Jacques Derrida et Souleymane Bachir Diagne La Traduction comme trahison

Abstract

Jacques Derrida and Souleymane Bachir Diagne : Translation as Betrayal

Traditional Western thought finds its rise from logocentrism. The latter establishes a link of identity between the word and the thing. The resulting translation is a reflection of accuracy. It is this approach that Derrida deconstructs. The deconstructive scheme requires that there is no addressee and therefore “must be translated”. As a consequence, the translator will never exhaust a work. There will always be emptiness and lack. The translation is always unfaithful. It is neither a neutral reception nor a simple reproduction of a text. Nor is it the original restitution of meaning. To translate a work is to mourn its originality. For Derrida, translation is “an operation intended to ensure its survival as a work”. This survival of the work “lives more and better, above its author”. It is this survival that makes the translator a traitor because the meaning crumbles in the semantic transfer. Obviously, meaning is never transmitted in the same way. He still suffers betrayal. The latter makes translation an event. The event is erased, because it only happens by repeating itself and altering itself. This approach is the foundation of Souleymane Bachir Diagne’s thinking. For him, translation is celebrating plurality; it is “in a way imagining a happy Babel”. By drawing on African anthropology, by analyzing orality and the implications of its transcription, Souleymane Bachir Diagne believes that the fidelity of the translation comes from its betrayal. We cannot have a pure translation. This logic breaks completely with nationalism. The translation “contributes to the task of realizing humanity, and even better: it identifies with it”. Against the “clash of civilizations”, translation as betrayal establishes a “dialogue of cultures”. The Senegalese thinker thus thinks that it is thanks to translation that one can “say in one’s own language, the culture of the other”. Translation is “the ability to take all languages together and think about what their coexistence might mean”. This is where the Monolingualism of other by Jacques Derrida takes on its importance. This work is part of a deconstruction of language as a property and no doubt as a natural home. “I only have one language and this is not mine, my own language is a language that cannot be assimilated to me. My language, the only one I can hear myself speaking, is the language of the other”. Therefore, no pure language. This one suffers the effect of contamination. Therefore, for Bachir Diagne, the act of translating “finds two languages, two cultures’’. To translate is therefore to betray the origin and linguistic purity.