently, this, in turn, makes it possible to refute the notion of language as territorial, closed and homogeneous. I focus on he notion of “Muttersprache” (mother-tongue), privileged by Schleiermacher in his treatise on translation, along with its specific metaphoricity of being inherently one by nature, of ‘rootedness,’ related to the ‘soil’ of one ‘Volk’. These terms are particularly symptomatic of the devaluation of any non-native, non-homogeneous language from worthy poetic production. In order to promote the construct of national languages, non-homogeneous languages are dismissed as mishmash-languages as non-languages, nobody’s mother tongues, as mere babble.In opposition to this, we need to focus on the unaccountable inherent diversity of other languages within each language, on the language of the Other, another language of the Other which is not that of the master or colonizer (Derrida).
This is becoming increasingly more urgent in times when so many write and speak a language that is not their own: minorities, displaced persons, and refugees (Deleuze/Guattari). Furthermore, such linguistic and political situations have been transformed into productive strategies of not-belonging (to no language, no identity). To give a contemporary example, I will provide a (short) reading of Gardi’s Broken Deutsch.
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