Introduction: To ashes, or disclosing impunity

Abstract

Originally published in 2004 as Vocabulaire européen des philosophies: Dictionnaires des intraduisibles, the Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon (Cassin 2014a) is a rich and fascinating resource for students and researchers in such fields as comparative literature, translation studies, and continental philosophy. The paradoxical task of translating a labyrinthine work on the inherence of untranslatability to all acts of translation is not lost on the editors. Indeed, spanning more than 1300 pages in the English edition (there are others, either published or forthcoming, including in Arabic, Farsi, Romanian, Russian, and Ukrainian [Apter 2014, vii]) and encompassing a dizzying range of entries that ‘compare and meditate on the specific differences furnished to concepts by the Arabic, Basque, Catalan, Danish, English, French, German, Greek (classical and modern), Hebrew, Hungarian, Latin, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, and Spanish languages’ (Apter 2014, vii), the Dictionary’s editors underscore the quandary of seeking ‘to translate the untranslatable’ while underlining the tome’s ‘performative aspect, its stake in what it means “to philosophize in translation” over and beyond reviewing the history of philosophy with translation problems in mind’ (vii). In theory as (in) practice, the distinction marked by that difficult and generous shift into reading, or more humbly into forever attempting to read, ‘over and beyond’ matters a great deal. By pivoting from translation as a disciplinary, describable, and compartmentalizable problem or ornamental puzzle for the history of philosophy into untranslatability in translation as a foundational impasse whose terrain we witting and unwittingly traverse (or pass and repass) as we discipline our thinking, the editors alight upon yet another quandary that compromises their opening description of the volume as a ‘massive translation exercise with encyclopedic reach’ (vii). Taken to its logical conclusion, that compromise might enable rather than restrict or negate careful reading. It is a productive or enabling compromise, one that grounds our responsibility as readers, but only if we read it with requisite care. No reach, even if it extends over and beyond 1300 pages, can be truly encyclopedic on matters of translation and hence of untranslatability. An encyclopedic reach, concerning translation and the untranslatable within the compass of the world’s languages, would be impossible. There are, depending on how one counts (and for linguists, the question of