Who Translates?: Translator Subjectivities Beyond Reason

Douglas Robinson

SUNY Press, Feb 1, 2001 - Literary Criticism - 208 pages

Translators have long claimed that their job is to step aside and let the source author speak through them. In Who Translates? Douglas Robinson uses this adage to set up a series of postrationalist perspectives on translation, all based on the recognition that translation has always been thought of in terms of the translator s surrender to forces beyond his or her rational control. Exploring this theme, Robinson examines Plato s Ion, Philo Judaeus and Augustine on the Septuagint, Paul on inspired interpreters, Joseph Smith on the Book of Mormon, and Schleiermacher, Marx, and Heidegger on translation. He traces the imaginative and historical linkages between twentieth-century conceptions of ideology and ancient conceptions of spirit-channeling, and the performative inversion of power relations by which the channel (or translator) comes to wield the source author as his or her tool. And he argues throughout for a postrationalist conception of translation based not on the translator s rational control of words and meanings but rather on a flowing through the translator of voices and textualities.

Contents

• Who Translates?: 1
• Channeling: 7
• Rationalism Pre and Post: 12
• The Spiritchanneling Model: 16
• Ideology: 17
• The Spiritchanneling Model: 19
• Reason and Spirit: 21
• Reason? Spirit?: 26
• Logologies of Reason and Spirit: 30
• The Divine Inspiration of Translation: 36
• A Short History of Spiritchanneling: 37
• Socrates and the Art of the Rhapsode: 43
• Philo and Augustine on the Legend of the Septuagint: 48
• Joseph Smith and The Book of Mormon: 54
• Paul on Glossolalia and Interpreting: 61
• Ideology: 67
• Ideology and Cryptonymy: 69
• Heidegger on Spirit: 77
• AbrahamTorok and Freud: 82
• Heideggers Crypt: 94
• First Translation: 96
• Second Translation: 104
• Third Translation: 113
• The Ideologic of Spectrality: 116
• Marx and Schleiermacher on Spirits and Ghosts: 123
• Transient Assemblies: 133
• The Pandemonium Self Rationalist and Postrationalist Theories of the Self: 135
• Lacans Schema L: 142
• Pandemonium: 145
• The Invisible Subject: 150
• The Translators Objects: 158
• Fidus interpres and the Double Bind: 164
• The Invisible Hand: 174
• Translation Agencies: 180
• Beyond Reason: 187
• Works Cited: 191
• Index: 197

About the author

Douglas Robinson is Professor of English at the University of Mississippi and has written numerous books on translation and culture, including The Translator s Turn, Translation and Taboo, and Becoming a Translator: An Accelerated Course.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Who Translates?: Translator Subjectivities Beyond Reason; G - Reference,Information and Interdisciplinary Subjects Series
• Author: Douglas Robinson
• Contributor: State University of New York Press
• Edition: illustrated
• Publisher: SUNY Press, 2001
• ISBN: 0791448630, 9780791448632
• Length: 208 pages
• Subjects: Language Arts & Disciplines / General; Language Arts & Disciplines / Rhetoric; Language Arts & Disciplines / Translating & Interpreting; Literary Criticism / Semiotics & Theory; Philosophy / General