Posts Tagged ‘history of ideas.’
“A translator’s primary work isn’t knowing what it means (that’s a prerequisite, not the work itself). Translation is working out how to say it, how to write it. Translating is writing.”*
Further, in a fashion, to yesterday’s post: the estimable Damion Searls argues for a literary approach to translating rigorous philosophical texts…
Ludwig Wittgenstein’s [here] Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is a book with an aura. His name, let’s admit it, is already a vibe; the title sets an extremely highbrow tone; the paragraphs are all numbered, promising a very impressive logical rigor, even if questions linger. (Is 6.2322 really exactly one level more primary than 5.47321? What does “3.001” mean since there’s no 3.0 or 3.00?) And then the text itself has a kind of cryptic grandeur, awe-inspiring opacity, Olympian disregard for normal human understanding that gives us what we expect, what we want, from such an iconic philosopher. It’s an exciting challenge. A lot of the reason why the book has been so widely read in the century since its English publication in 1922, by philosophers and philosophy students and nonphilosophers alike, is how it makes its readers feel.
Several similarly forbidding-yet-thereby-thrilling books were published in English that same year—T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land; James Joyce’s Ulysses—but unlike those, the Tractatus was a translation, and the question arises how much of its style was a byproduct of bringing it into English. The book’s title did not come from Wittgenstein: it was an esoteric pun on Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus from 1670, suggested by G. E. Moore, the Cambridge philosopher who was the fourth most important figure in getting the book into English, after the credited translator C. K. Ogden, the actual translator Frank Ramsey [here], and Bertrand Russell [here]. Wittgenstein’s own German title was the far more humble and straightforward Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung, something like Essay on Logic and Philosophy. Russell’s introduction, included in the first edition and every subsequent one until this one, firmly placed the book in the context of technical academic philosophy. And the book’s language in English was simply not at all like Wittgenstein’s forceful, earnest, fluid, subtle German.
Yet the book in English is what it is; should it just stay that way? This same debate came up around the retranslation of yet another iconic book from 1922: C. K. Scott Moncrieff’s translation of Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way. He too completely changed the title (from Proust’s In Search of Lost Time to the Shakespeare quote Remembrance of Things Past); he too created an English-language voice, lush and purple, that wasn’t the original’s. And yet his writing was what generations of English-language Proust readers knew and loved; his translation was modified slightly over the years but largely preserved; when Lydia Davis came along with a new translation faithful to other aspects of the original, such as Proust’s analytical rigor, many readers didn’t care whether or not her version was more like the real Proust—Scott Moncrieff’s Proust was the real thing as far as they were concerned.
The situation with the Tractatus is clearer and less debatable, for two reasons. First, the earlier translations are more deeply flawed than Scott Moncrieff’s Proust ever was. Second and perhaps more important, Wittgenstein’s book is explicitly about the relationships between language and thought, between language and the world, making it imperative to get these relationships right in translation. And so I have retranslated the book, paying special attention to where the assumptions of typical academic philosophy translation would lead us away from expressing Wittgenstein’s thought in English. Implicitly, I am making the case for a certain kind of approach that is generally called “literary”—attentive to emotional nuances, subtle connotations, and expressive power—even when translating rigorous philosophical texts…
Eminently worth reading in full: “Translating Philosophy: The Case of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus,” in @wwborders.
* The equally estimable Emily Wilson, paraphrasing Searls
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As we emphasize essence, we might spare a thought for the creator of the inspiration of the title of Wittgenstein’s work, Baruch Spinoza; he died on this date in 1677. One of the foremost thinkers of the Age of Reason, he was a philosopher who contributed to nearly every area of philosophical discourse, including metaphysics, epistemology, political philosophy, ethics, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of science. His rationalism and determinism put him in opposition to Descartes and helped lay the foundation for The Enlightenment; his pantheistic views led to his excommunication from the Jewish community in Amsterdam.
As men’s habits of mind differ, so that some more readily embrace one form of faith, some another, for what moves one to pray may move another to scoff, I conclude … that everyone should be free to choose for himself the foundations of his creed, and that faith should be judged only by its fruits; each would then obey God freely with his whole heart, while nothing would be publicly honored save justice and charity.
– Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, 1670
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