Abstract
This chapter traces the history of the dichotomy of body and spirit, one of the fundamental tropes of translation. McAlhany takes as his point of departure the encounter between an unpleasant geometer and a translator of Horace narrated in Montesquieu’s pseudotranslated Persian Letters (1721). In this interaction, the geometer uses the trope of body and spirit to deny the possibility of translation, leaving the translator speechless. This encounter leads McAlhany to examine the development of the body/spirit trope in the early accounts of the Septuagint, the translation of the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek. He contrasts Jewish and Greek resistance to translation with the tyrannical “spirit” of translation adopted from the Roman and Christian tradition, and concludes by connecting the silence of Montesquieu’s translator to Benjamin’s oblique understanding of the translator’s task.
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Notes
- 1.
Letter 123 in the 1721 edition, 129 in subsequent editions.
- 2.
All translations, from this and other texts, are my own unless otherwise indicated. For a different translation, see Mauldon (2008: 170–171).
- 3.
Johnson’s (2001) claims that “Plato did not write on translation” (p. 44) and “Socrates does not mention the translator explicitly” (p. 45) thus depend upon a narrow definition of translation.
- 4.
For a translation with a different sense, see Allen (1999: 95).
- 5.
- 6.
Fairclough (1929: 461).
- 7.
Similarly Masskehet Sopherim 1.7, with five translators instead of seventy. Rabbinic literature speaks only of the translation of the Torah, though the tradition eventually expands to include other Hebrew scriptures.
- 8.
Megillah 8b cites one view that the scriptures of the Jews remained sacred only when translated into Greek.
- 9.
In the different accounts of the Septuagint translation, the number of translators is either seventy or seventy-two until the tradition settles on seventy. Philo, however, never mentions the number of translators, and maintains a narrative distance from the miraculous aspects of the story. See Canfora (1996: x).
- 10.
See Johnson (2001: 48–54) for a different comparison of Philo and Augustine on the Septuagint.
- 11.
For a different translation, see Nauckhoff (2001: 82–83).
- 12.
For a different translation, see Lefevere (1992: 169).
- 13.
Benjamin (1923: x): Über den Begriff dieser Genauigkeit wüßte sich jene Theorie freilich nicht zu fassen, könnte also zuletzt doch keine Rechenschaft von dem geben, was an Übersetzungen wesentlich ist.…keine Übersetzung möglich wäre, wenn sie Ähnlichkeit mit dem Original ihrem letzten Wesen nach anstreben würde.
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McAlhany, J. (2017). Montesquieu’s Geometer and the Tyrannical Spirits of Translation. In: Albakry, M. (eds) Translation and the Intersection of Texts, Contexts and Politics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-53748-1_2
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