After Babel and the Impediments of Hermeneutics: Releasing Translation into its own Territory

Abstract

This article proposes that Steiner’s account of a hermeneutic translation does not square with his deeper linguistic and literary sympathies, that he often puts him­self in contradictory argumentative positions, despite the vigorous clarity of his reasoning, and that he might find a suitable home for those sympathies and some solution to his predicament in the kind of translational model that is offered here. While Steiner takes pleasure in language’s capacity to make room for individual privacies, for the contingencies of idiolect, and to create the imaginative space for ‘alternity’, that is, for the hypothetical, the suppositional, the optative and con­di­tion­al, the kind of hermeneutic translation which he promotes fosters sobriety, bal­ance and durability, and resists the excessive and the proliferative. It is perhaps not surprising, therefore, that many of the conclusions he draws from translation are negative and tinged with defeatism; we can only regret that he does not use his own discovery of stalemate to imagine the kind of translation that might outwit po­lar­ized positions. The article includes, as worked examples, translations from the first stanzas of Lamartine’s “L’Isolement” and Verlaine’s “En sourdine”.