《JACQUES LEZRA_the indecise muse-Ethics in translation》.pdf

FALL 200 8 Volume 60, Number 4 JACQUES LEZRA The Indecisive Muse: Ethics in Translation and the Idea of History I. Two Dogmas of Transtation When I was a child in Madrid, my friends and I took our literary pleasures where we could find them, and we found them very often in translation. René Goscinny and Albert Uderzos great Astérix et Obélix series came to us in Castil- ian furnished with occasional footnotes. Juego de palabras intraducibie, it would say at the bottom of the page : untranslatable word-game or untranslatable pun, referring to words spoken by a Gaul, Roman, Belgian, and so on . At the time, we understood these footnotes to be characterizations of the Spanish words we had before us rather than of a French original, and I suspect, in fact, that it never crossed our minds that there might be a French original, no doubt because the notorious national rivalry between Spain and France made the possibility unthinkable. For us, it was the Spanish that was intraducibie, with the language into luhich the comic could not be translated remaining unspecified; that the foot- noted Spanish words were commonplace and should thus be easy to translate struck us as hilarious and seemed an indictment ofthat other, misty language and proof of Gastilians nuance and particularity. Years later, when I read these same works in French and in English, I realized to my shock that the footnotes were not deliberate parabases but marks of melancholia or exasperation, a sort of throwing-up-of-the-hands left diacritically by a nameless translator who was unable I wish to acknowledge the generous support of ihe University of Wisconsin-Madison Graduate School Research Fund, which made much of the work on this essay po