To advocate foreignizing translation in opposition to the Anglo-American tradition of domestication is not to do away with cultural political agendas—such an advocacy is itself an agenda. The point is rather to develop a theory and practice of translation that resists dominant target-language cultural values so as to signify the linguistic and cultural difference of the foreign text. Philip Lewis’s concept of “abusive fidelity” can be useful in such a theorization: it acknowledges the abusive, equivocal relationship between the translation and the foreign text and eschews a fluent strategy in order to reproduce in the translation whatever features of the foreign text abuse or resist dominant cultural values in the {24} source language. Abusive fidelity directs the translator’s attention away from the conceptual signified to the play of signifiers on which it depends, to phonological, syntactical, and discursive structures, resulting in a “translation that values experimentation, tampers with usage, seeks to match the polyvalencies or plurivocities or expressive stresses of the original by producing its own” (Lewis 1985:41). Such a translation strategy can best be called resistancy, not merely because it avoids fluency, but because it challenges the target-language culture even as it enacts its own ethnocentric violence on the foreign text.
The notion of foreignization can alter the ways translations are read as well as produced because it assumes a concept of human subjectivity that is very different from the humanist assumptions underlying domestication. Neither the foreign writer nor the translator is conceived as the transcendental origin of the text, freely expressing an idea about human nature or communicating it in transparent language to a reader from a different culture. Rather, subjectivity is constituted by cultural and social determinations that are diverse and even conflicting, that mediate any language use, and, that vary with every cultural formation and every historical moment. Human action is intentional, but determinate, self-reflexively measured against social rules and resources, the heterogeneity of which allows for the possibility of change with every self-reflexive action (Giddens 1979:chap. 2). Textual production may be initiated and guided by the producer, but it puts to work various linguistic and cultural materials which make the text discontinuous, despite any appearance of unity, and which create an unconscious, a set of unacknowledged conditions that are both personal and social, psychological and ideological. Thus, the translator consults many different target-language cultural materials, ranging from dictionaries and grammars to texts, discursive strategies, and translations, to values, paradigms, and ideologies, both canonical and marginal. Although intended to reproduce the source-language text, the translator’s consultation of these materials inevitably reduces and supplements it, even when source-language cultural materials are also consulted. Their sheer heterogeneity leads to discontinuities—between the source-language text and the translation and within the translation itself—that are symptomatic of its ethnocentric violence. A humanist method of reading translations elides these discontinuities by locating a semantic unity adequate to the foreign text, stressing intelligibility, {25} transparent communication, the use value of the translation in the target-language culture. A symptomatic reading, in contrast, locates discontinuities at the level of diction, syntax, or discourse that reveal the translation to be a violent rewriting of the foreign text, a strategic intervention into the target-language culture, at once dependent on and abusive of domestic values.
This method of symptomatic reading can be illustrated with the translations of Freud’s texts for the Standard Edition, although the translations acquired such unimpeachable authority that we needed Bruno Bettelheim’s critique to become aware of the discontinuities. Bettelheim’s point is that the translations make Freud’s texts “appear to readers of English as abstract, depersonalized, highly theoretical, erudite, and mechanized—in short, ‘scientific’—statements about the strange and very complex workings of our mind” (Bettelheim 1988:5). Bettelheim seems to assume that a close examination of Freud’s German is necessary to detect the translators’ scientistic strategy, but the fact is that his point can be demonstrated with no more than a careful reading of the English text. Bettelheim argues, for example, that in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1960), the term “parapraxis” reveals the scientism of the translation because it is used to render a rather simple German word, Fehlleistungen, which Bettelheim himself prefers to translate as “faulty achievement” (Bettelheim 1983:87). Yet the translator’s strategy may also be glimpsed through certain peculiarities in the diction of the translated text:
I now return to the forgetting of names. So far we have not exhaustively considered either the case-material or the motives behind it. As this is exactly the kind of parapraxis that I can from time to time observe abundantly in myself, I am at no loss for examples. The mild attacks of migraine from which I still suffer usually announce themselves hours in advance by my forgetting names, and at the height of these attacks, during which I am not forced to abandon my work, it frequently happens that all proper names go out of my head.
The diction of much of this passage is so simple and common (“forgetting”), even colloquial (“go out of my head”), that “parapraxis” represents a conspicuous difference, an inconsistency in word choice which exposes the translation process. The {26} inconsistency is underscored not only by Freud’s heavy reliance on anecdotal, “everyday” examples, some—as above—taken from his own experience, but also by a footnote added to a later edition of the German text and included in the English translation: “This book is of an entirely popular character; it merely aims, by an accumulation of examples, at paving the way for the necessary assumption of unconscious yet operative mental processes, and it avoids all theoretical considerations on the nature of the unconscious” (Freud 1960:272n.). James Strachey himself unwittingly called attention to the inconsistent diction in his preface to Alan Tyson’s translation, where he felt it necessary to provide a rationale for the use of “parapraxis”: “In German ‘Fehlleistung,’ ‘faulty function.’ It is a curious fact that before Freud wrote this book the general concept seems not to have existed in psychology, and in English a new word had to be invented to cover it” (Freud 1960:viiin.). It can of course be objected (against Bettelheim) that the mixture of specialized scientific terms and commonly used diction is characteristic of Freud’s German, and therefore (against me) that the English translation in itself cannot be the basis for an account of the translators’ strategy. Yet although I am very much in agreement with the first point, the second weakens when we realize that even a comparison between the English versions of key Freudian terms easily demonstrates the inconsistency in kinds of diction I have located in the translated passage: “id” vs. “unconscious”; “cathexis” vs. “charge,” or “energy”; “libidinal” vs. “sexual.”