George SteinerTHE HERMENEUTIC MOTION

The Hermeneutic Motion

The Hermeneutic Motion, the act of elicitation and appropriative transfer of meaning, is fourfold.

trust aggression embodiment restitution

Steiner defines trust as an investment of belief. We grant from the beginning that there is

‘something there’ to be understood. All understanding and its demonstrative

statement (translation) starts with an act of trust.

"But the trust can never be final." "It is betrayed by nonsense by the discovery that there is

nothing there to elicit and translate." "Nonsense rhymes, poesie concrete, glossolalia are

untranslatable because they are lexically non-communicative or deliberately insignificant."

(Steiner 156)

The translator may find that ‘anything’ or ‘almost anything’ can mean ‘everything’.

Or he may find that there is nothing there and every meaning worth expressing is monadic and will not enter into any alternative mould.

AGGRESSION

The second move of the translator is incursive and extractive.

Steiner finds Heidegger’s analysis relevant. "Da-sein, the “thing there”, “the thing that is because

it is there”, only comes into authentic being when it is comprehended, i.e. translated."

(Steiner 157)

"The translator invades, extracts, and brings home." "But again, as in the case of the translator’s trust, there

are genuine borderline cases." "Certain texts or genres have been exhausted by

translation." "There are originals we no longer turn to because the

translation is of a higher magnitude."

(Steiner 157)

INCORPORATION

The incorporation is the embodiment of meaning and form. This is the phase where source text meaning, extracted by

the translator in the second movement, is brought into the target language.

"Acts of translation add to our means; we come to incarnate alternative energies and resources of feeling." (Steiner 158)

"But we may be mastered and made lame by what we have imported. There are translators in whom the vein of personal, original creation goes dry." (Steiner 158)

"The importing of the meaning of the foreign text ‘can potentially dislocate or relocate the whole of the native structure’."(Munday 164)

Balance can be achieved by the fourth movement, the act of compensation.

RESTITUTION

Translation leaves the original with a residue . But the residue is positive.

"The work translated is enhanced." (Steiner 159) Source text’s transfer to another culture broadens the original.

"Genuine translation will, therefore, seek to equalize, though the mediating steps may be lengthy and oblique. Where it falls short of the original, the authentic translation makes the autonomous virtues of the original more precisely visible."

" Where it surpasses the original, the real translation infers that the source-text possesses potentialities, elemental reserves as yet unrealized by itself."

(Steiner 160)

CONCLUSION

"This view of translation as a hermeneutic of trust (élancement), of penetration, of embodiment, and of restitution, will allow us to overcome the sterile triadic model which has dominated the history and theory of the subject."

(Steiner 160) Steiner criticizes the triadic model for: Having no precision or philosophical basis. Overlooking the key fact that a fourfold discourse is

conceptually and practically inherent in even the rudiments of translation.

CRITICISM

Feminist translation theorists such as Simon and Chamberlain criticize the male-dominated view of language.

‘’The model that Steiner provides is presented as gender-free, and yet the whole “thrust” of Steiner’s argument supposes the perspective of masculine sexuality.’’

(Simon 27)

"His model for this act of restitution is, he says, "that of Levi-Strauss's Anthropologie structurale which regards social structures as attempts at dynamic equilibrium achieved through an exchange of words, women, and material goods." Steiner thereby makes the connection explicit between the exchange of women, for example, and the exchange of words in one language for words in another."

(Chamberlain 463)

Jeremy Munday finds Steiner’s references to Chomsky’s generative-transformational grammar as a support for universalist view of language dated.

(167)

WORKS CITED

Chamberlain, Lori. “Gender and the Metaphorics of Translation”. Signs. 13.3 (1988): 454- 472. Jstor. Web. 2 Nov. 2015.

Munday, Jeremy. The Routledge Companion to Translation Studies. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2008. Print.

Simon, Sherry. Gender in Translation: Cultural Identity and the Politics of Transmission. London and New York:

Routledge, 1996. Print. Steiner, George. After Babel: Aspects of Language and

Translation. 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998. Print. Steiner, George. “The Hermeneutic Motion”. Translation

Studies Reader. Ed. Lawrence Venuti. New York: Routledge, 2012. 156-161. Print.