Pragma

When I was angling to review this book, I was told
I could either write between six and eight hundred words or an ‘essay review’ of 2,500 words. I can make do with four: ‘buy it; read it’. What follows is therefore either flattery or padding.

The great beauty of The Philosophy of Translation is the contribution it makes to the understanding of translation as a pragmatic act. Although Damion Searls does not shy clear of translation theory, and the opening chapter is as good a summary as exists of the approaches (‘domesticating’ – yawn, ‘foreignizing’ – sigh) that have historically formed the field of translation studies, he is above all aware that translation happens, and that maybe thinking about the ways in which it does take place is more interesting than establishing a set of hard’n’fasts about how it should take place.

Although this is a largely affable and good-mannered book, it doesn’t pull its punches in making these assertions: Milan Kundera’s idea that translators should aim at ‘strict word-for-word replication’ is a ‘stupid claim’ (or one that is radically foreignizing, if those are the rose-coloured glasses you want to wear); David Bellos’s mischaracterisations of Proust are politely but firmly crunched. But Searls’s general approach – a good one – is to call on sympathetic witnesses (Look at this! Isn’t it interesting? Isn’t it fun?) as he makes his dislocating argument.

And it truly is dislocating. As someone trained in old-school translation studies, with the narrow gauge of my brain formed by Schleiermacher’s fundamental 1813 assertion that ‘either the translator leaves the writer alone as much as possible and moves the reader towards the writer, or he leaves the reader alone as much as possible and moves the writer towards the reader’, there is something refreshing, mind-opening, about Searls’s neat reformulation of translation as a set of spectra rather than a bunch of binaries: I finished the book with my mental timetables torn up, running on new tracks.

Of course, even without its being a curate’s egg, parts of The Philosophy of Translation are better than others. Searls acknowledges it as divided into two halves, ‘the first four chapters providing a history of ideas of translation and most of the philosophical argument, while the last four chapters contain most of the concrete translation examples and a coda’. He claims that ‘one thing that makes translation such an intellectually rich topic is how amenable it is to examples’. This may be the case, and of course it is always more effective to make an argument by appealing to specifics, as Searls shows in his dismantling of the theoreticians’ foreignizing-domesticating tug o’ war. However, the line between example and anecdote is a fine one, and there are points in the second half of the book that feel like party conversation rather than argument. This does not detract from how enjoyable they are (it’s a good party; it’s good conversation), but they don’t noticeably add to the discussion laid out in the book’s first half.  

To call a book The Philosophy of Translation is to invite accusations of a number of things, and Searls addresses them early on: this is not ‘imperious arrogance’ but rather ‘defining a position with as little hedging as possible and offering it to readers so that they can decide what they think of it’. I think this is true: The Philosophy of Translation is a friendly and fundamentally wise book which in its polite fashion unmakes and remakes many of the ways we think and misthink about a subject that has only grown more central over recent years. It is difficult to imagine a better introduction to the topic for the general reader. Buy it; read it.