On an Exact Art (Again)

There is an a priori leap which precedes every act of translation; there are assumptions/presumptions, usually unexamined, of “translatability.” We take it that the text in front of us can be, more or less exhaustively, deciphered and transferred. This axiomatic motion is based on philosophic and formal expectations together with pragmatic evidence. The epistemological premises are at once so thoroughly internalized and so diffuse that we hardly bother to elicit or examine them. Thus translation may be said to proceed from bases of more or less occult conventionality. Mathematicians after Frege and Russell would say the same with regard to certain branches of their own arts; the thing works though its foundations are unstable or elusive. But I want to see whether we can bring to partial light at least the substance, the authority of the a priori foundations of “semantic trust” which underwrite—the analogy with insurance, with validation is here instrumental—the actual business of translation.

In the daily practice of translation, the sum of empirical evidence, of “pragmatics,” is, self-evidently, the most telling. We have sound reasons to suppose that the translation of messages between languages has been a fact of human communication and co-existence since “Babel.” The self-evidence of this historical finding is so compelling that we elide the question whether the “Babel postulate”—the ubiquitous myth of the punitive fragmentation of a single primal tongue, the ubiquitous evocation of an Eden prior to translation—was devised in order to give to translation the necessity, the dignity of a cosmic origin, or, on the contrary, whether the myth follows long after the bitter perception of mutual incomprehensibility. We do not pose this categorically unanswerable question but proceed from the manifest immensity of the corpus of interlingual exchanges as we know them since the beginnings of history.