falling in line

("Revolt is a crumpled page in the waste basket," wrote Reb Tislit. "But, often, a masterpiece is born from this sacrificed page."
And Reb Ezé: "True revolt is the one inspired by the impossibility of ending. God is in perpetual revolt against God."

"In this case, I renounce the God who has sacrificed the smile," said Yukel.)

Silence envelops the city, with its buildings leaning on one another: gigantic boxes, from some of which light gleams through a haphazard opening, maybe from a blow.
He thinks of the various processions he has taken part in, parades, forced marches.
We fall into line and follow.
We do not see the face of those in front, but we know it was once ours.
It is behind this face that we age, that we let time escape, that we take leave.
"I, for my part, belong to a generation without face," said Yukel.

They were the line and the failure.

(Edmond Jabès, from The Book of Questions)

("La révolte est une page froissée dans la corbeille à papier, écrivit Reb Tislit. Mais de cette page sacrifiée, naît souvent le chef-d'oeuvre."
Et Reb Ezé: "La vrai revolte est celle que l'impossible terme anime. Dieu est un perpétuelle révolte contre Dieu."

- Alors, je renie ce Dieu, dit Yukel, qui a sacrifié le sourire.)

Le silence enveloppe la ville avec ses immeubles appuyés l'un à l'autre, énormes boîtes dont certaines brillent de l'intérieur par une ouverture de hasard; un coup reçu, peut-être.
Il songe aux différents défilés auxquels il a participé, aux parades, aux marches forcées.
Nous prenons les rangs and nous suivons.
Nous ne voyons pas le visage de ceux qui nous précèdent mais nous savons qu'il fut une fois le nôtre.
C'est derrière lui que nous vieillissons, que nous laissons échapper le temps, que nous prenons congé.
- Moi, j'appartiens à une génération sans visage, dit Yukel.

Ils étaient la ligne et l'échec.

(Edmond Jabès, Le Livre des Questions)

Comments

[Alain]

Amie, thank you for posting this. I love Jabes. Very cool quote, especially "a generation without a face." There is a sense of revolution betrayed, of fascism and anonymity. But if true revolt is god in continuous revolt with himself, what can we hope for?

[Amie]

Alain, glad you liked the quote. I wondered about how to translate that line about 'a generation without a face.'It can be rendered perhaps more literally and brutally as:
"Me, I belong to a faceless generation."

That's a really great question about god, revolution and hope.
Perhaps one could read that line as meaning that the name Dieu is nothing but a perpetual revolt against everything, itself included, for isn't god everything? Perpetual revolt in that it is not limited to/by the present, ever?

I just remembered that the very last line in Derrida's "Writing and Difference" is a quote from Jabès:

Tomorrow [Demain] is the shadow and reflexibility of our hands [nos mains].
Reb Dérissa

[Matt]

Any chance "échec" could be rendered as "stoppage" or even "bottleneck?" As in the line without movement, or the march as inhibitor to progress, etc. Just thinking of 'tenir qqn en échec' (to hold sb in check) I guess, but say so if I'm completely wrong.

Of course there are a few things said about "un coup" somewhere as well. As well as about "falling..."

[Alain]

Amie, your response evokes Derrida's use of "a venir", the democracy to come, and the future anterior. I like the idea of the present always being self-disrupting, always undoing itself. The hope rests on the fact that no situation is hopeless, that the current coordinates are already contain the seeds of their own demise. Oh gosh, now I sound like Hegel again. I hate when that happens. Anyway, great post.:)

[hugh]

Cool quotation.

Couldn't we read: "La vrai revolte est celle que l'impossible terme anime" as "The real revolt is the one animated by the impossible goal"? So it's not the impossibility as such which is providing the impetus, but rather the goal. (I think this makes a difference.)

And "Dieu est un perpetuelle revolte contre Dieu" could (I think) be "God is a perpetual revolt against God".

[Amie]

Thanks all, really good questions.

Hugh, yes "Dieu est un perpetuelle révolte contre Dieu" can certainly be translated as "God is a perpetual revolt against God" rather than "in perpetual revolt." Why "in" seems good to me is because I think it perhaps underscores that the revolt is not taking place in some abstract or atemporal place. As for the other line "La vrai révolte est celle que l'impossible terme anime", I could certainly consider translating it as the "the revolt animated by the impossible end/limit" but not goal, because the entire sense of the sentence (and of the revolt) seems to me precisely non-teleological.
And non-theological as well, since Dieu in perpetual revolt is nothing but the impossibility of it's own end (terme).

Alain, yes, that's a great connection with JD's the democracy-to-come, and how he always emphasises the l'à-venir in that term. I'm also struck how in the Jabès quote, right after the perpetual revolt, one reads "In this case, I renounce this God who has sacrificed the smile." Does this not mean, no sacrificing the slightest passing singularity, even in the name of God, of perpetual revolt? Doesn't this relate to Derrida's attempt to think justice, the (in)calculable of singularities?

Matt, that's very suggestive about "échec". As you probably know, there's the entire sense of échec in terms of chess of "stalemate", "checkmate", etc.,...
Isn't it great that translation is impossible! and in it's impossibility opens up all sorts of things. If there were some universal language in which everything could be translated without remainder, that really would be checkmate, end.

[Adam Kotsko]

I like tortured overliteralism -- let the reader decide the degree to which God-as-perpetual-revolt-against-God is taking place in an abstract place. I don't know of many other places where un would be translated as "in". So it's not that it could be rendered as "a perpetual revolt against God," but rather that it should.

So similarly, I would say no to terme as "goal" because the Robert gives only one idiom in which terme carries the sense of "goal," out of an entry that takes up an entire column -- mener qch à son terme (bring something to completion, to carry something through [to completion]). There just are not strong connotations of "goal" there.

With La vrai revolte est celle que l'impossible terme anime, I don't know what is added by putting in the passive that's not in the original, nor do I know what you get from "inspired" (again, not among the many options in the Robert) that you couldn't get from "sustained," "animated," "brought to life," "enlivened." "The true revolt is the one that the impossible end animates/brings to life/sustains" -- an immanent thing, not an outer agency, as implied in "inspired."

As I said, though, I am in favor of being as literal as possible, which probably comes from my primary translation experience being Derrida -- and certainly from translating philosophy as opposed to poetry. Yet I do think that it would be possible for you to get closer to the meaning and connotations of the original text than you in fact have, even if a perfect translation isn't possible.

In conclusion, I am an asshole who deserves to die.

[Adam Kotsko]

There were all manner of italics in my previous comment when I typed it -- when I pushed "post," they were gone.

[Mat]

Shit happens, asshole.

[Matt]

Sorry, couldn't help it. I still have ten minutes to complete that "Tuesday" post, I see...

http://www.languagehat.com/archives/002155.php

Well, my experience is with translating poetry, not philosophy, and I agree with you, so there! Take that, Adam Kotsko!

[hugh]

oh, um, that anonymous comment was me, not that it matters...

just out of curiosity, how does one get to comment here w/o any 'marker' at all?

oh, now I see. Fascinating.

Is there really any clear distinction between philosophy and poetry? Despite what Badiou (and the entire academic anti-Holderlin and anti-Celan universe) would say, I mean.

[Adam Kotsko]

Nancy says that the difference between literature and philosophy is that when you're translating literature, you never insert the original in brackets at those untranslatable points.

He might be wrong, however.

[Amie]

Adam, I didn't translate "terme" as goal, if you'd care to notice.
And if I put the sentence in the passive, it is because of the way the passage comes across to me.
Again, as non-teleological: not animated by an end, but by the impossibility of ending. Which is to say, I don't read it as immanent. Sorry. Perhaps you would care to elucidate the meaning(s) of "time" in the passage above, since you think I do not translate them well?

I am all for literalism in translating, but I'm sure you realize that if one is going to be entirely literal, well, there is no translation. So, unlike you, I'd be somewhat circumspect in saying how a phrase *should* be "literally" translated.
Whether it is Derrida or Jabes. Do you really think one can "literally" translate Derrida?

[alphonsevanworden]

Adam, is it not possible that you are so much better a speaker of english than french that you carry english nuance over when reading french? This is kind of a terrible trap with french to english trans.. "Animates" would be disastrously bad here because in American english its sense leans on the vivifying of something dead or increasing the energy in something dull; "sustains" might be okay but lacking and strongly implies in english something else was involved in the generation; (I agree "inspires" is best.) Also, how to get the weight off that adjective - "impossible" - in the english sentence, which it does not carry in the french? In english one risks offering "the impossible end" as one among several choices (possible ends are strongly implied). I like Amie's strongly interpretive translation; it is after all sitting next to the original and offered to mainly anglophone readers with a bit of French; combined the texts approach what a French speaker would get out of the Jabès.

[reverend gisher]

"In conclusion, I am an asshole who deserves to die."

this should be stamped on the backs of coins, so i can feel the raised print with my fingers, and then ignore it, as i continue to count my money."

you would be typing these comments with all due respect to the crown standing over your shoulder, if some folks didn't get off their asses, and actually do something with their talent. all of you folks all seem to have talent i would sell my soul for.(a soul that is nothing more than my illusion and comfort)

[Adam Kotsko]

Amie,

On the one hand, I was disagreeing with your translation of "God is a perpetual revolt against himself." (At the end of the day, my only really serious quarrel with your translation was this sentence.)
On the other hand, I was agreeing with you over against the commenter who suggested "goal" for terme. Re-reading my comment, it does sound like I was offering much more of a global dismissal than I intended to do.

Alphonse,

Yes, that is very possible. I am obviously relying very heavily on a Big Fat Dictionary to try to make up for my relative lack of experience in reading French. Plus, as I kind of said, I'm not as good with poetry as I could be.

Sorry for taking so long to respond.

[Adam Kotsko]

Amie,

Also -- the literal has to be the place to start, in my opinion, or else one tends too much toward paraphrase rather than transition (a distinction that is obviously not possible to sustain in complete rigor, but is still perhaps useful). NOT that you're doing that here (even with "the impossibility of ending" sentence it strikes me as very clearly a translation rather than a paraphrase).

[Adam Kotsko]

transition == translation

[Amie]

Adam, I seem to have done a poor job of trying to clarify some of the questions regarding the translation. Let's see if I can do better, this time around.
Let's begin, before translating literally, by reading the french text à la lettre. As you say, your question is about the following remarkable and vertigo-inducing phrase:

Dieu est un perpétuelle révolte contre Dieu.

In your comment above, you render this as "God is a perpetual revolt against himself." Proceeding à la lettre, where do you get "himself"? It is precisely such a translation that I wished to avoid, by not using "a" for "un", for it seems to me to obliterate the sense of the phrase. Let me try to explain. Read literally, does the french phrase refer to an entity, a substance that is God? Rather, doesn't the name Dieu in the phrase designate nothing but perpétuelle révolte? And how could such a revolt refer to a self-identical substance when it is perpetual and is not limited to/by a present, such that the "est" in the phrase "is" torn asunder. You will have noted that the name Dieu is repeated twice, at the beginning and end of the phrase. But if it re-marks nothing but perpetual revolt, it is precisely what makes the phrase without beginning or end. What is a phrase without a beginning or a full-stop to close it, bring it to an end? The name Dieu not only refers to perpetual revolt, it renders the phrase that remarks it impossible to close.
Then there is the question of how to translate "contre". More so than"against" which has a somewhat static sense, contre implies a sense of movement. So, it is in order to "carry across" ( or translate ) something of this that I tried: "God is in perpetual revolt against God."

On the question of translation 'beginning' with literality, yes, where else to begin? But how to cross - literally - the border from a language to another? A la lettre, un is not a, to say nothing of Dieu...

[Adam Kotsko]

Amie, Yes, I misquoted when I said "himself." I *still* think that "God is a perpetual revolt against God" is a better translation than "God is in...," because Jabes seems to me to be saying that God *is the revolt itself.* That gets lost when you toss in the "in." So it's not just a slavish literalism -- I don't think that your phrase is saying quite what Jabes's phrase is saying, i.e., is not interpreting Jabes quite right on this point. And I don't think that a translation that says, with Jabes, that God is the revolt is going to wind up being any more or less "static" than the translation that you gave.

So while I think that your reasoning in support of your translation is correct as an interpretation of Jabes, I don't think it necessarily ends up supporting your translation over against what we will provisionally call a "more literal" one, and that you're jumping way too quickly into these rarified conceptual regions of the aporias of translation when this particular case is not particularly difficult. _Especially_ since I'm pretty sure the option of saying "God is in perpetual revolt..." would have been available to Jabes -- if that's what he had wanted to say, he could have said it. If someone with more experience with French could correct me here, that would be great, but I would be very surprised.

But seriously, if I didn't make this clear: the rest of the translation is good. The "impossibility of ending" line is harder than the line we're primarily discussing, and on further reflection, I totally agree with your choices there.

I used to do a weekly translation attempt on my site, and I think it would be great if you would consider doing something like this more often. In fact, you could probably search the archives of my site for "Thursday Translation Attempt" if you wanted to derive some pleasure from how much I sucked at first.

[Amie]

Hey Adam, I'm going to try and make this my last comment on this subject, as I am likely only repeating what I've already said, and also because I am truly fascinated by 'questions of translation' and could easily go on forever, thereby driving everyone nuts. Anyway, appreciate the discussion and if anyone else wants to chime in that would be welcome. So, one more time:
You write, "Jabes seems to me to be saying that God *is the revolt itself*". This is where we differ in our reading of the french phrase. I do not find any reference to an "itself" in the phrase, "something" that is in revolt against "itself". Instead, I think, Dieu names - and repeats ( the word Dieu is repeated in the phrase ) - nothing but a movement of perpetual revolt. Also, I think the word "contre" is critical.
OK, I'll stop. But it's nice to have a chance to discuss translation.

[alphonsevanworden]

Compromise?:

"God revolts perpetually against God."