The Ethics of translating : Antoine Berman and the “Ethical Turn” in translation
Translation studies, according to Antoine Berman, has produced a “Copernican revolution” in knowledge, for the “task of thinking has become a task of translation”. “Making relations”, translation is one of the forms of discourse like Foucault’s archeology and Derrida’s grammatology which has produced a powerful critique of logocentrism put to the test of linguistic defamiliarization. Through the formulation of a critique and an analytic of translation that aims to establish a dialogic relation between native and foreign tongues within the horizon of translation, Berman attempts to posit an internal necessity for a translation ethics on a basis other than a “categorical imperative”. However, his project of an ethics of translation oscillates between a metaphysical totality and the rupture of an epistemological becoming. Formulated first as an injunction to recognize the Other as Other, the ethical project subsequently becomes an obligation to translate the play of signifiers literally: displacing the opposition between meaning and grapheme performs a pedagogy of alterity that both disturbs and rejuvenates. Berman’s axiological system of two terms, an opposition between an ethical and an ethnocentric translation, between foreignizing and domesticating strategies, between “good” and “bad” translation, is replaced by an ethical absolute — the necessity for a translation to “desire to make a work of art” while continuing to be an “offering” to the source text. Berman’s “pure translation” contrasts with an ethics of difference and a politics of translation in the theory of Henri Meschonnic, Lawrence Venuti, and Gayatri Spivak.