The Translatability of Cultures: Figurations of the Space Between

Translation between any two languages sets in motion a tug-of-war around those aspects of each language that are least accessible to agreed-upon equivalents, around those aspects of expression and understanding that are unique to a given culture. This struggle - between possession and dispossession, or between reinscription and obliteration - is necessarily perilous for the culture that has less power to retain the usages of its language. Since translation wields powerful forces of cultural change, it is an arena both of the global coercions of national cultures and of the local dominations of everyday others by everyday selves. Thus the ethics of translation are both the ethics of cross-cultural discourse and the unit problem of ethical discourse itself. The fourteen essays in this volume - which consider a wide variety of cultures from ancient Egypt to contemporary Japan - address both sorts of discourse and elucidate the two-way or mutual conditioning of cultural positions as well as the illusions and exclusions created by mutuality. In short, the essays describe the conditions under which cultures that do not dominate each other may yet achieve a limited translatability of cultures.