Ce texte de Michael Plastow, psychanalyste à Melbourne (Australie), ouvre et s’appuie sur le souhait de publier des travaux en langue anglaise. Deux articles de M. Plastow paraissent dans la Revue Lacanienne, N°5, dont le dossier est consacré à « La psychanalyse est-elle une addiction ? ». Il s’agit d’un premier article théorique sur le jeu avec des enfants autistes ; le second fait part des conditions de l’exercice pratique d’un psychiatre, psychanalyste, dans les institutions soumises à cette influence d’une économie régnante, quasi-autorégulée, à laquelle les nouveaux maîtres, à l’ego dévastateur, s’accrochent, influence également déjà à l’oeuvre « chez nous ». C’est aussi remercier ce collègue anglophone que de lui ouvrir le site de l’ALI pour un travail dans sa langue.
Mais surtout Michael Plastow a traduit en anglais le séminaire de J. Lacan, « Le savoir du psychanalyste ». Il fait part ici de sa réflexion théorique psychanalytique à partir de son expérience de la traduction de ce séminaire, à paraître prochainement pour usage interne pour les membres anglophones de notre association.
Jean-Louis Chassaing
I am writing of an encounter with translating, an encounter specifically from translating the series of talks that Jacques Lacan gave at the Sainte-Anne psychiatric hospital in Paris between November 1971 and June 1972, known as The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst. In doing so I am struck by the distance that the translation necessarily takes from the original, and an inherent foreignness of the original, leading to a breach that cannot be spanned. Yet nonetheless, there remains not only a possibility of something being able to pass through the translation, but also a necessity and an imperative to translate. From the act of translating as an act of the analyst, a questioning arises regarding the status of the translation as well as the place of the translator.
Why would an analyst want to translate? I am speaking also of translation as an activity of each analyst in so far as he or she continues to interrogate a text in producing a reading, something from which reference to the original cannot be absent. After all, to accept one or other translation as unassailable would be to suppose that there is an Other who knows what Lacan is saying, a transcriptor or translator, official or unofficial, who could give us an established version of Lacan’s texts. Further to this, we can put forward that translation is a work of a School, as it is we, as School, who produce a reading of psychoanalytic texts, and in particular those of Freud and Lacan (1). If translation is then, as I am proposing, a work of the analyst, then it is also the work of a School of psychoanalysis.
So then what obscure form of affliction is put to work in this tedious, meticulous and time-consuming activity from which the result can be nothing more than approximate and provisional? After all a text, a translation, is always to be put into question despite whatever longing we might have for ‘the definitive translation’.
The traditional notion of translation, which is still current within translation theory, is that:
Translation is concerned with meaning (2).
Walter Benjamin, however, in his essay The Task of the Translator, proposes, in contrast, that:
… a translation […] must lovingly and in detail incorporate the original’s mode of signification … (3)
Here let us dwell for a moment on this lovingly which assumes a particular status in psychoanalysis. This work of translation, for the analyst, is a work that bears the mark of the transference, a transference of work, a transference to the text. The transference then is the con-text of translation, that which accompanies the text. It is in this con-text that the work of translating occurs, a work that produces another text, a text to which the translator lends his or her own name.
Benjamin’s proposition also refers to incorporating this mode of the original, a carnal reference to the body of the text. For in working this text, we read it, we experience it, as texture. It is a textile, it is composed of differing threads or strands, now loose, now woven tightly together, but retaining nonetheless a set of relations to each other. I am referring to the letter of the text, to its concrete composition. If we fall too heavily on the side of meaning in the translation, we have to give the letter up, we then lose the trace of these strands, we are no longer able to follow the threads, the insistence of certain sounds, the cadence of certain passages, the staccato of Lacan’s brief phrases.
To allow something of this to pass into the translation, we need to follow the letter of the text. That is, to create a translation that is idiomatic, in English, to make a translation that is ‘readable’ and therefore one whose primary purpose is to convey a knowledge, might be to lose what is fundamental in the text. Benjamin comments that:
… meaning is served far better – and literature and language far worse – by the unrestrained licence of bad translators (4).
If, as is proposed, a translation must lovingly and in detail incorporate the original’s mode of signification, then translating is not a question of bringing Lacan into English, as an insistence on meaning and readability might want to produce, but rather, of bringing English into the language of Lacan’s French. This is in accordance with Benjamin’s proposition that the translator must allow his language to be powerfully affected by the foreign tongue. He comments that it is not the highest praise of a translation to say that it reads as if it had originally been written in that language. Jacques Derrida, in his comment on Benjamin’s essay, notes that Heidegger:
… says somewhere that it is an operation of thought through which we must translate ourselves in the thought of the other language, the forgotten thinking of the other language. We must translate ourselves into it and not make it come into our language. It is necessary to go toward the unthought thinking of the other language (5).
Heidegger himself, in reference to the question of seeking to grasp and interpret the Platonic dialogues, proposes that:
To appropriate a past means to come to know oneself as indebted to that past (6).
Here the foreignness of the text is posited in a temporal sense but we can also posit this in relation to Lacan’s text in a different way, in a way in which we might encounter it as something foreign, something that has an effect on us not dissimilar to that which Meno, in Plato’s dialogue of that name, describes of his encounter with Socrates, that of the metaphor of being stunned by the sting ray. We recall that Socrates responds that it is not that he, knowing the answers, perplexes others. He is perplexed himself through his own not knowing.
The reading, the translation is indeed, lovingly, a working of a debt to the text, to the possibility of a psychoanalysis that this text and the teachings of Lacan produce. Working towards Lacan’s text, rather than moving away from it towards English, allows us to move closer to this « unthought thinking », this not-known of the text.
Benjamin’s proposal raises the question of what it is that is translated. If we examine the Translator’s Notes of the published texts and seminars of Lacan, we read comments regarding the difficulty of finding equivalents or correspondences for words and expressions in the texts. There is mention that what is aimed at is an « exact translation ». But what notion of translation is conveyed here? In what units is this exactitude measured? It propagates an ideal of such an exact translatability. It sustains a belief that there could be equivalences between languages, that is, the ideal of a universal borne by the equivalence of translation. We could further propose that this conception poses the task of translation as that of producing a university knowledge in which units of meaning, knowledge or information can thus pass into the translation.
Such a notion of translation as the transposition of a content, of a meaning, is no doubt in part the project of the published transcriptions and translations of Lacan’s seminars. In these, a more professorial and limpid approach replaces the hesitations, the unfinished phrases and sentences, the contradictions, the stumblings, the meanderings, even the moments of lyrical flight that I encounter in the text I am endeavouring to translate.
On a number of occasions in The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst, Lacan makes reference to Plato’s Meno, to which we have already referred. In this dialogue, Socrates demonstrates the limits of what, of knowledge, is able to be taught, specifically in relation to the question of virtue. That the question of virtue, of ethics or desire, is not able to be taught as Socrates shows, is pertinent here since in the teachings of Lacan, and specifically in The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst, it is also a question of how the knowledge of the analyst, the desire of the analyst, might be transmitted.
In any case we can say that there is never a complete equivalent for a word or expression between two languages; that if it is meaning or knowledge that is conveyed in a translation then we have failed before we start. Such are also the limits of what can pass in a translation. For Jorge Luis Borges:
Bilingual dictionaries […] make us believe that each word of a language can be replaced by another from another language. The error consists in not taking into account that each language is a mode of experiencing and perceiving the universe (7).
This proposition of Borges though, is not so far from Benjamin’s, that what might be translated is a mode of signification, like this mode of experiencing and perceiving the universe.
But each of the modes of signification is a particular one, particular to each language but also particular to each subject, between which is a breach that cannot be spanned. Even if we do find an approximate equivalent for which there is partial, but never complete, overlap with the semantic field of the word we are attempting to translate, we suffer an irredeemable loss at the level of the signifier, at the level of assonance, at the level of each possible association, of the tonal and cultural register, and so on. To this search for equivalence we can respond: there is no sexual relation, no equivalence, no proportion: it is not possible to bring the translation into complete accordance with the original.
The aspiration to equivalence and exactness perhaps also ignores the joke that Freud takes up, that of Traduttore – Traditore!, or Translator – Traitor, where it only takes the substitution of one letter to betray the fact that any translation is itself a betrayal. Freud comments here that:
The similarity, amounting almost to identity, of the two words represents most impressively the necessity that forces a translator into crimes against his original.
So then this betrayal of the translator is a necessary betrayal in the face of the inexistence of an exact translation.
What is this act of betrayal though? In one sense it is an act of disloyalty or infidelity, that is, of being unfaithful to the text translated. But if the betrayal is an act of concealment, violation or distortion, it is at the same time, through the equivocation of language, an act by which something is revealed. The Macquarie Dictionary, for instance, gives some senses of ‘betray’ as « to reveal or disclose in violation of confidence: to betray a secret; to reveal unconsciously (something one would preferably conceal) », or even « to show; exhibit ». So through the act of betrayal, something is able to pass. Through the absence of the original, the presence of something is able to be indicated or denoted.
It is in this direction that Lacan proposes that:
… it is from the structure of fiction that the truth is enounced (8)…
That is, it is in this sense that we can put forward that the translation produces a fiction, a semblant, as Lacan proposes in The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst, in the way that the psychoanalytic interpretation does:
There is not one psychoanalytic interpretation that does not give to whatever proposition one encounters its relation to a jouissance […] And it remains no less assured that it can in no way say it completely. It can, as I express myself, only half-say it, this relation, and forge some semblant from it … (9)
If we take up these propositions in relation to translation, we can recognise two aspects. On the one hand we have the text of the translation that betrays the original, that commits crimes against it, that indicates that the translatability, through meaning, gives rise to a betrayal. On the other hand, through this work of fiction, this semblant of a translation, there is something of truth that might be half-said, a truth that is belied through this semblant. For Benjamin, this difference is established through a working of the split between meaning and form:
A real translation is transparent; it does not cover the original, does not block its light, but allows the pure language, as though reinforced by its own medium, to shine upon the original all the more fully. This may be achieved, above all, by a literal rendering of the syntax which proves words rather than sentences to be the primary element of the translator. For if the sentence is the wall before the language of the original, literalness is the arcade (10).
Lacan also speaks of the wall in The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst in a similar way, as of a wall between the subject and that which lies beyond language. Beyond the wall, he asserts:
…there is, to our knowledge, only this real which is distinguished precisely from the impossible, from the impossible to reach beyond the wall.
On the wall, however, can be left a mark. There can be a writing on the wall, composed of these letters, this literalness, in the impossible approach towards something of the real. These letters then, pre-eminent amongst which is the love letter, or lettre d’a-mur, with its reference to the wall, to speak of something untranslatable, that is written on the wall, allowing the possibility of touching upon what lies on the other side.
Thus if the concept of fidelity in the translation has any merit, it is in so far as it is fidelity to the letter of the text, a text then that has recourse to what Benjamin refers to as « pure language ». But in this sense not every text is translatable as this pure language, this literality of the text, is one in which:
… all information, all sense, and all intention finally encounter a stratum in which they are destined to be extinguished (11).
Hence we can say that it is the very un-translatability of a text, the fact that it is not reducible to meaning or knowledge, that paradoxically makes it translatable. Here we might exclude from the category of such translatable texts that might give access to the letter, those texts in which the subject is elided, texts for instance of the discourse of objectifying science.
For Benjamin, this pure language, the kernel of pure language to which he refers, is something that does not lend itself to translation. But at the same time as the translation is not able to communicate it, the « tremendous and only capacity of translation » is also the attainment and conveying of this kernel intact.
Now it is not clear what the nature of this kernel might be, since for Benjamin it is something untouchable. We cannot follow him into the realms of a mythical metalanguage of which he posits that each language is a fragment. For us the kernel perhaps evokes the Kern unseres Wesen or the ‘kernel of our being’ that Freud refers to in the Interpretation of Dreams. For Derrida, this desire for the intact kernel, the desire to retain this kernel, is desire itself, which is to say that it is irreducible. Furthermore this desire for an intact kernel is a desire for a kernel, that has never been, to be intact. The kernel then presents itself then as a lack of kernel, an absence that one would want to forget. Thus, to take this a little further, we can propose that the kernel of being is a lack in being, castration with its mark of the proper name.
In The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst, the question of what might be conveyed through the medium of the signifier and nonetheless cannot be said, is central to Lacan’s elaborations. It is in the theorisation of the four discourses, and in particular the Discourse of the Analyst that Lacan attempts to formalise, through logic and with recourse to mathematics, this ‘kernel’. Thus the kernel is at once beyond the scope of language but at the same time can only touched upon, however lightly, through language. In particular, it is here that Lacan develops the notion of the matheme as a writing that might lend support to the transmission of psychoanalysis beyond the image and the word of the author, something nonetheless underwritten by the letter.
It is here that there is a question of the impossible, that is, not so much impossible to translate, but rather a question of the impossible that might be conveyed in a translation, an impossible towards which an analysis moves, an impossible as that towards which Lacan’s text and Lacan’s theory moves. The translation then, like the analysis, is composed of signifiers, but not confined to them.
Here, in reference to translation, we find a link with Benjamin’s separation of meaning, or knowledge, from the letter. In translating Lacan we find particular nexus points, particular places of knotting, that, through their very un-translatability, lend themselves to translation. Such points of knotting are able to pass, but are not translatable as such. Many of these are literally in the form of letters: A, S1, S2, $, a, for instance, and their formulations in the four discourses and in the algorithm of the fantasm.
We also find certain words that acquire a place in Lacan’s discourse, beyond their usual semantic field. The maintaining of such words that acquire a status beyond that of the signifier also finds its support from Lacan himself. For instance, Tomás Segovia tell us in the Translator’s Note to the Spanish language edition of Écrits that Lacan insisted on retaining certain terms that « have a conceptual function in his discourse (12) ». The example given here is the retaining of the verb ‘to demand’, despite its primary sense in Spanish, according to Segovia, being a legal one of issuing proceedings.
Such nexi are privileged places in the translation, points which approach an impossibility, where the translation might touch upon something of truth. For Lacan, once again from The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst:
…it is absolutely not true to speak of the matheme as of something that would in any way be detached from the exigency of truthfulness… (13)
Let us attempt to further untangle these notions of knowledge and truth, in so far as they bear upon the work of the translator. For Benjamin:
Where a text is identical with truth or dogma, where it is supposed to be ‘the true language’ in all its literalness and without the mediation of meaning, this text is unconditionally translatable.
Here we find separated out, the notion of meaning, or the knowledge that constitutes the content of the text, from truth or dogma. Lacan, in differentiating truth from knowledge, asserts that « a truth has no content (14) ».
Dogma, through its related term doxa, also refers us back to Plato’s Meno. If meaning or knowledge, of virtue, of desire, which is the content of this text, cannot be taught as Socrates puts forward, or as we are elaborating, is not all that is transmitted in a translation, then this episteme must be distinguished from the doxa, knowledge must be distinguished from truth. In the Meno, Socrates puts forward that:
… it is not only under the guidance of knowledge that human action is well and rightly conducted. […] true opinion (or doxa) is as good a guide as knowledge for the purpose of acting rightly (15).
This doxa then, or true opinion, is something that indicates an access to truth. Such a truth though, in arising in this way from the doxa, necessarily pertains to the particular: no universal truth here, nor anything reducible to a university knowledge. Lacan in this context, in The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst, comments on Plato’s encounter with this doxa:
… when Plato […] speaks of doxa as of something that he literally doesn’t know what to do with, he, the philosopher, who endeavours to found a science, notices that he encounters doxa at any street corner; there are true ones. Naturally, he isn’t damned well able to say why, no more than any philosopher, but no one doubts them being true, because truth imposes itself (16).
What is it then that distinguishes a text in its true opinion, with the mark of a truth? For Benjamin, the prototype of all great texts that might be translatable is the sacred text. It is the Holy Writ that puts a stop to the plunge into the bottomless depths of language unfastened from the yoke of meaning. In reference to The Names of the Father, Lacan notes that in that seminar he located:
… the paternal metaphor, notably the proper name, everything that was necessary was there so that, with the Bible, a sense could be given to these mythical and woolly theorisations of my sayings (17).
Hence this stop consists of the proper name, the proper name of God for the sacred text, but the proper name per se in reference to any text that might be translatable, and in particular here those of Lacan.
It is perhaps in this very proper name that we can find the « mode of signification » referred to by Benjamin and by Borges. We could also refer to this mode of signification as ‘style’, something that marks the subject’s relation to the signifier. That is, it is through the mark of the proper name on all common names in a text that we might find something of an access to truth in the text. If the task of the translator is to incorporate the mode of signification of the original, then something of this mark must be able to pass through the translation.
But the translator has recourse only to the common name. It is the common name that constitutes the body of the text. And yet, as we have said, the translator lends his own name to the text. Translation thus is a reading, but it is also a writing. And any writing worthy of the name must also leave the mark of a style.
Now Freud, in referring to Übersetzung, or translation, uses this term widely in his theorisations for the process of interpretation, dream-work, the work of the construction of screen memories, referring to repression as the failure of translation, and so on. On the other hand, Lacan does not make a theoretical category of the notion of translation. But in The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst, Lacan proposes psychoanalysis has to do with the translation into words of the value of truth of the symptom. Here we have the analyst posed as translator, in this instance through the psychoanalytic interpretation. This translation also has the function of moving from the common name in the articulation of the symptom, towards the proper name and its mark of truth. The analyst, as translator, we can also propose, endeavours to translate the value of truth in the text with the tools at his or her disposal, that is, the words of the translation.
Can this help us to say anything of the affliction of the translator? We could perhaps put forward that the symptom of the translator is the translating itself, through the common names of the text to which we have said that he lends his own name. In this direction we might say that the symptom of the translator presents itself as an endeavour to write, an endeavour to write what cannot be written, or an endeavour to write that which does not cease from not being written. This impossibility however does not lessen the necessity of that writing, a necessity that is co-extensive with the desire to write, to translate.
For this question of desire returns us to one of our opening questions: why would an analyst want to translate? Why would anyone want to take up the cause of the traitor? For to be moved to translate does no doubt imply a cause. This is also to take up the question of desire and its transmission that is posed in Plato’s Meno. The place of cause is occupied here, in reference to psychoanalysis, by the object cause of desire, object a.
We spoke earlier of Lacan’s reference to the wall as a-mur, or a-wall, the wall that is at once a barrier to the real but also the only border that abuts onto it. Then it is the letter a on the a-wall that might touch upon the object a here in the beyond of the field of the signifier.
In reference to the discourse of the analyst, Lacan puts forward that the analyst, occupying the position of the semblant of the object a, makes the object a come to the place of the semblant. For the translator the semblant, as we have put forward, is this text of the translation that is produced. Here it is also a question of allowing the object to come to the place of the semblant. For if the translator has a desire, a desire that moves him to translate, it is a desire that something might circulate, something not reducible to the knowledge contained in a text, something in the form of the object.
In The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst, Lacan speaks of the symptom of the incomprehension of the analytic discourse as that which must dominate in the analyst. That is, if the medium of the analysis is the signifier, it is not reducible to this. Similarly, if the translation is carried by the signifier, by knowledge, its reduction to knowledge would obscure something of the discourse from being transmitted. At the end of the analysis, the analysand is left with the incurable of the symptom, the incurable truth of desire, the leftover from the operation of the signifier that can nonetheless be put to work. The translator also encounters in the text in the place of this incurable, an untranslatable that might be conveyed through the symptom of translating.
We might say that the symptom of Lacan was his theoretical apparatus, the talks, seminars and writings by which he sustained his desire in relation to psychoanalysis. The analyst as translator engages this desire with his or her own in order that something of truth might pass. Here, to Lacan’s translation of a symptom into value of truth, the translator responds with the symptom of a translation.
(1) Piegari, J. C. Leer Lacan. Notas de la Escuela Freudiana, No. 6, Escuela Freudiana de Buenos Aires, ¿Lacanoamericanos?
(2) Hervey, S; Higgins, I. Thinking French Translation. Routledge, London, 2002, p. 132.
(3) Benjamin, W. The Task of the Translator. In: Illuminations. Pimlico, London, 1999, p.79.
(4) Benjamin, W. Ibid, p. 78.
(5) Derrida, J. (Texts and Discussions with Jacques Derrida) The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation. Ed. Christie McDonald. Bison, Lincoln, 1988, p. 115.
(6) Heidegger, M. Plato’s Sophist. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1997, p. 7.
(7) Cited in: Rodríguez Ponte, R. E. Traducción y Traducción. Notas de la Escuela Freudiana, No. 5, Escuela Freudiana de Buenos Aires, November 1986, p. 25.
(8) Lacan, J. L’acte psychanalytique: Compte rendu du séminaire 1967-1968. In : Autres Écrits. Seuil, Paris, 2001, p. 376.
(9) Lacan, J. Le savoir du psychanalyste, Séminaire 1971-1972, lesson of 2nd December 1971 .
(10) Benjamin, W. Op. cit., p. 79.
(11) Benjamin, W. Op. cit., p. 80.
(12) Segovia, T. Nota del Traductor. In: Lacan, J. Escritos, Siglo XXI, Buenos Aires, 1985.
(13) Lacan, J. Le savoir du psychanalyste, Séminaire 1971-1972, lesson of 2nd December 1971.
(14) Lacan, J. Ibid, p. 30.
(15) Plato. Meno. In: The Collected Dialogues. (Ed. Hamilton, H. and Cairns, H) Bollingen, Princeton, 1961, 380-381.
(16) Lacan, J. Le savoir du psychanalyste : Séminaire 1971-1972, lesson of the 3rd February 1972.
(17) Lacan, J. Ibid, p. 82.
