Book contents
- Frontmatter
- 1 Introduction: the new Durkheim
- Part I: Life, context, and ideas
- 2 Durkheim’s life and context: something new about Durkheim?
- 3 Durkheim’s squares: types of social pathology and types of suicide
- 4 Practices and presuppositions: some questions about Durkheim and Les Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse
- 5 The Durkheimian movement in France and in world sociology
- 6 The inner development of Durkheim’s sociological theory: from early writings to maturity
- 7 What difference does translation make: Les Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse in French and English
- Part II: Symbols, rituals, and bodies
- Part III: Solidarity, difference, and morality
- Further reading
- Index
7 - What difference does translation make: Les Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse in French and English
from Part I: - Life, context, and ideas
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 April 2008
- Frontmatter
- 1 Introduction: the new Durkheim
- Part I: Life, context, and ideas
- 2 Durkheim’s life and context: something new about Durkheim?
- 3 Durkheim’s squares: types of social pathology and types of suicide
- 4 Practices and presuppositions: some questions about Durkheim and Les Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse
- 5 The Durkheimian movement in France and in world sociology
- 6 The inner development of Durkheim’s sociological theory: from early writings to maturity
- 7 What difference does translation make: Les Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse in French and English
- Part II: Symbols, rituals, and bodies
- Part III: Solidarity, difference, and morality
- Further reading
- Index
Summary
Is there a man, learned or unlearned, who will not, when he takes the volume into his hands, and perceives that what he reads does not suit his settled tastes, break out immediately into violent language, and call me a forger and a profane person for having the audacity to add anything to the ancient books, or to make any changes or corrections therein?
St. Jerome (ca. 342-420 ad; as quoted in Glassman 1981: 15)Applied to translation, the phrase “X said” is more remarkable than appears at first glance. It certainly is useful, as just now to quote St. Jerome's exasperated depiction of the translator's work. Even so, to use it is to ignore a half-truth, for the phrase cannot mean what it says. The patron saint of translators composed his one-liner in Latin, while the English words on which I must rely to read it belong to the translator. So “X said” is no more than a shorthand. And as a shorthand, moreover, “X said” obscures what it abbreviates. Two statements of disparate origin, not one, inhabit every translation: what X said and what X has been made to say. Those two statements are forever distinct and variously related. As the first translator, in 1915, of Durkheim's 1912 masterpiece, Les Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse (hereafter Elementary Forms), Joseph Ward Swain invented many statements of the second, made-to-say kind. Re-translating Elementary Forms in 1995, so did I. My own statements, like Swain's, bear different kinds and qualities of relationship to the original. I propose to explore some of the relationships that matter when English is the language in which Elementary Forms is to be read.
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- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to Durkheim , pp. 160 - 180Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2005
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