Reading Group
The Ethics of Translation:
Thinking With and Beyond Jewish Difference
Deadline: Friday, September 13, 2019
Statement of Purpose
Our principal aim will be to examine the ethical dimensions of translation in Jewish thought with an eye to their salience for the globalized situation of culture today. We will look at multiple ways in which linguistic exchanges in translation — between an original text and a translation, between a home language and a target language, between the writer, the translator, and the reader — have been theorized. Some topics include: the role of the Hebrew Bible as a paradigm for the ‘language of origins’ and problems of translation; post-structuralist and phenomenological notions of untranslatability, alterity, and difference; and power relations of ethno-nationalism and colonialism relevant to engagements with a ‘native language’, a ‘foreign text’, or a ‘homeland’ in translation. Though our reading group takes its point of departure from the significant role of an ethics of translation in Jewish culture, this initial standpoint of attention to Jewish difference is meant to call into question our ‘natural attitude’ of anglophone monolingualism in order to open up multiple perspectives on concepts such as creation, revelation, redemption, the name, the Other, border-crossing, diaspora, and nation across manifold languages, cultures, and traditions.
☛ If you’d like to participate, please email natasha.hay@mail.utoronto.ca by Friday, September 13.
Tentative Reading List
NB: The sequence and selection of readings is tentative and flexible. I have left open some weeks in the course of the academic year should we wish to invite guest speakers and/or to workshop our own translations and translation-related projects. For example, Anne Carson is visiting Toronto this December, and we could perhaps invite her to speak or give a workshop for us.
Week 1. The Hebrew Bible: Origins of Language and Images of Translation
Passages on the naming of the animals, the Fall, and the Tower of Babel in the Bible (we will be comparing multiple translations)
Robert Alter, “Introduction to the Old Testament” in The Literary Guide to the Bible
Week 2. Language and Translation in the German Tradition: Theological and Anthropological Paradigms
Johann Gottfried Herder, selections from “Treatise on the Origin of Language”
Johann Georg Hamann, “Metacritique on the Purism of Reason”
Week 3. The German Tradition II: Classical and Romantic Hermeneutics
Friedrich Schleiermacher, “On the Different Methods of Translating” in The Translation Studies Reader (ed. Venuti)
August Wilhelm Schlegel, selections from commentary on his Bhagavad-Gita translation
Week 4. The German Tradition III: Translatio imperii or Intercultural Dialogue
Johann Wolfgang Goethe, “Notes and Essays” from West-East Divan
Friedrich Nietzsche, “Translations” in The Translation Studies Reader
Week 5. Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, and the Jewish Revival
Rosenzweig, “The New Thinking” in Philosophical and Theological Writings
Buber, selections from I and Thou
Week 6. Buber and Rosenzweig’s Bible Translation
Buber, “The How and Why of Our Bible Translation”
Rosenzweig, “Scripture and Luther”
Week 7. Walter Benjamin: Pure Language, Translatability, and the Untranslatable
Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator”
Benjamin, “On Language as Such and the Language of Man”
Week 8. Gershom Scholem: Revelation, Tradition, Kabbalah
Scholem, “The Name of God and the Linguistic Theory of the Kabbalah”
Scholem, “Revelation and Tradition as Religious Categories in Judaism”
Week 9. Emmanuel Levinas: The Saying, Alterity, and the Trace
Levinas, “Language and Proximity” in Collected Philosophical Papers
Week 10. Jacques Derrida: Il n’y a pas de hors-traduction
Derrida, “What is a ‘relevant’ translation?”
“Roundtable on Translation” in Derrida, The Ear of the Other
Week 11. Diaspora and Zion: Sacred Language and Secular Life in Jerusalem
Scholem, “An Unpublished Letter from Gershom Scholem to Franz Rosenzweig: Concerning Our Language, A Confession”
Derrida, “The Eyes of Language: The Abyss and the Volcano” from Acts of Religion
Week 12. Mothertongues, Fatherlands: Francophonie as an Algerian Jew Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other
Derrida, “Language is Never Owned: An Interview” from Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan
[Winter break]
Week 13. Postcolonial Translation Theory I: Post-Structuralism and its Discontents
Gayatri Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”
Tejaswini Niranjana, “Representing Texts and Cultures: Translation Studies and Ethnography” in Siting Translation
Week 14. Postcolonial Translation Theory II: Natural Language and Cultural Difference
Niranjana, “Translation, Colonialism, and the Rise of English”
Rey Chow, selections from Not Like A Native Speaker
Week 15. Anglophone Hegemony and ‘World Literature’
Barbara Cassin, “Philosophizing in Languages”
Robert Young, “That Which Is Casually Called A Language” in PMLA 131.5 (2016)
Week 16. Language and Home: Judaism and its Arabic Other
Abdelfattah Kilito, Thou Shalt Not Speak My Language
Mahmoud Darwish, selected poems from Unfortunately It Was Paradise
Week 17. Language and Home II: The Wandering Non-Jew
Fady Joudah, selected poems from Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance
Marwa Helal, selected poems from Invasive Species
Week 18. Language and Catastrophe: Poetics of ‘the ensilenced Word’
Paul Celan, “Bremen Address” and “The Meridian”
Celan, “Speak You Too”, “Argumentum e Silentio”, “Shibboleth”, “Psalm”
Edmond Jabès, selections from The Book of Questions
Week 19. Language and Catastrophe II: Missed Encounters
Jorge Luis Borges, “Averroes’ Search” and “The Library of Babel”
Anne Carson, “Variations on the Right to Remain Silent” from Float
Week 20. Erasures I: Poetics of Obliteration and the ‘War on Terror’
Solmaz Sharif, “The Near Transitive Properties of the Political and the Poetical: Erasure”
Sharif, “Reaching Guantánamo” and “Personal Effects” from Look
Week 21. Erasures II: Queer Theory and Trans Voices
Viviane Namaste, “‘Tragic Misreadings’: Queer Theory’s Erasure of Transgendered Subjectivity” from Invisible Lives or “Undoing Theory: The ‘Transgender Question’ and the Epistemic Violence of Anglo-American Feminist Theory”
Kay Gabriel, “Untranslating Gender in Trish Salah’s Lyric Sexology vol. 1”
Trish Salah, selections from Lyric Sexology