Book contents
3 - The pleasures of mistranslation
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
Summary
In German Hasidism, it is the word rather than the alphabetic sign whose hidden sense and unaltered preservation are of extreme importance. To mutilate a single word in the Torah, to set it in the wrong order, might be to imperil the tenuous links between fallen man and the Divine presence. Already the Talmud had said: ‘the omission or the addition of one letter might mean the destruction of the whole world.’ Certain illuminati went so far as to suppose that it was some error of transcription, however minute, made by the scribe to whom God had dictated holy writ, that brought on the darkness and turbulence of the world.
George Steiner, After BabelIn 1975, the year when Lacan began his seminar on Joyce, there was at least one other significant transcription between French thought and Anglophone literary culture: the appearance in English translation of a brief work by Roland Barthes entitled The Pleasure of the Text. Barthes's book posed some tricky problems for the translator, the most troublesome of which, as Richard Howard comments in a prefatory note, being to find a single English term to render jouissance. The lack of a suitable English equivalent for this word – which in modern French encompasses a range of senses of enjoyment or possession, from rarefied appreciation to sexual orgasm – leads Howard to the rather gloomy conclusion that, in English, ‘the nomenclature of active pleasure fails us’.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- James Joyce and the Problem of Psychoanalysis , pp. 55 - 72Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004