Found in Translation
September 5, 2013 8:40 PM   Subscribe

Though it is common to lament the shortcomings of reading an important work in any language other than the original and of the “impossibility” of translation, I am convinced that works of philosophy (or literature for that matter — are they different?) in fact gain far more than they lose in translation.

At various points in history, one language or another — Latin, Persian, Arabic — was the lingua franca of philosophical thinking. Now it is English. And for all we know it might again turn around and become Chinese.

Works of philosophy — and their readers — gain in translation not just because their authors begin to breathe in a new language but because the text signals a world alien to its initial composition. Above all they gain because these authors and their texts have to face a new audience. Plato and Aristotle have had a life in Arabic and Persian entirely alien to the colonial codification of “Western philosophy” — and the only effective way to make the foreign echoes of that idea familiar is to make the familiar tropes of “Western philosophy” foreign.
posted by whyareyouatriangle (43 comments total) 20 users marked this as a favorite
 
I've been told of German students learning English to read Kant.

Even within the same language, you have to translate philosophy at times. "Idea", for Berkeley and Locke and Hume, means more like what we call "sensation"; it does not mean a concept. Maybe that's why the unfortunate "Notion" is used in the English translation of Hegel's Phenomenology - the translator may have thought that "Idea" is too overloaded in English philosophy already.
posted by thelonius at 8:50 PM on September 5, 2013 [1 favorite]


As far as I'm concerned, no discussion of translation and philosophy is complete without a mention of Le Ton beau de Marot.
posted by Slothrup at 9:00 PM on September 5, 2013 [2 favorites]


No one reads a document more carefully than a really good translator. I see this all the time in my translation-industry job. Dozens of ludicrously literate monolingual Americans with decades of copy-editing experience apiece will sign off on a document declaring it to be Perfect, and the translator will email me back within ten minutes of receiving the job, pointing out a glaring error or inconsistency that we all missed.

I dunno how well this claim applies to literature, though. Read Nabokov on his failed attempt to translate Pushkin and you'll get an idea of how impossible it can be, for some writers from some source languages in some target languages.
posted by BrunoLatourFanclub at 9:04 PM on September 5, 2013 [1 favorite]


What a weird article. Literature is double-poised to gain and to lose. One the one hand, you are almost always going to lose to the original piece compared to a translation if this is your goal. (There may be exceptions. I heard that Marquez stated he believed the English translation of One Hundred Years of Solitude superior than the original Spanish.) On the other, it's with literature that you do get certain works getting a second life, being resurrected in the form of almost a completely different product. Pope's work may not have been very faithful to the Greek, but it's beautiful because it's Pope. The same with Edward Fitzgerald, but hey, he gave us lines such as:

"The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on; nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it."

With philosophy, this talk is sort of silly. Contemporary philosophy is no longer done in the abstract or obscure manner (and no longer takes advantage of the idiosyncrasies of a particular language) in which it was done in the past. It's done with the precision and technicality of a science. I'm pretty sure there's no discussion on what is gained or lost with translating Einstein's "On a Heuristic Viewpoint Concerning the Production and Transformation of Light" into English. A translation brings with it greater accessibility, that's all there is to it. (Though one may still want to be somewhat adequate in a foreign language, given that translations may still be imperfect, due either to mistakes or just great enough linguistic difference.)
posted by SollosQ at 9:20 PM on September 5, 2013


Contemporary philosophy is no longer done in the abstract or obscure manner (and no longer takes advantage of the idiosyncrasies of a particular language) in which it was done in the past. It's done with the precision and technicality of a science.

I... Huh.
posted by brennen at 9:24 PM on September 5, 2013 [2 favorites]


SollosQ is right about analytic phil, I guess, but I dunno about that being true of phil in general. My fave example would be the later works of Bruno Latour (well, duh) in which he shows pretty conclusively that he learned his English writing style late in life, by reading good FR-> EN translations of his own work.
posted by BrunoLatourFanclub at 9:30 PM on September 5, 2013


Contemporary philosophy is no longer done in the abstract or obscure manner (and no longer takes advantage of the idiosyncrasies of a particular language) in which it was done in the past. It's done with the precision and technicality of a science.

Sometimes. Philosophy is a vast topic and it's not all mathematical logic and pushing symbols around. Especially when first investigating a topic, it's often just fumbling around trying to figure out agreed upon definitions and the boundaries of the topic under discussion.
posted by empath at 9:32 PM on September 5, 2013


This is an odd article, and to answer the question raised in the title I think the commenters above are more on-the-nose than the article's author. What is "gained in translation," he implies, is access to the minds of philosophers around the world who can read the contemporary lingua franca (currently English); the loss of the original philosopher's specific language is not so bad. Eventually one ends up "reading the Persian version of a Pakistani philosopher's English prose composed in Germany on an aspect of Islamic philosophy that was particular to Iran", and the suggestion seems to be that that sort of intellectual creole-ization is more robust than the older approach (almost philological) of trying to work out what Heidegger really meant. I'm not convinced.
posted by Harvey Kilobit at 9:32 PM on September 5, 2013 [1 favorite]


IMO, what's gained in translation is more that in order to translate something, you kind of have to strip it down to the core of what the philosopher is trying to get across. A lot of cultural baggage has to either get explained away in a footnote or simply dropped, and arguments that depend on cultural 'common knowledge' stand out rather starkly when translated for a new culture, so it forces people to fill in the blanks with a new argument.

Consider that when arabic philosophers were discovered by the west, they basically focused mostly on the science, math and medicine aspects of it, instead of all the religious stuff about trying to define what god is or isn't and so on, which occupied a huge amount of the mindspace of islamic philosophers.
posted by empath at 9:38 PM on September 5, 2013


Philosophy is a vast topic and it's not all mathematical logic and pushing symbols around.

Precision and technicality isn't limited to formal languages. Yes, most of philosophy is more involved with conceptual analysis than formal languages, but the same standards of rigor apply.
posted by SollosQ at 9:42 PM on September 5, 2013


There is no sense whatosever in which modern philosophy is more rigorous or more precise than Aristotle, Plato, Al Ghazālī, Al Farabi, Aquinas, etc.

As far as this article goes: it's interesting. There are things in it I balked at, things I probably quite disagree with ("the whole Heidegger-Derridian undermining of metaphysics began to shake the foundations of the Greek philosophical heritage..." - is that really an adequate gloss of it?) but overall it's a really intriguing overview, and I found it very engaging. And this:
When today I read a vacuous phrase like “the Western mind” — or “the Iranian mind,” “the Arab Mind” or “the Muslim Mind,” for that matter — I cringe. I wonder what “the Western mind” can mean when reading the Persian version of a Pakistani philosopher’s English prose composed in Germany on an aspect of Islamic philosophy that was particular to Iran?
Yes, yes, yes.
posted by koeselitz at 9:46 PM on September 5, 2013 [4 favorites]


(Also, I would say that this notion of introducing "the precision of science" into new realms - political philosophy, for instance, which is my own field - has proven time and again to be borne of a very mistaken idea of what science and philosophy mean. "The precision of science" can only be introduced into scientific things - that is, material things that admit of observation and testing. Philosophy deals with many things that do not. It may have its own precision, but that precision is naturally quite different from the precision of a science. I think that, ultimately, the pseudo-Copernican hope that science might overtake all the studies is chimerical at best and a play for academic hauteur at worst.)
posted by koeselitz at 9:51 PM on September 5, 2013 [3 favorites]


Totally tangential to the subject, but as I'm partaking on a personal project to learn as many languages as I can as quickly as I can (I have a very high and until recently fairly unutilized aptitude for it and am basically making a hobby of it) I keep thinking back to one beautiful translation issue from my past.

Specifically that of Final Fantasy Tactics.

Aside from being an amazing game (seriously, it's one of the best ever) it features a very dense plot told through history and dialog and not-entirely-linear narrative, and it's original translation from the Japanese was less than optimal. Not, like, "all your base" bad, but not what you'd expect from translations today.

Later they re-released it with a clearer translation, which to me doesn't work nearly as well, besides being much, much cleaner and more accurate.

Because in this one, weird instance, where the framing device is literally a heretical historian digging up the true history of a famous war involving covered-up facts from the past and knowing that he'll likely be disappeared for doing so, having the translation hit that accidental sweet spot of almost right, but still a little vague and confusing throughout, while still always maintaining correct grammar and syntax, but awkwardly, is just perfect. It accidentally puts you very much in the shoes of the historian, who understands the story at large but has to come to his own conclusions about the smaller details, and the uncertainty makes the game feel much, much deeper and more rewarding than what you get with the cleaner translation, in my opinion.
posted by Navelgazer at 9:52 PM on September 5, 2013 [4 favorites]


koeselitz: "The precision of science" can only be introduced into scientific things - that is, material things that admit of observation and testing."

I'd say mathematics is a pretty hefty counterexample to that claim unless you broaden "material things" to the point of triviality.
posted by Proofs and Refutations at 9:57 PM on September 5, 2013 [1 favorite]


Does mathematics really have "the precision of science?" That's like saying that peanuts have "the flavor of peanut butter." I mean, yeah, but that's because peanuts are what make peanut butter taste like that. I feel like it really doesn't make sense to suggest that mathematics was a vague subject until science came along and made it precise.
posted by koeselitz at 10:03 PM on September 5, 2013


I'm pretty sure there's no discussion on what is gained or lost with translating Einstein's "On a Heuristic Viewpoint Concerning the Production and Transformation of Light" into English. A translation brings with it greater accessibility, that's all there is to it.

There may not be now (I don't know), but I wouldn't be surprised if there will be in the future. Studying precisely that sort of "gain or loss" in classical/medieval/renaissance scientific knowledges as they cross cultural/linguistic borders has been productive, and I'm not at all so certain that more modern scientific texts ("Einstein") are categorically different.
posted by junco at 10:08 PM on September 5, 2013 [1 favorite]


Mathematics is generally regarded as having been vague until the 19th century, well after the rise of the scientific method. George Pólya in his work on mathematical problem solving and proof construction shows key similarities between the scientific method and mathematical methods. Mathematical precision is fundamentally of the same kind as scientific precision despite not describing "material things that admit of observation and testing".
posted by Proofs and Refutations at 10:26 PM on September 5, 2013


It was precise, and worked, it just wasn't resting on a sound foundation and was somewhat fragmented until set theory, group theory and category theory, etc came along to tie it all together.
posted by empath at 10:41 PM on September 5, 2013


Proofs and Refutations: “Mathematics is generally regarded as having been vague until the 19th century, well after the rise of the scientific method.”

This doesn't seem true to me at all. Apollonius of Perga is vague? Even Euclid isn't really "vague." I'm not sure if you exactly mean vague, or even the opposite of precise. And it is absolutely true that the application of mathematics is the central fact of the rise of the scientific method from Galileo onward. The fact that you view earlier mathematics as "vague" does not change the fact that mathematics, as it was, was regarded as an important part of the work that was being done.

“George Pólya in his work on mathematical problem solving and proof construction shows key similarities between the scientific method and mathematical methods. Mathematical precision is fundamentally of the same kind as scientific precision despite not describing ‘material things that admit of observation and testing’.”

Look, we're talking about semantics. Science is "material things that admit of observation and testing. That's what people from Bacon onward have regarded it as. The fact that people like Pólya may have wanted to redefine science does not change the way science has been done. Pólya may call anything he wants "science" – anything at all. I have no objections to that. But the core of what science has been, from Copernicus to Galileo to Newton and on upward through Einstein, is the application of mathematical reasoning to observable, repeatable, and testable reality.

Again, there has been an attempt to force the Copernican revolution into all sorts of contexts which it does not fit. I don't think mathematics is a great example, because mathematics has found itself all bound up in science over the past centuries. (I would actually argue that the "precision" you're talking about is a sensation that comes purely from the proximity of mathematics to science, but that's probably a larger subject.)
posted by koeselitz at 11:08 PM on September 5, 2013


This doesn't seem true to me at all.

I'm fairly sure he's talking about Cantor, Bertrand Russell, Peano, etc, formalizing the foundations of math, rigorously defining things like "Natural Numbers" and so on, which had formally been done in a somewhat hand-wave-y fashion.
posted by empath at 11:13 PM on September 5, 2013


It is highly debatable that they were more rigorous. I'm aware that that's the common perception. If it weren't a derail, I would argue here that it's a misperception. But I should probably let this go, since I'm sort of dragging the conversation in a different direction than the one it should go in.

Incidentally, I really loved the discussion of the unique Persian strains of philosophy in the linked article. It's really rare to see them nicely laid out like this, and there are so many interesting moments in the history of philosophy there that I wasn't aware of.
posted by koeselitz at 11:21 PM on September 5, 2013 [1 favorite]


Even Euclid isn't really "vague."

By modern standards, he totally is. As David Hilbert put it: "[H]is propositions do not follow from the axioms which he enunciates. A vastly greater number of axioms, which Euclid unconsciously employs, are required for the proof of his propositions."

Without those implicit but unstated axioms, you get things like the Fallacy of the Isosceles Triangle -- a proof that's every bit as rigorous as anything in Euclid, but which winds up at a completely false conclusion because one of its unstated assumptions is false.
posted by baf at 12:23 AM on September 6, 2013 [1 favorite]


@theolonius Locke uses "idea" to refer to pretty much any mental item, including concepts. Same with Berkeley. Hume uses "impression" the way you're using "sensation."

And right, German students studying Kant read Kemp Smith's translation, or so the story goes.
posted by professor plum with a rope at 12:38 AM on September 6, 2013


One thing possibly relevant in this context are Jonathan Bennett's translations into modern English of early modern texts, including those originally in English.
posted by professor plum with a rope at 12:43 AM on September 6, 2013 [1 favorite]


And (at least contemporary Anglo-American) philosophy is (often) more rigorous than that done by Aquinas, Aristotle, etc..
posted by professor plum with a rope at 12:47 AM on September 6, 2013


thanks prof plum - it's been almost 20 years since I studied those philosophers. Maybe I'll take a look at Bennett

The German students story sounds a little too good to be true, actually.
posted by thelonius at 1:58 AM on September 6, 2013


The German students story sounds a little too good to be true, actually.

Not particularly. I know a few Germans who are involved in academic philosophy and they consider Hegel easier in English because the translators have already worked through the painfully dense sentence structure. But that's a peculiarity of German philosophy. I don't think Germans are as hard on Marx as they are on Hegel or Kant, for instance, because Marx is more highly regarded for his actual writing.
posted by graymouser at 3:18 AM on September 6, 2013


I guess English syntax would force you to break up some of the multi-page, world-tree sentences.

Heidegger would not like it. IIRC, he thought that philosophy could only be done in German or Greek.
posted by thelonius at 3:24 AM on September 6, 2013


IIRC, he thought that philosophy could only be done in German or Greek.

Well, he was a Nazi, so it makes sense.
posted by empath at 3:31 AM on September 6, 2013


Yeah, the Nazi thing. I read a book about Cassirer, who held a debate with Heidegger at Davos in, I think, 1928, earlier this year. The author claims that concern about the assimilation of right wing extremism into German "Lebensphilosophie" was one reason that the Vienna Circle logical positivists were so resolutely hostile to metaphysics.
posted by thelonius at 3:36 AM on September 6, 2013


I recall being told in real analysis that Cauchy didn't understand the difference between continuity and uniform continuity, and that was the nineteenth century. Anyway, back to translation.
posted by hoyland at 3:40 AM on September 6, 2013


It's pretty common in Japanese Zen circles to joke about how Dōgen etc. is easy to understand in English than Japanese. I think it is probably true for a couple of reasons: (a) Dōgen wrote in the Japanese of his time, but translations are invariably into contemporary English, and (b) it's very common for ambiguities in the source to be cleaned up in the translation, unless they're obviously intentional. As graymouser says, the translator has already chewed the material to an extent, so the reader has less work to do.

This article feels like a bait and switch to me. "Subtle nuances can be lost in translation" and "If something is translated into a lingua franca more people would read it" are completely orthogonal and, well, duh. I don't think anyone criticizes translations on the grounds that they make works more accessible. I was hoping for more discussion of the issues graymouser raises, i.e. the extent to which a translation of a philosophical work is, inevitably, also a commentary on that work.
posted by No-sword at 4:07 AM on September 6, 2013


The German students story sounds a little too good to be true, actually.

I met a philosophy undergraduate whose first language was German and who indeed said that he preferred to read Kant in English (although he hadn't learned English specially). Sometimes I think it amuses Germans to run down their own language, but still.

I thought the piece was excellent.

Several different things can happen in translation. Sometimes the process may simply make the original author's intention clearer by helpfully resolving ambiguities; it may set the author's insights in a context with some different built-in assumptions; and just occasionally the mistakes may be more interesting than the original thought.

That is one respect in which philosophy differs from some of the other humanities; philosophers do care about getting the original meaning as accurately as possible, but at the end of the day they care even more about what's true.

"Idea", for Berkeley and Locke

Gosh yes: or think of "substance"
posted by Segundus at 4:32 AM on September 6, 2013 [1 favorite]


Translations of subjective material are necessarily interpretations of that material. They are, unavoidably, original works of commentary, as some above have noted. As such, they are often, of course, more focused - because they tend to present a more 'digested' view of the source material.

When you have to translate an abstract phrase or term that has a thousand possible meanings in the source language into a target language, you are never going to find a perfectly isomorphic match. You have to compromise. You have to make hard choices. And unless you want to create a kind of poetry of your own (some translators, in some circumstances, will...) you will select words that reflect the most 'stable' or 'accepted' interpretation.
posted by jet_manifesto at 6:40 AM on September 6, 2013


The notion that contemporary anglo-american philosophy is some order of magnitude more rigorous than philosophy's previous incarnations is just patently, totally, and completely absurd. Especially when were talking about Aristotle, not to mention Aquinas, whose name is synonymous with rigor, and whose philosophical system hangs together like a beautifully constructed Gothic cathedral, complete with a mariological rose window.

To prove this for anyone's benefit would be a herculean task, although perhaps one worthy of a 600 page monograph. For the moment, I would only point out that the founding document of one major strain of contemporary analytic philosophy, Saul Kripke's Naming and Necessity, is motivated entirely by an intuition, a fuzzy-wuzzy intellectual feeling about what "meaning" is and how the world ought to work. And indeed, this intuitive foundation runs so deep that it shows up in other areas, like the attitudes its adherents have about love.

The introduction of formal methods of logic to philosophy showed promise, for a few years in the 20th century, of elevating philosophy to the status of a rigorous "science". But this hope only traded on some confusion about what science was. The result, in any case, was that philosophers became much better at giving technical precision to their fuzzy inclinations and intuitions, succeeding mostly in alienating philosophical amateurs and thoroughly establishing philosophy as a field dominated by white, socially awkward and economically privileged men.

End rant.
posted by dis_integration at 6:51 AM on September 6, 2013 [3 favorites]


Walter Kaufmann said to read Kant and Hegel in translation because it was basically badly written German. Hegel's great book was a published first draft. The problem is that these books set the standard for "good" philosophical writing and we have been suffering since. See Sartre's Being and Nothingness for example. For all this translation talk see George Steiner's After Babel.
posted by njohnson23 at 8:18 AM on September 6, 2013


I think I remember reading that in one of Kaufmann's books, saying how striking it is that Sartre, who was a first-rate writer when he wrote novels or plays or essays, wrote philosophy in imitation of this gnomic Hegelian style. I wonder if there were any dexedrine dealers in Jena....
posted by thelonius at 10:49 AM on September 6, 2013


"Every word (in Arabic) means itself, its opposite, and something to do with a camel." -- [D. Keene.]

The difference between translating and copying is the difference between a ditch and a canyon. It makes sense to me, that a skilled translator can bring life to details the original author may have under-emphasized. More likely, though, that cultural bias will supply the shifted emphasis. Translators have to drag all that baggage around--all the time--repacking it with fresh underwear for every document.

We take the word of the translator at face value, at least until we get through his argument--has the color green ever been resolved? As far as I know, logging the frequency of that particular reflected area of the spectrum isn't the same thing as saying that we all see the same thing. (It's instructive to mention, by analogy, that not every person can see that color. I say green, you say WTF?) To my ear philosophical sketches are similar to math equations. Not everyone is able hear numbers sing: the rest of us have to make do with allusion and the insightful synonym. And then there's the Haiku: this is a condensed bit of esoteric imagery directed at those who would let it rattle around in their minds until it begins to sing.

This is where you think you know what I told you, but fail to realize that what you hard me say is not what I meant. It's probably screamingly obvious that I'm writing this from the viewpoint of the great unwashed. I'm not complaining. I enjoy it, when the skilled make the effort to explain things to the unskilled, using non-technical terms.

You know who you are. Thanks.
posted by mule98J at 10:54 AM on September 6, 2013 [1 favorite]


njohnson23: “Walter Kaufmann said to read Kant and Hegel in translation because it was basically badly written German. Hegel's great book was a published first draft. The problem is that these books set the standard for 'good' philosophical writing and we have been suffering since. See Sartre's Being and Nothingness for example. For all this translation talk see George Steiner's After Babel.”

That's why it's best to read Walter Kaufmann's translations of such works. If they were written in badly-written German, you may as well read them in badly-written English.
posted by koeselitz at 10:56 AM on September 6, 2013


(Not that I actually believe Walter Kaufmann's personal opinion of the quality of German writing at all.)
posted by koeselitz at 11:10 AM on September 6, 2013


That's a grossly misleading characterization of what Kripke is up to. It's true that he admits that he rests his case that "Nixon" is rigid on intuitions about the way language works. But, he rightly points out that all sorts of philosophy rests on intuitions in the same sort of way at the end of the day. It's not really a founding document of any school or strain in any sense. Not like, say, On Sense and Reference was, certainly.

Look at contemporary discussions of substance, and look at Aristotle on substance in Metaphysics and Categories. The contemporary discussion is much more detailed and nuanced. I doubt any of us are as smart as Aristotle was (maybe Descartes or Leibniz were). But the current stuff is more rigorous; I can't see how one denies that.

You're right about the state of philosophy. Some of us are trying to change that.
posted by professor plum with a rope at 1:58 AM on September 7, 2013


professor plum with a rope: “But the current stuff is more rigorous; I can't see how one denies that.”

By understanding what "rigor" actually means.
posted by koeselitz at 12:51 PM on September 7, 2013


I mean – I'm sorry, that's glib. But it's a very weird blanket thing to act as though "the current stuff" is even some homogeneous thing we can point to, as though it all adds up to some comprehensive corpus, when really it is what scholarship has always been: just a collection of different works by different people. Philosophy might want to pretend that, like science, it can be an aggregation of a bunch of works that build on each other. That is, as it has always been, a chimerical fantasy. And most of the contemporary works really are unrigorous (though rigorous-seeming) treatments of unimportant side-alleys that were already thoroughly dealt with by previous thinkers.

I am not saying that modern philosophy is terrible comparatively, or that it is evil or worthy of denigration or anything like that. I'm not deeply interested in the analytic tradition, but there are some worthwhile thinkers there. What I am saying is that most modern philosophy isn't that great and doesn't represent some grand moment in the history of human thought. That's how it's almost always been. In 400 BC, Athens was crawling with two-bit thinkers who weren't really worth paying attention to. That doesn't change the importance of Xenophon – but the importance of Xenophon as a philosopher doesn't turn all the two-bit thinkers into geniuses.

Most of all, I am saying that nobody else can do our thinking for us. Other people can do experiments and studies; and, in an academic atmosphere of trust, we can accept that those results and reasonings are correct, and build upon them. That is why science works. But philosophy can't work that way. Nietzsche points out somewhere that it'd be brilliant if we could put together a committee to discern truth for us, but the nature of truth rules that possibility out. So this idea that collectively philosophy today can represent an improvement on singular thinkers like Descartes or Aristotle is a fundamental misunderstanding of how human thought works. Unlike science, philosophy represents a thoroughgoing questioning of its own premises and all other premises. As such, there are no grounds for a grand and lasting project of shared inquiry beyond the grounds that already exist: discussion about texts, conversation, etc. There is no sense in which "progress" can be made in philosophy as it is in science. Each person tries to find the truth, and talks with others as she or he does it. That's all.
posted by koeselitz at 1:03 PM on September 7, 2013


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