Introduction

Lawrence Venuti

"What Is a 'Relevant' Translation?" is an English version of a lecture that

Jacques Derrida delivered in 1998 at the fifteenth annual seminar of the
Assises de la Traduction Litteraire a Aries (ATLAS). A French organization with approximately eight hundred members, ATLAS works to
promote literary translation and to protect the status of the literary translator. About two hundred people heard Derrida's lecture, which was subsequently published in the proceedings.' As might be expected from an
audience composed primarily of professional translators, the response
was mixed, a range of variations between two extremes: on the one hand,
the feeling that the lecture was provocative but too theoretical to be of
practical value; on the other hand, the feeling that it was accessible and
pertinent, indeed, an illuminating treatment of translation practices.
Derrida anticipated such responses by acknowledging his audience
in diverse ways. Not only does he open with an elaborate apology for
I would like to thank Richard Sieburth of the Department of Comparative Literature
at New York University for a painstakingly close reading that greatly helped to improve the
translation. Eric Keenaghan of the English Department at Temple University assisted by
checking some references. Dilek Dizdar and Dieter Huber of the Faculty of Applied Linguistics and Cultural Studies at Gutenberg University (Germersheim) invited me to participate in a seminar that Derrida conducted on his lecture, thus creating the occasion that
initiated this project. Kristin Casady copyedited the text of the translation with care and
sensitivity. Derrida generously answered my queries and encouraged some experimental
renderings.
1. Jacques Derrida, "Qu'est-ce qu'une traduction 'relevante'?" QuinziemesAssisesde la
TraductionLitteraire(Arles1998) (Arles, 1999), pp. 21-48.
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? 2001 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/01/2701-0009$02.00.

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speaking about translation to experienced translators, but he avoids a

purely philosophical presentation of his ideas. Although he has frequently addressed the issue of translation, his approach has tended to
take the form of speculation or a commentary on a key text.2 Here he
addresses themes in the history of translation theory, notably the antithesis between "word-for-word" and "sense-for-sense" translation that occupied such writers as Cicero and Jerome. Yet he grounds his remarks in
an incisive interpretation of the role of translation in Shakespeare's The
Merchantof Venice(a text that also formed the basis of a seminar on forgiveness and perjury that he taught the year of the lecture). Derrida's
effort to give specificity to his ideas, to locate suggestive applications, is
perhaps most striking in his exploration of particular translation problems, especially those in which we get a glimpse of him as translator. He
proposes a French version for a line in Portia's speech on "mercy" and
recalls his own French rendering of a central concept in Hegel's dialectics,
the Aufhebung.As a result, this lecture can be considered Derrida's most
direct intervention to date into that fledgling discipline that in Europe
and elsewhere is known as "translation studies." What contribution does
it make, then, to the study of translation?
The idea of a "relevant" translation is not new in translation theory,
even if it has been subject to varying formulations, particularly over the
last three centuries. In 1813, for instance, Friedrich Schleiermacher took
up this idea when he questioned the translator who "leaves the reader
in peace, as much as possible, and moves the author toward him."3 For
Schleiermacher, relevance was questionable because it meant assimilation
or domestication, an erasure of the foreignness of the foreign text by
2. See, for example, Derrida, TheEar of the Other:Otobiography,
Transference,Translation,
trans. Peggy Kamuf, ed. Christie V. McDonald (New York, 1985) and "Des Tours de Babel,"
in Differencein Translation,trans. and ed. Joseph Graham (Ithaca, N.Y., 1985), pp. 165-248.
It is also worth keeping in mind that Derrida's first book was a translation of Edmund
Husserl's LOriginede la geometrie(Paris, 1962). He alludes to this "first attempt" at the beginning of his lecture.
3. Friedrich Schleiermacher, "On the Different Methods of Translating," in Translation/
History/Culture:A Sourcebook,trans. and ed. Andre Lefevere (London, 1992), p. 150.
Schleiermacher's ideas inform the translation ethics developed by Antoine Berman: see Berman's The Experienceof the Foreign:Cultureand Translationin RomanticGermany,trans. S. Heyvaert (Albany, N.Y., 1992), and La Traductionet la lettreou l'aubergedu lointain (Paris, 1999). A
synthesis of Schleiermacher, Berman, and Ezra Pound underlies the formulation of "foreignizing strategies" in my study, The Translator'sInvisibility:A History of Translation(London, 1995).

Lawrence Venuti's latest publications are The Scandalsof Translation:

Towardsan Ethics of Difference(1998), The TranslationStudiesReader (2000),
and the translation of Juan Rodolfo Wilcock's The Templeof Iconoclasts
(2000). He is professor of English at Temple University.

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rewriting it in the terms of the receiving language and culture. In the

twentieth century, however, relevance came to dominate translation theory and practice. Eugene Nida, a theorist who has exercised an international influence on translator training since the 1960s, championed the
concept of "dynamic equivalence" in which the translator "aims at complete naturalness of expression, and tries to relate the receptor to modes
of behavior relevant within the context of his own culture."4 More recently, the branch of linguistics known as pragmatics has spawned an approach wherein the relevant translation communicates an interpretation
of the foreign text through "adequate contextual effects" that take into
account the receptor's "cognitive environment" and therefore require
minimal "processing effort."5
Like Schleiermacher, Derrida questions relevant translation. He calls
attention not only to its ethnocentric violence but also to its simultaneous
mystification of that violence through language that is seemingly transparent because univocal and idiomatic. This view is based on his critique
of the sign. The relevant translation, he writes, "presents itself as the
transfer of an intact signified through the inconsequential vehicle of any
signifier whatsoever." Yet the fact is that any translating replaces the signifiers constituting the foreign text with another signifying chain, trying to
fix a signified that can be no more than an interpretation according to
the intelligibilities and interests of the receiving language and culture.
Unlike Schleiermacher, Derrida sees this practice as inevitable insofar as
every translation participates in an "economy of in-betweenness," positioned somewhere between "absolute relevance, the most appropriate,
adequate, univocal transparency, and the most aberrant and opaque irrelevance." He is acutely aware, moreover, of the cultural and political
implications of relevant translation. His reading of Shakespeare's play
gains enormous interrogative power from his view that "everything in
[it] can be retranslated into the code of translation and as a problem of
translation." Thus he shows how Portia aims to translate Shylock's Judaic
discourse of "justice" into the "merciful" discourse that underwrites the
"Christian State."
Derrida's reading enables-even if it nowhere articulates-an important insight into the social function of translation strategies. In the
history of Western translation, Christianity has favored free domesticating strategies that render the "sense" or "spirit" of the foreign text,
whereas Judaism has been stereotypically associated with literalizing
strategies that render the "word"or "letter."In 1789, when domestication
4. Eugene Nida, Towardsa Scienceof Translating,with Special Referenceto Principlesand
ProceduresInvolvedin Bible Translating(Leiden, 1964), p. 159.
5. For the linguistic theory, see Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, Relevance:Communication and Cognition(Cambridge, Mass., 1986), esp. pp. 13-14, the source of the quotations
in this sentence. For the application of this theory to translation, see Ernst-August Gutt,
Translationand Relevance:Cognitionand Context(Oxford, 1991).

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had already achieved canonicity in English-language translating, George

Campbell's commentary on his version of the Gospels drew this distinction and revealed its anti-Semitic burden: "A slavish attachment to the
letter, in translating, is originally the offspring of the superstition, not of
the Church, but of the synagogue, where it would have been more suitable in Christian interpreters, the ministers, not of the letter, but of the
spirit, to have allowed it to remain."6 True to the stereotype, Shylock insists on a literal translation of the contract, demanding a pound of flesh
for the unpaid debt while refusing the free "merciful" translation that
would absolve his debtor. Yet the Christians adopt an even more rigorous
literalism when Portia insists that, according to the wording of the contract, Shylock can't shed one drop of blood in carving out the pound of
flesh. It is this unexpected Christian rendering of the letter that compels
the Jew to submit to the translation of the hegemonic discourse, Christianity itself.
Thus, no translation strategy can be linked deterministically to a textual effect, theme, cultural discourse, ideology, or institution. Such linkages are contingent upon the cultural and political situation in which the
translation is produced. Literalizing strategies have actually been put to
contrary uses in the history of translation. Among German Romantics
like Schleiermacher, such strategies, while preserving the foreignness of
foreign texts, were intended to construct a homogeneous cultural identity
at home; they served a Prussian nationalist agenda during the Napoleonic wars.7 In the twentieth century, Antoine Berman saw the same strategies in ethical terms, as a discursive gesture of respect for the foreign that
introduces a difference into the translating language and culture.8
Derrida remains unsure about whether to apply the term translation
to his rendering of Portia's line, "when mercy seasons justice." I want to
suggest that it is indeed a translation, although one that exemplifies what
Philip Lewis, influenced by Derrida's thinking, has called "abusive fidelity."9This translation practice, Lewis observes, "values experimentation,
tampers with usage, seeks to match the polyvalencies and plurivocities or
expressive stresses of the original by producing its own." It is demanded
by foreign texts that involve substantial conceptual density or complex
literary effects, namely, works of philosophy and poetry, including Derrida's own writing. This kind of translating is abusive in two senses: it resists
the structures and discourses of the receiving language and culture, especially the pressure toward the univocal, the idiomatic, the transparent,
and in so doing, it interrogates the structures and discourses of the for6. George Campbell, TheFour Gospels,Translated
from the Greek:WithPreliminaryDissertations, and Notes Criticaland Explanatory(London, 1789), pp. 456-57.
7. This critique is presented in Venuti, The Translator's
Invisibility,pp. 99-118.
8. See Berman, La Traductionet la lettre,pp. 69-78.
9. Philip E. Lewis, "The Measure of Translation Effects," in Differencein Translation,
pp. 31-62.

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eign text, exposing its unacknowledged conditions. Thus, Derrida's rendering of the Hegelian Aufhebungas releveturned the French word into a
technical philosophical term and highlighted the contradictions in the
dialectical movement of thinking, "the double motif"-as he puts it"of the elevation and the replacement that preserves what it denies or
destroys."10Similarly, by using releveto render Portia'sverb "seasons," Derrida at once deviates from accepted French versions of Shakespeare and
indicates the assimilative violence involved in translating Shylock's demands into the Christian discourse of mercy.
In translating Derrida's lecture I sought to implement his reflections
on translation, as well as the concepts and practices that those reflections
have inspired in the work of other theorists and translators. This meant
adhering as closely as possible to his French, trying to reproduce his syntax, lexicon, and typography by inventing comparable textual effectseven when they threaten to twist English into strange new forms. The
possibilities, however, are always limited by the structural and discursive
differences between the languages and by the need to maintain a level of
intelligibility and readability, of relevance, for my English-language readers. Many of these readers will be accustomed to reading Derrida in English and will expect to confront a page punctuated by foreign words
and annotations. I have taken advantage of this expectation by inserting
Derrida's French within square brackets where a particular effect could
not be easily achieved in an English rendering. Because this is a lecture
about translation that addresses the question of polylingualism and is itself polylingual to some extent, effectively turning its audience into translators, I have also kept certain words in the original French or German.
Key terms like releve,which Derrida describes as untranslatable, have remained untranslated in most passages. But because releveis the object of
a richly detailed interpretation, I have rendered it expansively in some
instances, making explicit the range of meanings that it accumulates in
Derrida's discussion. Whether my translation is finally relevant, abusive,
or some gradation between, I leave to my readers to consider.

10. See Alan Bass's illuminating comments on Derrida's translation in Derrida, Margins of Philosophy,trans. Bass (Chicago, 1982), pp. 19-20 n. 23.