Translating: what Harman Said

I’m glad to get back in the swing of things and see that Harman is saying that the Speculative Turn will be done soon. I start teaching my SR class later this month and I have a syllabus in motion based upon when these pieces get turned around. (No pressure!) I did want to say two things about what Harman’s writing:
1. Editing: Ok, I’m edited a couple of books and I’m an editor at a journal, so caveat lector. But I should say the role of the philosophical editor is in certain areas deeply underappreciated. Good editors make for much stronger pieces, and indeed, in a number of cases I know (some quite personally!) saved a couple of pieces headed off to nowhere, bringing them back to making quite original claims. But I don’t see why anyone does it, except perhaps as a change of pace (i.e., procrastination) from other projects. You do a good job going over a piece and 9/10 the person reading your suggestions hates you for changing their “handed from the Muse herself” idiosyncracies (i.e., grammarless sentences) or hates you even more for being right. The other 10% grudgingly agree that your comments helped, but don’t expect Christmas cards for it. I say this as a writer, too: I love people editing my stuff into shape for me, and I don’t appreciate when editors worry that I’ll hate them forever for changing a word here or there. That’s not to say that this isn’t appreciated, but let’s face it: I’ve taken far more time editing a set of articles than writing one. (But in terms of learning to write, it’s been an immense help–especially as a young grad student editing Philosophia Africana. It also helped me understand what type of people in the academy to avoid. To be a bit pithy: you don’t really know someone until you’ve edited them. I’ll never forget the prominent philosopher who wrote a 30 pages, single-spaced response going over line-by-line critically the much shorter article published by a younger academic. The gentleman wouldn’t cut it down at all, writing [I’m paraphrasing though I have the direct quote in my head to this day] that “the record had to be corrected,” even though the other article had been largely in agreement over the philosophical issues at hand. This lead, then, to a tedious extra 20 pages of text going over minor clauses not having anything to do with anything.)

2. Translations: I like Harman’s quip about the proper translation of “Ereignis” (or rather, how could one ever find the word in English blah blah blah…). And he’s right on his two points. I would only want to say, in case it’s lost, that the art of translation, I think, is deeply philosophical. I remember at DePaul when a faculty member was coming up for full professor and couple of snarky grad students (perhaps the only snarky ones I knew at DePaul—well, snarky in the bad sense, since there’s a great deal of fun snark to be had in that era) said that they thought that his publications were too few, despite the raft of publications. To which I said (this was not Michael Naas, so I wasn’t simply defending the person under whom I wrote my dissertation), well, that the persons saying this had obviously no idea what went into a translation. Let alone translating the philosophers that this person was known for working on—quite well, I would add. Harman’s right to note the way in which the first move of the ill-informed is to pick on a translation. Someone takes an entire work and says that such and such a word was missed and that particular word translation shows obviously that the translator misunderstood the whole work. Maybe. But though my translation work has been limited (Harman’s description of the move from 1st draft to 2nd draft is enough to make me quiver from various memories), I am quite sympathetic. To be a translator is basically to put a kick-me sign on one’s back and hand out steel-toe boots. But to do any decent work requires knowing the work at hand really well and being a good writer who can’t somehow have the stamina to come back to a third or fourth draft to make good English out of transatorese. Try doing that with a work from Heidegger, for example. SImple rule of thumb, which would cut down on a lot of these types of criticisms (which in some cases is needed): if you can’t speak the original language with some fluency, perhaps you should look elsewhere in aiming your criticisms.

Combining (1) and (2) from above, I’d say the worst—easily—editing experience I’ve had was with a piece that took up a writer whose work has been translated and translated well (at least as well as one could do with the original works in question). The author retranslated quotations from these works, implicitly critiquing the translators, and then to boot, provided translations that were out of context or just plain the reverse of what was being said. I was pretty sure if the person heard “go left” for directions in the original language, I should be sure to “go right.” When I suggested using the original translations, using brackets and other changes to keep them to a minimum, the writer was not too pleased. In the end, I did the person a favor, though that’s not how they see it. But what a beautiful translation they could come up with for Ereignis…