Intimacies of Reading: Translation as Communication Paradigm

• In Event: Utilizing Levinasian Ethics for Modern-Day Rhetorical Situations

Abstract

This essay develops Pinchevski’s reading of translation as a paradigm for communication that implies a “special involvement with alterity” (105), arguing for the source text as a Levinasian address or call. Gayatri Spivak writes about translation as surrender, as an intimate form of reading, before any actual translation is attempted. Moreover, any translation must always be provisional: as she works, the translator must constantly grapple with what lies outside representation in both the source and target languages, with what is always already “lost in translation.” As material practice, therefore, translation encounters the ethical question—what is my responsibility to this text?—before it can ‘come to be,’ that is, before ontology. I bring my own experiences as a literary translator to bear on an analysis of translation as a communication paradigm that follows Levinas’s privileging of the ethical over the ontological.

Author

• Margaret Schwartz, Fordham University