The Metaphorical Ethics of Translation: Home, Hospitality and Fidelity
For Antoine Berman translation is precisely where “our entire relation to the Other is played
out”.1 It involves nothing less than the encounter of otherness within, and through,
language, and so performs the difficulties, possibilities and contradictions of the task of
finding accommodation for, and with, the other. Its liminal status, operating in a zone
between languages and cultures, grants it a central role in a wide array of human activities,
and it is for these reasons that translation, as a concept and praxis, has come to denote a
crucial “border concept” in contemporary comparative literary and cultural studies,
“affecting some of the most salient intellectual and ethical issues of our time,” as Sandra
Bermann notes.2 This broad understanding of translation, as a register and generator of
dynamics between people(s) is fundamental to the approach that is taken in this paper to the
concept of translation. In other words, it is not thought of in strictly linguistic terms, rather
the intellectual and ethical issues it raises are focused upon. But these, at the same time, are
nothing other than the dynamics of language and communication. What the idea and act of
translation gives us is a way of conceptualising these dynamics; of understanding how the
movement of language moulds and remoulds cultural and intellectual formations. It does this
in particular by performing the inherently metaphorical nature of language. Inscribed within
the play of signifier and signified that takes place in every act of translation is the possibility
of alternative meaning. As such it has a constantly destabilising effect that puts under
question the idea of fixed meaning. In short, translation is a metaphor of metaphor and,
moreover, can only be conceived of through metaphor.
This paper focuses on one of the most potent family of metaphors through which
translation takes its meaning: that of the home and the act of hospitality. Hermeneutic
thinkers such as Ricoeur have seen within the act of translation an ethical model based on
thinking of translation as an act of hospitality. This is a model based on a classification of
different modes of translation; seeing translation as hospitality as an alternative model to,
say, St. Jerome’s vision of translation as a conquering coloniser. This finds expression in
other forms in Translation Studies, such as Venuti’s influential codification of
‘domesticating’ and ‘foreignising’ translations, (metaphors which again speak to the scene of
hospitality). However, when these terms are exposed to poststructuralist thinking (especially
to Derrida’s work), the ethical issues are immediately problematised, as the hostility that is
always already inscribed within hospitality must be considered. In other words, any attempt
to classify ‘good’ and ‘bad’ translations is disrupted, and is replaced by an aporia. Conceived
thus, translation is a “necessary and impossible” act, as Derrida claims, and so the question
of how to act faithfully as a translator is a fraught one.3 But this aporetic moment is precisely
the moment of ethical decision. This is the point at which translators face up to and
negotiate ethical questions, and find a way of coming to terms with the contradictions
involved in any translation, in the knowledge that their interpretations are essentially
temporary and open for revision.
Antoine Berman, The Experience of the Foreign: Culture and Translation in Romantic Germany, S. Heyvaert, trans.,
(New York: State University of New York, 1992), p. 180.
2 Sandra Bermann, ‘Introduction’, in, Sandra Bermann and Michael Wood, eds., Nation, Language and the Ethics of
Translation, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005, pp. 1-10), p. 5.
3 Jacques Derrida, ‘Des Tours de Babel’, in, J. F. Graham, ed., intro. and transl., Difference in Translation, (Ithaca
and London: Cornell University Press, 1985, pp. 165-207), p. 171.
1
This paper takes this problematised scene of translation as a model to suggest that the
ethical issues it raises have a direct salience to how one thinks about the constitution of one’s
‘home’. In other words, it rereads the operations of the metaphor in order to think of home
and hospitality as the scene and performance of translation. In doing this, it proposes that
translation provides an ethical model for understanding how literature operates in the world,
based precisely on a process of destabilising what might be conceived of as fixed concepts.