Le Culte de l’Intraduisible

Abstract

The Cult of the Untranslatable

Untranslatability is not only characteristic of language or of the diversity of cultures, it is often inherent in convictions, even in literary and philosophical pride, rejecting from the outset any possibility of translating, moreover, it was the spearhead of linguistic theories refuting all interlinguistic communication and banishing the idea of translation from literary genres.
The notion of untranslatability has for a very long time been weighed down with prejudices of a philosophical nature cultivated by the proponents of the ineffable. These confined themselves to enclosing authoritative classical works in a kind of ivory tower and therefore relegating from the theoretical point of view any act of translation. Paradoxically, the works of Horace or Homer have only been appreciated through translations, not to say 'profanations,' which have had the certain merit of reincarnating the spirit of the authors of the originals.
We concluded that Mechonnic's approach, which appears to be a poetics of translation excluded, what we consider as the extension of the two old ones (form/meaning theses), literalism and pragmatism. Conversely, the deconstructuralist philosophical approach embodied in the works of J. Derrida rules out any possibility of translation based on meaning and its unstable aspect and subject to multiple interpretations. An absent meaning and therefore at least partially  untranslatable. In doing so, Derrida proposes another name to qualify this passage from one language to another: transformation, a term which already sets the limits of a possible fidelity and therefore of an authentic translatability. However, Derrida's poststructuralist vision clearly stands out from the rigor encountered in Mechonnic's work, which starts from a negation of translation but from a criticism of the method of approach to the translation of literary texts. It is in the same perspective of Derrida that we want to place our study because we believe that untranslatability has always been a consequence of a choice of method which, in the absence of rationalism, accuses languages and their specificities whereas these offer multiple possibilities of expression which approximately relegate the untranslatable to theoretical delirium. This optimism that we hope to maintain is part of a new approach that starts not from a negation of translation but from an 

language. This is to say that untranslatability is nothing other than reasoning that precedes translating it. As soon as the action is taken, there is no longer any question of evoking this pseudo axiom which cannot go hand in hand with practice. It would be more rational and positive, in our opinion, to speak of the concept of loyalty.

analysis of a state of affairs, namely the source text and that of the target