What is a "relevant" translation?

Critical Inquiry

Volumn 27, Issue 2, 2001, Pages 174-200

  Derrida, Jacques ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 33645269369     PISSN: 00931896     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/449005     Document Type: Review

References (4)

1. See Jacques Derrida, Ulysse Gramophone, deux mots pour Joyce (Paris, 1987). [An English translation of Derrida's text is available in Post-structuralist Joyce: Essays from the French, ed. Derek Attridge and Daniel Ferrer (Cambridge, 1984) TRANS.]
2. If one reflects on Jakobson's classification, only interlinguistic translation (the operation that transfers from one language to another and to which one most often refers as translation in the proper or strict sense) is governed by the economy I have described and, within it, by the unit of the word. Neither intralinguistic translation nor intersemiotic translation is governed by a principle of economy or above all by the unit of the word. [Derrida is referring to Roman Jakobson's famous essay, "On Linguistic Aspects of Translation," On Translation, ed. Reuben Brower (Cambridge, Mass., 1959), pp. 232-39, rpt. in The Translation Studies Reader, ed. Lawrence Venuti (London, 2000), pp. 113-18 TRANS.]
3. I have just alluded to the navy. Well, then, Joseph Conrad, for example, writes in "The Secret Sharer": "I would get the second mate to relieve me at that hour"; then "I ... returned on deck for my relief." [Joseph Conrad, "The Secret Sharer," (1910; New York, 1981), pp. 139, 149.]
4. See Walter Benjamin, "The Task of the Translator," Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York, 1968), pp. 69-82, esp. pp. 71-73. For Derrida's commentary on Benjamin's concepts, see "Des Tours de Babel," (trans. Joseph Graham) in Difference in Translation, ed. Graham (Ithaca, N.Y., 1985). Zohn's translation contains significant errors that have been described by Steven Rendall in his "Notes on Zohn's translation of Benjamin's 'Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers,'"TTR: Traduction Terminologie Rédaction, no. 10 (1997):191-206. Rendall offers an alternative translation of the essay in the same issue (pp. 151-65). The German text appears in Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, 7 vols. in 14 (Frankfurt am Main, 1974-89) 4:1:7-21TRANS.]