What Is Cultural Translation?

Bloomsbury Advances in Translation Series

Series Editor: Jeremy Munday, Centre for Translation Studies, University of Leeds, UK

Bloomsbury Advances in Translation Studies publishes cutting-edge research in the fields of

translation studies. This field has grown in importance in the modern, globalized world, with
international translation between languages a daily occurrence. Research into the practices, processes
and theory of translation is essential and this series aims to showcase the best in international
academic and professional output.

Other titles in the series:

Community Translation
Mustapha Taibi and Uldis Ozolins
Corpus-Based Translation Studies
Edited by Alet Kruger, Kim Wallmach & Jeremy Munday
Global Trends in Translator and Interpreter Training
Edited by Séverine Hubscher-Davidson & Michał Borodo
Music, Text and Translation
Edited by Helen Julia Minors
Quality In Professional Translation
Joanna Drugan
Retranslation
Sharon Deane-Cox
The Pragmatic Translator
Massimiliano Morini
Translation, Adaptation and Transformation
Edited by Laurence Raw
Translation and Translation Studies in the Japanese Context
Edited by Nana Sato-Rossberg & Judy Wakabayashi
Translation as Cognitive Activity
Fabio Alves & Amparo Hurtado Albir
Translating For Singing
Mark Herman & Ronnie Apter
Translation, Humour and Literature
Edited by Delia Chiaro
Translation, Humour and the Media
Edited by Delia Chiaro
Translating the Poetry of the Holocaust
Jean Boase-Beier
What Is Cultural Translation?
SARAH MAITLAND

Bloomsbury Academic
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
 Contents

Preface
Introduction: The urgency of cultural translation
1 Interpretation
2 Distanciation
3 Incorporation
4 Transformation
5 Emancipation
Conclusion: Cultural translation: Saving us from ourselves?

Bibliography
Index
 Preface

My intention in this book is twofold: to develop the first in-depth definition of the evocative and yet
frustratingly abstruse concept of cultural translation, and with it, to advance an argument for the
relevance of translation thinking to our understanding of how we live and work in globalized
societies confronted increasingly with the presence of difference in all its forms – different
ideologies, different modes of being and different modes of living and acting in the world. In a more
specific sense, my aim is to demonstrate the critical dimension inherent in my approach to cultural
translation – that is, its capacity to serve as a vehicle for new ways of seeing and being that enable us
to question the received ideas that structure the worlds in which we live. My argument is that it is
through ‘text’ in its broadest understanding – through the traditions, inscriptions and institutions of
culture and society – that we communicate our being in the world. In a hermeneutic sense, to ‘read’
the world as if it were a text is to understand something of how our being is constructed and what this
implies about being alive. By looking to the practice of interlingual translation, as the purposeful
means by which a text written originally in one language is made meaningful in a new time and place
to an audience that speaks another, we discover complementary attitudes of explanation and
understanding, interpretation and transformation analogous to the act of reading. My model thus
construes translation both as the means for exploring the sociocultural phenomena of the world around
us and, in turn, as a route to understanding in the world.
Over the course of five chapters I have attempted to trace cultural translation processes at work in
a wide range of everyday social and cultural contexts, from the production and reception of Internet
memes in Chapter 1, to acts of memorialization in Chapter 2 and mapping strategies in Chapter 3. In
Chapter 4, I tackle political satire and resistance movements and in Chapter 5 my concern is to
explore how cultural translation can be operationalized for emancipatory purposes in the critique of
ideology. Across each of these chapters, the interpretive framework behind the process of interlingual
translation provides the critical lens through which to examine processes of understanding between
different ideologies, different modes of being and different modes of living and acting in the world,
where ‘translation’ serves as the means both to advance and to contest meaning.
 Introduction
The urgency of cultural translation

To say that Europe is in a perpetual state of crisis appears to make light of the successive horrors of
war, genocide, terrorism, ethnic cleansing and economic collapse. But it is simply to observe that
despite the economic union of states that emerged from the Second World War, we do not, in our
present configuration, enjoy a sense of political or social union. Although battles between European
member states are now fought across boardroom tables, between diplomats, civil servants and heads
of government, ideological division appears to be more prevalent now than ever. As I write this, the
battle lines have once again been drawn and this time division in Europe is over the question of
immigration. Of course, this is a question that has divided European member states for some time, not
least following the outbreak of civil war in Syria and military intervention in Iraq, Afghanistan and
Libya. According to the UNHCR, the majority of the 137,000 people who crossed the Mediterranean
Sea into Europe during the first six months of 2015 were fleeing from war, conflict or persecution.
One-third of the people who arrived safely by sea to the shores of Italy or Greece during this period
were from Syria; the second and third most common countries of origin are Afghanistan and Eritrea
(UNHCR, 2015). But the harrowing spectacle of mutilated bodies washed up on the shores of the
Aegean and the Mediterranean, capsized dinghies, the erection of razor-wire fences, changes to
border policy and refugees sewing their lips shut in protest gives the impression of nothing short of a
crisis. In our debating chambers, in our newspapers, on our radios, on social media and on our
television screens, some of the most urgent questions of our time are now being asked. To what extent
do European member states have a responsibility towards refugees and, if so, how should this
responsibility be enacted? How should the economic and social cost of responsibility be shared out
more equally among the countries of Europe so that the greatest burden is not borne by only the
countries of first arrival? How many refugees should each country take? By what criteria should these
numbers be reached? What standards of care should states provide to refugees while their cases are
being processed? The questions go on and on. But while state organs grapple with these questions and
the fourth and fifth estates of the media and Internet become the battleground of debate, for the
thousands of refugees who have reached Europe safely, only to find themselves stranded without
access either to asylum procedures or to basic humanitarian services as a result of new border
controls, the real debate is about how we imagine other people, the extent of their suffering and our
duty to act upon it.
Somewhere in the acres of column inches filled by this public debate we witness the attempt to
conjoin two mutually antithetical orientations that Rorty identified with regard to writing: those who
write in the pursuit of self-created private perfection and autonomous human life such as Kierkegaard,
Nietzsche and Heidegger and those writing in favour of the shared, social effort to make our
institutions and practices more just and less cruel, as exemplified by Marx, Habermas and Rawls.
Rorty believed fervently that there is no way in which philosophy or any other theoretical discipline
can ever let us create a more comprehensive philosophical outlook that would somehow combine
within a single vision self-creation and private perfection with justice and human solidarity. We can
certainly attempt to create just and free societies where citizens are free to be as privatistic as
possible, as long as they do so on their own time and cause no harm to others by depleting important
resources. But at the level of theory he saw no real way to bring justice and self-creation together, for
the vocabulary of self-creation is private and, by necessity, unsuited to argument, while the
vocabulary of justice is necessarily public, a medium for argumentative exchange (Rorty, 1989, p.
xiv).
If we could accept the fact that no theory can synthesize Heidegger with Habermas, he wrote, we
might start to see the relationship between writers on autonomy and writers on justice as something
similar to the relationship between different kinds of work tools – as little in need of synthesis as a
paintbrush and a crowbar. Instead, Rorty’s project in Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (1989) was
to show how things would look if we dropped the demand for a single unifying theory of the public
and the private and instead contented ourselves to view self-creation and human solidarity as equally
valid but forever incommensurable ideals. He sketches the figure of the ‘liberal ironist’, where
‘liberal’ refers, as in Shklar’s conceptualization, to those people who think that cruelty is the worst
thing that we do, and ‘ironist’ to the people who face up to the contingency of their beliefs and desires
– people who know, with historicists, that beliefs and desires are not transcendental but situated
socially, culturally and historically:
Liberal ironists are people who include among these ungroundable desires their own hope that suffering will be diminished, that the
humiliation of human beings by other human beings may cease. For liberal ironists, there is no answer to the question ‘Why not be
cruel?’ – no noncircular theoretical backup for the belief that cruelty is horrible. Nor is there an answer to the question ‘How do you
decide when to struggle against injustice and when to devote yourself to private projects of self-creation?’ This question strikes
liberal ironists as just as hopeless as the questions ‘Is it right to deliver n innocents over to be tortured to save the lives of m x n
other innocents?’ or the question ‘When may one favor members of one’s family, or one’s community, over other, randomly chosen,
human beings?’ Anybody who thinks that there are well-grounded theoretical answers to this sort of question – algorithms for
resolving moral dilemmas of this sort – is still, in his heart, a theologian or a metaphysician. He believes in an order beyond time and
change which both determines the point of human existence and establishes a hierarchy of responsibilities. (Rorty, 1989, p. xv)

In Rorty’s liberal utopia, ironism is universal and post-metaphysical, where human solidarity is
construed not as a fact to be perceived once prejudice has somehow been abolished or by drilling
down into previously hidden depths of human interconnectedness:
It is to be achieved not by inquiry but by imagination, the imaginative ability to see strange people as fellow sufferers. Solidarity is
not discovered by reflection but created. It is created by increasing our sensitivity to the particular details of the pain and humiliation
of other, unfamiliar sorts of people. Such increased sensitivity makes it more difficult to marginalize people from ourselves by
thinking, ‘They do not feel it as we would,’ or ‘There must always be suffering, so why not let them suffer?’ This process of coming
to see other human beings as ‘one of us’ rather than as ‘them’ is a matter of detailed descriptions of what unfamiliar people are like
and of redescription of what we ourselves are like. This is a task not for theory but for genres such as ethnography, the journalist’s
report, the comic book, the docudrama, and, especially, the novel. (p. xvi, original emphasis)

In the sort of historicizing culture Rorty envisages, the sermon and the treatise are replaced with the
novel, the film and the television programme as the principal vehicles of moral change, rejecting
theorization that would signal all sides of life within a single vision and vocabulary in favour of
narratives that simultaneously connect the present with the past and with the possibility of different
futures. I dwell on this utopian vision – in which the drive to better imagine the suffering of the other
is fulfilled by treating the exigencies of private autonomy and human solidarity as coequal
incommensurables, where solidarity is not a state to be ‘achieved’ in the sense of an end to be arrived
at through better theory, and in which, as one assumes is the project of all theorization, the desire to
achieve better reflection is a deliberate stance to be taken – because it is a vision that animates the
definition of cultural translation I elaborate over the course of this book. Its guiding principle is the
belief that no form of communication – whether word or deed – exists outside the spatiotemporally
constructed domain of human creation. As Rorty maintains, we need to make a distinction between the
claim that the world is out there and the claim that the ‘truth’ is out there. To say that the world is out
there is to affirm the existence of many things in space and time that are the effects of causes other
than human mental states. Not all of the world results from human creation. But to describe the world,
to put the world around us into sentences, is to enter into something other than truth, for while
descriptions of the world can be verified as true or false, the world itself cannot. The world does not
speak, people do.
If the communication of the contents of the mind is contextually contingent – if, in other words, the
things we say and do communicate only our unique construction of the particular time and space in
which we find ourselves – then when human beings communicate with one another, whether directly
or indirectly, we participate in mutually assured regimes of constructedness by which nothing in the
world can be spoken of and nothing can be said that does not already exist outside of our own modes
of construction. Communication is not the transmission of ‘meaning’, in this sense, but its very
creation. To understand one another is to enter into forms of dialogue that result in some form of
mutually satisfactory agreement as to the ‘meaning’ of what is said. It is to step outside the safety of
our spatiotemporally contingent domain of understanding in which the world makes sense to me and
to acknowledge the way in which the world appears to someone else. This realization, that others
exist and that they construct the world differently, serves to repudiate not just the continuity of
meaning from one context to another but, more important, the assumption that the world of others is
either the same as or can be subsumed to my own. To recognize that others construct the world
differently is to recognize the existence of difference in others and myself, both as a bearer of
difference and as another ‘other’ myself. By acknowledging the constructedness of the world of
human descriptions, to employ Rorty’s vocabulary, I simultaneously valorize the others around me as
bearers of constructedness of their own and I rid myself of some of the self-confidence with which I
might presume to know the truth of the world.
If every being constructs the world according to their own experience of it, then in interacting with
the other beings of the world we cannot assume that communication will result in our seeing the
world in precisely the same way. We imagine one another through a glass, darkly, not between
boundaries of difference, but across them, constantly imagining others and the world around us while
others do the same to us and to the world around them. Within this infinite Venn diagram of
interconnected imaginations, we start not from the assumption of separate cultural contexts from
which we speak and into which we retreat after we have done so, but from a position of constant and
mutual construction. In other words, we understand the world not directly but through our
understanding of other people. We exist not in separate contexts but from a place in which our relation
with others secures our very existence. If we are constructing-beings in a world of constructing-
others, then the worldview that we hold is simply one worldview among many. If it is always in the
penumbra that we understand others, then by exposing ourselves to the perceptual lacunae that
separate us from the world and the others within it, we escape the limits of the familiar, the confines
of our own subjectivity, and are required to open ourselves up to unfamiliar others, to alien worlds
and unknown ideas. By reaching outwards to revisit what we think we know and understand about the
world around us we are also required to revisit what we think we know and understand about
ourselves.
This was the sense in which Ricoeur looked to translation as an ethical model for the hospitality of
otherness in a European context. He wrote that to translate a foreign culture into the categories
peculiar to one’s own presupposes one’s prior transference into the cultural milieu governed by the
ethical and spiritual categories of the other. In other words, for successful translation to the local, we
must place ourselves in the foreign other’s shoes, acknowledging the other’s existence as a thinking,
feeling, constructing being and, simultaneously, our inability to understand these constructions.
Through this empathetic gesture, not by which we would claim to ‘understand’ the other, but by which
we would acknowledge them precisely as bearers of that which we do not understand, Ricoeur
maintained that we could start to view the identity of groups, cultures, people and nations not as
immutable substances or as fixed structures to be accepted or rejected, but instead as ‘recounted
stories’ from which we would receive a sense of ‘narrative’ identity which is at base, mobile:
If each of us receives a certain narrative identity from the stories which are told to him or her, or from those that we tell about
ourselves, this identity is mingled with that of others in such a way as to engender second order stories which are themselves
intersections between numerous stories. Thus, the story of my life is a segment of the story of your life; of the story of my parents,
of my friends, of my enemies, and of countless strangers. (Ricoeur, 1996, p. 6)

By remembering that our ‘story’ – our identity, what we say and do – is an amalgam and is neither
original, nor primary, we renounce the idea of a fixed ‘truth’ and with it the implacability of the
ideologies by which we organize our realities, for it is through stories revolving around others and
around ourselves that we articulate and shape our own temporality. Behind Ricoeur’s approach lies a
lesson on the suspension of judgement about what we can understand of the world through direct
perception, requiring of us instead to explore indirect routes of understanding:
To communicate at the level where we have already conducted the work of translation, with its art of transference and its ethics of
linguistic hospitality, calls for this further step: that of taking responsibility, in imagination and in sympathy, for the story of the other,
through the life narratives which concern that other. This is what we learn to do in our dealings with fictional characters with whom
we provisionally identify through reading. These mobile identifications contribute to the reconfiguration of our own past and that of
the past of others, by an incessant restructuring of stories that we tell, some of them about others. But a more profound engagement
is required by the transition from the level of fiction to that of historical reality. It is not of course a matter of actually reliving the
events that happened to others; the inalienable character of life experiences renders this chimerical ‘intropathy’ impossible. More
modestly, but also more energetically, it is a matter of exchanging memories at the narrative level where they are presented for
comprehension. A new ethos is born of the understanding applied to the complex intertwining of new stories which structure and
configure the crossroads between memories. (pp. 6–7)

Importantly, however, storytelling is above all an act of interpretation, for as Benjamin reminds us,
the storyteller frames the stories she tells according to her understanding of them, ‘amplifying’ the
information she conveys through the narrative she unfolds: ‘It does not aim to convey the pure essence
of the thing, like information or a report. It sinks the thing into the life of the storyteller, in order to
bring it out of him again. Thus traces of the storyteller cling to the story the way the handprints of the
potter cling to the clay vessel’ (Benjamin, 1999, p. 91). Every understanding in the world is thus
actively interpretive, in the sense that everything we write and say about the world means more or
less something other than it says. Life is not one continuous story, recounted teleologically from one
point to another and exegesis, whether within one language or between several, is both embodied and
historical.
We cannot stand outside the subjectivity of our embodiment and we cannot remove ourselves from
our own historicity when we speak, write and interpret. The model of translation which so fascinated
Ricoeur simultaneously recognizes and articulates difference, for it is not just about the perception of
difference, the cognitive negotiation into which one enters in one’s mind; it is the importation of this
difference, the articulation of it from one’s own perspective, for at base, translation subsumes the
difference of the alien into the own. With this comes the possibility of failure. By necessity the
articulation of another’s experience in one’s own words requires the importation of other ideas,
other viewpoints, other worldviews. But we always transform irrevocably that which we perceive,
because we must necessarily reframe it from our own point of view. To identify with another is to
‘assimilate’ them – to make similar that which is other to us. The point is that we do so in the
knowledge both that the other is also doing the same to us and that our articulations can never grasp
the other wholesale. This is enough to unseat us from the implacability of our worldview. Through
translation, we exchange memories and confront traditions different from our own and so imagine the
other with empathy for their story. Or, to put it another way, difference is what refuses translation, but
it is also that which makes translation possible.
Hermeneutics, as elaborated by Ricoeur, is the ‘art’ of interpretation that questions the limits of our
interpretation, a form of understanding that is not simply a way of knowing or a method of analysis but
an ontological imperative: to understand who we are and where we stand before the object-for-
interpretation. We speak of hermeneutic ‘enquiry’ precisely because understanding is not a given.
Understanding is only a possibility; it is not something we achieve but a journey we undertake and it
is one that does not leave us unchanged. As we enter into thoughtful encounter with another,
interpretation is a high-risk, high-yield strategy, because we transform something of ourselves along
the way. As Simms observes:
To read, then, is to do hermeneutics, and to do hermeneutics is to understand ourselves – to understand, among other things, that our
being is such that it can only be fulfilled by doing hermeneutics. This circular argument is yet another variation of the hermeneutic
circle, but its circularity does not make it pointless, unless we want to say that life is pointless – it is what we do in life, insofar as we
are constantly interpreting the world around us in order to understand that our raison d’être is to interpret the world around us in
order to understand it. It is the constant renewal of this circular journey, with all its imaginative variations on the theme, that makes
life worthwhile. (Simms, 2003, p. 42)

We exist insofar as we interpret; we gain life by engaging in the conflict of interpretations.

Consciousness, a sense of self-awareness, a sense of being in the world, is thus not the first reality
we achieve but the last. For these reasons, interpretation is the first step towards critique – of the
beliefs and actions of others and our own:
We see immediately how translation constitutes a model which is suited to the specific problem that the construction of Europe
poses. First, at the institutional level, it leads us to encourage the teaching of at least two living languages throughout the whole of
Europe in order to secure an audience for each of the languages which is not in a dominant position at the level of communication.
But, above all, at a truly spiritual level, it leads us to extend the spirit of translation to the relationship between the cultures
themselves, that is to say, to the content of meaning conveyed by the translation. It is here that there is need of translators from
culture to culture, of cultural bilingualists capable of attending to this process of transference to the mental universe of another
culture, having taken account of its customs, fundamental beliefs and deepest convictions; in short of the totality of its significant
features. In this sense we can speak of a translation ethics whose goal would be to repeat at the cultural and spiritual level the
gesture of linguistic hospitality mentioned above. (Ricoeur, 1996, p. 5)

The act of translation, by necessity, broadens our horizons; it means living with difference and living
with failure. It means acknowledging the co-equal incommensurables that separate us. But because it
also enables us to envisage and embrace that which we did not previously imagine, translation is
about self-transformation. As with Rorty’s warning about the paintbrush and the crowbar, this does
not mean that foreign practices, other ideas, beliefs, traditions and ideologies can always be
integrated successfully into the familiar. But perhaps it is enough to acknowledge their
incommensurability and to place our focus firmly on the relationship it opens up between us. We take
responsibility in life precisely when we recognize both that understanding is always partial and that it
is only through reflection – by imagining outwards towards that which we do not understand – that we
learn something about ourselves. Translation is as much about recognizing the limits of our own
understanding as it is about overcoming them, for implied in the translational gesture of reaching
outwards is the simultaneous recognition of the fallibility of our knowledge and our need to reach
outwards anyway. To ‘imagine’ the other is to recognize that they are the bearer of positions
potentially antithetical to our own; that these are co-equal with our own and the two are
incommensurable. What appears to be a translational cul-de-sac in Ricoeur’s conceptualization,
therefore, is in fact precisely what is needed. As Nancy notes,
‘To be exposed’, means to be ‘posed’ in exteriority, according to an exteriority, having to do with an outside in the very intimacy of
an inside. Or again: having access to what is proper to existence, and therefore, of course, to the proper of one’s own existence,
only through an ‘expropriation’ whose exemplary reality is that of ‘my’ face always exposed to others, always turned toward an
other and faced by him or her, never facing myself. (Nancy, 1991, pp. xxxvii–xxxviii, original emphasis)

When construed as social practice, the describing activities of human beings, as Rorty would say,
become constructions to be read and engaged with. In this conceptualization ‘translation’ is so much
more than that which we produce when we undertake to communicate the contents of a text written in
one language for the benefit of an audience that speaks another. Translation is the social practice of
embracing the existence of the other. We understand the world from the self outwards; one self among
many others, human existence but the interaction of myriad selves across borders of difference. In the
sense that it is both essential and prior to the communication of meaning, translation is in fact primary
to that effort – it is quite simply what we do in social life and it is in translation, in other words, that
we live.
It is with this foundation in hermeneutic philosophy that I sketch my definition of cultural
translation, both the process by which we disclaim the notion that understanding is intrinsic and the
means by which we contest ideology. My aim here will be to trace the contours of Ricoeur’s
philosophical hermeneutics and to discuss some of the questions it raises, with particular reference to
what we think we know and understand of the practice of translation and the realization of resistance
in the world. In this vein, I will neglect many of Ricoeur’s other philosophical contributions on
discourse, narrative and metaphor and so forth in the hope that the broad availability of his material
in a range of different languages vitiates the need for an introductory overview here. Hermeneutics in
Ricoeur’s theory concerns the rules required for the interpretation of the written documents and
human actions of our culture and construes the communication of the contents of the mind as a process
analogous to the reading of a text. By ‘reading’ human action as we would a text we reveal something
about how meaning is constructed and how we communicate ourselves as beings in the world.
My first principle with regard to defining cultural translation is that as a hermeneutic enterprise par
excellence the translational model represents the practical outworking of Ricoeur’s theorization. By
this I mean that a translator is, in the first instance, a reader of a text. And, as such, is engaged in the
complex process of understanding something that, by definition, refuses to be understood. This
‘something’ is a text written in another language, in another time, in another place and for the benefit
of another audience. It is the translator’s job to understand this text and write it in yet another
language, for another audience, in another time and in another place. But the text does not speak. The
translator must read at a remove, for the text-for-translation has been written by an author now
deceased or inaccessible. The author’s ‘intention’ for the text now no longer animates its meaning in
the here and now of reading. Even where the author remains and is accessible to the translator, the
inherent plurivocity a text enjoys as soon as it is released into the interpretive wild means that
‘meaning’ always remains something other than what the author intended. It cannot be found by
seeking out the author. It must be ‘guessed’. Translation is based primarily on a translator’s cognitive
engagement with a piece of writing, on the one hand, and with the needs, knowledges, expectations
and perceptual lacunae of an audience who will receive the translation, on the other. To understand
the hermeneutics of translation, therefore, is to understand that the primary dialectics at work in
translation are those between the translator-qua-reader and the text-for-translation and the translator-
qua-writer and an audience. My definition of cultural translation is therefore concerned as much with
interpreting the objects of the world as ‘source texts’ with which we each can and should engage as it
is with the communication of this interpretation towards an eventual audience.
Within this model, the process of cultural translation comprises five broad dimensions mapped to
each of the five chapters of this book: the interpretation of a plurivocal ‘text’ to be understood; an act
of reading across a distance of time and space; the incorporation of the text within the sociocultural
context of the translator; the transformation of meaning for a purpose; the emancipation of the
translator as a reader. For Ricoeur, the textual model of interpretation was only just the beginning. By
highlighting the moral and political character of our decision-making in the social sphere, Ricoeur
created a framework for the interpretation, analysis and criticism of social action and institutions
based on the lessons of textual interpretation and aimed at bringing about a democratic society. As
with Ricoeur, who saw philosophical reflection, critique and liberation as inseparable, and whose
critical theory was aimed at personal and social transformation, my approach to cultural translation is
imagined as critical – in the sense that it seeks both to identify the limits of human understanding and
to uncover and oppose domination, exploitation and oppression. With Ricoeur, my approach to
cultural translation is interested in the ethical dilemmas posed when texts, human actions and human
productions exercise power over people. If, at base, hermeneutics is what we do in life, cultural
translation is the purposeful orientation of the hermeneutic dimension of life towards meaningful
action and the transformation of the interpreting self. This book represents the first attempt to
locate cultural translation at the heart of human communication, as the means by which we produce
and engage with cultural, political and social production in a globalized, multicultural world, and, as
such, it views cultural translation as the site of such contestations. By uncovering processes of
interpretation, distanciation, incorporation, transformation and emancipation most closely associated
with the translation of texts behind the cultural phenomena of everyday life, we find a means for
putting Ricoeur’s theories into practice – making ‘translation’ not just a touchstone for what we see,
do and say in public life, but also who we are.

Cultural translation: The story so far

The place cultural translation holds in the popular imaginary is undeniable. Enter the Internet search
string ‘cultural translation’ and the results are astonishing: over 150,000 hits returned in Google alone
– newspaper articles, blog posts, YouTube videos, SlideShare and Prezi presentations, translation
agency mission statements, city and town councils, third sector organisations, research projects,
summer schools and academic conferences. The website for the only MA degree in cultural
translation even advertises that according to a recent panel of the Modern Language Association
cultural translation is ‘the most important concept in cultural theory today’ (American University of
Paris, n.d.).
Cultural translation made its academic debut in 1985 in an article by Roger Keesing for the
Journal of Anthropological Research entitled ‘Conventional Metaphors and Anthropological
Metaphysics: The Problematic of Cultural Translation’. Keesing criticized the way in which
anthropologists working in tribal societies tended to repackage unconnected examples of ritual
practice using methodologies familiar to their academic readers but which no native informants used
themselves. This localizing practice made disparate modes of living appear coherent and concealed
the real-life differences between tribal peoples and the dominant Western philosophies of the cultural
anthropologists charged with studying them. Keesing argued that without the capacity for self-
criticism in the application of conceptual tools designed to understand the unique cultural character of
the different peoples of the world and the attendant acknowledgement of the ways in which
anthropology apprehends the reality of others, we run the risk of what he termed cultural translation,
that is, recreating our objects of study in our own image. The next year, Talal Asad published a
chapter in James Clifford’s landmark collection Writing Culture (1986) entitled ‘The Concept of
Cultural Translation in British Social Anthropology’ in which he argued that cultural translation was
an institutionalized practice that resulted from the differentials of power that separate societies. His
project was to draw attention to the critical distance between the anthropologist and the people
written about. Viewed from this vantage point of privilege, the attribution of ‘meaning’ to other
languages and cultures is: ‘an operation the anthropologist alone controls, from field notebook to
printed ethnography. In other words, it is the privileged position of someone who does not, and can
afford not to, engage in a genuine dialogue with those he or she once lived with and now writes about’
(Asad, 1986, p. 155, original emphasis). In the context of British social anthropology, he showed how
a powerful academic game was established in the 1950s by which anthropologists’ translation
strategies with regard to non-Western societies were driven largely by the needs of the Western
academy waiting to read about them back home. Although the overarching aim was to understand
modes of living different to their own, when it came to writing up the results of their research the
work of anthropologists was always geared towards fulfilling particular audience-directed
objectives. Writing about others is never innocent, Asad maintained, and entirely enmeshed within
global flows of power. The people and practices at the basis of their work, in other words, were
treated as texts, subject to regimes of representation dominated by the norms of the academic
readership.
In 1987 the Journal of Anthropological Research once again returned to the topic of cultural
translation, in an article by Todd Larsen entitled ‘Action, Morality, and Cultural Translation’, in
which he called for the capacity for ‘self-criticism’ in the application of anthropology, in a bid to
better acknowledge that while the aim might be to understand others on their own terms, the terms and
conceptual tools that are used to do so are themselves not culturally neutral. I will not dwell on these
contributions, for this ground has already been well covered, except to note that while Keesing and
Asad were the first to write of cultural translation as a discrete phenomenon of which we can talk,
they tap into a longer-running ethical debate surrounding the perceived neutrality with which
anthropologists mediate cultural difference when they attempt to reproduce the complex cultural
worlds of foreign others for the consumption of local academic audiences. As early as 1954
Lienhardt equated the problem of interlingual translation with the problem of describing to other
people how the members of a remote tribe think, ‘of making the coherence primitive thought has in the
languages it really lives in, as clear as possible in our own’ (quoted in Asad, 1986, p. 142).
Since Asad, and outside of anthropology, interest in cultural translation has gone from strength to
strength. In an interview published in 1990, in which he discussed notions of cultural difference and
the presumption of incommensurability, Bhabha spoke of cultural translation, following Benjamin’s
own observations on translation and the task of the translator, to suggest that: ‘all forms of culture are
in some way related to each other, because culture is a signifying or symbolic activity. The
articulation of cultures is possible not because of the familiarity or similarity of contents, but because
all cultures are symbol-forming and subject-constituting, interpellative practices’ (Bhabha, 1990, pp.
209–10). He later followed this in 1994 with The Location of Culture, in which he related cultural
translation to the ‘insurgent’ acts of renewal that occur in the colonial encounter with cultural
difference. He looks to Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988), in which a disembodied voice
asks ‘How does newness come into the world? How is it born?’ (quoted in Bhabha, 1994, p. 8).
Bhabha identifies this newness with those who have migrated from the Indian subcontinent to ‘the
West’. The migrant faces a challenge: either to remain unchanged by the migration process or, through
a process of integration, to become transformed. With the arrival of ‘newness’, the past and present,
own and other, known and unknown, come into contact, such that the past is refigured, ‘as a contingent
“in-between” space, that innovates and interrupts the performance of the present’ (p. 10). This
continuum is disrupted primarily by the encounter with cultural difference, which brings with it the
possibility of cultural contestation, ‘the ability to shift the ground of knowledges, or to engage in the
“war of position” ’ (p. 233). Cultural identity and the ways in which it is expressed and inscribed are
therefore always in a state of flux – necessarily incomplete and open to cultural translation. Through
the transnational dimension of migration, diaspora, displacement and relocation the unifying
discourses of our time – ‘nation’, ‘peoples’, ‘community’, ‘us’ – cannot be easily specified for the
global space of cultural difference is above all one of constant negotiation (p. 318). It is this space of
negotiation that Bhabha names cultural translation, for it is transgressive, blasphemous and
contestatory. It challenges received authorities and places them within a context of cultural relativism,
where other possibilities and other ‘enunciatory positions’ are available. Thus, he writes: ‘Cultural
translation desacralizes the transparent assumptions of cultural supremacy, and in that very act,
demands a contextual specificity, a historical differentiation within minority positions’ (p. 327).
In the years since Bhabha a handful of articles and book chapters mentioning the concept followed,
but it was not until the dawn of the new century that cultural translation really exploded onto the
academic stage, with the majority of journal articles, books and book chapters dealing in any way
with cultural translation as a discrete term published in the last ten years alone. Across the
humanities, in fields as diverse as cultural studies, postcolonial theory, travel writing, history,
intercultural communication, heritage tourism and social semiotics, cultural translation has been
invoked in discussions ranging from nineteenth-century photography; intercultural thinking; Cuban-
American identity development; women’s fashion; accented writing; the history of popular music in
South Korea and Taiwan; West African drama; news production; Chinese diaspora; and subtitling, to
name but a few. It has been described variously as: the ‘cultural encounters’ that ensue when one side
tries to make sense of the other, a ‘double process of decontextualization and recontextualization, first
reaching out to appropriate something alien and then domesticating it’ (Burke, 1997, p. 8 and p. 10);
‘an anti-essentialist and anti-holistic metaphor that aims to uncover counter-discourses, discursive
forms and resistant actions within a culture, heterogeneous discursive spaces within a society’
(Bachmann-Medick, 2006, p. 37, original emphasis); the construction of a source text and its
transference into a different language (Sturge, 2007, p. 6); and the ‘interpretive acts’ that draw from
different sources of information in order to describe a culture (Conway, 2010a, p. 189). As a topic of
academic study in the twenty-first century, cultural translation is clearly here to stay. But what do
these claims actually mean? Despite this current of epistemological excitement, the notion of cultural
translation remains as diffuse as it is tantalizing.
On one level, widespread under-theorization has left the majority of accounts of cultural
translation, and the assumptions that underpin them, necessarily incomplete (Ha, 2010, p. 359). In the
majority of the literature in which it is invoked as a discrete concept, for example, cultural translation
appears in the title of a text, in paragraph subheadings, journal abstracts or keywords; but beyond one
or two oblique references in the body of the text its meaning is taken largely as self-evident, leaving it
to readers to construct a definition for themselves. Thus in an intervention by Spivak published on the
website for the European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies, cultural translation is referred to
as a ‘special task’, something one can ‘assign’ oneself or ‘plot’, a ‘problem’, ‘an extremely
complicated thing’, yet without an explanation of what she means with these assignations, what her
understanding of cultural translation is or how it bears on her overall argument (2008). Even in works
where cultural translation maintains a more substantive presence, quotations from Asad and Bhabha –
presumably viewed as authoritative because of the sense of authenticity and legitimacy that surrounds
their names – take the place of making an actual case for the validity of the particular stance on
cultural translation being taken. What is meant by cultural translation, the rationale for choosing the
scholarship that is invoked, how one writer’s usage differs from that of others or how this usage
differs more generally from any other brand of translation that we know of, must be simply intuited.
This has contributed to a sense in much of the literature that this thing we call cultural translation
already exists empirically, that it does not need to be defined or questioned, and worst of all, that we
do not actually need to prove that it takes place (Young, 2010). A consequence of the sheer popularity
of cultural translation is that discussions go round in circles because writers do not make clear what
they mean and presume that others share their implied paradigm of cultural translation even when they
do not (Conway, 2012). As Pratt identifies, in the growing literature on cultural translation,
the dearth of examples is a symptom that often nags. The thing is referred to as if we already know what we are talking about; our
scholarly ruminations retain a vagueness that the ungenerous could take for intellectual impoverishment, or languor. When specific
examples are introduced, they are often cited as self-evident instances of a self-evident practice called cultural translation, not
analyzed so as to demonstrate how that concept actually works, what kind of understanding it enables, what it misses or obscures.
(Pratt, 2010, p. 94)

The confusion this creates can be seen most clearly in a seminal intervention on cultural translation
that was published in the Translation Studies journal in 2009. As part of a newly introduced forum
for interdisciplinary debate on cultural translation, Buden and Nowotny published a provocation
entitled ‘Cultural Translation: An Introduction to the Problem’ and invited responses to their theory of
cultural translation, which was based on the notion of the German citizenship test and the ways in
which migrants must conform to culturally framed constructions of race, identity and ethnicity in order
to pass. The uptake of their invitation was so strong that in 2010 two subsequent volumes of the forum
were published. As the editors note in their introduction to the forum:
‘Cultural translation’ is a term currently much used in a range of disciplines both inside and, perhaps especially, outside translation
studies itself and in very different ways. Many of these approaches seem to promise valuable insights into cultural practices of
transfer, yet the precise use of the term ‘cultural translation’ remains controversial. It is also as yet unclear how the concept will
impact on some of the fundamental assumptions of translation studies. This Forum aims to explore and evaluate the potential of the
concept both for translation studies and for its neighbouring disciplines. (Buden and Nowotny, 2009, p. 196)

Yet in their twelve-page ‘position paper’, Buden and Nowotny devote just over six hundred words to
the concept of cultural translation itself, which they say is linked to Benjamin’s rejection of the
primacy of the original text in translation and Bhabha‘s emancipatory politics of resistance through
cultural production. Their central case study of the German citizenship test – and the ways in which
migrants must conform to a culturally framed construction of border politics if they are to pass – does
not explain how questions of national identity and citizenship link either to Benjamin or to Bhabha.
Indeed, as Young observes in his response to the paper, away from the context of borders, migrancy
and supra-, inter- and transnationalism, Buden and Nowotny do not convince the reader that the taking
of a citizenship test is an example of cultural translation since migrants navigate the many statutory
interrogations to which they must learn the right answer or tailor their response to what is expected –
this does not necessarily prove or explain that they have been ‘translated’ (2010, p. 357). Tymoczko
(2010) likewise criticizes their choice of case study because it lacks transferable knowledge, since it
is not the case that all states require certain group identities to be silenced or assimilated in order for
citizenship to be acquired. Here, as elsewhere, cultural translation is supposed to name by itself the
state of affairs to which it speaks. In a piece entitled ‘On Empiricism and Bad Philosophy in
Translation Studies’ (2010) – and this should give some idea of the writer’s position – Pym reveals
that a copy of Buden and Nowotny’s text had been sent to him for comment prior to publication:
I declined to comment because, to be honest, I had no idea what the text was about. Now that I see it has been published alongside
no less than eight responses, I do not feel so ashamed – most of the respondents simply talk about their own ideas, perhaps as a
polite way of avoiding the embarrassing confusion about ‘cultural translation’. I have nevertheless now read the piece several times,
carefully, and I’m afraid I still have no clear idea of what ‘cultural translation’ is. Is that the problem the text introduces? (Pym,
2010, p. 6)

In what Conway (2012) terms the ‘messy’ theorization of cultural translation it is no exaggeration to
say that it is now nothing short of a heated debate. Cultural translation’s detractors are right to signal
the lack of examples, distinctions or definitions as evidence of a poorly developed – and at times,
poorly articulated – paradigm. Critics cite the ambiguity and the lack of precision and clarity when
scholars write about cultural translation (Conway, 2012; Chesterman, 2010; Pratt, 2010; Bery, 2009).
If theorization about cultural translation is to result in relevant, specific and transferable knowledge
that can help us better understand and analyze the way in which we live – if, in other words, it is
more than a flash in the discursive pan – then we must do a better job of convincing readers that
cultural translation not only exists, but that it can be defined, evidenced and exemplified in new,
interesting and concrete ways. This requires us to be very clear about what cultural translation is,
where it can be applied, what it can help us understand and, perhaps more important, what its
limitations are. Of any academic theory that claims to speak to the challenges of the human condition
in a globalized, interconnected world, we should demand nothing less.
This is not to say that attempts have not been made. Both the Routledge Encyclopedia of
Translation Studies (2009) and the Handbook of Translation Studies (2012) carry entries on cultural
translation, and recent interventions by Pym (2009) and Conway (2012) have attempted to catalogue
the dizzying array of existing contributions. As Sturge observes in the Routledge Encyclopedia, the
term is used in many different ways and in diverse circumstances. In some of these it is a metaphor
that challenges received conceptualizations of the ‘translation’ paradigm (that ‘source’ and ‘target’
languages and cultures exist as discreet and mutually coherent categories) and in others it refers to the
work of intercultural mediation and representation at the heart of literary translation. Cultural
translation, in this context, is not a translation strategy per se ‘but rather a perspective on translations
that focuses on their emergence and impact as components in the ideological traffic between language
groups’ (2009, p. 67, original emphasis). In the broadest uses of the term, she writes, cultural
translation signals not the interlingual transfer of meaning between cultural and linguistic monads but
the transformation of the very fabric of culture itself.
As Pym notes in his own survey, cultural translation in this non-linguistic, non-grammatical sense
differs from its textual counterpart because it assumes no fixed source from which to translate and no
clear target audience to whom the translation is directed. At base, therefore, the category of
‘translation’ referenced within the term cultural translation implies something other than linguistic or
cultural production and instead the more general process of communication between different cultural
groups (2009, p. 143). As bearers of culture, in this sense, cultural translation is something that we
simply do. In the face of the ‘frequently messy collection of ideas’ such a perspective has produced,
Conway’s survey, meanwhile, attempts to provide ‘an initial map of the terrain’ by classifying
existing contributions according to the differential way in which ‘culture’ and ‘translation’ are
employed (2012, p. 264). This enables him to create a conceptual map demonstrating that although
scholars do not necessarily delineate between meanings of cultural translation, invocations of the
term fall largely into one of two camps: those that view translation as a form of rewriting (of an
anthropological, symbolic or cultural community) and those that view it as a form of ‘transposition’
(in which foreign interpretive horizons, artefacts, texts and people are relocated into a new locale (p.
266).
All four surveys do a good job of tracing the broad contours of the cultural translation literature as
it has developed thus far. It is not my intention to reproduce such an exercise for three principal
reasons. First, each survey makes clear that despite the immense popularity cultural translation
enjoys, the concept itself remains paradoxically ill defined. Current efforts should most usefully be
orientated towards the production of an in-depth definition that can be tested, contested, engaged with
and developed, contributing to the evolution of the concept as a whole. Second, each survey makes
explicit reference to the fear that in a bid to promote translation in its broadest metaphorical
understanding, the interlingual practice of those charged with solving the communicative challenges
linguistic difference creates – translators – will eventually be marginalized. There is thus an
immediate need to articulate the relevance of cultural translation as a discrete concept and to outline
its position vis-à-vis interlingual translation. Third, and perhaps most important, by relying on only
two broad conceptualizations of cultural translation, as epitomized in the work of Asad and Bhabha,
the surveys themselves continue to circulate what remains an oversimplified epistemology reflected
throughout the cultural translation literature as a whole. Of course, from one perspective, the surveys
are themselves simply reflecting a disproportionate reliance on Asad and Bhabha already present in
the bulk of the literature. But we should be careful not to limit our theorization. With Rorty, rather
than attempt to unify what are at base disparate perspectives, the definition of cultural translation I
advance in this book aims to broaden our epistemological horizons by looking beyond Asad and
Bhabha and instead locates itself on a solid methodological platform based on Ricoeur’s hermeneutic
philosophy. It is to an above all triangular task that this book is directed: to provide the first definition
of cultural translation not limited to Asad and Bhabha but predicated on a clear, unambiguous and
sustained engagement with the theoretical model on which it is built; rooted in the interlingual praxis
of the translator; and applied to a wide range of examples drawn from across the social imaginary
and beyond the world of letters.

What’s ‘wrong’ with cultural translation?

Cultural translation’s detractors have been vociferous in their criticism and any definition worth its
salt must tackle these early on. An oft-cited niggle is use of the term ‘translation’ – which we might
understand as the purposeful means by which a text written originally in one language is made
meaningful in a new time and place to an audience that speaks another – in a metaphorical sense, to
refer to things above and beyond the worlds of text and language. Principally, concern has focused on
the use of translation’s supposed transportational etymology that evokes the act of moving or carrying
across from one place or position to another and changing from one condition or state to another. In
the early Christian usage, for example, it suggested the ‘bearing across’ of the deceased from this
world to the next or the physical transportation of a body from one grave to another. This is a trope
which Rushdie exploits when he writes that in their journey across the globe, migrants become
‘translated’ people, ‘borne across’ from one cultural milieu to another. Where critics signal a problem
is that it tends to be used to legitimize the application of an interlingual model of translation to all
manner of topics of human migration. For Tymoczko, we should not place much stock in the idea that
simply because translation’s roots are suggestive of physical transportation we can then legitimately
apply translation to all questions of the literal movement of peoples across the globe. While people
may literally relocate themselves, she argues, one thing that all translators know is that words can
never be relocated in such literal ways. Thus while the etymology of the word translation may indeed
signal ‘carrying across’, in the interlingual practice of translation, translators emphatically do not.
She writes: ‘The word translation implies that the semantic meanings of a source text can be
transferred intact to the target text, even when the words of the source text themselves are not carried
across; the metaphor implies that there can be a translation practice that meets these criteria’
(Tymoczko, 2010, pp. 107–8). A theory of cultural translation founded on the idea that meanings in
translation are carried across unaltered semantically and semiotically, she says, is undermined by the
very fact that this is precisely what does not happen when people migrate. In a similar vein,
Chesterman writes that the major problem with establishing a theory of cultural translation on the
transportation metaphor is that this historical sense of mobility is true only for the term in its English
and Indo-European cognates. It does not hold for other languages such as Chinese, Finnish, Japanese,
Tamil, Tibetan, Turkish or Vietnamese in which the corresponding term does not evoke carrying
across but rather the mediation of difference (2010, p. 104). To build a paradigm of cultural
translation-qua-human migrancy on the notion that translation means ‘carrying across’ is to proceed
from an already Eurocentric hierarchy.
More broadly, however, what Chesterman terms the ‘metaphorical extension of the concept of
translation to cover non-textual modes of transfer’ (p. 103) and which has elsewhere been described
as the ‘generalized’ (Pym, 2009, p. 160), ‘broadening’ (Bachmann-Medick, 2009, p. 2) or
‘inflationary’ (Wagner, 2010, p. 98) use of translation to cover non-interlingual contexts, means the
idea of translation itself ‘risks being diluted into nothing’ (Chesterman, 2010, p. 103). Indeed,
according to the cultural translation entry in the Routledge Encyclopedia, ‘Metaphorical usage could
at worst hollow out the word “translation”, not just into something that need not necessarily include
more than one language but into something that primarily does not include more than one language – a
factor, instead, of shifts and layering within globally dominant English without the need for bilingual
translation to take place’ (Sturge, 2009, p. 69). In other words, the development of translation thinking
across a range of scholarly applications may uncover useful synchronicities and create opportunities
for fruitful interdisciplinary debate; but in its infinite theoretical expansion it also runs the risk of
becoming so broad it becomes meaningless (Pym, 2009, p. 159). Chesterman summarizes the
consequence thus: ‘If practically every kind of change or transfer or metamorphosis can be called
translation, we shall soon need a different term to refer to what Jakobson (1959), in his well-known
semiotic classification – and extension – of the concept, called “translation proper” ’ (2010, pp. 103–
4).
If translation is now so vast in meaning, critics say, it no longer ‘means’ anything. Metaphors, by
their very nature, beat about the bush and go around the trees; they never quite ‘say’ and always defer
what they ‘mean’. Too protean in our metaphorical extension of translation and we risk draining
translation of its ability to refer to the practical realm of interlingual transfer on which it is based. It
is this concern for the loss of the practical that goes to the heart of arguments against cultural
translation, for there is a sense among its critics that those who theorize about cultural translation are
not translators, are uninterested in grounding their theorization in the practice of interlingual
translation and that on a fundamental level this is a Bad Thing. In this view, the very paradigm of
translation, as something that is supposed to signify the production and exchange of ideas between
different languages, is appropriated by cultural theorists with no real interest in or knowledge of the
practice of professional translation. Thus for Trivedi, when the term translation is applied to life in
postcolonial and diasporic contexts, as it is in Bhabha’s conceptualization, it further extends the
global reach of Anglo-American cultural studies, where the trope of translation has been appropriated
without the need to actually learn languages other than English in order to do so. If such bilingual
ground is worn away, he says, ‘we shall sooner than later end up with a wholly translated,
monolingual, monocultural, monolithic world’ (2007, p. 286).
Trivedi’s critique speaks to the fear that the uncontrolled enlargement of the idea of translation will
threaten the hard-won attention to language issues and the rigorous analysis of texts that the field of
translation studies has built for itself (Simon, 2009, p. 210). For Trivedi, cultural translation spells
‘the very extinction and erasure of translation as we have always known and practised it’ (2007, p.
282). Chesterman’s suggestion is to take a step back from the use of metaphor and to keep discussions
terminologically separate, using precise and distinct terms depending on whether we are talking about
texts, ideas, cultural communities or individual people (2010, p. 106). Any extensions of terminology,
he says, would have to be justified in terms of adding something to the study of immigration or other
sociocultural phenomena, thus ‘producing more benefits than costs in comparison to some other
terminology’ (p. 105). For Tymoczko, the problem is at base one of untrammelled interdisciplinarity:
‘Many fields have been tempted to latch on to terms meaning “translation” as an ostensibly easy way
out of their theoretical problems, not realizing how complex textual translation is and how many
theoretical problems the subject brings with it’ (2010, p. 110). The solution for Trivedi, meanwhile,
is thus to cut off such interdisciplinary sharing entirely:
One wonders why ‘translation’ should be the word of choice in a collocation such as ‘cultural translation’ in this new sense when
perfectly good and theoretically sanctioned words for this new phenomenon, such as migrancy, exile or diaspora are already
available and current. But given the usurpation that has taken place, it may be time for all good men and true, and of course women,
who have ever practised literary translation, or ever read translation with any awareness of it being translation, to unite and take out
a patent on the word ‘translation’, if it is not already too late to do so. (Trivedi, 2007, p. 285)

I wish to make four points at this stage. First, objections to a model of cultural translation based on a
perceived sense of mobility associated with translation’s etymology proceed from a particular
position on what constitutes both the process of ‘interlingual’ translation and the role of the translator
within it. Tymoczko criticizes cultural translation because interlingual translators supposedly do not
‘carry across’. But surely something is carried across – not discrete words or meanings, replicated
wholesale in some magic act of intercultural photocopying, but ideas, imputed by the translator into
the text-for-translation, ideas that are inspired by what is offered in the same. By its very nature,
moreover, translation involves using different words to stand in the place of the words of the source
text. Is this not the very meaning of metaphor? Translation is not simply a metaphor for the carrying
across of ideas from one page to another. Translation is metaphor. The point of looking to
translation’s etymological basis in transportational metaphors, surely, is that as with words,
sentences, texts, ideas, bodies, bones and relics, with transportation comes transformation.
Remember that the feast of the translation of Thomas à Becket celebrates not the movement of his
remains, per se, but the fact that by relocating his earthly vestiges from one site to another, new life
was breathed into his cult. Second, and following directly from the first, in response to critiques of
cultural translation’s English-language bias, D’hulst (2010) points out that in order to label such
views on translation thinking as ‘Eurocentric’, we must assume the prior existence of some sort of
‘neutral’ view. There is in fact no such thing as neutral theorization, and while we should not ignore
the presence of bias – epistemological or otherwise – we should not claim to advance value-free
approaches outside of geopolitical context.
Third, the weight of the anti-metaphor argument – that cultural translation’s application in fields
outside translation studies circumvents the study of linguistic and textual aspects of translation (read:
the authoritative knowledge produced by researchers in these areas) – should also not be exaggerated.
The presence of the term translation in diverse intellectual domains beyond translation studies is
hardly new, or, as Young puts it, ‘translation theorists who now wish to shut the stable door are
several centuries late’ (2010, p. 358). Translation never really implied only the textual, interlingual
brand, since both the textual usage and the metaphor of bodily transport go back to the same early
medieval period. From this time, translation always implied change, in form or appearance:
Those objecting to its extension to other activities will no doubt be distressed by the fact that the translations of Enoch (moving from
earth to heaven without death) was first described in 1382, translation as transference from one medium or form to another (for
example of a painting by an engraving) in 1588, of property 1590, as interpretation or explanation 1598, as enraptured 1643, as the
transference of a disease from one body to another in 1665, in astronomy, in physics 1715. (Young, 2010, pp. 358–9)

As Pym wonders, is there really anything wrong with the use of metaphors in a mode in which
metaphor already abounds? (2009, p. 159). Perhaps the problem, he says, is that the metaphors we
associate with cultural translation have become ‘dead’ metaphors – ‘images that we somehow accept
as self-evident truths. The more conscious metaphors of “cultural translation” may thus help us think
more critically about all kinds of translation’ (ibid.).
Fourth, as a field of intellectual endeavour, translation studies must be confident in its development
and allow its models – and the idea that translation is the preserve of the worlds of language and text
is but one model among others – to be tried and tested, embraced, adopted and questioned:
Translation proper gets a lot of mileage from the Forum respondents, but there is often what sounds like a rather disciplinarily
proprietorial air to the many complaints about the metaphorical extension of the term translation from its ‘proper’ domain of
transforming texts from one language to another. The problem with such complaints is that intellectual history is largely made up of
the creative appropriation of metaphors from one discipline to another. (Young, 2010, p. 358)

Translation studies has spent many years arguing for the relevance of translation thinking across the
social disciplines; we cannot simply put the genie back in the bottle the moment the take-up of
translational models outside the field becomes uncomfortable. Rather than construe the presence of
translation in domains beyond the worlds of language and text as ‘losing ground’ to cultural studies
and others, we must consider how our models can be better exported across the humanities at large.
The multiple points of departure the term translation offers with regard to the analysis of urgent issues
of identity, ethnicity, integration, justice, tolerance and respect at a time of border crisis surely cannot
help but strengthen translation studies at large, ‘proving its appeal to contemporary thought and social
action’ (Simon, 2009, p. 210). Indeed, as a domain of intellectual enquiry, translation studies was
itself built on the very practice of intellectual nomadism Trivedi decries. From the very translators
we study to the discourses we employ when we do so, the scholarship has always followed an
itinerant trajectory as we move from one subject area to another in a bid to better articulate how and
why we translate. As Wolf (2009) recognizes, to ban the metaphorical extension of the idea of
translation in formulations of cultural translation would ultimately mean rejecting any sort of
interdisciplinary work whatsoever (pp. 77–8). Indeed, differences in scholarly perspective are
essential if we are to raise our discursive game and usher in the age of rigorous, well-substantiated,
evidence-based and transferable models of cultural translation its detractors call for.
I wish to now turn to two further critiques deserving of much more serious treatment and which,
paradoxically, have received much less attention in the literature. The first, which attacks cultural
translation from an ethical perspective, is the concern that imprecise theorization promises more than
it can deliver and obscures both the global hierarchies of power and influence to which cultural
translation claims to speak and the material effects on the daily lives of real people caught up in them.
Here, the concern is not just with the definitional ambiguities cultural translation introduces, but the
assumption that with it comes the relegation of real-world problems of cultural difference. Or, in
Pym’s words, ‘the theories of cultural translation would thus be sweeping away the very otherness
that they generally proclaim to espouse’ (2009, p. 161). In our rush to prove the relevance of
translation thinking to the world, we must not allow terminologically loose pronouncements and
superficial statements to betray the very people we claim to serve with our work. As Pym puts it
elsewhere, ‘Who said that translation had to save the day? One senses that an immigrant would not
ask how translation might be used in the interests of justice and democracy’ (2010, p. 8). This is a
view shared by Bery (2009), who signals a need to remember the ‘who’ of translation – the people
who are actually affected – and not just the ‘what’ (p. 213). Introducing ideas from one field and
applying them to another is all very well, but when it pits the ethical status of real people against
inanimate objects, we impede rather than enrich communication between disciplines (Chesterman,
2010, p. 105).
There is an ethical price to pay, in other words, when we lose sight of the social and ideological
powers in play and become distracted by what Ha calls ‘chic intellectual language games’ that satisfy
the postmodern thirst for complexity but do not necessarily address the real-world problems that
disproportionately affect people on the basis of their race, ethnicity or any other delineator of group
identity (2010, p. 350). Theories, Pym writes, not based on empirical data and which display
‘imprecise and contradictory thought, betray a short-term consumption of fashionable concepts, are
ploys in search of academic power, and are deployed by fly-by-night intellectuals who will move on
to something else next year anyway’ (2009, pp. 160–1). As Pratt notes: ‘People could indeed be
forgiven for seeing this as another plumed display of intellectual authority by privileged
metropolitans who don’t know any languages and still want to uphold their monopoly on ideas.
People could be forgiven for asking whether cultural translation serves to configure the traffic in
meaning in the image of the free market’ (Pratt, 2010, p. 94). It is tempting to dismiss these arguments
as the spectre of disciplinary gatekeeping once again. But given the imprecise and obscure
theorization that has dogged the cultural translation literature in recent decades, they underline the
urgent need for precision: to elevate cultural translation above the level of fashionable trope to that of
a measurable and transferable political discourse capable both of illuminating power relationships in
the world and of criticizing them.
The second major challenge to cultural translation questions its methodological validity as a theory
based on the practice of interlingual translation. Here, critique returns us to the perceived ‘loss’ that
surrounds cultural translation’s supposed repudiation of the so-called proper form of translation that
deals with the problematics of transfer between multiple texts and multiple languages. In contrast to
this latter form, Trivedi writes, with cultural translation we have a kind of translation, ‘which does
not involve two texts, or even one text, and certainly not more than one language. These are examples
of what Bhabha, with his usual felicity, has in another context called “non-substantive translation” (in
personal conversation). One could perhaps go a step further and, without any attempt at matching
felicity, call it simply non-translation’ (Trivedi, 2007, p. 286). Pratt takes this methodological
concern a step further by claiming that at base, the interlingual model is ill-suited to the concerns of
cultural translation because difference in life is in a constant state of organic change: ‘The concept of
cultural translation bears the unresolvable contradiction that in naming itself it preserves the
distances/distinctions it works to overcome […] Because it sustains difference, a translation
paradigm is too blunt an instrument to grasp the heterodox subjectivities and interfaces that come out
of entanglements sustained over time’ (Pratt, 2010, pp. 95–6). In the attempt to overcome essentialism
through the theoretical promise of a model predicated on the movement between languages, cultural
translation in fact ossifies difference, by relying precisely on the very borders of language and culture
it seeks to dissolve.
I will deal with each of these in turn. The weakness of arguments against cultural translation on the
basis of supposedly incorrect understandings of the term translation begs the question: precisely who
owns the rights to translation? It should come as no surprise that areas such as cultural studies and
comparative literature are interested in translation, for the ‘cultural’ dimension of translation has
always played a role in linguistic formulations; there cannot be a clear-cut distinction between
translation ‘proper’ and its cultural sense precisely because in the creation of the linguistic categories
upon which Trivedi bases his argument there is always something more than the merely linguistic at
play. As Young notes, ‘translation has always, in a Derridean sense, been an improper term, without a
single, unitary meaning, always doubling back on itself to include a greater and sometimes even
contradictory semantic range’ (2010, p. 359). Moreover, what Trivedi describes as translation has
never been a purely linguistic activity. The role of the translator – as an individual working within a
specific set of audience requirements, constraints, needs and expectations to which her translation
must be sensitive – requires intense ethical reflection on the relations between distant and often
conflicting contingencies of text, society, people and culture. As an intellectual and creative process
of reading and writing, translation’s relationship to culture goes far beyond the narrow linguistic and
textual theorization supported by Trivedi. To defend an a priori sense of translation as linguistic
transfer would be both a limited and a limiting course of action indeed.
Implicit in Trivedi’s words, furthermore, is the assumption that the ‘otherness’ with which
translation engages is confined only to the interaction of translators with texts written in different
languages. But what of the otherness we encounter all around us, or the fact that when we find
ourselves encountered by other people we become ‘others’ to ourselves? Does not difference exist
everywhere? Even when dealing with people or examples in one language does not automatically
mean sameness. To say that cultural translation eschews linguistic paradigms of translation in favour
of ‘cultural processes’ does not mean that we cannot detect movements we associate most closely
with the linguistic work of translation, for, as I have already discussed, every understanding that takes
place in the world is actively interpretive, in the sense that all things can and do mean more or less
than they appear. We must never forget that the textual and linguistic problems with which interlingual
translation deals start before we address the problem of transferring texts from one language to
another, for the same modes of interpretation we associate with translation between languages also
take place in the one language alone.
In this book, I argue that as with translation in the interlingual, intertextual, sense, cultural
translation starts from a quest for understanding – of some form of source material and in the sense
that some cultural, political or social stimulus in the world sets in motion the interpretive work of
translation led by a human actor. If the practice of human communication involves the continual
interpretation of stimuli in the social sphere, cultural translation in my conceptualization here
delineates a model for all meaningful exchanges in the world and is therefore not a subsection of
interlingual communication. The ‘agents’ of cultural translation, moreover, are not the privileged
polyglot elite but every single one of us engaged in the practice of encountering and questioning
difference in every aspect of everyday life. If ‘language’ is the communication of the contents of mind,
words are but only one particular brand of human language; translation is therefore relevant to the
study of all the ways in which we communicate the contents of the mind, whether we use words or
not. If translation is both a priori to and at the very heart of human communication, then to restrict a
dimension of human existence in which every human being on the planet shares is to immure within
the privileged – and limited – walls of the academy what is ultimately a global social practice.
This brings me to my second point. Pratt rightly questions the inscription of cultural essentialism
within the heterogeneous processes that cultural translation claims to cover. Given that we do use
cultural translation to raise questions of migrancy, displacement and exile, there is surely value in
imbricating the tools we have developed in translation studies for the analysis of interlingual transfer.
Pratt worries that the application of translation implies the possibility of the reification of cultural
difference, but we need to view this critique as just this: a possibility. To return again to Rorty, Pratt’s
construction of cultural translation as the sustenance of difference is a position no less contingent and
no less valid than the construction of translation that orientates my own definition in this book. Pace
Rorty, the two positions remain incommensurable, and, as such, are theories to be debated, extended
and engaged with; but they are not facts and should not be treated as such. Translation as I conceive of
it here is about infinite cultural production; it is about the processes of interpretation, distanciation,
incorporation, transformation and emancipation most closely associated with the translation of texts
that we witness in the construction and contestation of the cultural phenomena of everyday life.
Translation in this view is interested neither in reifying nor surmounting difference but instead making
use of it productively, and creatively, for emancipatory ends. Cultural translation as I conceive of it
seeks not to overcome difference, but, as interlingual translation does, to create it.
That cultural translation has fostered such vociferous debate augurs well for the future. If there
were not some kernel of social relevance which cultural translation taps into, one suspects we would
not bother to comment on it at all and the term would simply slip away quietly from the academic
scene. We might not yet be sure what it means, but its position in the critical imaginary gives it a
certain substance. The need for precision, to make clear what we mean by the translational component
in the collocation cultural translation and what role it plays in the model, means that the time has now
come for cultural translation theorization to shape up or ship out. As Pym writes:
For us, much as we might ignore the precise meaning of ‘cultural translation’, the questions raised here are among the most
important and harrowing of our time. In Europe, the bodies of Africa are washed up on the beaches of Spain and Italy, second
generations are burning banlieues of France, immigrants’ houses are burnt in Germany, and the life-and-death dramas are acted out
 and on every day in the courts and tribunals. The problems of justice in such postmodern societies obviously require a lot more
thought and work than is currently available in the talk about cultural translation. (Pym, 2010, p. 8)

Languages and cultural communities are not separate. People move and migrate and the way in which
we respond to and interact with one another changes over time. As Pym is prepared to admit, cultural
translation might just offer us a means of thinking critically about the many ways in which difference
works in the world around us. Rather than ask why the term translation should be applied in other
domains – as Young shows, this has been taking place since the fourteenth century and translation
‘proper’ seems to have thrived this long – we should instead ask why cultural translation exists as a
distinct term in widespread usage. The question, in other words, is not how we should go about
limiting cultural translation’s use of the interlingual model but to ask why the interlingual model
should be used as the foundation for cultural translation in the first instance.

Towards a definition of cultural translation

As I have argued, cultural translation theorization can be grounded most usefully in a solid foundation
of the practice of the interlingual translator. By focusing on the specific actions of the translator vis-à-
vis the texts they translate, we not only achieve a lens through which to identify translational
movements across the social sphere, but, more important, we gain a way to critique them. It is with
this task in mind that I return once again to Ricoeur, for by applying the practice of the interlingual
translator to matters of human interaction and the attendant challenges of cultural difference, I argue
that the social practice of everyday life in a globalized, multicultural, world means that on a daily
basis every one of us is faced with interpreting that which we do not understand. For the same reason,
it is not enough to remain at a distance, to retreat into the comfortable worlds we know. Difference is
everywhere and we must reach outwards to engage with it, in an attempt to encapsulate that which we
do not know within terms that we do. This outward-facing gesture of incorporation transforms the
objects of translation irrevocably. But it also has the effect of causing us to question who we are and
what it means to understand along the way – by exposing us to difference; by enriching the limited
purview of our local language with this foreign importation from the outside.
It is precisely in the application of the interlingual model that we are able to broaden the horizons
of cultural translation, to speak not just to questions of human migrancy, but across the spectrum of
human endeavour, to discover how people and ideas are encountered, interpreted and transformed in
ways that can be illuminated by what we know about translation – as a relationship with difference
that leaves neither side unchanged. Fundamentally, cultural translation is considered here as the
traceable presence of hermeneutic gestures of reading and writing in the construction and reception of
a range of cultural phenomena present in the public sphere. As such, the book is imagined as a journey
across the stages of thoughtful encounter in the everyday world we associate most closely with the
interlingual translation of texts, from the translator’s interpretation of a source to-be-understood, the
same translator’s distanciation from the objects of perception and the incorporation of otherness
within regimes of the ‘own’, to the irrevocable transformation of difference and the eventual
emancipation of the illusions of the translating subject along the way.
Chapter 1 considers the quest for understanding that lies at the heart of translation and is concerned
with presenting the act of ‘reading’ as its primary gesture. Through a discussion of the subjectivity of
the translator’s ‘gaze’, this chapter challenges the assumption that a translation can stand
unproblematically as a simple ‘reflection’ of the texts a translator translates. Chapter 2, meanwhile,
considers the interpretive distance which separates the translator from the object of perception. Given
the multiplicity of readings different translators’ interpretations yield, any independent ‘meaning’ a
text might be thought to contain is liberated from its author’s original intentions. This places the
translator at a distance: both physically ‘away’ and temporally ‘after’ the original time and place of a
source text’s production and reception. This chapter views translation as a doubly historicizing
process in which both source text and translator are shown to be located in their historically
contingent spaces, through an awareness of the judgement all acts of perception require. Translation
can thus be construed as either a ‘loss’ to be mourned or an inaccessible ‘past’ that can be celebrated
and memorialized. Chapter 3 considers the gesture of power on the part of a translator and how this
process can be traced in the public sphere. Here, the focus for analysis is the map: as a written text
that not only stands in place of but also distorts the realities it purports to represent. Translations can
therefore be read as cartographic representations: as highly individualized accounts of a journey of
interpretation that mediates – and contains – the different worlds it encounters.
Chapter 4 investigates the ways in which translation gives rise to new, resistant or renovatory
interpretations of phenomena and considers the role of cultural translation in opposing the fixity of
received knowledge. With reference to a range of art forms (poetry, pop art and online video music
memes), it explores how an artist or creator’s subjective appropriation of the objects of their gaze
can lead to new, creative or resistant ideas, rejuvenating or subverting received notions and opening
up different ways of thinking as a result. Chapter 5 considers the ways in which cultural translation
can be operationalized in the critique of ideology and reflects upon a series of real-world cases
where the ‘meaning’ of events remains strongly contested in the public sphere. Read through a
translational lens, these cases are shown to be subject to a conflict of interpretations in which
translation can be harnessed productively to suggest not only alternative ways of understanding these
events but also as a first step towards critique. Across each of these five chapters, case studies of
cultural translation demonstrate how these gestures of reading and writing can be witnessed and
explored ‘in action’. Throughout, I insist that as the presence of translational gestures in the cultural
sphere, cultural translation is above all a hermeneutic enterprise. As such, it looks to its foundations
in Ricoeur’s hermeneutic philosophy and to Benjamin’s complementary notions of survival, afterlife
and ‘fame’, to raise translation both as a form of representation that appropriates rather than reflects
the realities it represents and as a doubly historicizing process by which both the source text and the
translator are shown to be located in their historically contingent spaces. It is this effect of
hermeneutic humbling that creates the conditions for critique by challenging the interpreter’s
pretensions to understand. It is with this emancipatory objective that cultural translation seeks to
make its strongest contribution.
 1
Interpretation
Translation and the quest for understanding

The Plaça Reial is a handsome square in Barcelona‘s Gothic Quarter, just off La Rambla dels
Caputxins. It is surrounded on four sides by porticoes concealing restaurants, cafes and nightclubs.
Above the porticoes, ochre-coloured neo-Classical facades are adorned with elegant wooden shutters
and Juliet balconies. The quadrangle itself is dotted with palm trees that gesture towards a large
fountain that stands in the centre. The Plaça Reial was designed by Francesc Daniel Molina i
Casamajó on the site of an old Capuchin monastery and was completed in the mid-nineteenth century.
Today, it is a popular tourist destination and venue for local arts events. It was here that I found
myself on a sunny afternoon in March 2014, having just finished a week-long interpreting assignment
for the Departament de Justícia de la Generalitat de Catalunya Centre d’Estudis Jurídics i Formació
Especialitzada. My task was to provide Spanish–English interpreting as part of a restorative justice
training course for bilingual Catalan and Spanish-speaking social workers practising in the area. The
training was to be facilitated by an international expert in restorative practices and would combine
front-led slide show presentations with group-based interactive workshops and managed role-plays.
The training would be delivered in English and it would be my job to interpret into Spanish every
statement the facilitator made, and in turn, relay to him the participants’ responses. In the run-up to the
training, I organized a planning meeting with the facilitator. I asked for copies of the slides and any
materials he was planning to distribute or make reference to as part of the training, as well as a list of
bibliographic references. Armed with a foot of journal articles and textbooks I primed myself on key
restorative approaches in operation across the world today and the major theoretical frameworks that
drive them. Slowly, the information on the slides started to make sense. I could see where complex
theoretical ideas on justice, society and community had been made relevant for practitioners working
in concrete situations of community-based criminal justice delivery. One of our conversations ahead
of the training went something like this:
‘What about the lesson plan for the week?’, I asked.
‘Facilitation doesn’t work that way’, he said. ‘Training workshops for diverse groups of adults are tailor-made to the specific
group of participants undertaking any one training at any one time. We will cover specific restorative practices, and we can talk
about these ahead of time, if you like. But the way in which we cover those elements has to remain organic. For it to mean anything
to the participants, and for it to become in any way meaningful within the specific community contexts in which our participants are
working, day in, day out, contexts in which only they are the experts, it has to be matched to them. It has to be a journey of
discovery led by them, not us.’

For any interpreter attempting to prepare ahead for a project, nothing instils a greater sense of dread
than the three words ‘journey of discovery’. What if the participants wanted to know why one
restorative approach was considered more appropriate than another, I wondered. What if they wanted
more detail on a particular case study? Having designed high-level restorative justice systems across
the world, the facilitator was equipped with the knowledge and expertise to handle such questions
and give meaningful answers. But what if the answer he gave simply wasn’t in my Spanish
vocabulary? Everything would come down to deft lateral thinking, I reasoned. I might not know the
specific Spanish or Catalan terminologies in common use within the Catalonian criminal justice
sector. But if I understood something of the broader concepts themselves, what real-world settings
they tend to relate to, what ideas drive their usage and what sort of future contexts they could be
employed in, I could use other Spanish words – not to describe what the facilitator meant, but what I
meant. Although I would not always be able to locate the precise concept within the audience’s own
realm of linguistic and professional experience, I could at least gesture towards a place of mutual
understanding. But if the training was going to proceed organically, driven by the needs of the
participants and rooted in their professional practice across a range of work settings, how could I
prepare ahead every topic that could potentially be covered? How could I be sure that the quality of
my interpreting would not slip when the direction of travel moved outside my own frame of
knowledge? The problem I faced, in other words, was not one of vocabulary but one of
understanding.
Sitting on the edge of the fountain, reflecting on this experience while I listened to a classical music
recital, a lamppost caught my eye. It is one of two lampposts in the Plaça Reial that stand facing one
another in empty space, equidistant from the fountain. Tall, dark grey iron columns bearing the crest of
the city rise from polished marble pedestals with chamfered angles and fan out into crowns of red
arms, ornately touched with gold, each supporting six lanterns. The lampposts were designed in 1879
by a young Antoni Gaudí, newly graduated as an architect. What caught my eye was not so much the
ornateness of Gaudí’s design – reason enough to stop and stare – but what sat atop the lampposts. It
was a helmet of Hermes, a pair of wings spreading out from either side, its wrought iron painted gold.
Monuments to Hermes and representations of his image can be found all over Barcelona, at the
entrance to the Parc de la Ciutadella, on the Passeig Marítim de Mataró, the Banc d’Espanya on Plaça
de Catalunya, the Museo de Cera, above the entrances to markets and stock exchanges along La
Rambla de Catalunya and Passeig de Gràcia, to name but a few. I could find no more fitting a symbol
for the central challenge of my interpreting assignment than the mythical co-founder of Barcelona, the
messenger-god of Olympus.
In Greek mythology Hermes was the god of fertility, thieves, travellers and lies. As the son of Zeus,
he was known for his athleticism and was often depicted as handsome, with feathered sandals, which
he fashioned himself, a golden staff for herding cattle and a cap with the ability to render its wearer
invisible. As the fastest of the gods, it was Hermes’s job to ferry messages between the gods of
Olympus and the people of earth by crossing the boundary separating the two worlds. His role was
imperative – to translate divine mysteries beyond the capacity of human words into terms that mere
mortals could understand. Without such a messenger the two realms would remain forever at a
distance, mutually mysterious and mutually incomprehensible. The first task of hermeneutics, the
philosophical method which takes its name from Hermes, is concerned with bridging gaps in
understanding, and for many years was concerned with the interpretation of sacred texts, thought, too,
to be the divine and mysterious ‘word of God’. Starting life within the framework of biblical
exegesis, it was viewed as a means for exploring how to understand and restore the divine intention
of scripture following successive generations of Judeo-Christian reinscription.
And yet Hermes was also a deceiver-god and was known to play skilled tricks and to use his staff
to make people hallucinate. As chief intermediary between humans and the gods he was tasked with
something greater than simply transmitting messages; he had to use all the persuasive devices at his
disposal to stand between these mutually mysterious and mutually incomprehensible worlds and
convince his respective audiences of the value and significance of his words. He had to convince
them to believe in what he was saying. He had to become an advocate for each side to the other. He
had to involve himself in the messages he was charged with carrying. And as Homer recounts, when
Hermes was born he jumped out of his cot and proceeded to hide all of Apollo’s cattle. When Apollo
discovered what he had done Hermes jumped back into his cot and protested his innocence. As divine
messenger, Hermes hides as much as he reveals. In a contribution to a seminal edited collection on
cultural translation in the anthropological context, Crapanzano perceived a similarity between
Hermes and the work of the modern-day ethnographer: ‘He presents languages, cultures, and societies
in all their opacity, their foreignness, their meaninglessness; then like the magician, the hermeneut,
Hermes himself, he clarifies the opaque, renders the foreign familiar, and gives meaning to the
meaningless. He decodes the message. He interprets’ (Crapanzano, 1986, p. 51). Both are charged
with the safe passage of meaning between mutually exclusive parties and both become involved
actively in the way in which such meaning is ‘packaged’. As Crapanzano observes, the ethnographer
tends to assume all interpretations are provisional, yet assumes a definitive reading nonetheless
(ibid.). As the god of cunning, from the Old Norse Kumandi, meaning ‘knowledge’, Hermes was a
creator of meaning as well as its messenger, and in this act of creation there is an aggressive as well
as a life-giving dimension, for to show knowledge – to represent to another all that which is strange
and unknown – we must also deceive. As Crapanzano points out, when Hermes took the job of
messenger of the gods, he promised Zeus he would not lie. But this is not the same as promising to tell
the whole truth (p. 53).
It is also useful to note the etymology of Hermes. His name, in the Greek form herma, is associated
with the piles of stones that stood as boundary markers placed throughout Greece to protect travellers
on their journey. The figure of Hermes thus stands for border-limits – for all that separates the upper
and the lower worlds, for the co-existence of mutually mysterious and mutually incomprehensible
realms of understanding that make mutual understanding impossible. As the emissary of the gods, he
was both the god of boundaries, and, by extension, the god of border-crossings. Hermes is a reminder
of both the limits and the very possibility of human understanding, for by being in the very business of
crossing borders, he both confirms their existence and validates the desire to supersede them. The
border-limits of human understanding thus contain their own invitation to be crossed, for their
presence at once impedes and demands passage. In the mortal world we recognize these borders
when communication fails, because we speak both to communicate and to conceal, always leaving
certain things hanging in the air. As Steiner rightly observed, where human beings are concerned there
are no spaces of absolute transparency because no two speakers mean exactly the same thing, even
when they use the same terms, or if they do, we would have no way of demonstrating it independently.
Understanding is so fraught with difficulty because between every message is what Steiner terms a
‘middle’ in which there is ‘an operation of interpretive decipherment’ (1998, p. 49). It is in this
space, the space where Hermes operates, that ‘translation’ begins. Properly understood, Steiner
writes, translation ‘is a special case of the arc of communication which every successful speech-act
closes within a given language’ (ibid.). The very thing that makes translation impossible is also that
which creates an imperative precisely for translation, for somehow we do manage to communicate
with one another, to read one another’s work, to hold international conferences, to trade commodities
and to export goods. We can no more deny that translation happens than deny our breath, for it is quite
simply what we do all the time. But in this hermeneutic view, translation is neither the absence of
misunderstanding, nor the destruction of the border-limits that challenge our knowledge of one
another. It is a cunning act of knowledge-creation across the border-limit, never complete, never
neutral, always partial and always embodied. It is here that the journey of cultural translation begins.

The symbol gives rise to thought

The first principle behind Ricoeur’s hermeneutic philosophy is that the problem of understanding is a
feature of all language, not just sacred texts, and that ‘language’ is a primary feature of our being in
the world. His initial project was to demonstrate the way in which the language we use, enshrined
within the texts we create, is engaged in representing and better understanding human reality in some
way: ‘Because it is a world, the world of the text necessarily collides with the real world in order to
“remake” it, either by confirming it or denying it. However, even the most ironic relation between art
and reality would be incomprehensible if art did not both disturb and rearrange our relation to reality’
(Ricoeur, 2008, p. 6). Texts are both inextricably linked to and riff off the world. It is the mimetic
quality of human life that establishes Ricoeur’s hermeneutics as a universal philosophy dedicated to
the way in which we read not just texts but the narration of human lives. If in this worldly relevant
sense hermeneutics is concerned with the decipherment of meaning wherever it is found then we must
see the ‘text’ as only the beginning in our interrogation of meaning-making. This intellectual genealogy
shares something with Benjamin, who was well known to Ricoeur:
Every expression of human mental life can be understood as a kind of language, and this understanding, in the manner of a true
method, everywhere raises new questions. It is possible to talk about a language of music and of sculpture, about a language of
justice that has nothing directly to do with those in which German or English legal judgements are couched, about a language of
technology that is not the specialized language of technicians. Language in such contexts means the tendency inherent in the
subjects concerned – technology, art, justice, or religion – toward the communication of the contents of the mind. To sum up: all
communication of the contents of the mind is language, communication in words being only a particular case of human language and
of the justice, poetry, or whatever underlying it or founded on it. (Benjamin, 1996, p. 62)

Ricoeur maintained that even at the most banal level of conversation the polysemy of the words we
employ requires a work of hermeneutics, because everything we say has more than one meaning when
used outside of determinate contexts. Yet it is not simply the fact that words have multiple meanings
that causes a problem for understanding. It is the fact that, from the very beginning, language is in the
business of mystery, for it always points to something beyond itself. Ricoeur’s point of entry into this
line of thinking is the symbol, which he defines as: ‘any structure of signification in which a direct,
primary, literal meaning designates, in addition, another meaning which is indirect, secondary,
and figurative and which can be apprehended only through the first. This circumscription of
expressions with a double meaning properly constitutes the hermeneutic field’ (Ricoeur, 2004, p. 12,
original emphasis). Like every sign, symbols stand for things they intend beyond themselves. But not
every sign is a symbol, for unlike signs, symbols conceal a double intentionality. In addition to the
primary intention a second intentionality is grafted upon it so that the obvious meaning also points to
something else. Unlike technical signs these are not transparent. Symbols present such a challenge
because their roots run deep. In this opacity is ‘the symbol’s very profundity, an inexhaustible depth’
(p. 287).
Hermes fits this description, for while on one level he appears to be the fleet-of-foot intermediary
between the upper and lower worlds of ancient Greece, a facilitator of communication, he is also the
trickster-god of misunderstanding and personification of the ways in which the limits of opacity can
only be superseded through active involvement. But this secondary reading of the legend of Hermes
was teased out only through reflection on the paradox of the border, which Hermes simultaneously
reinforces and supersedes. As with Hermes, symbols become a hermeneutic problem when meaning
is ‘concealed’ rather than given; hidden in plain sight, they lend themselves to mystery and ambiguity:
The symbol, I said, is constituted from a semantic perspective such that it provides a meaning by means of a meaning. In it a
primary, literal, worldly, often physical meaning refers back to a figurative, spiritual, often existential, ontological meaning which is in
no way given outside this indirect designation. The symbol invites us to think, calls for an interpretation, precisely because it says
more than it says and because it never ceases to speak to us. (p. 28)

Symbols have a double meaning where the literal signification points to a second meaning that can be
understood only by considering the reference of the first to the second – in other words, by taking a
contemplative ‘detour’. It is the plurivocity of symbols, their inherent multiplicity of meaning, which
gives rise to the possibility of opposed interpretations:
By living in the first meaning I am drawn by it beyond itself: the symbolic meaning is constituted in and through the literal
meaning, which brings about the analogy by giving the analogue. Unlike a comparison that we look at from the outside,
symbol is the very movement of the primary meaning that makes us share in the latent meaning and thereby assimilates us to the
symbolized, without our being able intellectually to dominate the similarity. This is the sense in which the symbol ‘gives’; it gives
because it is a primary intentionality that gives the second meaning. (p. 287, original emphasis)

This dimension is not to be confused with allegory, where we reach past the symbol to find the ‘true’
philosophical meaning it elides – the one that precedes the fable, which is only a poor disguise for a
truth universally acknowledged. With symbols, by contrast, we are drawn into an enigmatic game, for
they invite active involvement on the part of the interpreter: ‘I am convinced that we must think, not
behind the symbols, but starting from symbols, according to symbols, that their substance is
indestructible, that they constitute the revealing substrate of speech which lives among men. In short,
the symbol gives rise to thought’ (p. 295, original emphasis). Wherever meaning is symbolic, where
the surface meaning may elide another, less obvious meaning that depends upon the first, it is the work
of hermeneutics to discover and reflect upon this. Ricoeur gives the example of the expulsion of
Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden. Myth, he says, is symbol developed through a narrative and
this narrative expands over time. The Adamic myth is a symbol of exile, alienation; but as a second-
order mythic narrative it also suggests certain universals of human existence in which we too can
share. Beyond the story of Adam and Eve in the garden are themes of jealousy, desire and human
arrogance that remain universal so long as these things remain part of the human condition.
According to Ricoeur, the practical work of thought involved in hermeneutics ‘consists in
deciphering the hidden meaning in the apparent meaning, in unfolding the levels of meaning implied in
the literal meaning’ (p. xiv). Inherent to this hermeneutics of decipherment is a desire for
amplification – to interpret a symbol by being sensitive to the ‘surplus of meaning’ implicit in the
symbolism that only a full reflection could bring out. This work of amplification aims to demystify, to
unmask the unavowed, to ‘re-collect’ meaning ‘in its richest, its most elevated, most spiritual density’
(Ricoeur, 2008, p. 16). Ricoeur’s point is that the surplus of meaning is simultaneously that which
requires us to interpret and that which makes all other interpretations possible. Le symbole donne à
penser – ‘What the symbol gives, gives rise to thought. This aphorism suggests that everything has
already been said enigmatically, yet it is always necessary to start again when it comes to the
dimension of concepts.’ (p. 6) This is not about thinking without presupposition, but about starting to
think from our presuppositions.
 The symbol is given to thought only by way of an interpretation which remains inherently problematical. There is no myth without
exegesis, no exegesis without contestation. The deciphering of mysteries is not a science in either the Platonic or Hegelian sense or
in the modern meaning of the word science. Opacity, cultural contingency, and dependency on a problematical interpretation-such as
the three deficiencies of the symbol as measured by the ideal of clarity, necessity, and scientific order in reflection. (Ricoeur, 2004,
p. 314)

We can draw three conclusions about symbolism: the first is its inherent plurivocity, which ensures
that the symbol cannot survive outside of its unique situational context; the second is that the symbol’s
plurivocity simultaneously challenges understanding while issuing its own demand to be understood;
and third, that this same symbol gives rise to the possibility of interpretations that are diametrically
opposed.

Memes as cultural translations

What might the surplus of meaning – the work of reflection that arises from the co-presence of a
literal signification suggestive of a secondary meaning that can only be understood by a detour
through the meaning of the first – actually look like in context? In The Selfish Gene (2006) Dawkins
wrote of the emergence of an all-new replicating entity, ‘still in its infancy, still drifting about in its
primeval soup’ to challenge the prevalence of the gene as the primary means of securing evolution on
our planet through reproduction:
The new soup is the soup of human culture. We need a name for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of
cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. ‘Mimeme’ comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit
like ‘gene’. I hope my Classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme. If it is any consolation, it could
alternatively be thought of as being related to ‘memory’, or to the French word même. It should be pronounced to rhyme with
‘cream’. Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as
genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body by sperm or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the
meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. If a scientist hears, or
reads about, a good idea, he passes it on to his colleagues and students. He mentions it in his articles and his lectures. If the idea
catches on, it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain. […] When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you
literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme’s propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the
genetic mechanism of a host cell. (Dawkins, 2006, p. 192, original emphasis)

As a ‘unit of cultural transmission’ in the age of the Internet, the meme has now itself evolved, to
secure its reproduction by means of what I insist here is best understood as hermeneutic reflection.
By this I mean not only that memes are ‘symbolic’ par excellence in the sense that the modus operandi
of the most viral of memes requires their audience to go beyond the surface-level meaning to
appreciate hidden depths, but also that it is this very symbolic dimension that secures a meme’s
survival by increasing its chances of going viral. It is precisely in their inherent mysteriousness, the
fact that memes engender a degree of detective work in order for their performative effect to be
secured, that their contribution – to humour, wit, parody or politics – within the broader pool of
cultural artefacts with which it competes is secured.
Consider the ‘One does not simply walk into Mordor’ meme. The phrase is a memorable quotation
from The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001). The quotation is taken from a
meeting of the Council of Elrond at which it is revealed that the ring created by the Dark Lord Sauron
can only be destroyed by throwing it into the fires of Mount Doom, a volcano deep in the fearsome
territory of Mordor. Boromir, the character played by actor Sean Bean, warns of the difficulty of this
task by observing that ‘One does not simply walk into Mordor.’ As is typical of memes, the ‘One does
not simply walk into Mordor’ meme involves layering a variant of the phrase on which it is based –
known in Internet terminology as a ‘snowclone’ – onto an image still taken from the film itself. In the
‘One does not simply X into Mordor’ snowclone, the word ‘walk’ is typically substituted to humorous
effect. In the ‘One does not simply wok into Mordor’ meme, Sean Bean’s face has been placed over
the body of a chef; the ‘One does not simply Walken to Mordor’ meme layers a black and white
headshot of actor Christopher Walken over a still from the film showing a dark plateau with Mount
Doom in the background; and the ‘One does not silly walk into Mordor’ places Sean Bean’s face over
the body of John Cleese. In the first two examples we do not require too much hermeneutic
decipherment to work out what is going on. They do require the reader to have seen the film, of
course, and to understand that the fatuousness of Boromir’s original phrase has sparked something of
an Internet sensation; but, in the round, they do not have to point too far beyond themselves for the
richness of their meaning to be revealed. However, for the ‘One does not silly walk into Mordor’
meme to function, for it to have any comedic effect at all, the reader must not only understand all of
the foregoing; she must also understand the multiple – and multimodal – references that are being
made simultaneously. First, the reader must understand that the background image of the besuited body
of Cleese clutching a briefcase is taken from a sketch entitled ‘The Ministry of Silly Walks’, first
screened as part of the Monty Python’s Flying Circus (1970) television programme, in which the
actor starred as a civil servant in a fictitious British government department responsible for
administering grants for silly walks. Throughout the original sketch, Cleese walks in a variety of very
silly ways. In the meme, Cleese’s head has been replaced with that of Bean’s and the phrase ‘simply
walk’ has been replaced with ‘silly walk’. Without a prior knowledge of the comedic genealogy on
which this meme relies, the reader cannot decipher the hidden meaning behind the surface-level
reference to The Lord of the Rings. To employ Austin’s terminology, for memes to be truly
performative, rather than just constative, that is, to do more than merely ‘say’ something of interest
but to incite us towards some sort of action (such as clicking the ‘share’ or ‘like’ or ‘retweet’ icon and
thus increasing the viral score a meme achieves), is to suggest to readers the existence of a shared
secret to which, if they have the right background knowledge or experience (in this case, of 1970s
British comedy), they too can be privy.

Translation, language and being

For Ricoeur, the very fact that language refers to the world – it does not simply ‘say’ things; it has
something to say about them – meant that his reflections on the concealment of meaning through the
symbol were only the beginning of a much bigger project. He observed that the objective of a sign, to
stand ‘for’ something, is repudiated by its very nature as something designed to transcend itself. There
is no closed system of intra-significant signs in language, only signs that express an extra-linguistic
reality. Like pieces of Lego that make sense only when the mechanism by which they interlock with
other pieces of Lego is made known, signs exist in the very condition of reaching outwards, beyond
language, to the world. In the intention to signify, language becomes inextricably linked not just to the
world but to the references it makes to a world outside itself. As Ricoeur observes, ‘language speaks,
that is, shows, makes present, brings into being. The absence of the sign from the thing is only the
negative condition for the sign to reach the thing, touch it, and die in this contact’ (2004, p. 258).
When, for example, I once visited the toilets of a fashionable bar-restaurant in Belfast and was
confronted with two separate doors offering me a choice between ‘Olivia Newton-John’, on the one
hand, and ‘Elton John’, on the other, I did not actually expect to find a best-selling English-born
singer-songwriter-performer lurking behind my chosen bathroom door. Instead I found the venue’s
humour charming and I made my choice. Discursive statements are statements of reality; not reality
itself. Inherent within the symbolic materials we produce there is a simultaneous presence and an
absence. Ricoeur gives the example of metaphor, which, like symbolic language, reaches outside
itself to a world that it represents mimetically. But it does not reach outside of itself by itself; one
employs the metaphor, as a living device. It is impossible to coin a new metaphor without being
aware of what one is doing, and, in turn, the new metaphor creates a mystery for the reader unfamiliar
with it. This requires the reader to think carefully about it and in so doing to become aware of the
mystery involved in interpreting it. With metaphor, explains Simms, ‘we say that something is
something else, and in so doing assimilate the something else into the first something, despite the fact
that on first appearance it does not belong there. This constitutes for Ricoeur a form of ordering the
world by the imagination’ (Simms 2003, p. 79). To declare that ‘the law’s an arse’, ‘yer head’s a
marley’ and ‘she’s the quare girl’, as we are wont to do in Northern Ireland, or that ‘Achilles is a
lion’, to adopt Ricoeur’s own example, is to say that something or someone both is and is not that to
which they are being actively compared (2004, p. 249). Even the copula itself is othered by the fact
that Achilles is both the same and not the same as a lion. By referencing a world it represents
mimetically, yet simultaneously does not re-create, language contains its own othering. In this sense, a
sign is a negative truth, since it can only stand ‘for’ something if it is not the thing itself. For this
reason, metaphor ‘forces conceptual thought to think more’ (p. 303). It compels us to use the
imagination interpretively, to roll up our sleeves and participate actively in the creation of meaning.
As Simms notes, ‘the work of interpretation involved in understanding a metaphor is itself a part of
the knowledge arrived at. Metaphor is thus a point in language at which the objective facts of the
world meet the subjective interpretation of the individual who interprets them – a point at which
phenomenological truth is arrived’ (2003, p. 74).
Ricoeur’s point is that words have no ‘proper’ meaning on their own and meaning cannot be said to
‘belong’ to them. They are simply empty vessels and do not carry any meaning in themselves, for
language always opens outwards and gestures towards something beyond itself and beyond the world
of the speaker. ‘Meaning’ in language exists only inasmuch as we make language refer to the world:
Only this dialectic says something about the relation between language and the ontological condition of being in the world. Language
is not a world of its own. It is not even a world. But because we are in the world, because we are affected by situations, and
because we orient ourselves comprehensively in those situations, we have something to say, we have experience to bring to
language. (Ricoeur, 1976, p. 20–1)

This is significant, because it means that when it comes to the work of reflection that language
stimulates, as is the project of Ricoeur’s philosophical hermeneutics, the linguistic focus of our
enquiry cannot be separated from the domain of lived experience. We speak because we have
something to say. Language does not really exist until we employ it in a real-world situation of
communication – until we imbue it with meaning by using it to say something about something to
someone else. It is the instantiation of language through speech addressed to an interlocutor. As such,
language is an open system. When we speak, we select certain meanings and exclude others; these
choices produce new combinations, new sentences and new ideas. When this ‘discourse’ is
understood by another, by the receiver to which it is directed, it becomes meaning: ‘Just as language,
by being actualised as discourse, surpasses itself as system and realises itself as event, so too
discourse, by entering the process of understanding, surpasses itself as event and becomes meaning’
(Ricoeur, 2008, p. 75). Speech is event: it is deliberateness of choice; it is reference; and, crucially,
intersubjectivity, for language remains only potential until it is actualized by someone addressing their
words to another. Because a speaker’s signifying intentions are always relative to the situation and
the audience to whom they are addressed, discourse never exists for its own sake. It is also always
self-referential, precisely because signs in language remain empty until they are filled by a speaker
who deploys them. At the same time as it makes reference to the world, then, discourse also refers
back to the one doing the referencing. While the speaker can be identified through all manner of
indicators such as personal pronouns, language, meanwhile, acquires no subject until someone
actually speaks. It is only through this circular dialectic, by which a speaker engages with the world
and puts into words that self-same engagement that meaning comes to mean anything. Ultimately,
Ricoeur attests, ‘[l]​anguage itself, as a signifying milieu, must be referred to existence’ (2004, p. 15).
Benjamin offers a similar reflection in his essay, ‘On Language as Such and on the Language of
Man’, in which he observed that by ‘naming’ the world around us, language becomes the
communication of the ‘mental being of man’ (1996, p. 65). The language of a lamp, he says,
communicates not the lamp itself, but the ‘language-lamp, the lamp in communication, the lamp in
expression’ (p. 63). The lamp does not communicate by itself; we make it communicate. When we
name it, it becomes a vehicle for communication, both with others and back to ourselves:
What does language communicate? It communicates the mental being corresponding to it. It is fundamental that this mental being
communicates itself in language and not through language. Languages, therefore, have no speaker, if this means someone who
communicates through these languages. Mental being communicates itself in, not through, a language, which means that it is not
outwardly identical with linguistic being. Mental being is identical with linguistic being insofar as it is capable of being communicated.
(Benjamin, 1996, p. 63, original emphasis)

Language has no being. It is we who communicate things using language. Language does not
communicate anything except the person behind it, who communicates in language – that is, using
language, not ‘through’ it. This would be to imply that the ‘thing’ that is communicated is itself fixed
and inalienable. What language communicates is not an essential quality but the ‘mental being’ of the
one who communicates. In this infinite circle, the expressions of a mental entity, words, are but the
communication of a self through language, not language itself (p. 63). When it comes to Ricoeur’s
hermeneutic project, which is neither interested in linguistic description nor semantic theory but in
how the world relates to human beings through the mediation of texts, these insights are crucial, for
they suggest that language is secondary: to the world and to ourselves. Yes, language is the medium
through which meanings are conveyed; but as the communication of the contents of the mind it is a
medium that ‘belongs’ properly to being:
For us who speak, language is not an object but a mediation. Language is that through which, by means of which, we express
ourselves and express things. Speaking is the act by which the speaker overcomes the closure of the universe of signs, in the
intention of saying something about something to someone; speaking is the act by which language moves beyond itself as sign
toward its reference and toward what it encounters. Language seeks to disappear; it seeks to die as an object. (Ricoeur, 2004, p.
82)

In this way the referential function of language – the means by which it says something about
something to someone else – is only the counterpart of another aspect which proceeds from our being
in the world, for that which language ‘says’, ultimately, is something as pertinent about the one who is
speaking as the one who is being spoken to. ‘It is because there is first something to say’, Ricoeur
writes, ‘because we have an experience to bring to language, that conversely, language is not only
directed towards ideal meanings but also refers to what is’ (1976, p. 21). Language, then, is the
expression of our very ontological condition. As Benjamin attests:
There is no event or thing in either animate or inanimate nature that does not in some way partake of language, for it is in the nature
of each one to communicate its mental contents. This use of the word ‘language’ is in no way metaphorical. For to think that we
cannot imagine anything that does not communicate its mental nature in its expression is entirely meaningful; consciousness is
apparently (or really) bound to such communication to varying degrees, but this cannot alter the fact that we cannot imagine a total
absence of language in anything. (Benjamin, 1996, p. 62)

Yet we speak both to communicate and to conceal, for as much as language-in-life is a performance
by which human actors imbue words with intentionality, purpose and desire, we also leave certain
things unspoken. Whether intended deliberately or not, there is always something hidden in our
language. As Steiner reminds: ‘The language of a community, however uniform its social contour, is
an inexhaustibly multiple aggregate of speech-atoms, of finally irreducible personal meanings. The
element of privacy in language makes possible a crucial, though little understood, linguistic function’
(1998, p. 47). Because language belongs to being, in other words, it will always be aporetic.
Consider these words of wisdom from the March Hare in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1869):
‘Your hair wants cutting’, said the Hatter. He had been looking at Alice for some time with great curiosity, and this was his first
speech. ‘You should learn not to make personal remarks’, Alice said with some severity: ‘it’s very rude’. The Hatter opened his
eyes very wide on hearing this; but all he said was, ‘Why is a raven like a writing-desk?’ ‘Come we shall have some fun now!’
thought Alice. ‘I’m glad they’ve begun asking riddles – I believe I can guess that’, she added aloud. ‘Do you mean that you think
you can find out the answer to it?’ said the March Hare. ‘Exactly so’, said Alice. ‘Then you should say what you mean’, the March
Hare went on. ‘I do’, Alice hastily replied; ‘at least-at least I mean what I say-that’s the same thing, you know’. ‘Not the same
thing a bit!’ said the Hatter. ‘Why you might as well say that “I see what I eat” is the same thing as “I eat what I see!” ’ (Carroll,
1869, pp. 96–8, original emphasis)

According to the March Hare’s reproach, there is a distinct difference between meaning something, in
the intentional sense, and for that which you say to be actually reflective of that which you mean by
the time it reaches the person to whom you are speaking. The ‘linguistic function’ of which Steiner
writes is the inescapable duplicity that surrounds our expressions of human life. As Steiner puts it,
‘No two historical epochs, no two social classes, no two localities use words and syntax to signify
exactly the same things, to send identical signals of valuation and inference. Neither do two human
beings’ (1998, p. 47). No two people will interpret the same statement in exactly the same way,
because we imbue even apparently neutral terms with social, cultural, linguistic and political
particularity and because ‘understanding’ does not depend upon universal criteria that are shared
equally by all who understand. For Benjamin, this situation contrasts starkly with the time before the
fall of the mythical city of Babel, a time when there was perfect understanding and total
correspondence between signs and the things to which they pointed. In paradise, there was no need to
name things, because things simply ‘were’:
After the Fall, which, in making language mediate, laid the foundation for its multiplicity, linguistic confusion could only be a step
away. Once men had injured the purity of name, the turning away from that contemplation of things in which their language passes
into man needed only to be completed in order to deprive men of the common foundation of an already shaken spirit of language.
Signs must become confused where things are entangled. The enslavement of language in prattle is joined by the enslavement of
things in folly almost as its inevitable consequence. In this turning away from things, which was enslavement, the plan for the Tower
of Babel came into being, and linguistic confusion with it. (Benjamin, 1996, p. 72, original emphasis)

What we face in our post-Babelian miasma goes deeper than just the polysemy of words or the
ambiguity of sentences. It follows that if language is the expression of the contents of the mind, then
the putative ‘problem’ of language is at base a problem of the incommensurability of human
experience. When Benjamin writes that the paradisiacal language of humankind ‘must have been one
of perfect knowledge, whereas all later knowledge is again infinitely differentiated in the multiplicity
of language’ (p. 71), we can attribute this to the plurivocity of human experience as expressed in
language and which makes the things we say mutually incomprehensible, since ‘my’ experience does
not map directly onto yours. The mysteries of language thus consist partly in the fact that what is
experienced by one person cannot be transferred wholesale to another.
The starting point for hermeneutics – as a method for deciphering meaning where there is mystery –
is not simply that semantic meaning is distinct from symbolic meaning, or that the speeches we make
or the texts we write are more than the sum of their parts. Hermeneutics insists that because the things
we say and the things we write tell us something about the world, we cannot derive their meaning in
isolation from the worlds to which they point:
For the interpreter, it is the text which has a multiple meaning; the problem of multiple meaning is posed for him only if what is being
considered is a whole in which events, persons, institutions, and natural or historical realities are articulated. It is an entire
‘economy’, an entire signifying whole, which lends itself to the transfer of meaning from the historical to the spiritual level. (Ricoeur,
2004, p. 63)

Because it is a philosophy of interpretation based on the lingual condition of all human experience,
hermeneutics is committed to the idea that the significations that populate the world around us are
neither totalities closed in on themselves, nor are they restricted to the world of text. Behind (and
indeed, before!) texts there are real people with real motivations, intentions and desires. Each of
these brings to bear an influence on the shape and nature of the texts that are created:
To be sure, texts – mainly literary ones – are ensembles of signs that have more or less broken their ties to the things they are held
to denote. But, amid the things that are said there are people, acting and suffering; what is more, discourses are themselves actions;
this is why the mimetic bond – in the most active sense of the term mimetic – between the act of saying (and of reading) and
effective action is never completely severed. It is only made more complex, more indirect by the break between signum and res.
(Ricoeur, 2008, p. xi, original emphasis)

Although he takes lessons from semantic theory, Ricoeur embraces the textual model of interpretation
wherever there is meaningful discourse and believed that it is in the nature of every being on Earth to
communicate its mental contents. But he also believed that the communication of the contents of the
mind was not limited to the making of speeches or the writing of text, traditionally conceived. Then,
as now, our world is as much visual as it is verbal – if not more so today, with the rise of social
media and the multimodal cultures of circulation that prevail in an Internet-connected age. Ideas
predicated on received notions of ‘text’ no longer stand. One of Ricoeur’s key contributions to
hermeneutic philosophy was to extend the process of interpreting mystery within the words on a page
to the process of ‘reading’ the world around us. If the basic premise of hermeneutics is that written
works are possessing of meaning because they are reflective of life, then it follows that ‘life’ can be
viewed as a narrative to be engaged with – ‘read’ and interpreted as we would a text and revealing of
something about the human condition. In Ricoeur’s fundamental revision, hermeneutics is concerned
with interpreting any instance in which meaning is advanced and contested, for the textual model is
only the means for discovering how the world relates to human beings and human beings to one
another through language.
Thus while the prima facie concern of hermeneutics is the concealment of meaning in language –
the ‘circumscription of expressions with a double meaning’ – Ricoeur’s expanded definition of
hermeneutics is not limited to symbols as expressions of multiple intention (Ricoeur, 2004, p. 12).
His innovation is that we can apply the theory of the text to meaningfully oriented behaviour in the
Weberian sense, to the production of any human act, inscribed as much in deed as in text, where
meaning is contested. As with text, Ricoeur observes that in all manner of phenomena in the social
sphere, we witness attempts to cope with problems of understanding, and, as with text, these human
efforts to tackle conflict and complexity have a referential dimension in the sense that they project
worlds that are more than their ostensive situation. Such social structures ‘point toward the aporias of
social existence, the same aporias around which mythical thought gravitates’ (Ricoeur, 2008, p. 162).
As with the textual model, we cannot understand meaningful patterns in the social sphere without the
same kind of personal commitment that the reader deploys when grasping the complexity of the text.
As readers as much of ourselves as one another, we embrace the rules of the text within a theory of
action when we enter into thoughtful engagement with all manner of human expression, from the
newspaper articles we produce and comment on, to the material we post and share on the Internet, the
street graffiti we produce, the historical events we memorialize, the monuments we build and the
politicians and celebrities we raise and destroy. To Ricoeur, these are all ‘quasi-texts asking to be
read’ (2008, p. 33).
The common link between text and human action is its temporal character. As with storytelling, for
example, which is marked, organized and clarified according to the moment in which it unfolds, so
too action is historically contingent: ‘Everything that is recounted occurs in time, takes time, unfolds
temporally; and what unfolds in time can be recounted. Perhaps, indeed, every temporal process is
recognized as such only to the extent that it can, in one way or another, be recounted’ (Ricoeur, 2008,
p. 2). We can speak of a ‘discourse’ of action in which something is transacted from one agent to
another as a message might pass from one speaker to another through the process of interlocution.
Certain actions also leave their ‘mark’ – and it is these marks that serve as the ‘textual’ inscriptions
on which to base our hermeneutic enquiry. Just as we can interpret the internal and external relations
of a text, we can examine the multiple connections of an action, for, as with text, actions contain an
internal structure that has a reference to a world; and they project something outwards, connecting
themselves to the wider world, analogous to the referential function of the text. Like metaphor, human
action demonstrates mimetic qualities, for it is engaged in representing human reality in some way.
As a quasi-text, human action, ‘like every other text, makes room for a kind of hermeneutic circle,
inasmuch as one interprets it as a whole as a function of its parts and vice versa.’ (Ricoeur, 2013, p.
34). The world is open-ended because the things we say, the texts we produce, the things we make
and the things we do are also open to interpretation. In a bid to better understand the human condition
and the ways in which it inscribes itself in mystery, Ricoeur looks to the signs produced in writing or
by any other process of inscription equivalent to writing including ‘all the sorts of documents and
monuments that entail a fixation similar to writing’ (2008, p. 140). These ‘documents of life’
encompass any ‘expression of life’ or ‘cultural artefact’ in the ‘social imaginary’, including events
and public monuments, in addition to the actions of human beings themselves. It is Ricoeur’s belief
that the substitution and representing of things by means of signs is the very foundation of social life.
It is the conflict of interpretations these processes of substitution and representation activate that
enable the signs of human experience to mean all they can possibly mean. For Ricoeur, meaning in life
is a text to be interpreted. He thus gives interpretation what he describes as a ‘distinct’ meaning:
I propose to give it the same extension I gave to the symbol. Interpretation, we will say, is the work of thought which consists in
deciphering the hidden meaning in the apparent meaning, in unfolding the levels of meaning implied in the literal meaning.
In this way I retain the initial reference to exegesis, that is, to the interpretation of hidden meanings. Symbol and interpretation thus
become correlative concepts; there is interpretation wherever there is multiple meaning, and it is in interpretation that the plurality of
meanings is made manifest. (Ricoeur, 2004, p. 12, original emphasis)
Opening itself to multiple detours across the terrain of otherness – culture, society, politics, religion
and the human sciences – Ricoeur’s hermeneutics is committed to critical reflection on how
explanation and understanding operate when we interpret the signs of humanity all around us. Viewing
the world as textual, where human existence is expressed through discourse that invites interpretation,
Ricoeur’s hermeneutics remains essentially a theory of text, but which takes texts only as a starting
point.
As with texts, actions have agents who own the actions that belong to them, and, as with texts, they
also contain their own invitation to be interpreted, since both are diverse and multifaceted. The
expressions of human life are constantly circumscribed with heterogeneous meaning: ‘As a quasi-text,
action derives its readability from the rules that connect it together, thanks to which we can say that in
raising our hand, we vote; that in leaving a room we break off negotiations; in running down the street
we take part in a riot; and so on’ (Ricoeur, 2013, p. 34). Actions have meanings that are not
immediately apparent but which give rise to reflection. Like language, human action is conflictual, for
the plurivocity of an action allows it to be construed in a number of ways. We attempt to explain why
a person did this or that, and when we provide motives and causes, we impute certain things to both
the action and its agent, in an attempt to understand. But, as with text, one can always argue for or
against a particular interpretation of an action:
Could we not say that what can be (and must be) construed in human action is the motivational basis of this action, that is, the set
of desirability characters that may explain it? And could we not say that the process of arguing linked to the explanation of action
by its motives unfolds a kind of plurivocity that makes action similar to a text? (Ricoeur, 2008, p. 156, original emphasis)

When Ricoeur entitled his first collection of essays on hermeneutics the conflit des interprétations
his contention was not only that all human experience is at base conflictual but also that the mediation
of different positions in the world forms the basis of the hermeneutic project itself.

Understanding (as) the human condition

By saying that the actions of others can be construed in more than one way, that the expressions of life
all around us give rise to a mystery that can be studied and interpreted, that life can be read and
interrogated as we would a text, we show ‘life’ as a narrative to be read and engaged with. This is to
presuppose not just that all human experience is, in principle, expressible, but that human experience
demands to be said (Ricoeur, 2008, p. 36). This is the Sprachlichkeit that pervades all human
experience – that the linguisticality of the world around us is more than the outward expression of an
understanding and instead a never-ending search for meaning. So while Ricoeur’s philosophical
hermeneutics is interested above all in the mysteries of life in all its manifestations, it is the bigger
picture, our very experience of life and the world around us, that is of ultimate concern. Thus the
fundamental premise of hermeneutics is that because we gain meaning in life through our ability to
represent the world around us through the things we say, the things we write and the things we do,
human works are precisely possessing of meaning because they are reflective of life. By
understanding these we understand something of the meaning of life. At base, then, Ricoeur’s
philosophy is one of life and one of reading:
This is why philosophy remains a hermeneutics, that is, a reading of the hidden meaning inside the text of the apparent meaning. It is
the task of hermeneutics to show that existence arrives at expression, at meaning, and at reflection only through the continual
exegesis of all the significations that come to light in the world of culture. Existence becomes a self–human and adult–only by
 appropriating this meaning which first resides ‘outside’, in works, institutions and cultural monuments in which the life of the spirit is
objectified. (Ricoeur, 2004, p. 21)

If we express our understanding of the world through signs, symbols, speech and writing, when we
interpret such things, a certain questioning takes place. Since human life is a never-ending process of
engagement, moreover, ‘understanding’ in the social sphere is dialectical in nature, since our
activities in the social sphere are never fully introverted or introspective; we riff constantly off one
another’s interpretations. What Iser calls a process of ‘mapping the open-ended world’ is the
intermediary step between understanding our representations of the world around us and self-
understanding (2000, p. 9). Ricoeur’s hermeneutics is therefore more than epistemological, in the
sense of acquiring knowledge of the world; it is also ontological, for its primary interest is the study
of how knowledge-production increases what we know of ourselves and enables us to question our
being in the world. Being philosophical, Ricoeur’s hermeneutics is concerned above all with the
meaning and significance of life for us as human actors. If language is the vehicle through which
meanings are conveyed and the meaning of life is given, to ‘understand’ language is to understand
what it means to be human.

My definition of cultural translation

It is on this foundation of philosophical hermeneutics that I build my definition of cultural translation.
Pace Ricoeur, my definition takes as first principles that it is through language that the imagination
reaches expression and that words are only one particular brand of human language. It is through the
full spectrum of human endeavour – whether word or deed – that we communicate our being in the
world. To ‘understand’ human action, as our response to the world around us, is to discover human
truths – as much about ourselves as others. I believe that ‘understanding’ is primarily a problem of
understanding the expressions of mental life inscribed in the works of human endeavour all around us.
‘Hermeneutics’, then, is simply a description for what we do in life. Into this philosophical
foundation I integrate insights gleaned from the concrete domain of interlingual translation. As is the
project of hermeneutics, interlingual translation starts where there is mystery and proceeds to
instigate an act of interpretation in a bid to understand. In the case of interlingual translation, this
interpretive act is addressed towards the enigma of a foreign ‘source’ text – no less mysterious –
written in another language, by another person, addressed originally to another audience, in another
time and in another place. Hidden beneath the surface of the source is a surplus of meaning of great
interest to a reader who cannot understand the language in which the text was written originally and
who therefore remains stranded, left out in the linguistic cold. Like Ricoeur’s interpreter of texts and
human action, these hidden depths can only be plumbed through thoughtful reflection on the part of the
translator, who labours to enable the source to mean all it can possibly mean when written again in
the language of the translator’s reader, in a different time, in a different place and for very different
reasons than the original. By virtue of this shared interpretive project, both Ricoeur’s hermeneutic
theorization and the practice of interlingual translation are driven by a quest for understanding.
An interesting dimension distinguishes the interpretive practice of interlingual translation from the
process of interpretation as it unfolds in Ricoeur’s framework. In philosophical hermeneutics, the
objects of interpretation are the mysteries of human discourse – whether inscribed in text or in human
action – as the means by which human beings express themselves. ‘Discourse’ is precisely mysterious
because it is always expressive, always referential, always reaching outwards to represent a world
that it claims to describe. To ‘understand’ discourse is to step into a circular process of meaning-
making by which the works of human endeavour interact with and diverge tangentially from the
worlds they represent, long before the interpreter undertakes to understand. It is this quality that the
process of interpretation at the heart of hermeneutics takes as its object of reflection. This is a project
that interlingual translation shares: its target is the web of relations internal and external to the foreign
source text that connects it to the worlds of meaning it represents. And yet as an audience-directed
mode, translation also does something else, for its objective is more than to understand the production
of meaning in another text. It is also to produce meaning in a text of its own.
As with discourse, translation involves an agent, the translator, and an addressee, the audience who
will receive the translator’s work. And, as with discourse, that which translation produces is also
expressive, also referential, also making references outwards to the world. As with all human works,
translation is mimetic in the sense that it reflects the world of another text, written by another, in
another language, in another time and in another place. But it is also mimetic in the sense that
translation both expresses what is in the world of the source text and it creates a world of its own, for
it is only in the context of this translator-audience dialectic that a translation becomes meaningful.
Translators must do more than read and interpret texts; they must also read and interpret the needs,
knowledges and expectations of their target audiences and then they must create a text of their own to
which their audiences can respond. Translation is therefore purposeful, intentional, and although it
starts from an act of reading, it finishes with an act of writing which will then be read. Thus
translations themselves can be viewed as texts-for-interpretation – as human endeavour, the outward
expression of the contents of the translator’s mind. Translations themselves invite interpretation,
both because they have something to say about the world and because this view of the world can also
be contested by those who read them. Translation may well start life as secondary to the endeavours
of others, a methodology it shares with Ricoeur’s hermeneutics. But translation’s purposeful
dimension – as an act of writing to be read by an identified audience – makes it also a primary mode
of human expression, and, therefore, open to interpretation. Whereas philosophical hermeneutics
addresses the dialectic between reader and text and between interpreter and social phenomena,
translation deals in dialectics that are infinitely intersecting.
In this way, rather than relegating the practice of interlingual translation and its theorization to a
subset of cultural studies, as some critics have worried, my definition of cultural translation places
the interlingual dimension front and centre. This is an approach that fits with Benjamin’s own view of
translation:
It is necessary to found the concept of translation at the deepest level of linguistic theory, for it is much too far-reaching and
powerful to be treated in any way as an afterthought, as has happened occasionally. Translation attains its full meaning in the
realization that every evolved language (with the exception of the word of God) can be considered a translation of all the others.
(Benjamin, 1996, pp. 69–70)

By combining the interpretive methods Ricoeur identifies as part and parcel of the hermeneutic nature
of our existence with a sensitivity to the decisive nature of interlingual translation, my definition of
cultural translation shifts the locus of philosophical hermeneutics to address the deliberate,
purposeful acts of interpretation that aim to impact specific audiences in specific ways. My approach
to cultural translation is concerned with investigating how different people operationalize
interpretation in different times and in different places in a bid to achieve different ends within
different audiences. It locates in the social world of human expression political gestures of
motivation, determination and desire we associate most commonly with the audience-directed nature
of interlingual translation. In my definition, cultural translation applies the interpretive methods by
which philosophical hermeneutics attempts to understand the unknown and deploys them deliberately
in order to effect change. Cultural translation is thus a gesture of interpretation – of contested
understandings of the objects of human expression that suffuse the practice of everyday life in the
social sphere and the attendant gestures of thoughtful reflection and analysis this entails. But this
gesture of interpretation is also accompanied by a simultaneous gesture of desire – to occasion
different behaviours and different ways of thinking and acting within an identified audience. As such,
not everything in the world is cultural translation. To qualify as cultural translation a phenomenon of
human expression in the social sphere must be shown to engage in a contemplative work of
understanding addressed towards a particular substance, but it must also have as its primary objective
nothing short of the transformation of human hearts and minds.
 2
Distanciation
Translation and the space-time continuum

‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:/ Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’. It is thought
that it was the imminent arrival in England of a colossal granite bust of Ramesses II, the third pharaoh
of the Nineteenth Dynasty of ancient Egypt, which inspired Shelley to publish these immortal words
in 1818. ‘Ozymandias’, derived from a Greek transliteration of one of his throne names, is just one of
the names by which we recognize Ramesses. In film he has been portrayed on numerous occasions as
the pharaoh of the Book of Exodus, by Yul Brynner in The Ten Commandments (1956), Ralph Fiennes
in the animated feature The Prince of Egypt (1998) and Joel Edgerton in Exodus: Gods and Kings
(2014). In narrative fiction he is the subject of The Mummy, or Ramses the Damned (1989) by Anne
Rice, the Ramsès series by Christian Jacq (1995–7) and features as a crime-fighting vigilante-turned-
businessman in the critically acclaimed Watchmen comic series (1986–7) and graphic novel (2008)
created by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons with colourist John Higgins.
That he continues to inspire a cult of personality would leave the pharaoh well pleased.
Throughout the sixty-plus years of his reign he dedicated himself to building public monuments to his
greatness. He ascended the throne at the age of twenty-five and from about 1279 BC until his death in
around 1213 BC, and on a scale beyond all others who preceded him, covered a territory stretching
between the Nile Delta and modern-day northern Sudan with palaces, temples and statues, adding to
or completing existing sites and sometimes inscribing his name over the names of his predecessors,
securing his place in history by erasing the marks of his forebears and tagging their works as his own.
His building work was prolific. He is responsible for establishing a new capital named Pi-Ramesses
at the ancient site of Avaris – another boast to the greatness of both his name and his victory in battle
– and for the twin temples at Abu Simbel in southern Egypt near the border with Sudan. At the
entrance to the Great Temple in the same complex four giant statues of Ramesses rising twenty metres
were carved out of the exterior rock, each depicting the pharaoh seated on his throne.
Over three thousand years before the completion of Mount Rushmore, Ramesses knew that the
secret of everlasting life was to impress into the geology of the Earth a permanent record of his works
at every opportunity. He built the temples in honour of his queen Nefertari and to commemorate his
military prowess at the Battle of Kadesh against the forces of the Hittite Empire. The treaty he
concluded with King Hattusili III around 1259 BC is today recognized as one of the earliest surviving
peace accords, and a replica clay tablet displaying the text of the treaty hangs at the north entrance to
the Security Council in the United Nations headquarters in New York. And yet the Battle of Kadesh
was basically a draw. For over two centuries the Egyptian Kingdom had been locked in hostilities
with the Hittite Empire for control of lands in modern-day Syria. By the time Ramesses ascended the
throne there was no clear victor. In the pharaoh’s revisionist account, however, which is narrated on
wall after wall on many of his monuments, it was an all-out victory for the Egyptian Kingdom. Given
the sheer magnitude of his works and the shrewdness of his marketing strategy, Ramesses well earns
his epithet as ‘the Great’. But as one of history’s first spin doctors, his works also teach us something
about the limits of human achievement and it is this dimension that plays an important role in the
hermeneutic project on which I base my definition of cultural translation.
Ricoeur’s philosophical hermeneutics starts where there is mystery – when the signs of human
existence are separated from the things to which they refer. He believed that when the site of
separation is spoken discourse, where ‘interlocutors’ are engaged in contemporaneous dialogue, the
mystery can be solved because they share the same moment in time and space. This shared historical
co-situation means that when one speaker addresses herself to another, she can compensate for the
separation of signs from their things through the referential scope of the discourse she employs. That
is, being part of a common situation, a speaker can attempt to ‘show’ the thing that is intended: ‘This
situation in a way surrounds the dialogue, and its landmarks can all be shown by a gesture, by
pointing a finger, or designated in an ostensive manner by the discourse itself through the oblique
reference of those other indicators that are the demonstratives, the adverbs of time and place, and the
tense of the verb’ (Ricoeur, 2008, p. 144). The dialogue is steeped in this situation; we pepper it with
descriptives, demonstratives, proper names and oblique references, in a bid to point towards that
which we mean. For this ostensive designation process to be successful, everything the speaker says
and does depends upon how they are taken up in turn by the interlocutor:
Facing the speaker in the first person is a listener in the second person to whom the former addresses him or herself – this fact
belongs to the situation of interlocution. So, there is not illocution without allocution, and, by implication, without someone to whom
the message is addressed. The utterance that is reflected in the sense of the statement is therefore straightaway a bipolar
phenomenon: it implies simultaneously an ‘I’: that speaks and a ‘you’ to whom the former addresses itself. ‘I affirm that’ equals ‘I
declare to you that’; ‘I promise that’. In short, utterance equals interlocution. (Ricoeur, 1995, p. 43–4, original emphasis)

Utterances carry within them the intention of being recognized for what they are by our receivers.
When we make a promise we are also making a commitment; we are asserting to someone that we
will undertake a certain action. If I make a promise to you I expect you to recognize my promise as
such – both as words and as a commitment to act. Every utterance produces a certain psychological
effect on the part of the receiver through which a speaker’s intention can be recognized – what
Ricoeur describes as the ‘reciprocity of intentions’ (1976, p. 19). The speaker thus leaves a trail of
breadcrumbs for the interlocutor to follow. The beauty of the shared situation of spoken discourse is
that the speaker can occasionally check if the interlocutor is following, and, if not, necessary
corrections can be made. Questions such as ‘do you know what I mean?’, ‘you know what I’m
saying?’, ‘you dig?’, ‘you feel me?’, ‘capische?’, and, my personal favourite, ‘are you picking up
what I’m laying down?’ signal this referential co-dependency across a variety of registers.
I will make four points here about spoken discourse. First, statements do not refer, people do.
Personal pronouns are just one of the indicators by which a speaker implicates herself in the act of
referring to things in the world. In addition to being self-referential, discourse also designates the
interlocutor, since the signs of language are empty until someone employs them in the work of
referring to something real or imagined in the course of saying them to someone else. In this way, we
can say that the structure of discourse is tripartite, referring simultaneously to its own speaker, to the
person to whom one is speaking and to a reality beyond the words that are spoken. It is in the coming
together of all three that meaning is created. Second, statements do not ‘mean’ on their own. It is their
speakers who mean things and they do so with a particular listener in mind. Words have no ‘proper’
meaning in and of themselves and meaning cannot be said to ‘belong’ to them. It is only in the
purposeful act of someone saying something to someone else that meaning is carried. Discourse never
exists for its own sake. Third, because discourse refers back to its speaker at the same time as it
refers to the world, the subjectivity of its own speaker is also identified because the speaker belongs
to the situation of interlocution just as much as the interlocutor. The subjective side of meaning is the
speaker’s meaning, the self-reference of intentionality, while the objective side is the propositional
content contained within the sentence. To ‘mean’ is not just what the speaker intends, but also what the
sentence does. Because in spoken discourse there is an overlap between the subjective intentions of
the speaker and the ‘meaning’ of the discourse, the identity of the utterance is simultaneously that
which the speaker means and what their discourse says. But because in addition to a self-reference to
the speaking subject, discourse also has an audience and a reference to the world, the signifying
intentions of the speaker are always relative to the shared situation in time and space of each.
Meaning is therefore only fulfilled when pointed towards someone else. As Plato noted, words on
their own are neither true nor false and a combination of words may succeed in meaning something,
but it can also point to nothing.
Fourth, and for these reasons, the character of dialogue is above all ‘eventful’, in the sense that it
represents a fleeting moment of complicity between a speaker and an interlocutor, at a certain time
and in a certain place. Every message also has a temporal existence, for messages only ‘mean’
something when someone, at a particular time and in a particular place, intended the discourse to be
meaningful to someone perceiving it. As we go about the business of referring both to ourselves and
to our respective others, we also go about the work of referring to the world around us, such that our
speech also refers to the historical situation in space and time in which the speech takes place:
There is no identification which does not relate that about which we speak to a unique position in the spatio-temporal network, and
there is no network of places in time and space without a final reference to the situational here and now. In this ultimate sense, all
references of oral language rely on monstrations, which depend on the situation perceived as common by the members of the
dialogue. All references in the dialogical situation consequently are situational. (Ricoeur, 1976, p. 35)

Just as geotagging in the digital world records the latitude, longitude, altitude and bearing at the exact
moment we take a digital photo or make a Facebook update, discourse contains its own geospatial
metadata by which a ‘here and now’ of language-in-use is established. Despite the lingering
possibility of mystery, it is by this spatiotemporal co-situation of interlocution that enables two
interlocutors to work together in the shared space of meaning in a bid to solve it.
The resolution of mystery in the shared spatiotemporal situation of spoken language is best
explained through a concrete example. Consider the famous ‘Four Candles’ sketch from the BBC
television comedy series The Two Ronnies (1976) in which Ronnie Corbett played a shopkeeper who
becomes increasingly frustrated with a customer, played by Ronnie Barker, whose demands appear to
confound all reason. The setting appears to be a hardware shop and opens with the arrival of a
customer clutching a shopping list. The customer reads out the first item on the list: ‘four candles’, he
says. The shopkeeper disappears behind the counter and returns with four wax candles, which he sets
down in front of the customer. Confusion ensues. ‘No, fork ‘andles’, the customer explains, ‘‘andles
for forks’. With the shopkeeper, the audience realizes that in the regional variation that marks the
customer’s Estuary accent, what sounded like ‘candle’ was in fact the confusing combination of the
final phoneme /k/ in ‘fork’ and the beginning of the word ‘handle’, in which the /h/ is dropped. The
customer proceeds to work his way through the list and with every item confusion reigns. Thanks
once again to the dropped /h/, lettering for garden gates is mistaken both for pantyhose and a length of
garden hose, while size nine shoes are taken for a foot-operated piston pump. The exasperated
shopkeeper tries to clarify as much as possible about the remaining items before eventually giving up.
As the sketch suggests, dialogue can be fraught with problems. Both interlocutors want to achieve
certain things from an exchange. In this case, the customer wants to fulfil his shopping list and the
shopkeeper wants to sell him the items he seeks. But the shopkeeper repeatedly imputes unintended
meanings and their dialogue is replete with misapprehension. And yet, because they are
contemporaneous, they are somehow able to meet the customer’s needs, in spite of the confusion. The
shopkeeper listens to his requests and seeks clarification. The customer reiterates and paraphrases
himself; he makes gestures, adds emphasis and uses different intonation. With every iteration of the
shopping list the shopkeeper better grasps what the customer is intending. The dialogical nature of
their conversation means that by the end of their question-and-answer exchange there is no longer any
problem of understanding, because even when confusion does arise, both the speaker and the
interlocutor work together to achieve consensus around what is ‘meant’. Of course, it is more than
dialogicality that secures mutual understanding in life, for everything that is said in dialogue takes
place within a particular social context and historical tradition. The so-called short intersubjective
relation shared by two interlocutors is always intertwined with ‘long’ intersubjective relations
mediated by wider social institutions, roles, groups and classes. In the case of the shopkeeper and the
customer, this includes the issues that arise from the use of Estuary English, or the terminology of
hardware and household goods; the dialogue is only one element in a much wider ecology of
historical situatedness. But when it comes to the specific problem of understanding, of agreeing and
achieving meaning where there was contestation, it is the shared co-situationality of time and space
that makes their communication ‘successful’. It takes some time, involves no small amount of
irritation, and more than a little explanation, but by the end of the dialogue, that which is ‘said’ – fork
‘andles – in Ricoeur’s terms ‘turns toward the real’, and the ‘about which’ – handles for forks –
become one and the same thing.
The focus of Ricoeur’s hermeneutics, by contrast, is what happens when discourse passes from
speaking to writing, when, in other words, the object of interpretation is not the spoken word but the
written text, a domain where, unlike speech, the agent of language and the audience to whom language
is addressed no longer share the same moment in space and time. In a written text, that which is
‘said’, and the ‘about which’ that is the take-home message, no longer represent a shared goal that the
speaker and the interlocutor work together to secure as a team. Because textual meaning and
psychological meaning ‘have different destinies’, what the text signifies no longer coincides with
what the author meant (Ricoeur, 2008, p. 80). A gap opens between monstration, on the part of the
author, and identification, on the part of the reader. Here, Ricoeur maintains, is where the unknown
adventure of the text begins.

Semantic autonomy
When text takes the place of speech a dialogical situation remains – not between a speaker and a
hearer but between an author and a reader. Crucially, unlike the common situation of spoken dialogue,
the two parties to the written situation no longer have anything in common. They do not share the same
time and they are not in the same place. So as a phenomenon of its first reading, the reader is absent
when the text was written and the writer is absent when the text is read:
 Dialogue is an exchange of questions and answers; there is no exchange of this sort between the writer and the reader. The writer
does not respond to the reader. Rather, the book divides the act of writing and the act of reading into two sides, between which
there is no communication. The reader is absent from the act of writing; the writer is absent from the act of reading. The text thus
produces a double eclipse of the reader and the writer. It thereby replaces the relation of dialogue, which directly connects the voice
of one to the hearing of the other. (Ricoeur, 2008, pp. 102–3)

As with speech, written text still makes ‘reference’ – poems, essays and works of fiction all tell of
things, events, characters and states of affairs that are evoked but which are not there. But whereas in
oral discourse interlocutors can mediate misunderstanding by pointing towards the objects their
conversation is about, in the written situation, the act of pointing no longer exists. The ‘double
eclipse’ of the writer from the reader and the reader from the writer means that the movement of
ostensive reference is intercepted and can only be fulfilled by the task of reading. Without the author
to act as guide, the reader is left in a state of suspense and must speculate as to what is meant.
Consider the iconic photograph of Princess Diana sitting on the bench in front of the Taj Mahal.
During a tour of India with her husband the Prince of Wales in 1992, she visited the mausoleum on her
own and sat for press photographs while Charles attended an event in Bangalore, over a thousand
miles away. For the world’s press, and endless numbers of spectators ever since, the photograph has
served as a focal point for endless conjecture about the state of the Princess’s marriage. Why was she
sitting alone in front of the world’s greatest monument to love? Had she been snubbed by her
husband? Or was it she who had snubbed him? Were separate travel itineraries simply unavoidable
when two of the most popular people on the planet go on tour? The day after it was taken, the
photograph of the Princess sitting alone on the bench, now known affectionately as ‘Lady Di’s Chair’,
featured on the front page of newspapers across the world and her visit was widely interpreted as
both a statement on her solitude and her husband’s rejection of their marriage. In the public
consciousness, the photograph became the moment that sympathy shifted from the stoic prince to the
seemingly vulnerable princess. It became a cipher for their estrangement and Diana herself a blank
canvas for endless contemplation. As with the story of the Princess of Wales at the Taj Mahal, where
the world’s press looked to other supposed examples of their marital discord and created a narrative
of mutual bitterness, the exteriority of written discourse to itself invites speculation. To the text we
bring all manner of prior knowledge and experience:
The suspense that defers the reference merely leaves the text, as it were, ‘in the air’, outside or without a world. In virtue of this
obliteration of the relation to the world, each text is free to enter into relation with all the other texts that come to take the place of
the circumstantial reality referred to by living speech. (Ricoeur, 2008, p. 104)

When the reader and the writer no longer share the same space, in other words, written discourse
must be made to speak for itself.
This situation is compounded by the fact that whereas speakers know exactly to whom they are
speaking, so that all their messages are tailor-made to suit their identified audience, the reader of a
text is undefined at the time of writing. Instead of being addressed to ‘you’, it is addressed to an
audience that creates itself; in fact, the audience of writing is anyone who knows how to read. This
universality of address means that writing escapes the ‘momentary character’ of the event of spoken
discourse and explodes the limits of the face-to-face dialogical situation. Because neither the reader
nor the author share the same space and time, the immediacy of the dialogical situation in which
speakers and hearers participate in the live-event of human speech is replaced with a much more
complex relationship in which the author is no longer the a priori site of meaning. From the get-go,
there is thus a certain falsehood that we must rid ourselves of, for we tend to think we know ‘who’ the
author of a text is – and, by extension, what they are ‘saying’ – because we derive the idea of the
author from that of the speaker. But when text takes the place of speech there ‘is’ no speaker, in the
sense of immediate self-designation. This is because:
from the single fact that discourse is written down, it has a history that is no longer that of its author. This paradox is easy to
understand. The meaning of what has been written down is henceforth separate from the possible intentions of its author and hence
removed from any kind of psychologizing technique. What we can call the semantic autonomy of the text means that the text
unfolds a history distinct from that of its author. The ambiguity of the notion of signification reflects this situation. To signify can
mean what the text signifies or what the author meant to signify (in English: what does the text mean? What do you mean?).
(Ricoeur, 2013, pp. 12–13, original emphasis)

Whereas in spoken discourse the subjective intention of the subject and the meaning of the discourse
overlap, since to understand the speaker and to understand what the discourse ‘means’ is one and the
same thing, in written discourse the author’s intention and the meaning of the text cease to coincide
because the verbal meaning is now dissociated from the mental intention (Ricoeur, 1976, p. 29).
Moreover, every text has a historical context distinct from that in which its reading unfolds, since the
act of reading occurs in a different time and place to the time and place in which it was written.
Because of a text’s ‘double historical reference’ – to the world of the writer, on the one hand, and the
world of the reader, on the other – what is true for the psychological dimension therefore also holds
for the sociological conditions under which the text was produced and received. This threefold
semantic autonomy – in relation to the speaker’s intention, to the economic, social and cultural
circumstances of its production and to the economic and sociocultural milieu of reception – means
that texts open themselves up to an unlimited series of readings:
In short, that the work de-contextualizes itself, as much from the sociological as the psychological point of view, and allows itself to
be recontextualized in other ways is what happens through the act of reading. The result is that the mediation of the text cannot be
treated as an extension of the dialogical situation. In dialogue, the vis-à-vis of discourse is given in advance through the colloquy
itself. With writing, the original audience is transcended. (Ricoeur, 2013, p. 96)

A text can be viewed neither as a message addressed primarily to a specific range of readers, nor as
part of a historical chain, but an atemporal object that has cut its ties with its own historical
development.

Freedom from authorial intention

The practical consequence of the threefold semantic autonomy of the text is that the ‘event’ of saying
by the author is now surpassed through the act of reading by the meaning of what is said, for its
ostensive reference can now be completed by anyone who accesses the text:
The dissociation of the meaning and the intention is still an adventure of the reference of discourse to the speaking subject. But the
text’s career escapes the finite horizon lived by its author. What the text says now matters more than what the author meant to say,
and every exegesis unfolds its procedures within the circumference of a meaning that has broken its moorings to the psychology of
its author. (Ricoeur, 2008, p. 144)

If the author’s horizon is finite, the verbal meaning of the text breaks free from the moorings of
psychological intention. Just as the text frees itself from the limits of ostensive reference, the text also
frees its meaning from the confines of mental intention (Ricoeur, 2013, p. 59 and p. 144). What
Ricoeur terms the ‘matter’ of the text now escapes the author’s restricted mental horizon, so that what
the text says now means more than what the author meant to say.
We witness this liberation from authorial intention at work in the phenomenon of the politician’s
words that come back to haunt them. UKIP – the UK Independence Party – is a right-wing political
party in the United Kingdom. It has one member of parliament, three representatives in the House of
Lords and nearly 500 local government councillors (about 2% of the total seats). In the 2014
European Parliament election UKIP topped the national poll in the United Kingdom, winning twenty-
four seats. With a general election looming the next year, this swing towards the right shook the
Westminster establishment to the core. As a result, in the months before the general election, party
leader Nigel Farage became the subject of close media scrutiny. It was around this time that a woman
named Louise Burns tweeted pictures of herself breastfeeding her baby under a large napkin while
enjoying a Christmas afternoon tea treat with her mother and sister at the luxury London hotel
Claridges. It turned out that a waiter and supervisor had told her that it was the hotel’s policy for
mothers to cover up while breastfeeding. Her tweet read: ‘Asked to cover up with this ridiculous
shroud while #breastfeeding so not to cause offence @ClaridgesHotel today’ (Burns, 2014). A twitter
storm ensued. The Guardian covered the story the next day and it was syndicated worldwide. On 5
December 2014, a few days later, Farage gave an interview on LBC radio in which he was asked
about the Claridges controversy. He told the host that some people feel very embarrassed by
breastfeeding, adding that ‘it isn’t too difficult to breastfeed a baby in a way that’s not openly
ostentatious’ (LBC, 2014). When asked if Claridges was wrong to require Burns to put a napkin over
the baby’s head and whether a mother should go to the ladies’ room instead, he replied: ‘Or perhaps
sit in the corner, or whatever it might be’ (ibid.) That afternoon the Guardian headline ran: ‘Nigel
Farage says breastfeeding women should sit in a corner’ (Wintour and Mason, 2014). A mass ‘nurse-
in’ was planned to take place outside Claridges the next day. In the Twitterverse, meanwhile, Farage’s
words were picked over in great detail. Live and direct, a raft of tweets recorded the live liberation
of the meaning of the UKIP leader’s words from the limits of psychological intention:
I’m going to have children so I can indulge in ‘ostentatious breast feeding’. I’m imaging the be our guest scene from Beauty & the
Beast (Reid, 2014);
What exactly does ‘Ostentatious Breastfeeding’ involve exactly? Doing it as a landmark exhibition at the British Museum?
(Tindale, 2014);
Not a mother but what is ‘ostentatious breastfeeding?’ Does it involve a small brass band and a neon sign? (Hardman, 2014).

A Devon cake shop owner went one step further and tweeted a photograph of a ‘Breastfeeding mums
welcome’ sign she had placed in the window: ‘We’re causing a bit of a stir. Love it. #Exeter
#cakeadoodledo #getagrip’ (Cakeadoodledo, 2014). The image attachment showed a white A4 notice
affixed to the glass. Beneath the large ‘mums welcome’ headline was a statement in small type: ‘If you
are a Ukip supporter we politely ask, for the comfort of other customers, that you eat in the corner, or
in the toilet, or under a large tablecloth that we can drape over you. We’re sure you understand that,
when people are eating, you don’t want to have to look at a complete and utter tit’ (Cakeadoodledo,
2014). Over the course of this debacle, Farage had insisted that his comments on breastfeeding
mothers were ‘wildly misrepresented’ and that while he was not against breastfeeding he also
respected the rights of private businesses with respect to their customers. But as with 2012 US
presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s statement that as governor of Massachusetts he was given
‘whole binders full of women’ for jobs on his team, by the time Farage’s interview was disseminated
across the airwaves – that is, from the moment his audience exploded beyond the interviewer to
whom he was speaking, so that anyone with a television, radio or Internet connection could access it
– his comments on breastfeeding had become the subject of both intense scrutiny and intense parody.
Whatever meaning he had intended for his words was by this stage beside the point, for this was
something no longer in his gift.
Semantic autonomy creates a problem of interpretation not so much because the psychological
experience of the author is incommunicable but because written discourse cannot be ‘rescued’ in the
same way in which spoken discourse can make use of intonation, mimicry, intertextuality and
referential gesture in order to facilitate understanding. In Ricoeur’s terms, ‘The surpassing of the
intention by the meaning signifies precisely that understanding takes place in a nonpsychological and
properly semantical space, which the text has carved out by severing itself from the mental intention
of its author’ (1976, p. 76). Without the presence of the author, in other words, only the meaning
rescues the meaning. This goes against the Romantic view, summed up in the famous slogan, ‘to
understand the author better than he understood himself’, by which the understanding of texts could be
unlocked by exposing the other person thought to be contained therein. By understanding the
dialogical situation through which an author’s intentions were enacted upon his or her original
audience, the exegete could follow this course backwards and finish with understanding the author.
Ricoeur rejected this psychologizing impulse, by which we would extend to texts the same empathy
with which we would put ourselves in the place of another person’s consciousness: ‘This undue
extension maintains the romantic illusion of a direct link of congeniality between the two
subjectivities implied by the work, that of the author and that of the reader’ (2008, p. 18). For
Ricoeur, what is to be understood in the text is not the one who is speaking behind the text, but what is
being talked about, ‘the thing of the text, namely, the kind of world the work unfolds, as it were,
before the text’ (p. 127, original emphasis). If the central task is not to rescue meaning from the author
because the objective meaning is something other than subjective intention, then the task of
‘understanding’ must be directed somewhere else. Ricoeur’s message is that to seek a return to the
mental experience of the author is to miss the point: meaning starts with the author but this is only the
beginning of the journey. By rejecting the notion of the text qua author we shift the interpretative
emphasis away from uncovering hidden subjectivities and towards what is contained within the work
itself – its sense and reference, the world it opens up – and in this way we enable it to recontextualize
itself differently through the act of reading (Ricoeur, 2008, p. 291). As Ricoeur observes, ‘What the
text means now matters more than what the author meant when he wrote it’ (1976, p. 30).

Freedom from historical context

Benjamin captures these adventures of semantic autonomy with a tale from Book III of the Histories
by Herodotus. The Egyptian king Psammenitus had been taken hostage by the Persian king Cambyses.
Determined to break the spirit of his new prisoner, Cambyses gave the order for Psammenitus and
many other chief nobles to be placed in the suburbs where the Persian victory procession would pass
and contrived that Psammenitus would see his maiden daughter dressed as a slave, carrying a pitcher
to draw water. When the daughters passed their fathers, shedding tears and uttering cries of woe, the
fathers grieved for their children, weeping and wailing in return. But Psammenitus simply bent his
head towards the ground. Then came Psammenitus’s son, and with him two thousand other Egyptians,
each with ropes around their necks and bridles in their mouths, on their way to be executed.
Psammenitus watched the train pass by, and knew that his son was being led to death, but while the
other Egyptians lamented the spectacle, Psammenitus stood alone, inscrutable, giving no more sign of
mourning than when he saw his daughter. After they had passed, an old man approached the
Egyptians, asking for alms from the soldiers. He was once a friend of Psammenitus and now had been
stripped of all that he had. At this sight the king burst into tears, hitting himself on the head and calling
out his friend by his name. Watchers had been sent to inform Cambyses of the king’s behaviour as
each train went by. Astonished at the news of what was done, Cambyses sent a messenger to
Psammenitus, asking why he shed no tears when he saw his daughter humiliated and his son on his
way to die, and yet when he saw a beggar, who was a foreigner in their land, he honoured him with
pity. Psammenitus’s reply was that his own misfortunes were too great for tears, but when a man falls
into penury in old age, he well deserved them. When Cambyses heard his answer he himself was
touched with pity and ordered that the life of the son be spared and Psammenitus brought from the
suburbs into his presence.
Benjamin remarks that although Psammenitus explains his behaviour, the story itself remains
infinitely provocative, as suggested by numerous attempts over the years to give account for the story.
Montaigne, for example, believed that when the king saw the old man it was simply the straw that
broke the camel’s back. He was so full of grief already that it took only the smallest increase in
emotional trauma for his resolve to crack and for the floodgates of his misery to be opened. Benjamin
himself speculated that the fate of those with royal blood left Psammenitus so unmoved because he
knew very well that this too would be his own fate. Grief in this case would have been pointless
since nobles are always the first to be punished. The old man, by contrast, should never have been put
in that position and therefore deserved every one of Psammenitus’s tears. The point, Benjamin says, is
that Herodotus’s own report is the driest. We learn, for example, that Cambyses’s messengers were
too late to save the life of the son of Psammenitus and that ‘he had been cut in pieces the first of all’
(1996, p. 231). Herodotus does not tell us what effect this had, either on Psammenitus as the father, or
on Cambyses, who had both ordered his execution and granted clemency. We learn only that
Cambyses allowed Psammenitus to live with him from that point onwards: ‘That is why this story
from ancient Egypt is still capable after thousands of years of arousing astonishment and
thoughtfulness. It resembles the seeds of grain which have lain for centuries in the chambers of the
pyramids shut up air-tight and have retained their germinative power to this day’ (Benjamin, 1999, p.
90). As Thompson notes in her own study of the story, there is thus no single interpretation that is
decisive, precisely because Herodotus’s stories are open-ended and disturbing. He is not in the
business of uncovering singular truths but of arousing astonishment and stimulating thought:
[I]​f these stories have ranges of meaning beyond that of factual material, they still comprise just one facet of the historian’s
spectrum of evidence. They have their place as part of the whole composition, so that they illumine and are illumined by other forms
of evidence. Thus Herodotus does not attempt to cut through the multiple stories to arrive at the real evidence, because to him the
stories are not only real, but also the most rooted loci of meaning. (Thompson, 1996, 146)

The hermeneutic lesson here is twofold. On the one hand, it is with the passage of time that the
mystery of stories deepens because, as the saying goes, inscription generates suspicion – the instant a
text is dehistoricized from its original context of production and reception, its meaning in its own time
is lost. And yet, on the other hand, the text endures. Readers still read. Despite the ravages of time the
text continues to offer something; no longer what the author intended but something else. In
Benjamin’s terms, the information a text offers does not expend itself in the moment in which it was
new: ‘It preserves and concentrates its strength and is capable of releasing it even after a long time.’
(1999, pp. 89–90). This lesson enables us to identify two distinct critical attitudes vis-à-vis the text.
Either we can monumentalize the text by viewing it as a fixed and finite substance, rooted to the time
and place of its production and reception and which can only be appreciated by grasping its
wholeness intact, or we can historicize the text, by accepting that while the text is a product of its
time, its reader is rooted in the present and engaged in a process of looking backwards. It is from the
perspective of the reader that its meanings transcend the mental experience of its author and the
conditions of its production and reception.
Our other case from ancient Egypt places in stark relief the futility of the former attitude. I
emphasized that the reign of Ramesses the Great was characterized by an epic building programme
dedicated to immortalizing his greatness for all eternity. One of his most magnificent constructions
was the vast memorial temple known today as the Ramesseum, sited across the Nile from the modern
city of Luxor, in the necropolis at Thebes, the city of a hundred gates. In 1820, Giovanni Belzoni, part
antiquities dealer and part nineteenth-century Indiana Jones, published a first-hand account of his
arrival in the great complex in which he evokes the properly awesome nature of the works of
Ramesses:
After having taken a cursory view of Luxor and Carnak, to which my curiosity led me on my landing, I crossed the Nile to the west,
and proceeding straight to the Memnonium, I had to pass before the two colossal figures in the plain. I need not say, that I was
struck with wonder. They are mutilated indeed, but their enormous size strikes the mind with admiration. The next object that met
my view was the Memnonium. […] The groups of columns of that temple, and the views of the numerous tombs excavated in the
high rock behind it, present a strange appearance to the eye. On my approaching these ruins, I was surprised at the sight of the
great colossus of Memnon, or Sesostris, or Osymandias, or Phamenoph, or perhaps some other king of Egypt; for such are the
various opinions of its origin, and so many names have been given to it, that at last it has no name at all. I can but say, that it must
have been one of the most venerated statues of the Egyptians; for it would have required more labour to convey such a mass of
granite from Assouan to Thebes, than to transport the obelisk commonly known under the appellation of Pompey’s Pillar, to
Alexandria. (Belzoni, 1820, pp. 38–9)

One of the enduring symbols of the reign of Ramesses is the colossal statue we know today as the
Younger Memnon, one of two vast granite effigies of the pharaoh that stood at either side of the
entrance to the Ramesseum and whose landing in Deptford induced Shelley to give voice to the
immortal god: ‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:/ Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
(1819, p. 72). It was Belzoni who removed the statue and transported it to England. While there
appears to have been some disagreement over who had actually been behind Belzoni’s commission to
remove the bust, and whether or not it had been under the encouragement of the British Consul Henry
Salt and geographer and orientalist Jean Louis Burckhardt, what is clear is that the trustees of the
British Museum acquired the sculpture from Salt in 1822 and for several years it was displayed in the
old Townley Galleries, which have since been demolished. By 1834 the Egyptian Sculpture Gallery
in the British Museum was completed and because of the enormous weight of the statue and other
pieces, the museum called on the British Army Royal Engineers to move them into the new gallery,
under the command of Major Charles Cornwallis Dansey, who had had fought at the Battle of
Waterloo nearly twenty years earlier. Indeed, as former director of the British Museum, Neil
MacGregor, noted in the A History of the World in 100 Objects (2010) series, which was broadcast
on BBC Radio 4 over the course of twenty weeks and subsequently published as a best-selling book,
when the statue arrived in England it was quite simply the largest sculpture that the people of Great
Britain had ever seen. ‘And’, MacGregor noted, ‘it was the first object that gave them a sense of the
colossal scale of the Egyptian achievement’ (2010). Thought to date from about 1250 BC, the
sculpture was a truly wondrous accomplishment for its time, as much for the beauty of its aesthetics
as for the feats of engineering and logistics required to transport it to Thebes and construct it on site.
Its eyes look downward, holding the spectator in its gaze, while the colour of the granite changes from
the torso to the head, drawing the eye upwards towards a knowing smile. The upper body alone is
some six or seven feet tall and weighs over seven tonnes. There is a hole at the torso’s right breast,
which is thought to have been made as part of an unsuccessful attempt to remove the statue by
Napoleon’s expedition party to Egypt at the end of the eighteenth century.
In the first book of the Bibliotheca historica by Diodorus Siculus we find a detailed description of
the statue and its original surrounds. Paraphrasing Hecataeus of Abdera, he sketches the following
picture:
Ten stades from the first tombs, he says, in which, according to tradition, are buried the concubines of Zeus, stands a monument of
the king known as Osymandyas. At its entrance there is a pylon, constructed of variegated stone, two plethra in breadth and forty-
five cubits high; passing through this one enters a rectangular peristyle, built of stone, four plethra long on each side; it is supported,
in place of pillars, by monolithic figures sixteen cubits high, wrought in the ancient manner as to shape; and the entire ceiling, which
is two fathoms wide, consists of a single stone, which is highly decorated with stars on a blue field. Beyond this peristyle there is yet
another entrance and pylon, in every respect like the one mentioned before, save that it is more richly wrought with every manner of
relief; beside the entrance are three statues, each of a single block of black stone from Syene, of which one, that is seated, is the
largest of any in Egypt, the foot measuring over seven cubits, while the other two at the knees of this, the one on the right and the
other on the left, daughter and mother respectively, are smaller than the one first mentioned. And it is not merely for its size that this
work merits approbation, but it is also marvellous by reason of its artistic quality and excellent because of the nature of the stone,
since in a block of so great a size there is not a single crack or blemish to be seen. The inscription upon it runs: ‘King of Kings am I,
Osymandyas. If anyone would know how great I am and where I lie, let him surpass one of my works.’ (Diodorus, 1933, p. 169)

Many centuries later and there is still very little about this monumental figure that fails to inspire awe.
Yet in addition to wonderment, Belzoni’s account of his own first glimpse of the statue also suggests a
very different dimension – decay:
As I entered these ruins, my first thought was to examine the colossal bust I had to take away. I found it near the remains of its
body and chair, with its face upwards, and apparently smiling on me, at the thought of being taken to England. I must say, that my
expectations were exceeded by its beauty, but not by its size. I observed, that it must have been absolutely the same statue as is
mentioned by Norden, lying in his time with its face downwards, which must have been the cause of its preservation. I will not
venture to assert who separated the bust from the rest of the body by an explosion, or by whom the bust has been turned face
upwards. The place where it lay was nearly in a line with the side of the main gateway into the temple; and, as there is another
colossal head near it, there may have been one on each side of the doorway, as they are to be seen at Luxor and Carnak. (Belzoni,
1820, 39–40)

Compared to the blissfully ‘blemish-free’ sculpture that Diodorus Siculus described, the image of the
broken body and its scattered remains is sorry indeed. It was the state of disrepair into which the
statue had fallen by the time of its removal that captured Shelley’s imagination, for his sonnet mocks
the arrogance of the pharaoh’s words inscribed on the statue’s pedestal:
I MET a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desart. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
 Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away. (Shelley, 1819, p. 72)

As if to say, ‘King of kings, are you? See that your works have indeed been surpassed’, Shelley‘s
message is that the nature of power on Earth is transient and that no work, no matter how great,
escapes the ravages of time. For his piece on the statue of Ramesses in the History of the World in
100 Objects, MacGregor interviewed Anthony Gormley, sculptor of the modern-day statue the Angel
of the North, which stands on top of a hill near Gateshead in England. Its steel structure extends
twenty metres in height, with wings measuring over fifty metres across and overlooks the southern
fringe of Low Fell, once an eighteenth-century settlement established by miners. The sculpture itself
is sited on a former colliery pithead baths, once an integral part of Gateshead’s mining history and
now reclaimed as a green space since the early 1990s. According to Gateshead Council’s background
document, Gormley cites three functions that the angel fulfils: ‘firstly a historic one to remind us that
below this site coal miners worked in the dark for two hundred years, secondly to grasp hold of the
future, expressing our transition from the industrial to the information age, and lastly to be a focus for
our hopes and fears – a sculpture is an evolving thing’ (Gateshead Council, n.d.). In his contribution
to MacGregor’s piece on the bust of Ramesses, Gormley remarks that it is in the very material of the
granite statue that the essential ‘waiting quality of sculpture’ is conveyed, that is, the relationship
between the biological time of human life here on Earth and the eons of geological time onto which
we inscribe our ideas (MacGregor, 2010). Sculptures persist while life dies, making sculpture a
dialogue with death, a meditation on the ephemerality of human intention. Belzoni’s journal offered a
similar reflection: ‘It appeared to me like entering a city of giants, who, after a long conflict, were all
destroyed, leaving the ruins of their various temples as the only proofs of their former existence’
(1820, pp. 37–8).
Despite the air of persistence that surrounds a sculpture, and the insistence of the human hand
behind it, our monuments succumb to the ravages of time. Whether it is their physicality or their
locality that changes, these changes transform irrevocably the intentionality that informed a
monument’s making. Today the statue of Ramesses stands in Room Four of the British Museum, where
it dominates the space. But there is something about its present-day position as a museum piece that
has the effect of normalizing what was once so properly awesome, for with increased ubiquity and
access has come an increased feeling of the ordinary. The hundreds of thousands of visitors, each
taking photographs with their smart phones and circulating them online; the coffee table books and
tote bags with images of Ramesses printed on the front; every emanation creates an air of banality, of
containment, of the appropriation of the pharaoh’s legacy within the inseparable modern-day regimes
of spectatorship and commercialization. Ramesses had indeed attempted to immortalize his image, but
he could not control what happened to his likenesses after he was gone. For all his imperial grandeur
and ostentatious boasts, something that seemed so unattainable has finally been captured and tamed.
This meditation on the fleeting nature of empire has important lessons for the hermeneutic project of
cultural translation. Like the granite legacy of Ramesses, to monumentalize the text as the essence of
an author’s vision is to presume a permanence, a persistence of vision and intentionality, that is
refused by the passage of time. From the point of view of the reader in the here and now the author is
already dead and buried and the text is but a relic of the past. The way in which a work unfolds over
time is beyond the control of the author; it is only the footprint in the sand.
 Action autonomy
As he grew increasingly concerned with matters of ethics and international relations, Ricoeur looked
to the model of the text and to the refusal of fixity that accompanies semantic autonomy – whether in
terms of how we construe the figure of the author or where we locate the site of meaning – as a basis
for understanding human action in the world. He maintained that actions imprint their mark in space
and time, leaving ‘traces’ that can be ‘read’ as we would the texts of authors. Every day, and
throughout our lives, we create and engage with all manner of human works. Some of these are
‘formal’, such as the ‘documents’, ‘deeds’ and ‘records’ of human action. These include records of
employment; test results; bank details; criminal records and, in the age of the Internet, memes;
animated GIFs; photos on Facebook and Instagram; blogs; Tumblrs; tweets; YouTube videos; Vines, to
name but a few. Others are ‘informal’, such as reputation, celebrity, blame and praise. All of these
create ‘persisting patterns’ in our lives and have ‘durable effects’ (Ricoeur, 2008, p. 149). Even
history itself is the ongoing and contested record of human action – it is the ‘thing’ on which we leave
the traces of our human lives, in formal archives and in the narratives, myths and stories of public and
private record. In this way, we can say that the process of recording human action is continual and, as
with text, interpretive by necessity.
This complementarity with the world of text goes further. Before we can assign blame or give
praise we must be able to speak of those actions as belonging to an agent who asserts and completes
them. But a problem arises when the agent of an action is no longer present or available, when, in
Ricoeur’s terms, the action becomes ‘detached’ from its agent just as the text becomes autonomous
with respect to the intentions of its author. It is then that the fate of the marks of public and private
record escapes the control of their original agents and meaning becomes autonomous with respect to
the intentions of their owners (2013, p. 28). Of course, some actions have a clear agent to which they
can be attributed and their significance does not give rise to contested interpretations. But these are
not the focus of Ricoeur’s concern. He is interested specifically in the problem of understanding in
those human situations where the meaning of events no longer coincides with the logical intentions of
their agents, where, as happens with text, the meaning is ‘depsychologized’ to the point that the
meaning is in the action itself. Consider the cyber attack on Sony Pictures Entertainment in 2014. On
24 November Sony announced that it had been hacked by a group calling itself Guardians of Peace,
which had realized a massive data dump, including films not yet on general release, passports and
visas of cast and crew members, film budgets and confidential contracts, employee workplace
complaints, medical records, salaries of current and former employees, pre-bonus salaries of top
executives and thousands of emails involving Sony staff, producers and stars. The putative rationale
given for the leak was to force the cancellation of The Interview (2014), a political satire depicting
the assassination of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. The cyber terrorists issued a warning that they
would attack all cinemas that screened the film. The film’s two lead actors called off their
promotional tour and numerous screenings in major cinema chains were cancelled. Eventually, Sony
released the film online for rental and purchase on 24 December, with a limited cinema release on
Christmas Day, but the episode raised important questions: living in an age of cyber warfare, how do
we continue to assert and enjoy freedom of artistic expression? Should terrorists dictate creative
content? Should business interests take precedence over the values of liberty?
But beyond questions surrounding the wisdom of pulling The Interview from general release, the
hackers’ actions also gave rise to a range of other wider-reaching and longer-term meanings. The
leaked salary details of Sony employees suggested the possibility of a vast disparity in rates of pay
between women and men (Roose, 2014). This disparity was not confined to Sony employees. Among
the emails dumped by the hackers were details of differential remuneration rates between female and
male film stars, exposing, for example, that Amy Adams and Jennifer Lawrence were paid
significantly less than their male co-stars for their roles in American Hustle (2013). That there is lack
of parity between rates of pay for male actors and female actors is not a new story in Hollywood. Nor
is it possible to find easy correlations in the statistics that link gender with rate of pay. Many
variables, such as age, decisions about parenting and caring, preferences for benefits, union
membership and the role of agents have an impact. But when, two months later, Patricia Arquette used
her Oscar acceptance speech to call for wage equality for women in the United States (Shoard, 2015);
when, in May 2015, Charlize Theron confirmed that she would be paid the same as her male co-star
for a forthcoming sequel and that she and her agents had used the hack to renegotiate her contract
(Elle, 2015); or when, in June 2015, it was revealed that Jennifer Lawrence would be paid $8m more
than her male co-star for a forthcoming role, the narrative that Hollywood’s leading men are more
bankable than its women is being challenged (Masters, 2015). These are just a few of the public
statements issued in recent months by high-profile women working in the entertainment industry on
gender differentials in pay and conditions and the culture of fear that prevents people from speaking
out. By opening up the possibility of a counter-narrative, the ‘story’ of the Sony Pictures hack enjoys
significance well beyond issues of freedom of expression surrounding a cancelled film release.
Just as texts are available to an undefined and theoretically infinite audience, human action is an
open work. As with the Sony Pictures hack, every event has the potential to reach audiences beyond
the immediate context of its original undertaking. Similar to the way in which a text breaks its
ostensive ties with the sociocultural situation of its production and reception, ‘meaningful action’ –
that is, action where there is richness of meaning, contestation and where, therefore, there is mystery
– is emancipated from its original situational context and takes on relevance beyond the immediate
circumstances under which it occurred. Remember that as a consequence of semantic autonomy in the
written domain, a text’s references are no longer ostensive to the world in which the work was
written and received. In turn, this means that the act of reading enables a text to create all-new
resonances in an all-new world of meaning particular to the reader. It is likewise that ‘important’
action can develop meanings that can be fulfilled in situations other than the one in which the action
occurred originally: ‘To say the same thing in different words, the meaning of an important event
exceeds, overcomes, transcends, the social conditions of its production and may be re-enacted in new
social contexts. Its importance is its durable relevance and, in some cases, its omnitemporal
relevance’ (Ricoeur, 2008, p. 50). In the same way that the fixation of speech gives rise to the
surpassing of the event of saying by the meaning of what is said, the fixation of action in the doing is
eclipsed by the significance of what is done, in the sense that an action is not only decoupled from the
intentions of its agent but also gains consequences of its own, as it becomes inscribed in history.
When it comes to the problem of human understanding, which is at the heart of Ricoeur’s hermeneutic
concerns, this latter point is important because it suggests the inherent danger when the meaning of an
action not only spirals out of its agent’s control, but also when it snowballs, changing shape
organically, inexorably, as it takes on meanings beyond its agent’s original intentions and affects
audiences beyond those impacted by its original unfolding. In this way, Ricoeur maintains, human
events contain the possibility of their own transcendence (2013, p. 29). The need for reflexion arises
because our actions become embroiled in the wider course of human affairs:
 In the same way that a text is detached from its author, an action is detached from its agent and develops consequences of its own.
This autonomization of human action constitutes the social dimension of action. An action is a social phenomenon not only because
it is done by several agents in such a way that the role of each of them cannot be distinguished from the role of others, but also
because our deeds escape us and have effects we did not intend. (Ricoeur, 2008, p. 148, original emphasis)

In a practical sense, when the doer of an action is present we need not ask who did this or that, since
the meaning of the action and the intention behind it overlap. When baby Charlie is recorded biting
his elder brother’s finger in the viral video sensation, for example, very little mystery surrounds his
actions (VO CS, 2012). The video clearly shows the elder brother placing his finger in Charlie’s
mouth; Charlie bites down and the elder brother cries out in pain while Charlie laughs. But with
complex situations that are remote from their initial actions, we face a problem similar to that of
textual interpretation. As with the reader of a text, the interpreting self stands in opposition to the
other as ‘author’ of their actions, at a distance from their intentions as much in time as in space. In
addition to placing the interpreter of the action at a distance from the psychological intentions that
informed the unfolding of the event in the first instance, action autonomy also distances the agent and
the interpreter from the significance of the action within the wider social ecology of human events.
Whether reader of texts or interpreter of human events, it is this condition of distanciation that creates
a mystery demanding to be understood, for as with textual interpretation, the interpretation of human
deeds involves actions that are readable and meanings that go beyond the intention of their actors and
which, as a result, give rise to conflicting understandings (Kaplan, 2012, p. 68).

From distanciation to appropriation

In the domain of ethnography, Geertz outlines a similar process at work in ‘thick’ description, a
notion he attributes to Ryle’s meditation on the subtle differences between a ‘wink’ and a ‘twitch’. In
Ryle’s example, two boys swiftly contract the eyelids of their right eyes. In the first boy this is
involuntary; the other, meanwhile, winks conspiratorially to an accomplice. At the thinnest level of
description we construe the two sets of eyelid contractions as exactly alike. On the visual plain, for
example, there may be no way to tell which was an involuntary twitch and which was a deliberate
wink. And yet the difference between a twitch and a wink is vast: to wink is to attempt to send a
message to an identified audience, perhaps furtively, according to an already understood code. For
this secret message to be ‘successful’ the intended recipient must witness the wink and be aware of
the code. A twitch, by contrast, can achieve neither failure nor success for it has no intended
recipient, carries no message and is neither intended to be witnessed nor is hidden from others.
But, Ryle wonders, what if the second boy’s wink were awkward and amateurish? What if, for
example, a third boy were introduced, who mocks the second boy for his awkward attempts at
winking? This third boy would imitate the second boy by also contracting his right eyelid in the ways
in which the awkward winker had done. But the objective of the parodist would not be the same as
that of the furtive winker. The third boy is not awkwardly attempting to send a covert signal to
another; he is attempting to make apparent the awkwardness of the second boy for the amusement of
his friends. The task of third boy fails if his friends are not amused or do not witness the parody. On a
visual plain, the physical actions of the first, second and third boys may continue to be
indistinguishable. But a ‘thick’ description of all three situations enables us to nuance our reading of
the situation and to construe them as discrete attempts at meaning making. Different motivations,
different success criteria, different causes and different effects are each in play and without careful
reflexion the subtleties of their actions cannot be teased out. Thus when we attempt to ‘understand’
these actions through a thick rather than a ‘thin’ lens of interpretation, we open what Ryle describes as
the beginning of a series of internal subordinate clauses to which we can easily add layer after layer
of nuance. The second winker may reveal that he had not actually been trying to send a covert
message but was instead feigning the action in order to fool the grown-ups into the false belief that he
was trying to do so. When it comes to describing the work of the parodist we must then add yet a
further level of meaning to his actions. The thinnest description of the parodist is broadly the same as
for the involuntary eyelid twitcher; but, says Ryle, its thick description ‘is a many-layered sandwich,
of which only the bottom slice is catered for by that the thinnest description’ (Ryle, 2009, p. 497).
For Geertz, the take-home message is that meaning is not an essential substance that is immediately
available. It must be interrogated through thoughtful reflexion and with reference to the wider ecology
of subordinate and interconnected layers through which the studied behaviours take place. He
maintains that when we attempt to understand the ‘imaginative acts’ of human behaviour, as is the
project of ethnography and on which I base my own interpretive investigations with regard to cultural
translation, we do so precisely because they have taken on significance in their public unfolding.
When it comes to identifying the object of ‘understanding’, then, it is not what is going on in a
particular person’s head, but the meanings that emerge from the realization of this person’s being in
public:
Culture, this acted document, thus is public, like a burlesqued wink or a mock sheep raid. Though ideational it does not exist in
someone’s head; though unphysical is not an occult entity. The interminable, because unterminable, debate within anthropology as to
whether culture is ‘subjective’ or ‘objective’, together with the mutual exchange of intellectual insults
(‘idealist!’—‘materialist!’; ‘mentalist!’—‘behaviorist!’; ‘impressionist!’—‘positivist!’) which accompanies it, is wholly
misconceived. Once human behavior is seen as (most of the time; there are true twitches) symbolic action—action which, like
phonation in speech, pigment in painting, line in writing, or sonance in music, signifies—the question as to whether culture is
patterned conduct or a frame of mind, or even the two somehow mixed together, loses sense. The thing to ask about a burlesqued
wink or a mock sheep raid is not what their ontological status is. It is the same as that of rocks on the one hand and dreams on the
other—they are things of this world. The thing to ask is what their import is: what it is, ridicule or challenge, irony or anger, snobbery
or pride, that in their occurrence and through their agency, is getting said. (Geertz, 1973, p. 10, original emphasis)

Whether text or the ‘imaginative acts’ that constitute human behaviour, the psychological dimension of
meaning is now out of our hands. The author is as much distanced from the reader as they are from
their work and the reader is as much distanced from the author as they are from the sociocultural
context in which the work was realized. To ‘read’ is to be faced with a distance that stretches out
before us: of time, space, culture, history, language, politics – everything that separates us in the here
and now of understanding from the text in the ‘there and then’ of its original context of production and
reception. Distanciation, in this sense, signals everything that makes ‘understanding’ impossible.
As with interlingual translation, total understanding would presume total synonymy, and, as in the
case of interlingual translation, it would presume an interpretation ‘so precisely exhaustive as to
leave no single unit in the source-text – phonetic, grammatical, semantic, contextual – out of complete
account, and yet so calibrated as to have added nothing in the way of paraphrase, explication or
variant’ (Steiner, 1998, p. 429). Translation, as with understanding, seems impossible. And yet,
translators still translate, texts still get written and readers still read. We do somehow manage to
speak to one another; our criminal justice systems sanction and rehabilitate those to whom
responsibility for a particular action has been attributed; international conferences are held;
commodities are traded; goods are exported; we travel internationally; we order food in foreign
restaurants and use foreign public transportation systems; we interact with, make friends with, or fall
in love with people from different religious, ethnic, linguistic, political, sexual and gender
backgrounds. It is this very possibility within the realm of the impossible that requires us to revise
how we define the task of translation, and, by extension, the very objective of ‘understanding’ itself.
Ricoeur asks himself this very question:
But what does it mean to be able to translate? This possibility, or rather this capacity, is not ascertained solely by the fact that we
actually succeed in translating speech and texts from one language to another without totally prejudicial and, above all, entirely
irreparable semantic loss. The possibility of translating is postulated more fundamentally as an a priori of communication. In this
sense, I will speak of ‘the principle of universal translatability’. Translation is de facto; translatability is de jure. (Ricoeur, 1996, p. 4)

We can argue about the extent to which translation happens ‘successfully’. But the translatability of
all things is the law, for all things can, in principle, be ‘translated’. Distanciation problematizes
translation, to be sure, and the criteria by which we measure the ‘quality’ of a translation enable us to
deem some translations more appropriate to the circumstances of their commission than others. But
all texts are at base translatable, since all texts continue to be ‘about’ something. They refer to a
world; they address an audience. Simply because we are late to the party does not mean the party
never took place. With Ricoeur we oppose what he calls the ‘fallacy of the absolute text’, a text that
is hypostasized as an authorless entity:
If the intentional fallacy overlooks the semantic autonomy of the text, the opposite fallacy forgets that a text remains a discourse
told by somebody, said by someone to someone else about something. It is impossible to cancel out this main characteristic of
discourse without reducing texts to natural objects, i.e., to things which are not man-made, but which, like pebbles, are found in the
sand. (Ricoeur, 1976, p. 30)

Simply because interpretation is de-psychologized does not imply there is no such thing as
authorial intention or that we dispense with the notion of authorial meaning. We can and do intend
things when we speak, write and act and it is to this substance that we direct our efforts at
understanding. In addition to shifting our focus away from the Romantic claim to the mental life of the
author, we also renounce the Structuralist claim that the text is an end in itself. To say that reading
breaks the web of references that bind a text inextricably to the situation commonly experienced by
the author and the audience in the time and place of the text’s production and reception is not the same
as saying that there is no reference at all. The text is not absolute. It is free of its direct reference to its
author and its circumstantial reality, but its references still allow the text to speak. The text is
autonomous but continues to be ‘about’ something and in its autonomous trajectory away from the
author and its situation of production and reception, symbolic expression opens up new modes of
communication. In other words, signs still designate possible modes of existence. By recognizing that
the text is more than a closed system we enable ourselves to look simultaneously inwards – to the
internal world and structuring of the text – and outwards – to the something else the text advances.
This is about conceiving of the text dialectically: as an interpretive movement that moves
constantly back and forth between the work’s internal dynamics on the one hand, and, on the other,
‘the power that the work possesses to project itself outside itself and to give birth to a world that
would truly be the “thing” referred to by the text’ (Ricoeur, 2008, p. 17). What is to be ‘understood’ is
not the world of the author or the structures of the text but the opportunities it offers up for meanings
that exist beyond it. This is a gesture that rejects the emptiness of relativism in favour of the
possibilities for meaning that the text unfolds. By recognizing that the text is only the vestige of a
fleeting moment of complicity between an author and their audience, and that this moment is now
gone, we free ourselves from the ‘narrowness’ of the dialogical situation. There is no point
hypostasizing the text as the symbol of authorial intention because the objective meaning of a text is
something other than the subjective intention of the author. Thus we need not throw the baby out with
the interpretive bathwater. Given that the meaning of a text is liberated from the subjective intention
of its author, Ricoeur urges, ‘the essential question is not to recover, behind the text, the lost intention
but to unfold, in front of the text, the “world” it opens up and discloses’ (2008, p. 33). The task of
hermeneutics is not concerned with uncovering the psychology of the author but with the only element
that a reader truly is empowered to act upon: the text itself. This injunction gives two distinct and
unavoidable dimensions to the task of reading:
As readers, either we may remain in a kind of state of suspense as regards any kind of referred-to world, or we may actualize the
potential nonostensive references of the text in a new situation, that of the reader. In the first case, we treat the text as a worldless
entity; in the second, we create a new ostensive reference through the kind of ‘execution’ that the art of reading implies. These two
possibilities are equally entailed by the act of reading, conceived as their dialectical interplay. (Ricoeur, 2008, p. 158)

Reading is precisely dialectical because the nature of understanding is precisely lemniscatic by

necessity. If texts are abstracted from their authors and their surrounding world, and if we, as readers
in the here and now, are prevented from reinstantiating their references by our condition of
distanciation from the there and then of the text, then it follows that everything we do takes place in
medias res. To read is to be faced primarily with a textual relationship that started long before we got
there. In Ricoeur’s terms, ‘We suddenly arrive, as it were, in the middle of a conversation which has
already begun and in which we try to orientate ourselves in order to be able to contribute to it.’
(2008, p. 30). To fulfil the injunction to ‘actualize’ the references of the text in an all-new situation of
meaning, we must reach backwards and across the medias res, to the ‘past cultural epoch’ of the text
in a bid to access hic et nunc that which has already gone (Ricoeur, 2004, p. 16). By acting upon the
text’s potential to project new meanings into the world of reading in the present we open up new arcs
of communication with the information the text offers. From the here and now of reading, references
closed within the historicity of their original unfolding can therefore be made to speak in our own
time and place. But because the interpreter remains fixed in the here and now and the object of
interpretation in the there and then, interpretation is an infinitely extending work of distanciation and
approximation in which the time and place of the interpreter remain the only constants. When it comes
to articulating what goes on in the interpretation of a text, therefore, we can say that what we witness
is a complex series of elliptical spatio-temporal relations – of reader to text, of text to the world of
the author and of reader to the world of the text – such that only the reader stands in the space of
meaning that writing advances.
These infinitely extending trajectories are illustrated in Zeno’s paradox of Achilles and the
Tortoise, which concerns a footrace between the two. Being slow, the tortoise is permitted a head
start over Achilles. The premise is this: if each racer runs at a constant speed, the tortoise will
progress very slowly and Achilles very quickly. Despite starting at a disadvantage, therefore,
Achilles will very soon catch up with the tortoise, overtake it and win the race. But here is the
paradox. During the time in which it takes for Achilles to cover the distance between his original
starting point and the advanced starting point of the tortoise, the tortoise will have covered some
distance of its own. To overtake the tortoise, Achilles would not only have to catch up with the
tortoise but also to cover this extra distance the tortoise has by now covered. By this time, however,
the tortoise will have advanced further, requiring yet more time for Achilles to cross this extra
distance the tortoise has managed to cover. In other words, because the tortoise continues to move
while Achilles is busy covering the tortoise’s already covered ground, whenever Achilles reaches
somewhere the tortoise has already been, he will always have a further distance still to travel. While
the Greek hero always manages to make up the gap that separates him from the tortoise, the steady
tortoise manages to create a new gap, which itself must be covered. Each new gap is progressively
smaller, but because there are an infinite number of points where the tortoise has already been and
which Achilles must traverse, the faster runner can never actually overtake the slower one. Or, as
Aristotle recounts in Book VI of Physics, ‘the slowest runner will never be caught by the fastest,
because the one behind has first to reach the point from which the one in front started, and so the
slower one is bound always to be in front’ (1999, p. 161).
This paradox places in relief the twin arcs that extend backwards and forwards from the moment of
reading in the present: that of the text, in its time and place, and that of the reader, in a time and place
of her own. Like Achilles, the reader is at a disadvantage, since everything about the text – its internal
structuring, its range of reference, its links to the world in which it was produced and received –
remains out of the reader’s reach. And yet, like Achilles, the reader extends herself towards the text,
reduces the gap and draws herself closer. But the text remains ever-distant, forever progressing away
from the reader’s grasp. When it comes to Zeno’s paradox, however, the philosopher elides one
important dimension. If the tortoise were covering progressively larger distances between the two
runners rather than smaller ones, Achilles would indeed be unable to catch up. But as long as the
sheer speed of Achilles’s pursuit enables him to make the gaps between them progressively smaller,
he will eventually overtake the tortoise. We must not forget that somewhere within the infinite arcs of
distanciation and approximation that accompany the act of interpretation, readers do read, translation
does happen and at some point Achilles does overtake the tortoise. To read, to translate, to interpret –
to understand – we participate in a dialectical game by which we draw ever closer and ever further
from the objects of our hermeneutic desire. But as a process that is designed to culminate in an act of
writing, translation itself is the means by which the distance is closed and the breach in the space-
time continuum that separates the translator from the relics of the past is filled. It is this dimension
that provides the platform on which I build my definition of cultural translation and to which the
remainder of this meditation is addressed.
 3
Incorporation
Objects in translation appear closer than they are! On
the cartographies of interpretation

Right up until the early decades of the twentieth century, when British schoolchildren gazed at their
classroom walls, the world was pink. At its height, the so-called empire on which the sun never set
covered over fourteen million square miles and from its position of pink centrality, imperial Britain
fanned outwards, surrounded by other pink land masses, from Australia and New Zealand, to the
Indian subcontinent, much of Africa, Canada and a handful of Caribbean islands. As a form of global
brand marketing, the pink map presented a powerful image of an island nation that was truly ‘Great’
Britain. Anderson writes that as a form of imperial logo, the map is ‘an infinitely reproducible series,
available for transfer to posters, official seals, letterheads, magazine and textbook covers,
tablecloths, and hotel walls. Instantly recognizable, everywhere visible, the logo-map penetrated
deep into the popular imagination, forming a powerful emblem (Anderson, 2006, p. 179). But as
Colley observes in her study of the British Empire, the pink map in particular was also engaged in
some cartographic sleight of hand (2010, pp. 4–5). The colouring gave the erroneous impression that
the British Empire was the only imperial force in operation, when, in reality, the world was shared
with other empires marketing themselves in a range of different colours – the colonies of France, for
example, were usually depicted in purple-blue and Dutch colonies in yellow-brown (Anderson,
2006, p. 179). The singular use of colour made the territories of the empire appear more connected
politically than they actually were. Its use of the Greenwich meridian also had the not entirely
coincidental effect of placing Britain close to the heart of the represented world. Finally, because
Britain itself was coloured in the same pink as the territories it controlled, any sense of smallness
surrounding the British island was replaced with amazement at the vastness of its dominion. ‘Like
most cartographic exercises’, Colley writes, ‘it is not a simple depiction of the lie of the land, but in
some respects a lie, or at least a calculated deceit’ (2010, p. 5). To understand the translational
gestures behind these cartographic manoeuvres, we must delve deeper into the hermeneutics of
distanciation and interpretation by which we translate and pause to re-examine the conditions under
which a translation is produced.
Between every writer and a reader is a reference to a world that has long since passed. In the
double-blind situation of reading in the present, where the reader is absent when the text was written
and the writer is absent when the text is read, the trajectory of the work departs from the author and
the sociocultural situation of its writing and reception such that it no longer represents the voice of
someone present. With the passage of time the work escapes the confines of authorial intention,
transcending the psychological and sociocultural conditions of its production and reception and
opening itself up to unlimited interpretations, themselves situated in sociocultural situations of their
own (Ricoeur, 2013, p. 96). It is for this reason that a text is said to ‘create its own public’ because
from the point of view of the reader ‘understanding’ is no longer synonymous with the subjective
intention of the author. Rather than reifying the author as gatekeeper to the meaning of the text, it is the
task of hermeneutics to embrace the possibility for meaning that the text offers beyond itself, in
Ricoeur’s terms, ‘to restore to the work its ability to project itself outside itself in the representation
of a world that I could inhabit’ (2008, p. 18). ‘Meaning’, in this sense, is not an essence behind the
text, a telos to be arrived at, but a logos in the Aristotelian sense. It is a process, an engagement, a
reasoned interrogation with that which the text projects. Rather than an ‘intuitive grasping of the
intention underlying the text’, it is an ‘injunction’ which comes from the text and which issues an
invitation to think in a certain manner or to see things in a different way (Ricoeur, 1976, p. 88). Yet
standing between the reader and the fulfilment of this injunction is a circumstantial reality that is both
out of reach and which must be apprehended if understanding is to be achieved.
If every act of language is of its moment, with a temporal existence, fixed to the time and place of
its uttering, then the act of reading, asynchronous with the past cultural epoch of the text, is above all
one of confrontation – for the objects of understanding are self-contained reminders of not only
everything that has gone but also everything that must be surmounted if meaning is to be made. It is
this confrontational space that Steiner describes as the ‘middle’ between the text and the reader, the
conversation that has already begun before the reader arrives, and in which there must be ‘an
operation of interpretive decipherment’ (1998, p. 49). From the perspective of the reader, located
after and away from the sociocultural moment in which the text was written and received, the ‘past’ of
the text operates as a foreign country, for the condition of distanciation is above all one of
estrangement. Consider what it means to be ‘familiar’ with something. From the Latin familiaris, it is
suggestive of domesticity; of belonging to a family, household or community and with which
something is shared; it implies being on intimate terms, enjoying a friendly or family relationship;
things known from long association; the ordinary, the normal, the usual. Everything about the text, its
symbols, allusions, references, its place in history, its political positioning, is both locked within the
past cultural epoch of its original unfolding, and is, by definition, unfamiliar in the sense of being
‘other’ to that which we conceive of as our ‘own’. To read is to be confronted not just with the
inaccessibility of the author’s intentions for the text and the circumstantial reality in which it was
produced and received, but also with the presence of everything that does not ‘belong’ to us.
Appropriation starts with a reader’s desire to conquer this condition:
The problem of writing becomes a hermeneutical problem when it is referred to its complementary pole, which is reading. A new
dialectic then emerges, that of distanciation and appropriation. By appropriation I mean the counterpart of the semantic autonomy,
which detached the text from its writer. To appropriate is to make ‘one’s own’ what was ‘alien’. Because there is a general need
for making our own what is foreign to us, there is a general problem of distanciation. Distance, then, is not simply a fact, a given,
just the actual spatial and temporal gap between us and the appearance of such and such work of art or discourse. It is a dialectical
trait, the principle of a struggle between the otherness that transforms all spatial and temporal distance into cultural estrangement
and the ownness by which all understanding aims at the extension of self-understanding. Distanciation is not a quantitative
phenomenon; it is the dynamic counterpart of our need, our interest, and our effort to overcome cultural estrangement. Writing and
reading take place in this cultural struggle. (Ricoeur, 1976, p. 43)

When it comes to the professional practice of interlingual translation upon which I base my definition
of cultural translation, this dialectical ‘struggle’ manifests itself as a confrontation with the
foreignness of the text-for-translation with respect to the language of the translation’s end user. At its
most basic, translation concerns rewriting a text written originally in one language for the purpose of
being read in another. Faced with the foreign language, a language that the translator’s audience does
not understand, the translator must attempt to facilitate comprehension by locating appropriate
alternatives to the language of the original text in the language of the translation’s audience. As with
appropriation, translation is animated by the presence of the ‘alien’ – in this case, the unfamiliar word
of the foreign other. The translator’s process is dialectical because it is characterized by a constant
movement between the estranging word of the other and the familiar terrain of a language that a
translator’s audience knows and understands.
In the case of translating the 1978 film Grease for release in Spanish-speaking regions, for
example, this dialectical struggle starts with the very title itself. Set in a 1950s high school in the
United States, the title of the English-language theatrical release referred to the ‘greaser’ subculture
associated with rock and roll, hot rod cars and motorcycles. The epithet referred to the slicked-back
hairstyle modelled on the style of Marlon Brando and James Dean, which was greased with all
manner of gels, creams and waxes. In English, the term ‘grease’ is polysemous. It is not just a hair
product but also a lubricating oil that you add to the joints of machines; it is the fat you cook with in a
pan or add to a cake mixture; and, in a figurative sense, it is the physical effort you put into fulfilling a
particular task or objective. The term plays an important role from the beginning of the film. An
animated sequence shows John Travolta’s character Danny Zucco as he gets up from bed and makes
his way through his messy bedroom to the bathroom, face obscured by his unruly mop. Comb in hand
he stands in front of the mirror and proceeds to squeeze hair cream from a tube. A close-up of the tube
shows drops of hair cream flying through the air, where they morph into the shape of the six letters of
the film’s title. Behind the letters the shape of an open-top motorcar fades into view – the car is
‘Greased Lightning’, subject of the famous musical number by the same name. For Spanish-speaking
audiences, the title was translated variously as Brillantina and Vaselina, depending on the market
region. Both brillantina and vaselina are generic terms (despite the latter’s proximity to a well-
known brand name) for semi-solid lubricating hair care products in common use in South America.
But despite appearing ‘generic’ in the sense that the Spanish terms do not identify any hair care
product in particular and refer simply to the function and purpose of the product itself, they are in fact
totally particular, in the sense that they limit the term’s linguistic possibilities to only one application:
hair styling. Unlike the English term, brillantina and vaselina are not polysemous and do not open
themselves up to the world of machines, hot rod cars, grease-monkey mechanics or the film’s greaser
gang, the T-birds. By opting for terms associated with the practice of styling one’s hair, the Spanish
translation localizes the reference to match the familiar context of its spectatorship.
But consider what it means to do this. If appropriation is the enactment of a desire to overcome
‘estrangement’, then to avoid the risk of confusion, alienation or even deception, the cause of such
estrangement, the foreign word, is effectively replaced with the local. The sense of the foreign work
must be absorbed by the translator and a second work produced, drawn from the translator’s own
tongue. If we think of the film’s title as a mini ‘text’, the translator must not only absorb the presence
of the English when producing a second text in Spanish; in this instance the presence of the foreign
word must be totally obliterated. In broader terms, far in time and space from the original context in
which the text was written, produced and received, translation is a function of multiple distances. A
translated text does not seek to represent the intentions of the author of the original foreign text but the
totality it projects before the translator and the translator’s construction of such a world. Given that
we have not yet found a way to travel through time and space, to overcome distanciation one’s only
option is to reach out across the distance to view it through a lens which is not strange but ‘own’. In
this sense, interpretation ‘brings together’, ‘equalizes’, renders ‘contemporary and similar,’ thus
genuinely making one’s own what was initially alien (Ricoeur, 2008, p. 114). It is for this reason that
Ricoeur describes appropriation as the counterpart of distanciation: ‘The purpose of all interpretation
is to conquer a remoteness, a distance between the past cultural epoch to which the text belongs and
the interpreter himself. By overcoming this distance, by making himself contemporary with the text,
the exegete can appropriate its meaning to himself: foreign, he makes it familiar, that is, he makes it
his own’ (Ricoeur, 2004, p. 16).
If distanciation and appropriation exist in dialectical relation, as two sides of the same interpretive
coin, what Steiner describes as the imposition of a ‘native garb’ of translation on the ‘alien form’ of
the source language is in fact a gesture that attempts both to comprehend and to contain the text, for
the journey outwards, towards the text of the other, is always a return journey (1998, p. 271). Out of
the distance that was once closeness, in other words, appropriation effects an all-new proximity – not
between translator and author, or author and audience but between translator and text, audience and
translator. In the case of the translator, distanciation is more than the effect of being at a remove from
the author of the text and the time and place in which the text was written. It is the ontological
condition of being alienated in the present place of reading by the estranging quality distanciation
creates. Appropriation, by extension, is a cognitive process of familiarization, a conscious embracing
of the otherness of the other within the horizon of the own. ‘Understanding’, in this sense, always
takes place within a historical horizon and ‘meaning’ is distanciated from subjective consciousness:
For it is, paradoxically, in so far as we belong to an historical tradition that meaning is always at a distance from us in the
immediate here and now. ‘Distanciation’ is the dialectical counterpart of ‘belonging’. These two movements represent the twin
arches of the hermeneutic bridge. The text thus becomes, for Ricoeur, the model for a belonging to communication in and through
distance. In interpretation we endeavour to reappropriate those meanings that have been disappropriated from understanding.
Hermeneutics, in short, is the attempt to render near that which is far – temporally, geographically, culturally, spiritually etc. It strives
to recover that which has been removed. (Kearney, 1994, p. 110, original emphasis)

Semantic autonomy and appropriation thus go hand-in-hand, for with distanciation comes
atemporalization, since the text has escaped both its author and its original addressee and it is now
open to anyone who can read. This omnitemporality of meaning is the counterpart of historicity – the
condition by which the reader, fixed in the reading present, must look backwards and across to the
text, which is now a relic of the past. The problem that translation tackles, then, is not so much that the
reader is separated spatially and temporally from the text-for-translation, the ‘fact’ of alienation, but
the separation anxiety this state of alienated separation creates when it comes to attempting to
understand. As Steiner notes:
Resistant difference – the integral and historical impermeability, apartness of the two languages, civilizations, semantic composites–
plays against elective affinity–the translator’s pre- and recognition of the original, his intuition of legitimate entry, of an at-homeness
momentarily dislocated, i.e. located across the frontier. At close quarters, say as between two European languages, the charge is
maximal at both poles. The shock of difference is as strong as that of familiarity. The translator is held off as powerfully as he is
drawn in. (Steiner, 1998, p. 399)

Distanciation is estranging because it is to be reminded that our access to the world is not immediate;
that human understanding is fallible and cannot be assumed. The site of this struggle is therefore as
much social as it is textual, for separation anxiety is not limited to the world of letters but permeates
the myriad interactions and problematic understandings that characterize human existence in a
globalized, interconnected world. The challenge distanciation creates is not so much the empirical
state of separation between reader and text, self and other, but our desire, our continued need, to do
something about it.
 What is appropriation?
Two consequences attend the reader’s distanciation from the text-for-interpretation. First,
distanciation places the reader in a necessarily oppositional position vis-à-vis the text, since there is
no mystery to be interpreted until the text is read. There exists no disagreement, no contestation,
except in the condition of being interpreted. It is only when the text is actualized in the mind of the
reader that the distance that separates the reader in the present from the time and place of the text’s
production and reception in the past is realized. Simply put, the text does not exist as an object of
interpretation until the reader reads it. This leads to the second consequence: that the reader’s
opposition to the text is psychological in nature. That is, it is a state of separation that exists in the
mind of the one who is in the position of reading a text. Indeed, it is the reader’s opposition to the
object of reading that creates the condition of ‘reader’ in the first instance. Without something ‘to be
understood’ a ‘reader’ does not exist in order to read and understand.
Together, these insights shift the axis of meditation away from the subjective world of the author
towards that of the reader. It is this reader-focused emphasis that forms appropriation’s first
principle:
What is indeed to be understood – and consequently appropriated – in a text? Not the intention of the author, which is supposed to
be hidden behind the text; not the historical situation common to the author and his original readers; not the expectations or feelings
of these original readers; not even their understanding of themselves as historical and cultural phenomena. What has to be
appropriated is the meaning of the text itself, conceived in a dynamic way as the direction of thought opened up by the text. In other
words, what has to be appropriated is nothing other than the power of disclosing a world that constitutes the reference of the text.
(Ricoeur, 1976, p. 92)

Given the text’s autonomy with respect to the author and the sociocultural milieu in which it was
produced and received, appropriation renounces any attempt to grasp the genius or the soul of the
author as the one who talks ‘behind’ the text. For Ricoeur, that which must be appropriated is what he
variously describes as the ‘matter’ of the text, the ‘world of the text’ and the ‘thing of the text’. This
projection of a world is, he admits,
a possible world, to be sure, but a world nevertheless, a place I can think of myself inhabiting in order to carry out there my own-
most possibilities. Without being a real world, this intentional object intended by the text as its outside-the-text constitutes a first
mediation, inasmuch as what a reader can appropriate is not the lost intention of the author behind the text, but the world of the text
in front of the text. (Ricoeur, 2013, p. 17)

Discerning this ‘world of the text in front of the text’ concerns making an important move away from
the ‘sense’ of a text towards its ‘reference’, that is, ‘from what it says to what it talks about’ (Ricoeur,
1976, pp. 87–8). Whereas the sense is the ideal object that a proposition intends and this is immanent
within the work, the reference is the value of the proposition, its claim to point towards reality. This
latter quality is what Ricoeur elsewhere describes as ‘what is being talked about, the thing of the
text, namely, the kind of world the work unfolds, as it were, before the text’ (Ricoeur, 2008, p. 127,
original emphasis). We therefore have two distinct ways of approaching the text at our disposition:
As readers, either we may remain in a kind of state of suspense as regards any kind of referred-to world, or we may actualize the
potential nonostensive references of the text in a new situation, that of the reader. In the first case, in which we focus only on the
sense, on its internal structure and relations, we hypostasize the text by treating it as self-enclosed, as a worldless entity; in the
second, we create a new ostensive reference through the kind of ‘execution’ that the art of reading implies. These two possibilities
are equally entailed by the act of reading, conceived as their dialectical interplay. (Ricoeur, 2008, p. 158)
In the first disposition, the reader seeks an essence located behind the text that governs how the work
is structured. In the second, the reader looks beyond the text, away from its interior world towards the
world it discloses before itself. By focusing on the reference in this latter way, we can engage with
the text fully, to breathe new life into it in the here and now of reading.
To enter into understanding of a text is thus to follow its movement from sense to reference, away
from its initial situation of discourse, away from the putative intention of the author and the structures
of the text towards the possible world it establishes beyond itself through its power of reference
(Ricoeur, 2013, p. 136). The nature of reference has an important consequence for interpretation:
It implies that the meaning of a text lies not behind the text but in front of it. The meaning is not something hidden but something
disclosed. What gives rise to understanding is that which points toward a possible world, by means of the non-ostensive references
of the text. Texts speak of possible worlds and possible ways of orientating oneself in these worlds. In this way, disclosure plays the
equivalent role for written texts as ostensive reference plays in spoken language. Interpretation thus becomes the apprehension of
the proposed worlds that are opened up by the non-ostensive reference of the text. (Ricoeur, 2013, p. 60)

For Ricoeur, it is not about getting into the head of the author but interpreting the world that a work
unfolds before us. Because it is written, there is no speaker present to explain things; instead, we must
‘construct’ its meaning for ourselves. Only one party, in this case, the reader, speaks for both. Along
this road from configuration to refiguration, therefore, the text does not say; it offers. The text does not
refer; the reader does. It projects a possible world but it is ultimately a world the reader builds for
herself. It is the reader who is the ‘real character who brings about the intersection of the (possible)
world of the text with the (real) world of the reader’ (Ricoeur, 2013, p. 18). For Ricoeur, the world
of the text is not an empirical world, but ‘my’ world, the world as it unfolds itself to me and only to
me. As such, it is unique to me and unique to my interpretation of the text:
What we make our own, what we appropriate for ourselves, is not an alien experience or a distant intention, but the horizon of a
world toward which a work directs itself. The appropriation of the reference is no longer modelled on the fusion of consciousnesses,
on empathy or sympathy. The emergence of the sense and the reference of a text in language is the coming to language of a world
and not the recognition of another person. (Ricoeur, 2013, p. 61)

As a result, the subjectivity of appropriation is not about projecting oneself onto the text, but allowing
the text to disclose what it has to say to us. There is no intuitive grasping of authorial intention, only
an impulsion leading us away from the text, an invitation to think in a certain manner, an incitement to
see things in an all-new way. The text, Ricoeur asserts, seeks to place us in its meaning, such that
‘intention’ is not of the author but of the text, and it opens up a direction for thought. Interpretation is
therefore not an act that proceeds from the text, but an act that is performed upon it. To comply with
the ‘injunction’ of the text is to appropriate in the here and now the intention of the text, understood as
whatever the text means for whoever complies with what it offers. In this sense, the text-for-
interpretation is not a blueprint but a call to action: to look forwards, to focus not on what it says but
what it offers. Reading is, above all, an act of belonging to the text.

Mapping the ‘other’

To read, to interpret, is to place oneself in the meaning indicated by the relation of interpretation the
text itself supports. But notice how the focus has shifted – towards readers and their world, their
interpretation, their reading, their selfhood. Without the author to guide them, everything that unfolds
in this relation between readers and text is led and developed by the readers alone. Benjamin gives
the example of the difference between a reader and a man listening to a storyteller. Unlike the man
listening to the story, who is in the company of the storyteller and enjoys his companionship, the
reader of a novel is entirely alone:
In this solitude of his, the reader of a novel seizes upon his material more jealously than anyone else. He is ready to make it
completely his own, to devour it, as it were. Indeed, he destroys, he swallows up the material as the fire devours logs in the
fireplace. The suspense which permeates the novel is very much like the draft which stimulates the flame in the fireplace and
enlivens its play. It is a dry material on which the burning interest of the reader feeds. (Benjamin, 1999, p. 99)

We do not read from a space of empty time. Our readings, like history, are filled with the reader’s
presence in the here and now. In Ricoeur’s words, ‘every reading of a text always takes place within
a community, a tradition, or a living current of thought, all of which display presuppositions and
exigencies – regardless of how closely a reading may be tied to the quid, to “that in view of which”
the text was written’ (Ricoeur, 2004, pp. 3–4). Interpretation is therefore both embodied and
historical. There is no understanding outside of history, for ‘interpretation’ gives life in the present,
beyond the historical immediacy of the text in its original time and place. The impact of this on the
nature of the reading we produce cannot be overstated, for it means that the very historical reality we
claim to construct as an object of reading is also the very historical reality to which we belong and in
which we participate (Ricoeur, 2008, p. 50).
Ricoeur’s example is to describe reading as the performance of a musical piece, as delimited by
the provisions of the written score but performed by an artist who actualizes the written annotations in
the here and now:
Bringing a text to language is always something other than hearing someone and listening to his speech. Reading resembles instead
the performance of a musical piece regulated by the written notations of the score. For the text is an autonomous space of meaning
that is no longer animated by the intention of its author; the autonomy of the text, deprived of this essential support, hands writing
over to the sole interpretation of the reader. (Ricoeur, 2013, p. 56)

In Spanish, an actor is an intérprete; una interpretación is an artistic performance. By giving life to

the thoughts and intentions of a particular person or group, a spokesperson in French is an interprète,
speaking for and on behalf of another. From these we gain a sense of interpretation both as the
embodied realization of a portrayal and as an act of agency, of one who represents the interests of
others. Consider what happens when we make status updates, post content, comment on threads and
share images, text and video on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. In these, we commit to words our
‘reading’ of the world around us. But since every post and tweet is geotagged, we also imbricate
something of the poster in the post itself. As Steiner observes, there is no ‘unwobbling pivot in time
from which understanding could be viewed as stable and definitive’ (1998, p. 262). By creating its
own pivot from which to understand, in this sense, the embodied nature of interpretation is best
viewed as the hermeneutic version of photobombing, for to interpret is to place ourselves within the
space of the text and to layer upon it our own particular representation of what we have read.
There is a note of caution here to which we must be sensitive. If the translator’s task is primarily
explicative – that is, to make graphic that which challenges understanding – explication is also
always additive, since understanding is always situated and embodied. Interpretation therefore does
not merely restate; it also illustrates. It does not show, in other words, it tells; and this is an important
distinction. Benjamin’s example in this regard is film – a means of reproduction he describes as
anything but replicative:
By close-ups of the things around us, by focusing on hidden details of familiar details of familiar objects, by exploring commonplace
 milieus under the ingenious guidance of the camera, the film, on the one hand, extends our comprehension of the necessities which
rule our lives; on the other hand, it manages to assure us of an immense and unexpected field of action. (Benjamin, 1994, p. 536)

A person walking, a fish jumping, the camera can slow these down so that we see the tiniest detail of
the clothes the walker is wearing, the droplets of water on the fish’s scales. Like a translation, and as
with all acts of explanation and understanding, the moving camera involves itself in the process:
‘Here the camera intervenes with the resources of its lowerings and liftings, its interruptions and
isolations, its extensions and accelerations, its enlargements and reductions. The camera introduces
us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses’ (ibid.)
In a 1965 newsreel produced by British Pathé News featuring a two-minute item on the production
of maps for the Ordnance Survey, we can see these dimensions in action. The film opens with an
exterior close up of the specialist equipment used by surveyors to ‘plot’ the land. A man appears,
squinting one eye and peering into the viewfinder of an optical instrument with the other. ‘An
unobtrusive army of men on the alert spying out the land’ says the narrator (1965). The film cuts to an
interior shot of men at work at the headquarters of the Ordnance Survey Commission, poring over
desks covered in maps and illuminated by spotlights. As the narrator speaks, we are shown close-up
shots of precision mapmaking, as one man uses a ruler and a needle to trace the contours of a map on
wax-coated graph paper. Another uses a scalpel to place miniscule street names on a red-coloured
map. To make a printing plate of a map, we are told, a photograph must first be taken, a process that
requires a vast camera system specially designed for the Ordnance Survey. We watch as men in white
laboratory coats place a map in a vice-like frame and position it in front of the camera, which is held
in a large scaffold. We learn from the narrator that it is the most advanced and accurate camera of its
size in the world. A man in brown overalls prepares red and yellow paint for the printing press. A
map showing roads, hills and place names will be photographed several times in different forms
since only two colours can be printed at once from the ‘meticulous blocks’ they produce, says the
narrator (ibid). Another man collects the coloured maps from the printing press and arranges them on
a desk. We learn that the machine will print 5000 ‘spot-on’ Ordnance Survey maps an hour (ibid.).
The narrator leaves us with the following closing statement: ‘If we hadn’t been famous for anything
else, mapmaking would have been enough to put Britain “on the map” ’ (ibid.). From the close-up
shots of the precision equipment used for measuring the contours of the land and the delicacy with
which we see the men construct the Ordnance Survey maps on paper and later produce printed
reproductions, to the running commentary of the narrator and footage of bespectacled men holding
scalpels and compasses, everything about this film tells us that mapmaking is a science; that it is a
highly complex task, where accuracy and exactness are valued above all other qualities. The
newsreel offers a portrayal in which the practice of cartography is venerated both as a source of
national pride and, where precision is presented as a vector for verisimilitude, as a source of trust.
But when construed as an act of understanding, this is less of a truth to be acknowledged than it is a
position to be defended.
The model of text interpretation teaches that understanding has nothing to do with an immediate
grasp of a foreign psychic life or with an emotional identification with a mental intention. What is
appropriated is not something felt, but something released by the reference of the text, its ‘power of
disclosing a world’. If understanding is always mediated historically by the reader’s location in the
interpreting present, a paradigmatic act of embodied performance on the part of the reader, and if the
text is no longer driven by authorial intention, what does it mean to appropriate its meaning to
oneself? By turning to the world of cartography, we find a dialectic of distanciation and appropriation
in which similar acts of reading, interpretation and understanding are present. Maps, as with
translations, are interpretations that aim to conquer a remoteness: they appear as representations on
our computer screens, satnav apps, atlases or desktop globes, and act as guides to that which is
normally physically inaccessible. When faced with uncertainties in our immediate geography, we turn
to maps as a source of guidance. In an unfamiliar city, we consult a street map and suddenly the
metropolis opens up before us. By seeking their counsel, an unspoken agreement passes between the
reader and the cartographer; we accept the authority and authenticity of the knowledges they reflect.
They are explications that quite literally make graphic the worlds from which we are prevented from
accessing directly because of the distance that separates us. And yet, by definition, maps are
representations: they are hermeneutic interpretations of the territories on which we live and as such
are also always additive.
Many modern maps are based on a projection created by sixteenth-century cartographer Gerardus
Mercator for use in navigation. Despite the status of the Mercator projection as the go-to model for
hundreds of years, the Mercator exaggerates its scale towards the poles, giving an erroneous picture
of the relative size of different territories. Countries such as Greenland come out roughly the same
size as the African continent, when, in reality, the latter is some fourteen times larger. By making
many countries appear smaller than they really are, this is a projection that gives the impression that
certain territories are more important than others. It is for this reason that Huggan describes maps as
paradigmatic structures, for they ‘conceptualise, codify and regulate’ the vision we hold of a
particular landscape (1994, p. xv). In 1974 Dr Arno Peters launched a controversial counter-
projection to challenge the primacy of the Mercator. Peters was not a cartographer but a historian and
his project was political: to oppose the charge of Eurocentrism and Western privilege that enhanced
the global North to the detriment of the South in received projections of the Earth. The Peters map
preserves equal area and retains a rectangular grid of latitude and longitude, making all countries a
more accurate size in terms of their relation to one another. However, the shape of countries in the
Peters projection continues to be distorted, and compared to the Mercator map it appears to stretch
land masses vertically. According to the New Internationalist obituary for Peters, who died on 2
December 2002, aged 86, Peters did not engage with his most vitriolic detractors; many contended
that he had plagiarized an earlier map published in 1855 by the Reverend James Gall; others resented
his intrusion into a field in which he was not expert (New Internationalist, 2003). Despite this
opposition the Peters Map was adopted by the UN, aid agencies, schools and even became the subject
of an episode of the television series The West Wing (1999–2006).
The obituary notes that what fewer people realize is that the map was itself a sequel to his earlier
Synchronoptische Weltgeschichte – Sychronoptic World History, published in 1952 and arranged in
tabular form with time running along the top and regions running down the side, so that the reader
could see at a glance what was happening around the globe at any one time: ‘Noticing that in most
histories of the world Europe got more attention than Africa, Asia and Latin America combined,
Peters decided to create a history which gave equal weight to each century in human history and to
each region’ (New Internationalist, 2003). Although it engages in distortion of its own, what the
Peters projection demonstrates is what Huggan calls the ‘potential for discrepancy that exists between
the model (or modelling system) and the “reality” represented by the model’ it purports to represent
(1994, p. 6). No map is without some degree of distortion, given that all maps utilize some form of
scientific projection to calculate land mass and to determine the shape and size of territories. When
depicted on paper their representation of the world they represent is never ‘distance-factual’. As a
giant semiotic system, the map is the product of ‘conventions that prescribe relations of content and
expression in a given semiotic circumstance’ (Fels and Wood, 1986, p. 54). The Peters projection,
like the Mercator, is a rectangular-based system and thus gives rise to continued misrepresentation.
But when judged alongside the political project of his previous work, perhaps achieving the best
representation was not the point: the constructedness of the cartographic exercise in the Peters map is
explicit for all to see. It is a translation that makes no claim to an absence of hermeneutics.
A similar moral is brought into play in a parable by Jorge Luis Borges, translated in Dreamtigers
(1964) as ‘On Rigor in Science’. The short story, which is presented fictionally as an excerpt from
‘Suarez Miranda: Viajes de Varones Prudentes, Book Four, Chapter XLV, Lérida, 1658’, is worth
reproducing here in its entirety:
… In that Empire, the Art of Cartography reached such Perfection that the map of one Province alone took up the whole of a City,
and the map of the empire, the whole of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps did not satisfy and the Colleges of
Cartographers set up a Map of the Empire which had the size of the Empire itself and coincided with it point by point. Less
Addicted to the Study of Cartography, Succeeding Generations understood that this Widespread Map was Useless and not without
Impiety they abandoned it to the Inclemencies of the Sun and of the Winters. In the deserts of the West some mangled Ruins of that
Map lasted on, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in the whole Country there are no other relics of the Disciplines of Geography.
(Borges, 1964, p. 325)

As the story highlights, all attempts at representing the Earth on a flat piece of paper are doomed to
failure, since either the true shape of the world around us or the true distance between its
topographies will inevitably be lost. The map of the Empire in the story promises complete coverage
of the lands it controls, yet the image of it rotting in the deserts of its own territory exposes the
absurdity, naïveté or egoism behind the desire for a metonymic ‘point by point’ reflection of the
topographic realities the map purports to reflect. ‘The provisionality of cartographic representation’,
explains Huggan, ‘renders maps, and the areas or territories they claim to represent, incomplete,
indeterminate, and insecure’ (1994, p. xvi). In a mimetic sense, he says, ‘the function of the map topos
has never been purely “representative” ’; simply put, therefore, ‘maps lie; they inevitably differ from
the reality they purport to represent’ (p. xv and p. 3). Huggan is not so much exercised by the deceits
of cartographic appropriation as by the injurious gestures of selection and discrimination that
accompany it:
The map’s efficacy as a claim, like its impact as a political weapon, rests on the combined effect of its diverse strategies: the
delineation and demarcation of territory; the location and nomination of place; the inclusion and exclusion of detail within a
preset framework; and the choice of scale, format, and design. Many of these strategies are obvious, but some are subliminal,
reflecting the subtlety with which maps operate as forms of social knowledge or as agents of political expediency. (Huggan, 1994, p.
9, emphases added)

Maps, as with translations, are social constructions that serve as technologies of control in which
power is exercised precisely through the judicious ‘delineation and demarcation’ not just of
territories but of the lived experience they represent. By ‘othering’ the lands it represents, the map not
only reduces the other to a second-order discourse – an object of representation – but, crucially,
places the one who produces the map in the ultimate position of power, as the one who also does the
selecting and discriminating. Through this kind of cartographic ‘orientalism’, maps can be divorced
from the social consequences and responsibilities of their exercise, transformed into not only
graphical representations but also discourses that seek to carve up and contain the world. As
Winichakul notes, ‘a map anticipated spatial reality, not vice versa. In other words, a map was a
model for, rather than a model of, what it purported to represent’ (1997, p. 110). In this way, maps
imply the existence of ‘empty’ spaces, waiting to be ‘named’ into existence by the act of mapping
which traces topographical identities onto them. Somewhere between the cartographer’s observation
of the world and its subsequent representation, the two become asynchronous and discourses of
power and authority are extended along the way. Maps are not carbon copies but simulacra of a
vision of reality mediated through the cartographer’s gaze. We can read a map as we would any text
or translation: as influenced by the hermeneutics of the one who produced it.

Appropriation as containment
Three interrelated aspects of appropriation stand out so far. First, appropriation starts where there is
an ontological state of separation from the objects of our interpretation. Second, this state of
separation displaces the figure of the author as the historical agent of meaning because ‘meaning’ is
both sited in the here and now and is constructed by the reader in the interpreting present. In Steiner’s
words, the translator ‘must actualize the implicit “sense”, the denotative, connotative, illative,
intentional, associative range of significations which are implicit in the original, but which it leaves
undeclared or only partly declared simply because the native auditor or reader has an immediate
understanding of them’ (Steiner, 1998, p. 291). De-psychologized thus, interpretation is not concerned
with what is going on in the author’s head but with the fruit of the dialectical relation between a
reader and the text. ‘Appropriation’ is not so much targeted at discerning what the text ‘means’ but
what the text can possibly mean to us. Third, and because this imaginative encounter is concerned
first and foremost with bringing into the present space of the reader everything about the text that
challenges the immediacy of understanding, interpretation is distinguished by the immediacy of its
character. But remember that translators, readers and interpreters the world over are living, thinking,
beings, immersed in social, cultural, political, historical and geographical contexts of their own. That
which we interpret, therefore, we also transform. It is an interpreter’s performance of the object of
perception and as such a difference is created between that which is interpreted and that which
interpretation yields. In the context of interlingual translation, Benjamin offers a well-known image of
this predicament, in which the text is a language forest and the translation is left outside: ‘it calls into
it without entering, aiming at that single spot where the echo is able to give, in its own language, the
reverberation of the work in the alien one’ (1999, p. 77). The translational ‘echo’ that returns from the
language forest is often confused for the intentional voice of the author, but to Benjamin it is the echo
of an enquiry the translator herself initiates.
The significance of these insights goes well beyond the world of text. They suggest that if the
purposeful interpretation of the world around us is animated by a desire to conquer the distance that
separates us from our respective others, then ‘understanding’ is at base a self-directed mode of
ontological struggle with the otherness all around us. It is for this reason that Ricoeur describes
understanding as the dialectical counterpart of being in a given situation of interpretation, because
understanding is ‘the projection of our ownmost possibilities at the very heart of the situations in
which we find ourselves’ (2008, p. 61). As we shift our emphasis away from understanding the other
towards understanding the world of the work, we also shift how we view the very task of
understanding. It is not an objective procedure but the expression of an ongoing process of a reader
understanding herself in front of the work. Understanding the text thus produces a certain circularity
that reaches outwards and arches back to the reader’s own self-understanding. Within this
hermeneutic circle:
 An interpretation is not genuine unless it culminates in some form of appropriation (Aneignung), if by that term we understand the
process by which one makes one’s own (eigen) what was initially other or alien (fremd). But I believe that the hermeneutical circle
is not correctly understood when it is presented, first, as a circle between two subjectivities, that of the reader and that of the
author; and second, as the projection of the subjectivity of the reader into the reading self. (Ricoeur, 2013, p. 61, original emphasis)

That which we contain through interpretation we make our own. Despite the notion that interpretation
is about the opening up of possibilities, therefore, these possibilities must be realized in the here and
now of the reader. All the reader can do is to make the text their own, to incorporate and to contain,
bringing it into the body of the local and closing down the interpretive possibilities the foreign text
presents within the framework of the familiar:
The translator labours to secure a natural habitat for the alien presence he has imported into his own tongue and cultural setting.
[…] The foreign text is felt to be not so much an import from abroad (suspect by definition) as it is an element out of one’s native
past. It had been there ‘all along’ awaiting reprise. It is really a part of one’s own tradition temporarily mislaid. Master translations
domesticate the foreign original by exchanging an obtrusive geographical-linguistic distance for a much subtler, internalized distance
in time. (Steiner, 1998, p. 365)

As a process of incorporation, appropriation is ‘a proximity which suppresses and preserves the

cultural distance and includes the otherness within the ownness’ (Ricoeur, 1976, p. 43). In the context
of translation, we appropriate the foreign under the category of the same. Translation in this sense
both preserves and overcomes distance, for it both acknowledges that which is different and inscribes
it within its own creations. To translate, therefore, we must impose boundaries and limitations upon
what a text possibly can mean. As a homeward movement, moreover, translation is ultimately a
gesture of containment – what Steiner describes as the ‘portage home of the foreign “sense” and its
domestication in the new linguistic-cultural matrix’ (1998, p. 351). There is thus a territorial
dimension to our acts of understanding, for the text is a foreign land over which the translator seeks to
establish dominion: ‘We encircle and invade cognitively. We come home laden, thus again off-
balance, having caused disequilibrium throughout the system by taking away from “the other” and by
adding, though possibly with ambiguous consequence, to our own. The system is now off-tilt’
(Steiner, 1998, p. 316). As Steiner observes, there has been an outflow of ‘energy’ from the text-for-
translation to the world of the translator; but somewhere between seizure and surrogacy, the task of
taking ‘home’ becomes synonymous with taking ‘away’ (p. 398). With the desire to overcome the
strangeness of the foreign there is also a desire to possess – to reduce, compress and contain.

Translation as the exercise of sovereign authority

Consider the case of an island archipelago known to some as the Spratly Islands, located off the
coasts of Malaysia, the Philippines and southern Vietnam in the South China Sea. It spans almost 800
islands, islets, reefs and atolls, covers a land mass of approximately one-and-a-half square miles in
size and is spread across an area of over 150,000 square miles. It is largely uninhabited, has no
indigenous population and is subject to multiple overlapping claims, two of which – Brunei and
Malaysia – appeal to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, which recognizes an
‘exclusive economic zone’ stretching 200 nautical miles from the coastline of a state. The Convention
draws a distinction between the 200-mile exclusive economic zone, which confers a ‘sovereign right’
on the area below the sea, and what is known as the ‘territorial sea’, which extends outwards for
twelve nautical miles from the baseline of a coastal state and which confers full sovereignty over
both airspace and seabed. In the same archipelago, within the 200-mile exclusive economic zone that
extends from the Philippines, in an area that is also claimed by the People’s Republic of China, lies a
submerged reef known to Philippine claimants as Ayungin, Ren’ai Jiao in Chinese transliteration and
by others as the ‘Second Thomas Shoal’. In 1999 the Philippine Navy grounded the vessel BRP
Sierra Madre at the reef and has maintained a small military presence on board ever since. The ship
was constructed originally for the US Navy during the Second World War and ownership later
transferred to the Philippine Navy; in July 2015 it was reported that the navy had been quietly
reinforcing the rusting hull and deck to prevent it from disintegrating (Reuters, 2015). As a
commissioned navy ship considered on ‘active’ duty, under the ‘Mutual Defense Treaty Between the
Republic of the Philippines and the United States of America’ signed on 30 August 1951, the
Philippines could request US military assistance if the BRP Sierra Madre were attacked.
Fifteen miles from Second Thomas Shoal, meanwhile, is a once-tiny coral islet known by some as
‘Mischief Reef’ and which is at the centre of a vast Chinese land-reclamation project. Over the
course of a few years, China has reclaimed thousands of acres from the South China Sea, turning
reefs, which it refers to as the Nansha islands, which are under water at high tide and therefore not
considered land under international law, into permanent artificial islands. The area is thought to be
rich in mineral and oil deposits, but claims that its reserves could be as strong as the Kuwait region
have not yet been proved through exploration. Ownership of land in the area could also offer a
strategic advantage in terms of establishing a presence in a major sea route worth trillions in trade
and blocking sea-borne threats to South China (Etzler, 2014). According to a position paper of the
Government of the People’s Republic of China ‘on the Matter of Jurisdiction in the South China Sea
Arbitration Initiated by the Republic of the Philippines’,
China has indisputable sovereignty over the South China Sea Islands (the Dongsha Islands, the Xisha Islands, the Zhongsha Islands
and the Nansha Islands) and the adjacent waters. Chinese activities in the South China Sea date back to over 2,000 years ago.
China was the first country to discover, name, explore and exploit the resources of the South China Sea Islands and the first to
continuously exercise sovereign powers over them. (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China, 2014)

The Spratlys have become a cipher for competing claims to sovereignty where even the maritime
territories they represent appear to be in a state of constant evolution. In the statement, China locates
its claim to territorial dominion over the islands in the power to name. By placing a mark upon the
metaphorical space of the land, through the word, China succeeds in containing the islands, if not in
international law, then at least in the moral imaginary. It is through this hermeneutic gesture that
competing claims to the contested space of the Spratlys are read and expressed.
For Tuan the physical world exists without values. The subjective experience of space manifests
itself in what he calls the ‘landmarks’ of a place, which operate as markers, visible features of the
way in which we perform our identity on the spaces around us. It is we who familiarize this alien
space-without-values, imbuing it with ritual, attaching sights, sounds and smells, ascribing feelings,
meanings and ideologies to it. When we impose signs and landmarks on places that relate to
particular identities, loyalties and agendas – naming strategies – we familiarize empty human space
and make it ‘place’. These traces operate as clues to the multiple readings and meanings we attach to
the lived human experience of the physical world around us. These markers simultaneously signal
belonging but they can also divide, displace and exclude. Places in this sense are ‘duplicitous’
because their meanings are not only multitudinous but also change over time, depending on who uses
them, why, where and when. As it passes through these continua of ascription, the identity of a place
multiplies exponentially, expanding and contracting over time according to the way in which it is
lived and experienced. New interpretations of space graft yet more identities, creating an aporia
between the object as a discrete geographical reality and the object as we experience it (Tuan, 1977,
p. 146).
Places, as with ‘translations’ bear an ‘embodied’ relationship to the world. They are constructed by
living people, touched by the traces of multiple reconstructions and as such are never ‘complete’ but
performed (Cresswell, 2004, p. 37). This is the ‘place-ballet’ through which space becomes more of
a social construct than a series of discrete places in their own right (Buttimer and Seamon, 2015, p.
163). Each person will view space differently and, as such, space is constantly evolving over time.
The ‘spirit’ of a place, in other words, exists in the eye of the beholder, for ‘seeing’ creates a distance
between self and other, interpreter and object. For Tuan, because what we see is ‘out there’, all
seeing creates a difference. We view the landscape not as it actually is but as we frame it to be, for
places exist not as independent realities waiting to be rendered successfully, but as place-objects
constructed from the interpreter’s own perspectives, knowledges and expectations. When time
elapses between the lived experience of a place and its subsequent interpretation, a variation occurs.
The ‘truth’ of a place disappears and it is overshadowed by the subjective experience and outlook of
the one doing the interpreting. Tuan puts this succinctly: ‘If time is conceived as flow or movement,
then place is a pause’ (1977, p. 198).
In the context of the Spratlys, competing claims to territorial sovereignty function as translations:
embodied, partial realizations of a particular worldview. Just as no ‘true’ knowledge of a place exists
except as framed by its beholder, no text exists to its interpreter outside of its original geopolitical
landscape. Just as the enactment of place is both a way of viewing the world around us and a way of
understanding our subject-position within it, the translator’s gaze on the space of the text is ultimately
a mode of looking. As a practice equally engaged in the creation of difference, translation ascribes
meanings onto the space of the text, whose values are no longer synonymous with those of the author
but which must be constructed by the translator on her own. Because we are distanced from the
author’s role in determining the meaning of the text, the text is an autonomous space of meaning in
which we dispense with authorial control. Despite this imaginative leap into the hermeneutic
unknown, a journey outwards into the terra incognita of the foreign text, translation is ultimately a
journey homeward-bound, decontextualizing the text, opening up its potential to project possible
worlds, expanding the infinite possibilities for understanding located within it, but, importantly, fixing
what is seen and read within the terrain of writing. In the final analysis, the translator must settle on
only one of the infinite possibilities it raises, ‘pausing’, to use Tuan’s term, the text’s infinite
trajectory in the present space of interpretation. Steiner describes this as the translator’s ‘interpretive
attack and appropriation’ and maintains that as comprehension’s etymology shows, one ‘comprehends’
not only cognitively but also by encirclement and ingestion (1998, p. 415 and p. 314). The
translator’s response is just one of numerous continua of interpretation through which the space of a
text passes as it migrates through appropriation from its ‘past’ reality in time and space to its new
home in the present place of translation. It is the translator’s positionality within the interpreting
‘present’ that informs how the translation takes shape. To the present-day translator, the space of the
text is not just an object, in the sense that the translator can look upon it, but also a way of looking, as
the product and object of a hermeneutic enterprise. When viewed as ‘texts’, the changing geopolitical
status of the Spratly Islands suggests they are not only places in a constant state of translation,
constructed and reconstructed in different times and places, but are also the space of competing
interpretations and conflicting approaches to how the space should be owned and conceptualized. The
lesson for our study of hermeneutics is that while appropriation enables us to open up the infinite
possibilities for understanding that emerge from differential interpretations of the phenomena of our
world, appropriation also requires us to fix upon only one.
 4
Transformation
Translation as revolution

Lichtenstein: A Retrospective was shown at the Tate Modern between 21 February and 27 May 2013
and was the first full-scale exhibition of the artist’s work in over twenty years. Co-organized by the
Art Institute of Chicago, it brought together over one hundred of Lichtenstein’s most celebrated
paintings and sculptures and fostered renewed debate about the significance of his work. One of the
key pieces in the touring retrospective, and perhaps his most famous painting of all, was Whaam!, a
diptych from 1963 that Lichtenstein had based on a comic strip pane published the previous year in
the All American Men of War series by illustrator Irv Novick and published by DC Comics in 1962.
In Lichtenstein’s enormous painted version, one of several in which he depicted scenes of aerial
combat, a fighter pilot sends a rocket hurtling through the sky. It speeds across from left to right,
exploding an enemy jet in a spectacular flash of red, yellow and white. According to the Tate’s
exhibition guide webpage, ‘Lichtenstein carefully reworked his source image by cropping,
eliminating detail, deleting or editing speech bubbles and making the rocket trail horizontal rather
than diagonal, thereby sharpening the drama and giving more weight to a single enemy. The result is
not just the story of a dogfight, but a compositional tightrope act’ (Tate London, n.d.).
Lichtenstein’s paintings of war and romantic melodrama became an overnight success but they also
provoked harsh criticism. For some, he was the architect of pop art, venerated for his distinctive
cartoon style, but for others he was a copycat; a plagiarist, not an artist. As the Tate material notes:
‘In 1964 Life magazine facetiously queried “Is he the worst artist in the US?” – a question that riffed
on a headline 15 years earlier in a 1949 Life magazine feature on Jackson Pollock which asked
laconically: “Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?” ’ (ibid.) Lichtenstein was well
known to have been inspired by popular culture and constructed his work as an ongoing dialogue with
received approaches to art and art criticism. What accounts for a critical reception of his work that
equates methods of imitation, simulacrum, parody and play with plagiarism and plunder? To answer
this, we must delve further into the causes and effects of appropriation.
As an attempt to overcome the distanciating estrangement that separates the translator from the
object of understanding, translation is an encounter with otherness that contains. To make the foreign
familiar, translation must incorporate. It must draw near to the foreign text and possess it, bringing it
into the body of the local. In the autonomous space of meaning from which appropriation begins, a
text becomes decontextualized. The relationship it bears to the time and place of its production and
reception – to its sociocultural moment in history – is out of the translator’s reach. In translation,
references become decoupled and all-new values are ascribed, expanding exponentially its potential
to project new possibilities for understanding. And yet, at the same time, the translator distils this
infinite horizon of possibility into a singular reading in the here and now of writing. By making it their
own, translators, as readers in the first instance, mould the text according to their own reading. As an
‘interpretation’ of the text that also breathes life into the words of the other text and makes them anew,
translation is above all a version-creating exercise. It is neither an innocent nor an automatic activity.
It is a dynamic mediation born of opposition between a reader and a text, between what is ‘ours’ and
what is ‘theirs’, between the security of the familiar and the alienation of the unknown, and, as such,
starts with an imaginative encounter with ‘otherness’ and ends when the self-same otherness is
immured within the translator’s own interpretive frame.
According to Steiner, the ‘ideal’ scenario within this context would be a translation that operates as
a ‘total counterpart’, a ‘perfect “double” ’, of the original, a ‘re-petition – an asking again’ (1998, p.
318). In the face of translation’s containing gestures, this is an ideal that sets out a demand for equity:
Translation fails where it does not compensate, where there is no restoration of radical equity. The translator has grasped and/or
appropriated less than is there. He traduces through diminution. Or he has chosen to embody and restate fully only one or another
aspect of the original, fragmenting, distorting its vital coherence according to his needs or myopia. Or he has ‘betrayed upward’,
transfiguring the source into something greater than itself. The paradigm of translation stays incomplete until reciprocity has been
achieved, until the original has regained as much as it had lost. (Steiner, 1998, p. 415)

In Steiner’s ‘hermeneutic motion’ this compensatory stage of translation is directed towards the
restoration of balance. It is an act of ‘reciprocity’ between the translation and the source, between the
two languages that have been interrupted by the translator’s ‘interpretive attack and appropriation’ (p.
415). In this way, Steiner maintains, it forms part of the very moral fibre of translation (p. 316).
Through ‘tact’ and ‘intensified moral vision’, the translator creates ‘a condition of significant
exchange’ by which there would be translation without loss and the ‘order’ between the source and
receiver would be preserved (pp. 318–19). This idealized conceptualization is consistent with
representations of the translator as a ‘conduit’ or intercultural ‘ambassador’ charged with ensuring the
safe passage of otherness from the time and place in which the text was produced to the time and
place of its translation and reception. And yet, as with most touristic travel, a translation’s itinerary
tends to be homeward-bound, for while the process may begin as a journey to the land of the other, a
return ticket is usually implied.
When it comes to the concrete practice of interlingual translation the driving force behind this
homeward journey is the receiver of a translation – the audience towards which the translator directs
her words. When I translate a Golden Age play from Spanish into English so that it can be adapted for
the British stage (as I did with Lope de Vega’s El castigo sin venganza for the Theatre Royal Bath in
2013), there is no sense of ‘exchange’ – understood as something transactional or reciprocal, a mutual
giving and a receiving – with Lope de Vega as the author of the play. He is long since dead and cannot
participate in any dialogical interaction with me. Nor do I enter into a ‘dialogue’ with the text itself.
The play neither speaks back to me when I question it nor does it respond to me when I translate it.
My strategic choices, my approach to translation, have no effect on the seventeenth-century Spanish-
language text. It does not transact with me. It does not reciprocate. Confronted with my translation
both text and author are silent. It does not ‘give’; I ‘take’. As the translator, my understanding of
Lope’s play is properly that of a ‘source’ text: it is my point of departure, the raw materials, the
inspiration from which I will construct my English translation. In a hermeneutic sense it is the ‘world’
of dramatic possibilities I will read into the text and appropriate. In the double-blind situation of
reading and translating Lope’s play today, any sense of ‘exchange’ that has any bearing on the shape of
the translation is not with the historical author but with the artistic director of the theatre company
who commissioned me to produce it.
Distanciation separates the interpreter from the object of interpretation – from the foreign author
and the historical context in which the text was produced and received. Translation starts with a
desire to understand the text’s relationship to this foreign world across this distance and it ends with
an interpretation intended to be understood by audiences in the here and now. Translation’s priority,
indeed its very raison d’être, is to facilitate understanding among an identified audience, and, as such,
it is purposeful, targeted and deliberate. It is an intention, a desire enacted on the part of the translator
and performed, one hopes, in both the translation she produces and on the part of the audience that
receives it. When it comes to conceptualizing the task of translation, therefore, we would do better to
orient ourselves away from a notion of ‘exchange’, that is, away from what is or is not lost when we
appropriate our objects of interpretation and instead towards everything we stand to gain when we do
so. The Hollywood phenomenon of the ‘reboot’ shares many features with this approach to
interlingual translation. In the reboot, the continuity of an existing series of fictional works is
disrupted to introduce new characters and plot lines. When studio executives hired J. J. Abrams, best
known for his behind-the-scenes roles in blockbusters Armageddon (1998) and Cloverfield (2008) to
direct the first in a new Star Trek film franchise, it was precisely the potential for freshness and
creativity in ‘translation’ that critics celebrated:
Mr. Abrams doesn’t treat ‘Star Trek’ as a sacred text, which would be deadly for everyone save the fanatics. But neither does he
skewer a pop cultural classic that, more than 40 years after its first run, has been so lampooned (it feels like there are more ‘South
Park’ parodies than original episodes) it was difficult to see how he was going to give it new life. By design or accident, he has,
simply because in its hopefulness ‘Star Trek’ reminds you that there’s more to science fiction (and Hollywood blockbusters) than
nihilism. (Dargis, 2009)

While certain elements in the reboot remain recognizable to audiences familiar with the original
works, such as the continued presence of the original Kirk, Spock, Uhura, Bones, Chekov, Sulu and
Scotty characters, new elements or twists on familiar themes are introduced. In Abrams’s reboots,
which include Star Trek (2009) and Star Trek into Darkness (2013), Spock and Uhura are involved
in a romantic relationship and Spock’s home world, Vulcan, has been destroyed. Reboots depend
upon the existence of already well-known source material and, as with translations, they appropriate
their source material for the sole purpose of moving their intended audience in some way. In the
reboot, there is also a commercial imperative at work. Studios expand their revenue potential by
piggybacking on the success of proven models, securing a new generation of fans and reinvigorating
the franchise for existing ones. In this context, the ‘voice’ of the original Star Trek ‘author’, Jean
Roddenberry, is lost and the shape of the original Star Trek universe has been transformed radically.
In this sense, only Abrams and the creative team behind the reboots have the agency to ‘speak’; it is
their story, their visuals, their ideas, their cast and their script behind the latest emanation of the Star
Trek model. But this need not be characterized as a ‘loss’, for there can also be tremendous gain, as
another newspaper story on the reboot suggested:
Sure enough, Abrams‘s Star Trek zips along, fuelled by state-of-the-art special effects, agreeable young actors and a generous
measure of comedy. By focusing on Spock and Kirk as novices finding their footing, and putting their gut-vs-logic dynamic at the
heart of the film, Abrams gives non-followers plenty to hang on to, but also pays homage to familiar Trek tropes: Bones says: ‘I’m a
doctor, not a physicist!’; Scotty says: ‘I’m giving her all she’s got!’; and Leonard Nimoy, the original Spock, makes a cameo to
symbolically pass on the torch. For advanced-level Trekkers, there are in-jokes and seismic events hardly anyone else will notice.
This is the first time, for example, we see how Kirk cheats Starfleet’s notorious Kobayashi Maru test, as mentioned in Star Trek II:
The Wrath of Khan – an event, indeed a sentence, that will mean absolutely nothing to the rest of us. (Rose, 2009)
In the context of interlingual translation, when a translator’s interpretative judgement is committed to
writing it is the translator who speaks – with the sole intention of influencing an audience in some
way. Steiner‘s vision of an ‘ideal’ translation that makes up for the loss of ‘order’ through ‘exchange’
and ‘compensation’ would in reality entail a uniquely self-centred gesture, for translation cannot help
but direct itself towards its own context of production and reception. That is, towards the translator’s
audience. As with the Star Trek reboots, translation can engage in thoughtful ‘nods’ to its antecedent
text, a text to which it owes its very existence, as the pre-existing model from which a translation is
shaped. But if, as Steiner maintains, the ‘perfect’ translation should act as a ‘double’ that repeats a
message without distortion, then this is a brand of translation that will always let us down. If,
however, translation’s very distorting processes can be viewed as part and parcel of a process of
creative renewal, we go some way towards a view of translation not as containment, but as
revolution.
Remember that the task of translation starts with a demand: to understand a mystery. To do so we
must reach out across a distance of time and space and make the objects of interpretation our own.
But we need not accompany this act of interpretation with mourning for the loss of the source. To read
involves inhabiting a textual world that is not our own. We must participate in its performance and let
it affect how we respond as readers. Even though, for example, we know that the characters of a
novel are not ‘real’ in the material sense, by being drawn into their lives, their worlds and their
concerns we ‘believe’ in them nonetheless. When we read we make an investment in the inherent
value of the text. Before appropriation, then, is a profound belief: in the presence of something
worthy of appropriation. In Steiner’s model this is the first stage of the hermeneutic motion in which
we find the translator’s ‘initiative trust, an investment of belief’ in the meaningfulness of the text-for-
translation, for if translation is above all the outward demonstration of an act of understanding, then
translation must, by extension, start with an act of trust (1998, p. 312). Indeed, the very fact that
translation has been called for is testament to the prior assertion that there is something ‘there’ – the
foreign language, the foreign object, the mysterious act, the difference of the ‘other’ – to be
understood. Like the hermeneuts of old, who began their reading of the Bible with prayer and
devotion, seeing language not as literal but as figurative, mysterious and with many levels of meaning,
the brand of modern hermeneutics both Steiner and Ricoeur espouse is one of rigour and
introspection. It aims not to restore that which has been appropriated but to enter into thoughtful
engagement with the text: ‘Being methodical, penetrative, analytic, enumerative, the process of
translation, like all modes of focused understanding, will detail, illumine, and generally body forth its
subject’ (Steiner, 1998, p. 316). Simply because lossless translation is impossible does not mean that
there is nothing to be gained from the process. Texts speak about a world. As long as the things which
texts address remain in human experience, they will continue to tell us something about human
existence when we share in them. Simultaneously, we also acknowledge the presence of something
we do not understand. This in turn implies a recognition of our lack of comprehension in the face of
the misunderstood, of the fallibility of our own understanding and, at the same time, a commitment to
do something about it. Hermeneutic trust, in this sense, is humbling. It is an initial emptying of our
interpretive cache. It is an acknowledgement that there is something in the world of the other text that
we need to fulfil a lack in our own. It asks not what the ‘other’ means, but what the other’s text can
possibly mean to us:
The over-determination of the interpretive act is inherently inflationary: it proclaims that ‘there is more here than meets the eye’,
that ‘the accord between content and executive form is closer, more delicate than had been observed hitherto’. To class a source-
text as worth translating is to dignify it immediately and to involve it in a dynamic of magnification (subject, naturally, to later review
 and even, perhaps, dismissal). (Steiner, 1998, p. 317)

As a result, something is added to the status of the original, because of the investment the translator
makes in it. As Arendt wrote in her introduction to Benjamin’s Illuminations, there is tremendous
value in looking to the works of our world in this way:
Like a pearl diver who descends to the bottom of the sea, not to excavate the bottom and bring it to light but to pry loose the rich
and the strange, the pearls and the coral in the depths, and to carry them to the surface, this thinking delves into the depths of the
past – but not in order to resuscitate it the way it was and to contribute to the renewal of extinct ages. (Arendt, 1999, p. 54)

The ‘sea-change’ that translation ushers in is that of the new delights that can emerge when an original
text in translation is extended and renewed. In the case of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium series (2005–
7), for example, with the posthumous translation of his novels into English came massive international
appeal and feature film trilogies in Swedish and English. To conceptualize translation as posterior to
the original is to focus only on the sense of derivation – of following after – and misses out on the
sense of preservation – of keeping it in the public mind – that also accompanies it. It is, in Benjamin’s
terms, the ‘ever-renewed latest and most abundant flowering’ of an original life a text has already led
(1999, p. 72). Indeed all of a work’s retellings, remakes and revisions are part of this lineage, which
is tantamount to the achievement of posthumous ‘fame’ for the author:
The history of the great works of art tells us about their descent from prior models, their realization in the age of the artist, and what
in principle should be their eternal afterlife in succeeding generations. Where this last manifests itself, it is called fame. Translations
that are more than transmissions of subject matter come into being when a work, in the course of its survival, has reached the age
of its fame. Contrary, therefore, to the claims of bad translators, such translations do not so much serve the works as owe their
existence to it. (Benjamin, 1996, p. 255)

The act of translation brings a focus, and an audience, to the source text in ways in which would not
have been possible otherwise. Beyond opening up greater access to a work for monolingual readers,
the success of a translation can also give rise to commissions for myriad other translations in a
multitude of languages, bringing to light writers known only in their own regions, or revealing the
significance of a body of work hitherto undervalued or known only to a precious few.

Translation as transformation
As Benjamin reminds us, because translation comes later in history than the source texts on which it is
based, it thus ‘marks their stage of continued life’ (1996, p. 254), for the translator’s distanciation
from the text is not the first distanciation. As works in their own right, texts are distanced first and
foremost from themselves over time. Transformation is part and parcel of translation precisely
because, as Benjamin points out, the text is already something living and this living thing is already a
product of its own time. No text, whether a source or a translation, can stand out of time. Even before
the translator comes along to transform it, the source text is always in the process of transformation,
taking on new forms and new significance in new times and places:
For just as the tenor and the significance of the great works of literature undergo a complete transformation over the centuries, the
mother tongue of the translator is transformed as well. While a poet’s words endure in his own language, even the greatest
translation is destined to become part of the growth of its own language and eventually to be absorbed by its renewal. Translation is
so far removed from being the sterile equation of two dead languages that of all literary forms it is the one charged with the special
mission of watching over the maturing process of the original language and the birth pangs of its own. (Benjamin, 1996, p. 256)
To cast appropriation in a purely negative light simply because the source text is changed is to forget
that when it comes to translation’s source material ‘change’ is already a natural part of the lifespan of
such material. The key to reorienting our conceptualization of the task of translation, therefore, is the
fact that when it comes to the evolution of texts, ideas and cultural practices, both the ‘source’ and
‘translation’ are bound together in mutual interdependence.
Consider the Mona Lisa (c. 1503–9), the most famous painting in the world. Even the name by
which we know it is a translation, for the early sixteenth-century painting by Leonardo di ser Piero da
Vinci, and which hangs in its own room in the Denon wing of the Louvre in Paris, in the museum’s
English-language catalogue is listed as ‘Portrait of Lisa Gherardini, wife of Francesco del Giocondo,
known as the Mona Lisa (the Joconde in French)’ (Louvre, n.d). It was acquired by King François I
of France in 1518 and has been housed in the Louvre since the late eighteenth century. Since 2005 the
portrait, on a poplar wood panel, of a little-known Florentine woman has hung in a specially
refurbished gallery designed to cope with the millions of tourists who flock to see that mysterious
smile. As I describe it to you I know that you already know the smile to which I refer. Already you
visualize that face. That knowing look. The way her hands sit atop one another. You have seen all this
before and were drawn in, even before I reminded you of it here. In what Benjamin describes as the
‘age of mechanical reproduction’, this is because most of us already ‘know’ the Mona Lisa. As one of
the most written about, most talked about, most mysterious figures in the art world, we are already
well familiar with her. We have seen her before, perhaps not in the Louvre itself, but in one of the
many likenesses that have circulated globally since its first acquisition – in books, such as Dan
Brown’s bestseller The Da Vinci Code (2003) and films such as Mona Lisa Smile (2003) and The
Da Vinci Code (2006) adapted from Brown’s novel. We also see her image printed on any number of
gallery gift shop products, on posters, postcards, scarves and tote bags. Who was the real identity of
da Vinci’s sitter? What were his reasons for painting her? Was the background imagined or based on a
real landscape? What is she thinking behind that enigmatic smile? In global circulation, the image of
da Vinci’s muse has proliferated to such an extent that anyone can become an art critic. She is, as
Sassoon writes, ‘an open text into which one could read what one wanted’ (2001, p. 10).
As a text open to infinite interpretation, the Mona Lisa has inspired numerous readings, from
Marcel Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q (1919) in which the subject is depicted sporting a goatee beard and
moustache, to Salvador Dalí’s Self Portrait as Mona Lisa (1954), in which the familiar visage and
twisted moustache of the artist himself can clearly be seen within his reproduction of Mona Lisa’s
face. Duchamp’s piece, meanwhile, is regarded as one of his ‘readymades’ – manufactured, often
mundane objets trouvés, usually bearing no pre-existing artistic function, adapted in some way and
submitted as art in a challenge to received notions of aesthetic value in the art world. In the case of
L.H.O.O.Q, a pun on the French pronunciation of the letters and their suggestion of the phrase Elle a
chaud au cul, which Duchamp was thought to translate as ‘she has a fire down below’. The objet
trouvé in the case of L.H.O.O.Q was a cheap postcard reproduction of the Mona Lisa onto which
Duchamp drew a moustache and beard and added the title. In the age of the Internet, of course, where
pastiche of this nature has become commonplace, da Vinci’s work has become quite simply ‘the most
visited, most written about, most sung about, most parodied work of art in the world’ (Battersby,
2013).
This is a form of translational pastiche that is not possessive but symbiotic, for with every parody,
every hodgepodge, potpourri reproduction, the Mona Lisa’s fame grows. Although its homeward-
directed, familiarizing tendencies may well result in the diminution of the painting’s unfamiliar
‘otherness’, from the perspective that an image downloaded to one’s computer from the Internet is a
poor substitute for experiencing the painting oneself, the fact is that none of these parodic translations
would exist without it. In this sense, translation is a mode that depends upon the presence of otherness
– on the previous life of a work – for its very existence. It is appropriative, to be sure, but in its
dependence upon this previous life it also makes its source material shine, for it is the work that gives
life to the translation. As Benjamin writes, what draws the reader to the novel ‘is the hope of
warming his shivering life with a death he reads about’ (1999, p. 100). The reader receives life from
the text, and the text, to echo Benjamin’s words, achieves its afterlife. If the life lines of reader and
work are interlinked, in this sense, then the existence of one is linked inextricably to the other. As
Steiner writes, ‘Where the most thorough possible interpretation occurs, where our sensibility
appropriates its object while, in this appropriation, guarding, quickening that object’s autonomous
life, the process is one of “original repetition”. We re-enact, in the bounds of our own secondary but
momentarily heightened, educated consciousness, the creation by the artist’ (Steiner, 1998, p. 27). To
adopt this ‘heightened’ consciousness is to translate in the knowledge that the source text retains an
autonomous life and that while translation is a revivification of such, it is a revivification within the
confines of an autonomous life of our own. The consequence of this life-giving re-enactment is that
while the source and translation are mutually interdependent, the translation has no power to
obliterate the source, for it remains free to enjoy a future of its own. The lines of the two are
intertwined and interdependent; yet each takes its own direction and each enjoys its own source of
sustaining power. In this sense, what Steiner worries is the ‘empty scar in the landscape’ after the
open-cast mine of appropriation closes (p. 314), for Benjamin is renewal, an opportunity to actually
honour the original instead of destroying it. Translation thus has the power to illuminate, as well as to
contain.
At the heart of this proposition is a paradox: that translation can ‘repeat’ the work of another while
creating simultaneously an original work of its own. Steiner’s term, ‘re-enactments’, is apt to
describe the process of cultural translation at work in the phenomenon of live-action remakes of
famous works of art. In the ‘art remake’, people pose as well-known works of two-dimensional art,
remade in three-dimensions and photographed, using costume, makeup and lighting and without any
digital post-editing. In 2011 a competition for the best art remake was hosted by the Booooooom
blog, one of the largest art blogs on the Internet, run by Vancouver-based artist Jeff Hamada.
According to the competition rules, photographers were required to ‘reference classic works of art’
and ‘put all your creative energy into re-creating and re-staging the image’ (2011). The submissions
are displayed on the Booooooom blog alongside copies of the original works on which they are
based. Live-action Frida Kahlo’s are shown, complete with stick-on eyebrows, a mocked-up Van
Gogh’s bedroom in Arles and even a vintage suitcase with clothes arranged in block colours and
separated by a black belt to imitate one of Mondrian’s famous blue, white, yellow and red
compositions. Hamada cites as inspiration a photo spread by artist Miranda July for Vice magazine in
2009 in which she poses as extras from classic films (July, 2009). She starts the piece with the
following note:
Dear Julie,
Do you ever feel like an extra in your own life? It seems like I’m forever stuck in the background, watching other people say and do
all the things I feel inside. One day I’m gonna surprise everyone with my talents. They will be laughing and crying and texting me so
often that I will be annoyed.
Until then,
Sandy (July, 2009).
Below the note are a series of stills taken from classic films such as The Godfather (1972) and
Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), each followed by a stylized photograph of July dressed as one of the
extras in the background of the original stills. In a still from Grease (1978), for example, the original
still shows Frenchie and the other pink ladies sitting on a cafeteria table, crowded around Sandra Dee
as she sings one of the main numbers. The still captures the moment one of the background singers,
her hair up and scarf tied around her neck, sings her heart out, the emotion of the moment captured on
her face. In July’s meticulous re-enactment every detail is recreated, from the hairstyle and scarf, to
the angle at which the original singer is sitting. In a review for Bitch magazine, Briar Levit wrote the
following:
I find myself checking out all the details. I compare the original still to her image – scrolling back and forth repeatedly to verify the
facsimile she’s created. But in the end, I still ended up asking the question ‘why’? once I was done looking. What’s the point? Is this
just a chance for her to play dress up? To flex some ironic costume muscles? What is she saying here? (Levit, 2009)

We might ask a similar question in the context of cultural translation: what is to be gained by
construing these re-enactments as a translational dialectic between a reader and a text? In both these
cases, what we witness are photographic snapshots of real human beings coming together in ways
imagined by a photographer, qua reader, engaged in recreating a real-life piece of source material
already in existence. Each re-enactment features alongside an example of its artistic stimulus and in
both, the costume, makeup, lighting, composition and positioning suggest the artists have been
scrupulous in their attempts at similitude. And yet even as these images assiduously recreate the
source inspiration, there are subtle and not-so-subtle departures from the originals and it is precisely
this transformative dimension that make these re-enactments so arresting. In July’s magazine spread,
her re-enactments are shot against a pale grey background, which has the effect of making her extras
springboard off the background towards the spectator. Whereas in the films themselves, the extras
exist at the literal and metaphorical margins of the screen – almost out of shot, in the background, in
the corner, some with their backs turned, others with only their faces visible – in July’s re-enactments
they become the focus of our attentions, lead characters in the film of their lives. While in Hamada’s
art re-enactment competition, it is the three-dimensional, living, breathing, nature of the photographs
that transforms original elements in the artwork into real objects in everyday life. Again, Benjamin’s
approach to translation offers insights into this process:
It is clear that a translation, no matter how good, cannot have any significance for the original. Nevertheless, it stands in the closest
connection with the original by virtue of the latter’s translatability. Indeed, this connection is all the more intimate because it no
longer has any significance for the original itself. It can be called a natural connection, and more precisely a vital connection. Just as
expressions of life are connected in the most intimate manner with the living being without having any significance for the latter, a
translation proceeds from the original. Not indeed so much from its life as from its ‘afterlife’ or ‘survival’ [überleben]. Nonetheless
the translation is later than the original, and in the case of the most significant works, which never find their chosen translators in the
era in which they are produced, indicates that they have reached the stage of their continuing life [Fortleben]. (Benjamin, 1997, p.
153)

By construing translation as a posteriori to the text-as-historical object – an integral part of its

translational afterlife – we alleviate ourselves of the burden of looking backwards, to the perceived
loss of substance the source text suffers when it is translated. If we construe translation as a forward-
looking writing practice, which proceeds from the text but does not overwrite it, then we need not
view translation as the obliteration of the source, since its lifeline continues in spite of the
translation. Paradoxically, then, while the translation’s very life-force depends upon the existence of
the source, the source is free to enjoy a life of its own.
 Benjamin illustrates this idea with the example of the translational ‘tangent’ and its relationship to
the source text ‘circle’ from which it proceeds. Touching the circle at only the brief and single point
of encounter in time and space between a text and a translator, the tangent of translation moves on to
take its own course, creating a life and a future of its own (1996, p. 261). For translation to create
something ‘new’ from an existing idea, there must first be an acknowledgement both of the value of
the original idea from which such newness is inspired and the point at which such newness will
depart from the original. Translation is a simultaneous embracing of the possibilities of departure and
an acknowledgement of the place from which its journey begins. In the curation of both Hamada and
July’s series, for example, it is interesting to note that the ‘source’ material on which these
translations are based is always actively referenced, whether through the provision of a still from the
classic film, in the case of July’s study of movie extras, or whether in the provision of a descriptive
text and image to accompany the provision of the original artwork in the remake project. In effect, the
source continues to live on within and inside the translation, because without it the artist’s
performative effect could not be achieved. The creative work of restaging and re-enacting depends on
the audience’s prior knowledge of the source and the translation acquires its status precisely because
of the visible presence of the source within it. Rather than loss, containment and annihilation,
translation of this sort is celebratory, for its very value lies in the audience’s knowledge and
awareness of the source on which it is based. Translation thus honours the original precisely because
its very success depends on its relation with, and not replacement of, the source on which it is based.
In both cases, the source is far from diminished but is in fact augmented – whether in Hamada’s case
adding to the prestige of the original masterpieces through creative imitation, adding to their
Benjaminian ‘fame’, or in July’s case shining a spotlight on hitherto overlooked human presences in
the original films. In each of these cases, translation includes even as it excludes. It incorporates and
contains, but it also builds upon and celebrates. In the Spanish sense of the word presenciar, both to
be present and to bear witness to, appropriation thus functions to presence the source rather than to
absent it.

Translation as renovation
In hermeneutic terms, what first appears to be a gesture of possessive approximation, overcoming the
distance by containing the foreign, is in fact a more nuanced process of refutation and recognition, of
repudiation and embracement across a distance. For Ricoeur, it is ‘a proximity which suppresses and
preserves the cultural distance and includes the otherness within the ownness’ (1976, p. 43) To read,
to translate, is to both preserve and to overcome distance. It is an act of intercultural outreach that
simultaneously confirms the presence of difference, acknowledges the challenges to understanding it
poses and welcomes the creative possibilities it offers. It is for this reason that translation is not
totally totalizing. Although a profound intention lurks behind interpretation, ‘that of overcoming
distance and cultural differences and of matching the reader to a text which has become foreign,
thereby incorporating its meaning into the present comprehension a man is able to have of himself’
(Ricoeur, 2004, p. 4), by incorporating such differences within the domain of the local, translation is
something other than ‘overcoming’ otherness, since the otherness continues to intend on the translation
in ways that mean it is never truly obliterated. As Benjamin remarks, ‘A real translation is
transparent; it does not cover the original, does not block its light, but allows the pure language, as
though reinforced by its own medium, to shine upon the original all the more fully’ (1999, p. 79).
When we focus only on what has been lost to the distance we miss out on what can also be gained.
Because it is through interpretation that we understand the text, and that which we ‘understand’ is our
own construction of that which the text presents to us, interpretation involves breathing new life into
the text. It means riches are released. It is, to recall a previous metaphor, a moon that both
illuminates, as well as obscures the source. In this, appropriation’s positive, ‘compensatory’, side
emerges, for translation can offer the text a range of survival it would otherwise lack:
The relations of a text to its translations, imitations, thematic variants, even parodies, are too diverse to allow of any single theoretic,
definitional scheme. They categorize the entire question of the meaning of meaning in time, of the existence and effects of the
linguistic fact outside its specific, initial form. But there can be no doubt that echo enriches, that it is more than shadow and inert
simulacrum. We are back at the problem of the mirror which not only reflects but also generates light. The original text gains from
the orders of diverse relationship and distance established between itself and the translations. The reciprocity is dialectic: new
‘formats’ of significance are initiated by distance and by contiguity. Some translations edge us away from the canvas, others bring
us up close. (Steiner, 1998, p. 317)

The transformative nature of translation can thus be seen as an end in itself. In the case of the art-
selfie, where gallery spectators photograph themselves in front of a famous work of art, it is tempting
to view this as a form of mechanical reproduction that does ‘harm’ to the original. It is common for
galleries to have a formal policy on visitor photography, for example, with some enforcing a total ban
through their network of exhibit attendants. Intellectual property, loss of income through approved
merchandise, a risk to the safety of patrons or damage to property are chief concerns. Flash
photography in galleries and museums is disruptive and emits light at potentially damaging ultraviolet
wavelengths, while lingering crowds waving tablets and selfie sticks in the air risk obscuring works
and obstructing emergency exits. From one perspective, given the cult of celebrity that surrounds
paintings like Vermeer’s Girl With a Pearl Earring (c. 1665) and Van Gogh’s Sunflowers (1888),
without an overt camera policy, the risk of selfie-stick-related health and safety incidents increases
exponentially. In the age of the digital camera, moreover, visitors no longer need to exit through the
gift shop to purchase a lasting visual record of their favourite works. In the United Kingdom, where
national museums established by act of parliament permit entry free of charge, the financial
implications of threats both to the health and safety of their visitors and workers and to the overall
bottom line are not insignificant. In a climate of diminished state-funding for the arts, however, the
problem of camera-wielding visitor numbers is not helped by the commercialization of public art in
recent decades – from the rise of crowd-pleasing retrospectives of established artists to museum-
sponsored ‘must see’ lists of works. In many galleries the long-held common practice is to permit
non-flash photography for ‘personal, non-commercial’ purposes in the main display halls where
access is often free of charge, but to prohibit photography in pay-per-view commercial exhibitions.
Yet some, such as the Prado, continue to uphold a total ban on photography of artworks. Indeed one of
the bastions of photography-free museum spectatorship in Europe was the National Gallery in
London, which changed its policy in August 2014 following the introduction of free Wi-Fi. A
statement released by the National Gallery press office said:
As the use of Wi-Fi will significantly increase the use of tablets and mobile devices within the Gallery, it will become increasingly
difficult for our Gallery Assistants to be able to distinguish between devices being used for engagement with the Collection, or those
being used for photography.
It is for that reason we have decided to change our policy on photography within the main collection galleries and allow it by
members of the public for personal, non-commercial purposes – provided that they respect the wishes of visitors and do not hinder
the pleasure of others by obstructing their views of the paintings. (Furness, 2014)
Note the air of futile inevitability. There is no suggestion of any improvement in visitor experience
that arises from an open policy on personal photography, only the sense that the sheer ubiquity of
mobile devices makes enforcing a ban no longer sustainable. The reversal was reported as an
admission of defeat in the face of camera phone technology and the death nail for quiet contemplation
and deep engagement with museum exhibits. Recounting her last visit to MOMA, Daily Telegraph
Arts Editor-in-Chief Sarah Compton wrote that the space ‘was full not just of viewers but of
photographers; it was impossible to stop, think and look at a painting amid the jostling crowd’ (2014).
It is an odd thing, she muses, the desire constantly to capture what you see, even before you have
allowed yourself the chance to see it:
Presumably this is the fate that awaits the National. All those Impressionist landscapes, the Renaissance crucifixions, and
Leonardo’s sublime Virgin of the Rocks – just so much background for another selfie, or a group shot of your mates.
Actually, I just about understand the desire to mark one’s presence in a particular spot by recording yourself there. What I
absolutely fail to comprehend is the impulse to point and shoot the image in front of you. There are postcards in the shop,
reproductions online. Why on earth do people want to fill their camera rolls with photographs of paintings? (Compton, 2014).

What seems to truly rankle about the use of camera phone technology in the gallery hall is the fear that
our obsession with technology distracts us from the ‘real’ purpose of public art: to enter into
thoughtful engagement with the works we see. We are generation ‘clickbait’, incapable of
concentration in the age of short-form Internet lists. More interested in telling people what we are
doing than actually doing it ourselves, we visit galleries not to look at works of art but to say we have
‘seen’ them. To capture works of art through the lens of a camera without appearing to look at them
ourselves first is to prioritize consumption over contemplation, to record, repost and retweet, rather
than reflect upon what we see. ‘Today, the real permanent collection is the one we all store on the
cloud’, Archie Bland wrote of the National Gallery’s reversal in the Independent (2014).
In one sense, this is only the latest stage in a much older debate. In his essay ‘The Work of Art in
the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, Benjamin writes of how works of art were always
reproducible by hand; it was with the advent of photography in the early twentieth century that every
work of art could be reproduced on a massive scale. ‘Even the most perfect reproduction of a work
of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where
it happens to be’, he writes (2005, p. 98). Reproductions have no historicity, no moment in time and
space; they are timeless. The concept of ‘authenticity’, he observes, tends to be tied to the physical
presence of the original work of art – chemical analysis of ancient manuscripts, for example, enables
their provenance and age to be established. A manual reproduction of a work which dispenses with
the presence of the original, tended to be branded as a forgery and the original preserved all its
authority. This is not the case, however, with ‘technical’ reproduction:
The reason is twofold. First, process reproduction is more independent of the original than manual reproduction. For example, in
photography, process reproduction can bring out those aspects of the original that are unattainable to the naked eye yet accessible to
the lens, which is adjustable and chooses its angle at will. And photographic reproduction, with the aid of certain processes, such as
enlargement or slow motion, can capture images which escape natural vision. Secondly, technical reproduction can put the copy of
the original into situations which would be out of reach for the original itself. Above all, it enables the original to meet the beholder
halfway, be it in the form of a photograph or a phonograph record. The cathedral leaves its locale to be received in the studio of a
lover of art; the choral production, performed in an auditorium or in the open air, resounds in the drawing room. (Benjamin, 2005, pp.
98–9)

In the age of the art-selfie, gallery visitors post their photographs on Facebook and Instagram. The
images can be shared, reposted, retweeted, captured by search engines and downloaded to computers
all over the world. Thanks to the cultures of circulation that propagate and promulgate the spread of
cultural material around the world in the blink of an eye, a grand master can hang in a gallery in New
York and can feature as someone’s office screensaver. With every click of the camera, swoosh of a
selfie-stick and social media share, something of the majesty of the source work is diminished; its
prestige, its grandeur, becomes less. And yet ‘majesty’ and ‘prestige’ are experiential qualities. The
original’s depreciation is not real, it is imagined. When a photo is taken of a grand master and shared
on social media, copies circulate around the world, but the work itself hangs unchanged in its gallery
space. Its substance, the glory of its material achievement, is undiminished.
What Benjamin describes as ‘the desire of contemporary masses to bring things “closer” spatially
and humanly’ (2005, p. 100) is the technique of reproduction that detaches the reproduced object from
the domain of ‘tradition’, in the sense that it facilitates the creation of many reproductions and in so
doing substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence: ‘Every day the urge grows stronger to
get hold of an object at very close range by way of its likeness, its reproduction. Unmistakably,
reproduction as offered by picture magazines and newsreels differs from the image seen by the
unarmed eye. Uniqueness and permanence are as closely linked in the latter as are transitoriness and
reproducibility in the former’ (ibid.). But by allowing the reproduction to meet the receiver half way,
by bringing works ‘closer’ in his or her own particular situation, the object that is reproduced is also
reactivated. It is precisely the destructive dimension that gives rise to catharsis, the renewal of the
traditional value of cultural heritage through reproduction and renovation. The same mechanics of
technical reproduction that enable a work to be possessed, contained and appropriated are also the
very processes that release positive change. As Nina Simon, executive director of the Santa Cruz
Museum of Art and History at the McPherson Center and author of The Participatory Museum (2010)
writes:
When visitors take photos in museums, few try to capture the essential essence of an object or create its most stunning likeness.
Most visitors take photos to memorialize their experiences, add a personal imprint onto external artifacts, and share their memories
with friends and families. When people share photos with each other, either directly via email or in a more distributed fashion via
social networks, it’s a way to express themselves, their affinity for certain institutions or objects, and simply to say, ‘I was here’.
(Simon, 2010, 176)

For Simon, an open photography policy goes hand in hand with a visitor-centred approach that is
focused on participation and engagement. Restrictive policies militate against visitor inclusion and a
sense of private ownership over works of art that belong to the nation. Visitors use photography and
selfie-taking as a way to make meaning of their gallery, museum or exhibition experience and they do
so in a way that is entirely different from their interaction with official merchandise. Photographs and
selfies are records of their personal and social experiences, not deliberate or professional likenesses,
of master works. This is something that cannot be bought in the museum gift shop: the experiential
moment of spectatorship. A form of appropriation is at work here, but it is not one that brings damage
to the source. As long as security, health and safety and flash photography restrictions are not
infringed upon, it is a form of appropriation that in fact brings honour to the source material.
When people share their photos online they succeed in promoting museum content. It is free
marketing for the institutions that house great works of art and which could result in increased ticket
sales through increased exposure and awareness. Simon notes how digital texts have the greatest
impact when consumers are able to circulate, reuse, adapt and remix them. With every Facebook
share, for example, the reach of Vincent Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, on display in the National Gallery,
is extended exponentially. But more than this, it is in the creative interaction with cultural objects that
photographs of museum works shared on social media enable Internet users to make meaning of the
exhibits; to inhabit them in ways that make them meaningful to them. In the National Gallery’s own
explanation for relaxing the photography policy there is a recognition of both of these things: that
memorialization is important to a visitor’s experience and that this also brings prestige to the works
that are captured. Rather than diminishing them, the works achieve an increased spotlight. According
to the National’s Director of Public Engagement: ‘We know that when people feel inspired they often
like to share the moment, so along with the free Wi-Fi service we are now welcoming visitor
photography: from now on people will be able to share their experience of the Gallery and its
paintings with friends and family through social media’ (National Gallery, 2014).
This is about cultural translation that does not seek to reproduce but to transform. It is about
adapting how we conceptualize the relationship between the text and its translation, the work and the
art-selfie. When we bemoan the infinite possibilities for technical reproduction that more relaxed
photography policies open up, we perceive the link as pernicious. But to view gallery photography in
translational terms, proceeding from a hermeneutics of appropriation by which a spectator draws near
to, contains, transforms and celebrates a work through interpretation, is to suggest that the best way to
keep translation’s sources alive is in fact to translate them:
To grasp the true relationship between original and translation, we must undertake a line of thought completely analogous, in its goal,
to those taken by critical epistemology in demonstrating the impossibility of a reflection theory. Just as in critical epistemology it is
shown that there can be no objective knowledge, or even the claim to such knowledge, if the latter consists in reflections of the real,
so here it can be shown that no translation would be possible if, in accord with its ultimate essence, it were to strive for similarity to
the original. For in its continuing life, which could not be so called if it were not the transformation and renewal of a living thing, the
original is changed. (Benjamin, 1997, p. 155)

As an interpretive process, ‘objective’ knowledge of the source is impossible; if it is likeness that we

strive for then translation will always mean failure. The ‘true’ relationship between source and
translation is altogether more messy, for while they stand in relation to one another it is not in terms of
likeness. Translation’s bridging of the gap between a translator and a text that is distanced both from
its author and the time and space of its production and reception is makeshift at best – it is a
muddling-through, a feeling of the ways, rather than a confident lead. Benjamin’s famous example is
the problem of ‘bread’ – the German Brot and French pain both intend the same object but their
modes of intention are entirely different. The place they hold in society, the cultural practices they
signal, are completely distinct. The two words are not interchangeable. For this reason, he writes that
translation ‘is only a somewhat provisional way of coming to terms with the foreignness of languages’
(1999, p. 75).
If similitude is not the goal, what, then is the true task of the translator? If, as hermeneutics teaches,
the making of meaning between a speaker and an interlocutor is an ‘event’, the act of reading creates
an all-new meaning event. Thanks to writing, the world of the text breaks free from the limited world
of its author and creates a similar emancipation with its reader, transported beyond the finite horizon
of the original audience. The task of translation is not concerned, as previously believed, with
finding, locating and uncovering – the so-called maxim ‘understanding the author better than he
understands himself’ – but with creating, constructing and innovating. Because translation is an above
all interpretive process, we need not see its ‘afterlife’ as a totalizing by-product of a failed imitation
game but the production of something else. When judged from a translational perspective, then, the
degree to which Lichtenstein‘s Whaam! coincides with the image from the All American Men of War
comic book series is really not the point. As with Benjamin‘s translational tangent and the circle of
the source text, the moment of contact between the two pieces is brief. As with the tangent,
Lichtenstein’s piece takes its inspiration from the comic before launching off to make its own way in
the world. As the Tate exhibition guide itself states, Lichtenstein deliberately reworked his source
image by changing details thoughtfully: ‘ “I was interested in using highly charged material [in] a very
removed, technical, almost engineering drawing style”, Lichtenstein said’ (Tate London, n.d.). Thus he
retains the basic formal structure of his stimulus, but also adds to it, augments it, adapts it. By
removing a chunk of mountainside from the background of the left hand panel and two fighter jets from
the right, he simplified his version of Novick’s original, removing some of the distractions and
training the eye. Visually, the clarity of Lichtenstein’s image invites the eye to follow the rocket’s
trajectory from the jet on the left towards its explosive impact with the jet on the right. The ball of fire
the explosion releases is more vivid, more intense in shape and colour than Novick’s, and by
changing the colour of the letters of ‘WHAAM!’ from red to yellow, the eye charts a course from left
to right, in parallel with the rocket’s trajectory, from the yellow of the speech bubble to the explosion
on the right, the colour of the letters connecting with the nucleus of the explosion at the centre of the
destroyed plane. Perhaps the most arresting dimension of Lichtenstein’s transformation was that he
took something so small that it could be held in the hand, crumpled up and thrown away, destroyed by
rains or carried away on the winds and raised it to the size of metres, not millimetres – from comic
strip to canvas, a painting that could hang and draw spectators, not readers. He took something almost
ordinary and in so doing his stylized transformations served to produce something political. To judge
on the basis of how successfully it reproduces the original DC Comic pane, or to dismiss it as
unoriginal in itself, is to miss the point. By Benjamin’s measure, Lichtenstein’s work is simply doing
what a translation does: ‘Translation is removal from one language into another through a continuum
of transformations. Translation passes through continua of transformation, not abstract areas of
identity and similarity’ (1999, p. 70). By embracing the continua of transformation through which the
source passes we learn to better manage our translational expectations. To punish a translation for
discontinuity with the source on which it is based is not only to misplace the transformative
hermeneutic on which translation is predicated but also to elide the great rewards such a process
affords.

Translation as revolution
Beyond the transformation of source material, what is it exactly that makes translation precisely so
rewarding? When it comes to a viral video parody such as ‘Bruce Springsteen & Jimmy Fallon:
“Gov. Christie Traffic Jam” (“Born To Run” Parody)’, which was aired on 14 January 2014 as part of
the Late Night programme, what is it that can be gained by translation’s transformational agenda? In
the video, Jimmy Fallon appears as 1980s-era Bruce Springsteen, complete with sleeveless denim
shirt, aviator sunglasses and a mop of curly black hair held behind a tight red bandana. Clutching a
guitar he starts playing the opening chords to Springsteen’s unofficial New Jersey anthem Born to
Run (1975). The ‘source’ material for this translation is clear, and at the beginning the translation
strategy seems to be one of maximum proximity to the source. But although Fallon’s impersonation of
Springsteen’s voice and singing style is almost pitch perfect, we realize that the lyrics of the
Springsteen original have been changed. According to the Huffington Post, which covered the story
and transcribed the lyrics on their website, the opening lines of Fallon’s parody, are:
In the day we sweat it out on the streets stuck in traffic on the GWB
 They shut down the tollbooths of glory because we didn’t endorse Christie
Sprung from cages on Highway 9
We got three lanes closed, so Jersey get your ass in line
Ooohhh, baby this Bridgegate was just pay back
It’s a bitch slap to the state Democrats
We gotta get out but we can’t
We’re stuck in Governor Chris Christie’s Fort Lee New Jersey traffic jam (Luippold, 2014).

At this point the real Springsteen joins him on stage, dressed identically to Fallon and clutching a
guitar of his own. Standing together they take turns to sing the revised lyrics together. As with the
phenomenon of the art re-enactment, this is a translation that vacillates between proximity and
distance, at times echoing the source material closely and at others departing from it radically. As
with art re-enactments, the performative effect of the translation actively depends upon the audience’s
prior knowledge of the source material. In such translations, the source is not elided but actively
required for the translation to function. The effect in the art re-enactments is to valorize the original
masterpieces, to venerate them as worthy of reproduction by attempting to reproduce them as
accurately as possible in three dimensions. In the Fallon parody, the source is both seen – through the
presence of Springsteen himself and the way in which Fallon is dressed – and heard – in the melody
of the song and in the way in which he mimics Springsteen’s voice and singing style. But the effect is
different. When Fallon sings about Governor Chris Christie and bad traffic on the ‘GWB’, we witness
a translation that not only pays tribute to Springsteen as a subject worthy of imitation but which also
has a point to make. It is this that both gestures towards the true ‘source’ of this translation and which
must be understood by its audience if it is to achieve its performative effect. The true subject of
parody in this instance is not Springsteen, but Christie. The GWB is the George Washington Bridge,
which connects northern Manhattan across the Hudson River with Fort Lee, New Jersey. It is one of
the busiest bridges in the world and is used by millions of vehicles a year. The bridge is owned and
operated by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which builds and oversees much of the
infrastructure critical to trade and transportation across the New York/New Jersey region. At rush-
hour on 9 September 2013, and without prior warning to the public, the Port Authority closed two of
the three lanes carrying traffic from New Jersey to New York. In Fort Lee the closure caused traffic
chaos. Emergency medical services could not respond to emergencies, children could not get to
school. For four days the world’s busiest motor vehicle bridge became a car park before Patrick
Foye, then executive director of the Port Authority, and who had not been informed about the closings,
ordered the lanes to be reopened. On 14 September a Port Authority spokesperson emailed a
statement to a local newspaper columnist claiming the lane closure was due to a traffic study. On 1
October 2013 the Wall Street Journal published an email sent by Foye on 13 September in which he
described the closure as ‘abusive’, ‘hasty and ill-advised’ and potentially a violation of federal and
state law. Soon after, the New Jersey State Assembly Transportation Committee opened an
investigation (New York Times, 2015). On 8 January 2014 emails and text messages subpoenaed by
the committee connecting appointees and associates of Christie to the closures were leaked. The
cache of documents suggested that a top aide had ordered the lane closure to punish Fort Lee for not
endorsing the governor for re-election. Among the documents was an email dated 13 August 2013
from Bridget Anne Kelly, a deputy chief of staff to Christie, to David Wildstein, a school colleague of
Christie and director of interstate capital projects at the Port Authority. Kelly wrote: ‘Time for some
traffic problems in Fort Lee’. ‘Got it’, Wildstein replied (ibid.). Later text messages made light of
buses filled with school students stuck in traffic: ‘They are the children of Buono voters,’ Wildstein
wrote, referring to Christie’s opponent Barbara Buono (Zernike, 2014). Following a 16-month
investigation, US attorney for New Jersey, Paul J. Fishman, announced on 1 May 2015 indictments
against Bridget Anne Kelly and Bill Baroni, former deputy executive director of the Port Authority,
who were charged with nine counts, including conspiracy to commit fraud by ‘knowingly converting
and intentionally misapplying property of an organization receiving federal benefits’ (Zernike and
Santora, 2015). Wildstein pleaded guilty at the United States District Court in Newark to conspiracy
to commit fraud and conspiracy against civil rights (ibid.).
Fallon’s parody is a translation of its time – it fuses two distinct sources, Springsteen’s Born to
Run, with its notes of breaking free, its anthemic associations with working communities in New
Jersey and the GWB scandal, adapting the former and transforming the latter irrevocably. The
subsequent fusion is as reverential of Springsteen as it is scathing of the politics surrounding the
traffic lane closure. It is about deliberately harnessing translation’s transformative potential for very
specific reasons, riffing off its source material to satirize revelations that lane closures on the world’s
most heavily used bridge had not been undertaken for traffic research purposes but for political
payback. To read Fallon’s parody in this way is to work with, rather than against, the hermeneutic
flow. If, as Benjamin warns, ‘the fundamental error of the translator is that he holds fast to the state in
which his own language happens to be rather than allowing it to be put powerfully in movement by the
foreign language’ (1997, p. 163), the true task of translation is to not only give rise to the possibility
of newness, but also to ensure we are not left unchanged in the process. We gain from Benjamin the
notion that the translational encounter with otherness is not just one of interpretation, but also one in
which the foreign source has the power to affect the local receiver, to emancipate it through the
challenge of the foreign.
Consider a second viral video, this one produced by environmental campaign group Greenpeace in
July 2014 entitled ‘LEGO: Everything is NOT Awesome’ (GreenpeaceVideo, 2014). The video was
released as part of Greenpeace’s global ‘Save the Arctic’ campaign to prevent Royal Dutch Shell
from drilling in the Arctic waters off Alaska. Greenpeace claimed that the oil company risks
destroying the region’s unique marine environment and aggravating global warming. Against this
backdrop, the Greenpeace video focused on a partnership between the oil company and Lego, which
dated back to the 1960s. Greenpeace accused the oil giant of trying to hijack the magic of Lego and its
positive associations across the world in order to distract attention from its environmental impact.
Greenpeace’s Arctic campaign leader said at the time: ‘It is using Lego to clean up its image and
divert attention from its dangerous plans to raid the pristine Arctic for oil. And it’s exploiting kids’
love of their toys to build lifelong loyalty it doesn’t deserve. It’s time for Lego to finally pull the plug
on this deal’ (Greenpeace, 2014). The video itself, a film short produced by London-based creative
agency Don’t Panic, begins innocently enough. The camera pans across a winter scene made of pieces
from the Lego City Arctic range and shows floating ice, sea birds, polar bears, huskies, indigenous
people fishing and ice hockey and football being played. Heavy machinery, a Shell tanker truck and
Shell employees with beaming faces appear. In the background a female voice sings to a slow piano
accompaniment: ‘Everything is awesome/ Everything is cool when you’re part of a team/ Everything
is awesome/ when you’re living on a dream/’. As the lyrics sound, the camera shows a Shell flag atop
a flagpole, zooming out to reveal that it stands on a vast oil platform. A close up of a man in a
pinstripe suit standing on the deck of the rig, smoking a cigar.
We watch as oil starts to seep from the spot where the drill dips into the ocean. It creeps across the
water towards the winter wonderland in the background. Dead Lego fish float on the sea of black. A
tide of thick liquid starts to engulf the peaceful scene. The fisherman, polar bear and huskies are now
surrounded by the oil. Their bodies are no longer fully visible. A helpless Lego Arctic fox cub is
overcome by the dark tide. As the short ends we see a polar bear scrambling to climb the last
remaining iceberg in a sea of oil. On top of the iceberg is another Shell flag. The camera cuts away
from the polar bear and zooms in on the encroaching oil as it covers the very last white Lego stud; the
Lego logo that is printed on the circular stud is eventually covered in black. The camera zooms out
and the iceberg is gone, submerged in oil. Only the Shell flag remains, rising from the black. Text
flashes on screen: ‘Shell is polluting our kids’ imaginations. Tell Lego to end its partnership with
Shell’ (GreenpeaceVideo, 2014). A link to an online petition is given at the very end.
Here, as in Fallon’s parodic video critique of the GWB traffic lane scandal, the Greenpeace short
depends upon the prior knowledge of its audience, without which, the sheer drama of the appeal
would be lost. Without this knowledge, however, the message remains clear enough: Greenpeace
believes Shell is endangering the environment in the Arctic and that Lego should end its partnership
with them as a result. But a familiarity with the Lego Movie (2014), a computer-animated action
adventure set in a Lego world and which itself harks back to the stop-motion brickfilms of the 1980s
and 1990s, enables Greenpeace to add irony and pathos to the appeal. The two lead characters in the
Lego Movie, Emmet and Lucy, fight and defeat the evil Lord Business, saving the universe from his
empire the Octan Corporation. When the oil engulfs the Arctic scene in the Greenpeace short, Emmet
and Lucy can be seen holding hands as oil surrounds them from all sides, covering their feet and legs
and rising up their bodies. Meanwhile the lead song from the Lego Movie, ‘ “Everything is
Awesome!!!” Tegan and Sara featuring “The Lonely Island” ’, a fast-paced and upbeat number, is
covered in the Greenpeace short by a melancholy female voice. The fun of the original song is instead
replaced with a slow lament. Greenpeace’s message is that unlike the film, where the Lego world
which Emmet and Lucy battle to protect is a happy and harmonious one, everything in the Arctic is
most emphatically not awesome.
This is a translation that makes a virtue of the appropriative hermeneutic at the heart of every
translation process: of the proliferation and extension of meanings and possibilities beyond the finite
horizons of the original, fusing the cute with the diabolic and taking its audience beyond the world of
a beloved children’s brand and the frivolity of the Lego Movie and harnessing their transformation for
resistant aim:
A big motif for our campaign is the casting of the familiar with the unexpected. With the film, we decided to remix the hit theme
tune of the Lego Movie ‘Everything is Awesome’ because we knew Lego fans would get the reference and respond to it. The track
is slowed down and becomes a haunting accompaniment to the catastrophe unveiling on screen as oil floods over an impressive and
intricate build. Using a cover of the Lego Movie theme tune was a risky move, but we knew we had a right under freedom of
speech to parody it for our protest. And we chose to take the risk of copyright conflict because we were sure the irony wouldn’t be
lost on Lego fans. The song got our message across better than anything else could. (Polisano, 2014)

Greenpeace organized other campaign activities, including delivering the petition to the company
door in Denmark, setting up tiny banners on the models of Big Ben and the Eiffel Tower in Legoland
in Windsor and distributing 5,000 mini figures to dozens of local groups to take to Lego stores and
engage directly with the public. According to the video’s makers, it has received over seven million
views, over 57,000 YouTube ‘likes’, over 150,000 Facebook and Twitter shares and driven over
680,000 petition signatures (Don’t Panic, n.d). On 9 October 2014 it was announced that Lego would
not renew its marketing contract with Shell. Steiner writes that no language, no cultural ensemble or
symbolic set imports from the outside without risk of being transformed (1998, p. 315). Translation
should be an encounter with the foreign that does not leave us unchanged. If the translator’s
distanciation from the text means appropriation will always transform the text in irrevocable ways, an
opportunity exists to turn this transformative hermeneutic into creative, resistant, potential to
deliberately disrupt the status quo and perhaps even to change hearts and minds along the way.
 5
Emancipation
Translation as a critique of ideology

On 19 May 2015 Belfast County Court ruled that a Christian-run bakery in Northern Ireland had
discriminated against a customer by refusing to fulfil an order for a cake carrying the words ‘Support
Gay Marriage’ which was intended for a private function marking the International Day against
Homophobia. Gareth Lee had placed the order on 9 May 2014 at a Belfast branch of Ashers Baking
Company and paid in full for a cake bearing the image of Sesame Street puppets Bert and Ernie and
with a logo of campaign group QueerSpace. Two days later the company contacted him to say the
order could not be processed. In October 2014 the Equality Commission for Northern Ireland, which
has a statutory duty to enforce anti-discrimination legislation, brought a case against Ashers on behalf
of Lee and following a three-day hearing in May 2015, a judge ruled that the firm had discriminated
against Lee on the grounds of sexual orientation. In her courtroom remarks, District Judge Isobel
Brownlie stated:
My finding is that the Defendants cancelled this order as they oppose same sex marriage for the reason that they regard it as sinful
and contrary to their genuinely held religious beliefs. Same sex marriage is inextricably linked to sexual relations between same sex
couples which is a union of persons having a particular sexual orientation. The Plaintiff did not share the particular religious and
political opinion which confines marriage to heterosexual orientation. The Defendants are not a religious organization; they are
conducting a business for profit and, notwithstanding their genuine religious beliefs, there are no exceptions available under the 2006
Regulations which apply to this case and the Legislature, after appropriate consultation and consideration, has determined what the
law should be (Gareth Lee v Ashers Baking Co Ltd et al [2015], at 43).

Outside the courtroom, Paul Givan, of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) and member of the
Legislative Assembly for the Lagan Valley constituency, spoke to assembled media about the ruling
and was recorded by the Belfast Telegraph giving the following statement:
There will be deep consternation right across the community in Northern Ireland at this finding that a Christian family that have
conducted themselves with the utmost graciousness and dignity throughout this case have been found guilty of discrimination. The
challenge to the politicians in Northern Ireland is to what type of society we are going to live in. Is it a society where Christians are
to be subject to this type of attack on their faith, because that’s what it is regarded amongst the religious belief; that this is an attack
and an assault on people’s deeply held sincere convictions. (Williamson, McAleese and McKeown, 2015)

The ‘challenge to the politicians in Northern Ireland’ is a reference to the DUP’s plans for a so-called
conscience clause that would enable Christian businesses to lawfully restrict the provision of goods
and services to individuals where the provision of such would conflict with the religious beliefs of
the business owners. On 8 December 2014, several months prior to the ruling and following the
Equality Commission’s initial decision to bring legal proceedings against Ashers in October 2014,
the DUP released a consultation document entitled ‘Consultation on the Northern Ireland Freedom of
Conscience Amendment Bill’. The document was circulated in support of a planned Private Members
Bill to the Northern Ireland Assembly in which Givan would propose to amend the Equality Act
(Sexual Orientation) Regulations (Northern Ireland) 2006. According to the DUP website, ‘The
document provides the background to this Bill being brought forward, including recent legal action
taken by the Equality Commission. It also outlines a range of questions for those responding to the
consultation as well as a copy of proposed draft legislation which would be introduced’ (DUP, 2014).
In the language of the draft legislation, businesses would be granted an ‘exception based on religious
belief’ to the provisions of the equality act such that:
Nothing in these Regulations shall make it unlawful (a) to restrict the provision of goods, facilities and services; or (b) to restrict the
use or disposal of premises, so as to avoid endorsing, promoting or facilitating behaviour or beliefs which conflict with the strongly
held religious convictions of A or, as the case may be, those holding the controlling interest in A. (Givan, 2014)

In February 2015, Sinn Fein announced that it would make use of the ‘petition of concern’ facility, put
into place to safeguard the protection of minorities from the imposition of political decisions that do
not achieve cross-community support, to effectively veto the bill if it came before the Assembly. In
what ways do we witness a translational agenda at work in this case and what lessons might be
learned for similar examples?
Whether we conceive of appropriation as possessive or transformational, this is not the final stage
in translation’s hermeneutic journey. Once ‘meaning’ no longer coincides with what the author
intended, no privileged authority exists beyond the world of the text to mediate diverging
interpretations. To ‘understand’ the text is above all to impute significance, to different areas and
different aspects, at different times and in different places. In Ricoeur’s words, it is about ‘producing
the best overall intelligibility from an apparently discordant diversity’ (2013, p. 57). Without the
author to guide us, the only choice we have is to roll up our sleeves and take the plunge ourselves.
Every act of reading, in this sense, is predicated ultimately upon an act of judgement:
The text as a whole and as a singular whole may be compared to an object, which may be viewed from several sides, but never
from all sides at once. Therefore the reconstruction of the whole has a perspectival aspect similar to that of a perceived object. It is
always possible to relate the same sentence in different ways to this or that other sentence considered as the cornerstone of the
text. A specific kind of onesidedness is implied in the act of reading. This onesidedness grounds the guess character of
interpretation. (Ricoeur, 1976, p. 78)

Just because there is always more than one way to construe a text, however, does not mean that all
interpretations are equal. While there are no rules for making ‘good’ guesses, there are methods for
validating the guesses that we do make (p. 76). It is the reader’s job to show that their interpretation
of a text is more probable than any other. This is something other than showing that one reader’s
conclusion is ‘true’ while another’s is ‘false’. Validation is not the same as ‘verification’: ‘it is an
argumentative discipline comparable to the juridical procedures used in legal interpretation, a logic
of uncertainty and of qualitative probability’ (p. 78). Judges, for example, have discretionary powers
with regard to the law precisely because we say there is ‘room for interpretation’. In order to ensure
that a judge’s ruling is not arbitrary, their interpretation is subjected to validation – precedents are
consulted, evidence is presented, arguments are made, interpretations are defended or prosecuted,
and, on the balance of probability and in the light of the available evidence, conclusions are weighed.
Like the parties to a legal case, readers must build their case for support, attempting to prove beyond
all reasonable doubt that their interpretation is the most probable in the light of all that is known about
a text. We submit our understanding to the scrutiny of the court of public opinion, we advance an
argument and we await a ruling.
How do we build this case for support? What does it mean to defend an interpretation against
everything that is known about a text? How do we balance the ‘onesidedness’ of our interpretation
with the needs of maximum probability? Because guesses are always putative and open to further
interpretation, we must set them against a panorama of potential meanings:
Congruence and plenitude, these are the principles an explanation should satisfy. Plenitude has to do with probability and offers a
qualitatively ‘better’ account. Plenitude is interested in more than sense – is about enabling a text to mean all that it possibly can
mean, in the sense of its reference, to exceed and extend the boundary between the expressible and the inexpressible, this is
interpretation. (Ricoeur, 2013, p. 58)

Texts contain ‘clues’ and they form the starting point in this process. These clues guide us towards a
specific construction, in the sense that they contain ‘a permission and a prohibition’ by which
unsuitable constructions are excluded and constructions that give ‘more’ meaning to the same words
are allowed:
In both cases, one construction can be said to be more probable than another, but not more truthful. The more probable is that
which, on the one hand, takes account of the greatest number of facts furnished by the text, including its potential connotations, and
on the other hand, offers a qualitatively better convergence between the features it takes into account. A mediocre explanation can
be called narrow or forced. (ibid.)

So interpretation is judicious. It is about asking questions of the text, seeking both the fine detail and
the bigger picture. If the central task of hermeneutics is to understand a mystery, in the final analysis
interpretation is a guess which must be validated by others and which has the aim of terminating in
comprehension. Because interpretation is an argumentative practice we must offer reasons that are
relevant and convincing if we are to determine which guesses are more plausible than others and
demonstrate the relative superiority of one conflicting interpretation over another. This is not a linear
progression from ignorance to understanding but is a circular process of endless enquiry that is
subject to historical incompleteness. It is a reminder that human understanding is an ongoing work of
contestation.

A hermeneutics of trust and suspicion

Guesswork, validation, probability and plenitude – none of this can proceed without our initial
investment in the text as the site of the clues we need. But while we trust in the presence of something
mysterious that demands to be understood, we must also remain suspicious, ever watchful for the
ways in which our interpretation could be shown to be less valid than we thought it was. Give any
‘text’ of meaning to a group of people, and whether the object of interpretation is drawn from the
world of letters or from the world of human action all around us, each individual will ‘read’
something different. This is because our response to a text results from a particular way of reading – a
hermeneutic strategy. Our construction of a text is not a methodological ‘truth’ universally
acknowledged. The conclusions we draw are tendentious by their very nature. So we proceed with
caution; we must be determined to test against the highest standards of reason every claim we believe
a text is making. Wise words come to us by way of Humpty Dumpty, who remarks to Alice,
‘There’s glory for you!’
‘I don’t know what you mean by “glory”,’ Alice said.
 Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. ‘Of course you don’t – till I tell you. I meant “ ‘there’s a nice knock-down argument for
you”.’
‘But “glory” doesn’t mean “a nice knock-down argument”,’ Alice objected.
‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor
less.’
‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’
‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master – that’s all.’ (Carroll, 1999, p. 213)

In the sense that we control only our own imputations, neither the author nor the reader is the ‘master’
of the texts that we read. Since texts offer only a limited field of constructions, moreover, the
possibility that a different interpretation will emerge to challenge the primacy of our reading is ever-
present. As Ricoeur maintains, ‘The logic of validation allows us to move between the two limits of
dogmatism and scepticism. It is always possible to argue for or against an interpretation, to confront
interpretations, to arbitrate between them and to seek agreement, even if this agreement remains
beyond our immediate reach’ (Ricoeur, 1976, p. 79).
Present in almost every act of reading and interpretation are two interlinked dispositions of ‘trust’
and ‘suspicion’ that animate both our imputation of meaning – our understanding into the world of the
text – and our defence of the same. This dialectic, between trust and suspicion, dogmatism and
scepticism, is about refusing objectivism, whereby we claim to forget ourselves, and absolute
knowledge, by which we would claim to capture the world within a single horizon. This is an
approach to interpretation based on mindfulness: of the tendentiousness of appropriation and the
tentativeness that surrounds the interpretations we produce as a result. Benjamin’s hermeneutic model
advances a similar method. ‘For successful excavation’, he writes, ‘a plan is needed’:
Yet no less indispensable is the cautious probing of the spade in the loam; it is to cheat oneself of the richest prize to preserve as a
record merely the inventory of one’s discoveries, and not this dark joy of the place of the finding itself. Fruitless searching is as
much a part of this as succeeding, and consequently remembrance must not proceed in the manner of a narrative or still less of a
report, but must . . . assay its spade in ever new places and in the old ones delve to ever deeper layers. (Benjamin, 1999, p. 611)

Kearney describes Benjamin’s approach as above all one of open-endedness. When it comes to the
construction of history, for example, Benjamin argued that every stage of history was neither complete
nor predetermined and open to heterogeneous readings, subverting any presumption of certainty. In
such an approach, Kearney observes, not only the past but also the present must be ‘brushed against
the grain’ so as to explode the erroneous notion that history is a continuous and progressive march
towards ‘progress’ (1994, p. 160).
When I think of this dialectic of trust and suspicion a particular image always comes to mind. It is
of a poster that hangs in the office of fictional Special Agent Fox Mulder in the television series The
X-Files (1993–2002). The poster shows a grainy photograph of a UFO flying over a patch of green
woodland. At the foot of the poster bold white text reads simply, ‘I want to believe’. From his tiny
room in the basement of FBI headquarters Mulder investigates the ‘X-Files’ – mysterious cases and
unexplained events that remain unsolved. Since the disappearance of his younger sister under strange
circumstances it has been Mulder’s lifelong goal to find out what happened to his sister and uncover
the truth about what he believes to be a government conspiracy to deny the existence of
extraterrestrial life. In the pilot episode Special Agent Dana Scully, a medical doctor and instructor
in the FBI academy, is assigned to the X-Files unit as Mulder’s partner. Rooted in the world of
science, her character stands for reason and rationality and forms the sceptical counterpoint to
Mulder’s unwavering belief in the paranormal and the allure of the unknown. The poster is a
powerful visual metaphor for the endless circle of trust and suspicion that both characterizes and
sustains Mulder’s quest. Simultaneously, it is a succinct statement of his lack of understanding vis-à-
vis the existence of aliens and a government cover-up, which in turn feeds his lack of belief. But it is
also an earnest statement of his investment in the possibility of a government conspiracy and the
existence of extraterrestrial life – that there might indeed be something to be understood. In declaring
his lack of belief he also signs himself up to the existence of something to believe in. In other words,
it is precisely by addressing his lack of understanding that he creates his own object to be understood.
For the episode “Closure” (The X-Files, 2000), in which Mulder finally learns the truth about his
sister’s disappearance, the series tagline, ‘The truth is out there’, which appeared on screen each
week at the end of the opening credits, was changed to ‘Believe to understand’. Like the poster, it is a
reminder that when it comes to the quest for understanding that directs our investigative efforts, there
is no independent ‘truth’ except that which is constructed through the methods of understanding by
which it is derived. To understand a text, we must believe that it is more than the sum of its parts,
while divesting ourselves simultaneously of our presumption of understanding. In so doing, we
embrace both our lack of understanding and its very possibility. In Ricoeur’s terms:
You must believe in order to understand. No interpreter in fact will ever come close to what his text says if he does not live in the
aura of the meaning that is sought. And yet it is only by understanding that we can believe. The second immediacy, the second
naïveté that we are after, is accessible only in hermeneutics; we can believe only by interpreting. This is the ‘modern’ modality of
belief in symbols; expressions of modernity’s distress and cure for this distress. Such is the circle: hermeneutics proceeds from the
preunderstanding of the very matter which through interpretation it is trying to understand. (Ricoeur, 2004, pp. 294–5)

We interpret because there is a mystery we do not understand. Because we do not understand what we
interpret, we believe. By interpreting we confirm our belief both in our lack of understanding and in
the possibility of achieving it by interpreting. We must understand in order to believe but we must
also believe in order to understand.

‘Read’ thyself
The hermeneutic circle of belief and suspicion repudiates the immediacy of understanding. It
challenges the notion that we might extend to texts and actions the same empathy we extend to others
in face-to-face meetings – what Ricoeur describes as the ‘romantic illusion of a direct link of
congeniality between the two subjectivities implied by the work, that of the author and that of the
reader’ (2008, p. 18). Texts are not people, and actions, once decoupled from their agents, are open to
be read and interpreted in ways beyond those envisaged by their owner. In the context of translation,
this calls us to reject any notion of the text-qua-author. The author of a text for translation cannot be
recovered through translation and the translation is not the same as the author’s text or what the author
intended for it. ‘After’ and ‘away’ from the time and place in which the text was produced and
received, ‘meaning’ is no longer animated by the presence of the author. Because psychological
intention and textual meaning no longer coincide, readers are at a distance from the text. The only
course of action is to involve oneself directly in the process of meaning-making. Or, as Ricoeur
suggests, ‘I must quit the position, or better, the exile, of the remote and disinterested spectator in
order to appropriate in each case an individual symbolism’ (2004, p. 294). In other words, we must
go from asking what is the meaning of a phenomenon – the symbol, the text, the action, the other – to
asking what these things mean to me? Or, more accurately, how do I make them mean?
 This insight sets into motion a fundamental reorientation of the task of interpretation. It suggests
first and foremost that the answers to the mysteries of the world do not lie ‘out there’, with something
or someone else, but in here, with me, the one doing the interpreting:
If we can no longer define hermeneutics in terms of the search for the psychological intentions of another person which are
concealed behind the text, and if we do not want to reduce interpretation to the dismantling of structures, then what remains to be
interpreted? I shall say: to interpret is to explicate the type of being-in-the-world unfolded in front of the text. (Ricoeur, 2008, p. 82,
original emphasis)

Rather than the revelation of mystery, the primary focus of Ricoeur’s hermeneutic philosophy is the
question of ‘who’: who is it that is interpreting, who says what, who does what, about whom and
about what does one construct a narrative, who is morally responsible for what is interpreted?
Hermeneutics remains a play of the distanciation that bears meaning apart from the intention of its
author and the appropriative drive to make familiar what is far – spatially, temporally,
geographically, linguistically and culturally. In the process, the text is decoupled from its own context
of production and reception and is reconstituted in the time and place of the interpreter, transforming
it irrevocably. But when it comes to appropriation something is also transformed in the person doing
the appropriating. To understand, we must step off the interpretive precipice into the unknown. We
make our best guess and take our chances. But we might misstep. The validity of our position vis-à-
vis the object of interpretation could be challenged. Our interpretation could be shown to be less
likely or less probable than another. Because we must defend our interpretation while also
acknowledging that our interpretation could be invalidated, appropriation is not so much a possession
of the world around us as a dispossession of the certainty with which we might presume to understand
it. A conflict of interpretations is always inevitable because there is no such thing as absolute
knowledge, and ‘truth’ is not a finality to be arrived at but a ‘wager’ to be asserted. It is a reminder
that the interpretive ground from which we venture into the hermeneutic abyss is never secure. By
placing ourselves under suspicion we remember that our own particular interpretive constellation is
simply one in a whole galaxy of possibilities.
Consider what this means for the interpreter. If objects are not transparent unto themselves and
understanding is always tentative, then reflection on the world is not simply a matter of intellectual
intuition. It is, in Ricoeur’s conceptualization, ‘the making explicit of this ontological understanding,
an understanding always inseparable from a being that has initially been thrown into the world’
(2008, p. 14). Precisely by renouncing what Ricoeur describes as ‘the dream of a total mediation’,
we expose the fallacy of the interpreting subject as ‘first truth’ (p. 17). It is not the fulcrum around
which all things turn but a being-in-the-world engaged as much in the activity of interpreting others as
it is in the activity of being interpreted by them in return. The consequences of this are profound. By
challenging the idealist doctrine that the self is knowable to itself, Ricoeur’s hermeneutic ontology
rejects the temptation to reduce being to being-for-consciousness: I ‘think’, therefore I ‘am’. Against
the tradition of the cogito Ricoeur maintains that the self is not a priori but ‘posited’ (1995, p. 19). To
achieve selfhood it is not enough merely to think; we only ‘become’ when we locate ourselves in the
context of our existence as a being that exists with, alongside and in response to others:
The first truth–I think, I am–remains as abstract and empty as it is unassailable. It must be ‘mediated’ by representations, actions,
works, institutions, and monuments which objectify it; it is in these objects, in the largest sense of the word, that the ego must both
lose itself and find itself. We can say that a philosophy of reflection is not a philosophy of consciousness if, by consciousness, we
mean immediate self-consciousness. (Ricoeur, 2004, p. 323, original emphasis)
Like consciousness, which cannot conceive of itself by itself, and which does so only by going
outside of itself to experience that which it is not, the self-before-others is not a given. It can only
understand itself through the long detour across ‘the signs of humanity deposited in cultural works’
that lie outside our immediate consciousness (Ricoeur, 2008, p. 84). The journey from the self to the
self across the significations of history and culture by which we constitute the world around us thus
follows a circular motion, directing itself away from the self before arching back again. In this way,
the self becomes so inextricably linked to the world that there is no cogito except a self that is
‘mediated’ through the texts, ideas, actions, works, institutions and monuments that construct it in
return – the ‘objectifications’ of the world all around us. For Ricoeur, this final stage of distanciation
‘is the ruin of the ego’s pretension to constitute itself as ultimate origin’ (2008, p. 35).
If self-understanding is postponed until the end, after the subject’s long detour across the terrain of
the other and back again, then to know oneself is to understand how one relates to others and what this
relation means. Interpretation is therefore about resisting the self; it is about dissipating the ‘illusion’
of self-knowledge through intuition by forcing our self-understanding to pass first through the signs of
the external world before coming to existence itself:
That appropriation does not imply the secret return of the sovereign subject can be attested to in the following way: it if remains true
that hermeneutics terminates in self-understanding, then the subjectivism of this proposition must be rectified by saying that to
understand oneself is to understand oneself in front of the text. Consequently, what is appropriation from one point of view is
disappropriation from another. To appropriate is to make what was alien become one’s own. What is appropriated is indeed the
matter of the text. But the matter of the text becomes my own only if I disappropriate myself, in order to let the matter of the text
be. So I exchange the me, the master of itself, for the self, disciple of the text. The process could also be expressed as a
distanciation of self from itself within the interior of appropriation. (Ricoeur, 2008, p. 35, original emphasis)

If appropriation is about understanding oneself in front of the text, the text is now the very medium
through which we come to an understanding of ourselves. Distanciation and appropriation thus
operate as two sides of the same interpretive coin, where multiple dialectics of containment and
transformation, inclusion and exclusion, ensure that the terminal phase of interpretation is not to
understand another but ourselves.

Holding a mirror up to nature

There is something transformational in this, as much for the interpreter as for the text that is being
interpreted. By appropriating meanings that have been distanciated from our consciousness we
expose ourselves to these other horizons. This has the effect of enabling us to transcend the limits of
our own subjectivity, of the familiarity of the local and the security of the known, to open ourselves
up to the possibility of others, to the existence of other modes and other worlds of thinking. Because
meaning ‘is never first and foremost for me’, Ricoeur explains, we possess the other while
dispossessing ourselves (In Kearney, 1994, p. 94). Appropriation is therefore not only one half of the
dialectical partnership; it brings about a profound change in self-understanding:
Far from saying that a subject already mastering his own way of being in the world projects the a priori of his self-understanding
on the text and reads it into the text, I say that interpretation is the process by which disclosure of new modes of being – or if you
prefer Wittgenstein to Heidegger, of new forms of life – gives to the subject a new capacity for knowing himself. If the reference of
the text is the project of a world, then it is not the reader who primarily projects himself. The reader rather is enlarged in his
capacity of self-projection by receiving a new mode of being from the text itself. (Ricoeur, 1976, p. 94)
For the reading subject, interpretation is above all a transformative experience in which we gain
ourselves precisely by losing ourselves in the process. Through the long detour across the terrain of
the other and back again we receive a ‘truncated ontology’ by which we come to see ourselves above
all as beings-before-others. By seeing ourselves from the outside our consciousness becomes
heightened. A ‘second naïveté’ reminds us that neither the subjectivity of the reader nor the author,
neither the self nor the other, comes first:
The first function of understanding is to orientate us in a situation. So understanding is not concerned with grasping a fact but with
apprehending a possibility of being. We must not lose sight of this point when we draw the methodological consequences of this
analysis: to understand a text, we shall say, is not to find a lifeless sense that is contained therein, but to unfold the possibility of
being indicated by the text. (Ricoeur, 2008, p. 64)

By unseating the authority with which the cogito presumes to self-assert, the ego is made to ‘assume
for itself the “imaginative variations” by which it could respond to the “imaginative variations” on
reality that literature and poetry, more than any other form of discourse, engender’ (p. 35, original
emphasis). Understanding is not about capturing these ‘imaginative variations’, therefore, but
receiving from them the possibility of increased self-knowledge. Instead of asking, ‘how and what do
we know’, the hermeneutic detour requires us to ask instead, what is the mode of being of the one
who exists only in relation with others?’
This is theorization that seeks to shatter the subject’s desire to set itself up as the measure of
objectivity. It insists that it is only by reaching outwards to the external world that we discover who
we are. In the encounter with other people, other ideas, other ways of thinking and acting,
interpretation requires us not only to face up to the existence of other subjectivities, other modes of
thought and other modes of expression but also to be changed by them in the process. By transforming
the experience of the reader in the encounter with otherness, taking us out of our comfort zone,
estranging us in the foreign terrain of the unknown, reading serves a critical function – what Kaplan
describes in his study of Ricoeur as ‘displacing the illusions of subjectivity’. In so doing, Kaplan
maintains, Ricoeur combines a hermeneutics of trust and suspicion with a hermeneutics of the text,
linking the power of the text to reveal with the critique of subjectivity by which the self is revealed to
itself, and, in the revealing, is changed (2012, p. 36).
What does it mean to hold a mirror to nature in this way? In what sense is the self revealed to itself
when we deploy interpretation beyond the realm of the text, to engage with the actions of human
beings? With ‘Britain Furst’, which uses social media platforms to upload satirical images disguised
as Islamophobic or anti-immigrant invective and designed to mock the social media strategy of the
real ‘Britain First’, we see these claims in action. Britain First is a far-right movement led by former
British National Party councillor Paul Golding and describes itself as a ‘patriotic political party’
(Britain First, n.d.). On the group’s Facebook page, a statement of principles includes the following:
‘Britain First is committed to preserving our ancestral ethnic and cultural heritage, traditions, customs
and values. We oppose the colonisation of our homeland through immigration and support the
maintenance of the indigenous British people as the demographic majority within our own homeland.
Britain First is committed to maintaining and strengthening Christianity as the foundation of our
society and culture’ (Britain First, n.d.). The group is known for its direct action mosque invasions,
protest marches and for its frequent use of the image of Lee Rigby, a twenty-five-year-old British
Army Fusilier killed on 22 May 2013 near the Royal Artillery Barracks in southeast London by
Michael Adebowale and Michael Adebolajo, who stated on video immediately after the attack that
‘The only reason we have killed this man today is because Muslims are dying daily by British
soldiers. And this British soldier is one. It is an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. By Allah, we
swear by the almighty Allah we will never stop fighting you until you leave us alone’ (The Telegraph,
2013). Ahead of standing candidates in Wales for the European elections on 22 May 2014, Britain
First registered its party description as ‘Remember Lee Rigby’. This description was approved by
the political registrations watchdog the Electoral Commission and printed on all ballot papers in
Wales, a move for which the Commission has since apologized (Electoral Commission, 2014).
The group is also known for the reach and frequency of its viral marketing campaign strategy and
use of social media to share emotive imagery and messages of a nationalist or anti-immigration nature
across audiences on a massive scale. The group uses social media to raise funds and in July 2015
came first in the Electoral Commission‘s donations league table for smaller political parties in the
United Kingdom (BBC, 2015). Its tweets and Facebook posts are visually arresting, often written in
capital letters and tend to focus towards the histrionic, featuring ‘share if you agree’ calls to action
superimposed over images of Winston Churchill, the knights of the Crusades and the British and
English flags. With over one million ‘likes’, Britain First’s Facebook page reaches a vast online
audience and it has been reported that as many as two million people interact with its online content
daily (Wheelan, 2014). A survey of posts by Britain First on 12 November 2015 includes a mocked-
up Sun newspaper front page headline, ‘Britain First declares war on Muslim extremists’ (Britain
First, 2015a); a link to an authentic Daily Mail article on the trial at Bradford Crown Court of
thirteen men and a seventeen-year-old charged with twenty-eight sexual offences against a girl when
she was thirteen and fourteen, which Britain First described in the attached status update as ‘A BAD
CASE OF MUSLIM GROOMING….’ (Britain First, 2015b); and ‘OBAMA, THE MUSLIM
SOCIALIST, IS A FAILURE AS A PRESIDENT!’ which appeared as a status update attached to an
image of the words ‘Like if you agree the Obama presidency is a disaster!’ (Britain First, 2015c).
The ‘Britain Furst’ Facebook page, meanwhile, run by blogger Gareth Arnoult, shares posts of a
similarly histrionic nature, but with a very different intention, for these posts are not made in earnest.
They are designed to piggyback on Britain First’s emotive content circulation strategy and are crafted
deliberately to be as ridiculous, as melodramatic and as apparently xenophobic as possible, in a bid
to lampoon the very people who support Britain First. Britain Furst’s satirical posts have been
covered by numerous media outlets, including the Guardian, the Independent, the Daily Express, the
Huffington Post and Vice, as well as numerous online blogs. On 9 November 2015, for example,
Britain Furst posted a mocked-up image of a vast queue of people waiting at ‘UK Border Controls’
overlaid with the words ‘Immigrants are trying to force David Cameron to ban Christmas because it
offends them. Share to tell David Cameron not to cancel Christmas. This is our country, not there’s.
Keep Christmas British’. The image was accompanied by a status message reading, ‘KEEP
CHRISTMAS BRITISH’ (Britain Furst, 2015).
Recall that in Ricoeur’s approach interpretation is about increasing self-knowledge through the
journey outwards to the domain of the other, unseating the authority with which we assert our own
existence and receiving from this journey the possibility of increased self-knowledge through the
realisation that understanding is not a given. ‘Meaning’, in this sense, exists only in the relational
interplay, in the ‘imaginative variations’ between a self and another. Interpretation causes us to reflect
upon who we are in relation to others and, in so doing, to achieve a heightened sense of
consciousness. What, then, do Arnoult’s own ‘imaginative variations’ on the themes of Islamophobia
and anti-immigration engender with regard to the agenda of Britain First? What mirror to nature do
they hold? In an interview with Vice about the satirical news website ‘British Fake News Network’,
his companion project to Britain Furst, Arnoult said:
 One of the things I don’t like on the site is when you get people going, ‘Can’t believe this. Bloody Muslims.’ Those things you
expect from people who don’t realise it’s satire – fine. But it’s the next guy going, ‘You’re an idiot, you don’t get it do you?’. What
good’s that going to do? They might not be the most critically-thinking of people, but you’re never going to get them back into the
mainstream of politics if you’re just going to belittle them. The people who are going, ‘You people are bigots, you’re racists, you’re
scum’ are just satisfying their own egos. (Haynes, 2015)

The outworkings of this strategy – to encourage critical thinking, to bring to thoughtful reflection
rather than foster marginalized entrenchment – can be seen in action on another Facebook timeline,
that of the Guardian newspaper. On 20 June 2014 the Guardian posted a link to its own article on
Britain Furst, with the status, ‘In a few years, we’ll all be wearing Muslamic Ray-Bans’ (Guardian,
2014). The article covered a post by Britain Furst in which the image of a pair of Ray-Ban sunglasses
with a halal sticker over one lens has been overlaid with the words ‘Muslamic Ray-Bans/ Ray-Ban
have been forced to make “halal” sunglasses. SHARE IF YOU THINK THIS IS A DISGRACE!!!!’
(Walsh, 2014). The first comment from a Facebook user in response to the Guardian’s post promoting
the Ray-Ban article summarizes incisively the effect and impact of Arnoult’s own agenda:
If media attention given to ‘Britain Furst’ highlights the ridiculousness of the ignorant and xenophobic posts from the actual ‘Britain
First’ fascist page, then that is only a good thing in my opinion. Whether you think that the page itself is funny or not. […] ‘Britain
Furst’ is the direct opposition to the real far-right ‘Britain First’ page. How is it not constructive to take their posts and make a
mockery of them, pointing out their shortsightedness and the fallacies of their arguments in order to show people how wrong they
are? It sounds very constructive to me. ‘Britain Furst’ is quite obviously a parody page since the idea of ‘halal sunglasses’ is quite
obviously ludicrous. The more people point out the idiocy of the ideologies of pages like ‘Britain First’ the less likely people are to
follow their page or to agree with the admin running it. (Guardian, 2014)

Viewed through a hermeneutic lens, this user’s comments suggest that the satirical posts circulated by
Britain Furst have functioned as interpretative journeys across the terrain of anti-Islamic sentiment
that flourishes in the online environment. Riffing off the topics of greatest concern to the real Britain
First, Britain Furst promulgates its own imaginative variations on these themes, using the devices of
satire and parody to – in the words of the Facebook commenter – ‘point out their short sightedness’
and ‘make a mockery of them’. As such, Britain Furst serves to ‘highlight the ridiculousness’ of
Britain First by demonstrating that at a time of political and economic instability the worldview
promoted by the latter is but one way of characterizing urgent questions of respect, tolerance, asylum,
freedom of movement and border security. If the campaign work carried out by Britain First is shown
to be just one hermeneutic guess among many, valid for some but ‘short sighted’ and ‘fallacious’ for
others, something of the certainty with which Britain First presumes to speak for the people of the
United Kingdom with regard to issues of immigration, among others, is diminished, and with it, the
illusions of the party as both a speaking, and acting, subject.

Saving us from ourselves

How can interpretation’s critique of the subject be operationalized in such a way that we might
critique ideology itself? It is here that cultural translation makes its most significant contribution in
three key domains. In its broadest terms, understanding always remains within the historical limits of
the hermeneutic circle. By this, we mean that the work of alterity that hermeneutics addresses – the
distanciation of a reader from the time and place in which a text was written and the distanciation of
an author from the time and place in which the text is read – finds its echo in the work of alterity at the
heart of our selfhood. Like the distanciation that separates a text from its reader, the other stands in
contrast to the self. But just as the other stands before the self, the self also stands before the other.
This other is another self and both are at a distance from one another. In the final analysis, each
occupies the same position in this circle of distanciation and appropriation, as an ‘othered’ self in the
face of another self engaged in the process of ‘othering’ the other self. When we interpret within this
context we make a hermeneutic wager: that our self-comprehension will be enhanced rather than
diminished as we make our way around the hermeneutic circle, reaching outwards to the world of the
other before returning to the domain of the self. In so doing, our consciousness is heightened. The
more we engage ourselves in the explanation of alien meanings, in other words, the better placed we
are to understand our own inner meaning. Ricoeur’s dictum, ‘the shortest route from self to self is
through the other’ expresses his conviction that self-knowledge is achieved only in the encounter with
otherness. The self can never be self-sufficient without the signs and signals of meaning that come
from the other. As Kearney explains, because there can be no one true reading of a text, we find
ourselves ‘condemned’ to a conflict of interpretations and for Ricoeur, this condemnation has a
positive effect:
Because my ontological self-understanding as a being-in-the-world can only be ‘recovered by a detour of the decipherment of the
documents of life’ – that is, by means of a hermeneutic critique of the various ‘signs’ of existence – it always remains a desire to
be, a project of interpretation that can never be completed in any total sense. Finding ourselves thus exposed to an inevitable
plurality of interpretations, we learn that a philosophy of consciousness which holds to the hegemonic claims of the cogito is a
philosophy of false consciousness. To reduce the desire to be to the immediacy of self-consciousness, removing it from the
mediating detour of interpretation, is to hypostasise it. But the desire to be can never relinquish its role as a being-interpreted.
(Kearney, 1994, p. 104, original emphasis)

By reaching outwards to the world of the other, we dispossess ourselves of the self-confidence with
which we presume to understand. This has the effect of broadening our horizon of experience and
transforming who we are and how we understand ourselves as living, acting, beings in the world
(Kaplan, 2012, p. 36). To interpret others, in other words, is to become who we are. Though
ostensibly directed towards understanding the world of the other, interpretation in fact has the effect
of revealing the self to itself: ‘The selfhood of oneself implies otherness to such an extent that one
cannot be thought of without the other, one passes into the other. It is thus the growth of his own
understanding of himself that he pursues through his understanding of the other. Every hermeneutics is
thus, explicitly or implicitly, self-understanding by means of understanding others’ (Ricoeur, 1995, p.
16).
As human beings we remain incomplete until we interpret others and are interpreted by them in
return. We gain life by engaging in the conflict of interpretations. We exist insofar as we interpret.
Rather than abandon speculation altogether, it is precisely the fallibility of our interpretation across a
distance that invites us to think more, to think differently and to think better:
As we interpret, we learn, we develop, and we transform ourselves. Corresponding to the appropriation of proposed worlds offered
by the text is the ‘disappropriation’ of the self. Interpretation implies self-interpretation, thus any discourse that challenges authority
may also challenge one’s self-understanding. Self-reflection turns into critical reflection when it identifies the limits of understanding
in order to determine legitimate and illegitimate prejudices and authority. Any interpretation that exposes the illusions of the subject
functions in the same way as a critique of ideology. (Kaplan, 2012, p. 39)

If discourse that challenges authority may also challenge one’s self-understanding, and if critique
follows the exposure of the illusions of the subject, how do we actually make use of interpretation to
these ends? What might it look like to deploy interpretation in a strategic effort to critique ideology?
The answer lies not just in using subversive discourse to challenge the authority of an agent or
institution of ideology. If critique of ideology is only secured when a subject’s illusions are exposed
through the interpretive detour across the terrain of otherness, then the key to operationalizing
interpretation for emancipatory purposes is to ensure that the agents and institutions of ideology
become interpreting subjects themselves. That is, to place the subjects of power in a position
whereby they are required both to undertake a journey of understanding across a distance, and, in
doing so, to achieve a heightened sense of the fallibility of their own presumptions to knowledge as a
result. In other words, by translating back to the agents and institutions of ideology their own
ideologically marked translations of others. In this way, they are brought into a hermeneutic circle by
which they are required to engage with a conflict of interpretations. Their interpretation is exposed as
only one hermeneutic guess among many and they are required to build a case for support for the
validity of theirs above all others. Whether their guess is proven to be less probable an interpretation
or not, by facing the possibility of other perspectives, other possible ways of construing the world,
something of their horizon is expanded and with it something of the certitude with which the agents
and institutions of authority speak for the world is also transformed. In this, Ricoeur asserts, we start
to achieve a critique of ideology.

Self-knowledge through interpretation

Let us consider two recent cases in which the refusal of a service had been justified on grounds of
religious conscience and the different forms of opposition that were posed in response. What might it
mean, for example, to deploy one’s ‘discourse’ in order to challenge the ‘authority’ of Kentucky clerk
Kim Davis to refuse same-sex marriage licenses in Rowan County? On 26 June 2015 same-sex
marriages became legal across the United States, following a supreme court ruling that the
constitution grants gay couples ‘equal dignity under the law’. In the weeks following the ruling Davis
refused to issue any marriage licenses and in July 2015 two same-sex and two opposite-sex couples
brought legal proceedings against her. In the subsequent federal court hearing she said that the first
amendment to the US constitution gave her the right not to issue marriage licenses to same-sex
couples, because to do so would violate her religious beliefs. In a statement posted to the website of
the Liberty Counsel, a Christian legal aid group that had been engaged in representing Davis, she
said:
I never imagined a day like this would come, where I would be asked to violate a central teaching of Scripture and of Jesus Himself
regarding marriage. To issue a marriage license which conflicts with God’s definition of marriage, with my name affixed to the
certificate, would violate my conscience. It is not a light issue for me. It is a Heaven or Hell decision. For me it is a decision of
obedience. I have no animosity toward anyone and harbor no ill will. To me this has never been a gay or lesbian issue. It is about
marriage and God’s Word. It is a matter of religious liberty, which is protected under the First Amendment, the Kentucky
Constitution, and in the Kentucky Religious Freedom Restoration Act. Our history is filled with accommodations for people’s
religious freedom and conscience. I want to continue to perform my duties, but I also am requesting what our Founders envisioned –
that conscience and religious freedom would be protected. (Ohlheiser, 2015)

After she defied the federal judge’s order to process licenses she was taken into custody on 3
September 2015 and released on remand six days later, on the condition that she would not prevent
her deputies from issuing marriage licenses. Challenges to Davis’s refusal came in myriad guises,
from direct confrontations with gay couples across the service counter in the clerk’s office, to street
protests and even the commissioning of a billboard in Davis’s hometown of Morehead, Kentucky,
which read: ‘DEAR KIM DAVIS,/ The fact that/ you can’t sell your daughter/ for three goats and a
cow/ means we’ve already REDEFINED MARRIAGE’ (Nichols, 2015). At the height of these events
and as public interest in the case spiked, an anonymous Twitter account entitled ‘Sitnexto Kim Davis’
was set up, purporting to offer a series of insider reports on the stand-off from one of Davis’s co-
workers. The description for the account reads, ‘I sit next to Kim Davis. This was supposed to just be
a chill job. Goddamn it, Kim’ (Sitnexto Kim Davis, 2014). As the tone of the description belies, this
is a fictitious account of life as one of Davis’s co-workers in the clerk’s office. With nearly one
hundred thousand followers, over four hundred satirical tweets have been posted through the account,
including:
‘I’m supposed to go to the lake on Friday, but I just realized I won’t be able to get the jet ski trailer in the parking lot. #KimDavis’
(Sitnexto Kim Davis, 2015a);
‘#IStandWithKimDavis – her brave stand to go to jail has made this the best BBQ in years!’ (Sitnexto Kim Davis, 2015b);
‘Todd changed the marriage forms this morning. #KimDavis name is now in 72pt font, SO EVERYONE KNOWS IT’S HER
(Sitnexto Kim Davis, 2015c).

These tweets not only bemoan the media circus caused by Davis’s actions, they also mock the
principles on which she made her stand and question her rationale for distancing herself from same-
sex marriage. According to Ricoeur’s framework, however, they achieve something more. By
challenging the moral authority with which Davis refused to issue marriage licenses to gay people,
these four hundred satirical tweets also challenge how we ourselves view these events. They ask us
to consider our own moral platforms vis-à-vis not only same-sex marriage but also the potentially
competing interests of equality of opportunity and conscientious objection. By exposing ourselves to
Davis’s actions and the discursive challenges it has activated, we come to greater knowledge about
where we stand as regards the legitimacy or prejudice of her actions, exposing our own moral
position by tracing the contours of debate and identifying the limits of our own understanding. To
engage in interpreting the Davis case is also to set about a work of interpreting ourselves.
When it comes to the self-improvement work of interpretation, then, it is only by engaging with
ideology, by entering into interpretive debate across the terrain of difference that we acquire
knowledge of our own position in the world. From the perspective of the distanciated consciousness,
when it comes to challenging ideology through the interpretive devices of appropriation, therefore,
the aim is not to undo the distance but in fact to preserve it, precisely so that we can achieve the
critical perspective on oneself and one’s culture that we need in order to evaluate them both
critically:
[Appropriation] does not purport, as in Romantic hermeneutics, to rejoin the original subjectivity that would support the meaning of
the text. Rather it responds to the matter of the text, and hence to the proposals of meaning the text unfolds. It is thus the
counterpart of the distanciation that establishes the autonomy of the text with respect to its author, its situation, and its original
addressee. It is also the counterpart of that other distanciation by which a new being-in-the-world, projected by the text, is freed
from the false evidences of everyday reality. Appropriation is the response to this double distanciation, which is linked to the matter
of the text, as regards its sense and as regards its reference. (Ricoeur, 2008, pp. 34–5, original emphasis)

This is about conceptualizing appropriation as part and parcel of a productive relationship with
difference – of opinion, idea, ideology, language, culture, history and politics – by which we would
acknowledge that the very gap that separates us from the objects of our understanding is also that
which opens up the possibility for fruitful debate. We need to be challenged by the difference of
others precisely because it is only by entering into interpretive debate that we discover for ourselves
who we are and where we stand – I interpret, therefore I exist; I exist in order to interpret. As with
textual interpretation, there is no transcendental vantage point from which to ascertain if the traditions
by which we live are ideologically biased. As collectivities of human endeavour, society and culture,
we achieve existence only by retrieving meanings that exist first ‘outside’ the sociocultural
phenomena by which human life is objectified. Critique can be raised in this hermeneutic circle
precisely because the distance between us, between traditions, institutions and ways of living that are
foreign to one another, is never fully overcome. Just as the text is always distanced both from its
author and from its reader, human existence is not transparent onto itself:
We exist neither in closed horizons nor within a horizon that is unique. No horizon is closed, since it is possible to place oneself in
another point of view and in another culture. It would be reminiscent of Robinson Crusoe to claim that the other is inaccessible. But
no horizon is unique, since the tension between the other and oneself is unsurpassable. (Ricoeur, 2008, p. 275)

It is for this reason that we must not shy away from bringing together parties separated by an
ideological distance, as appears to be a catching trend with regard to the cancellation of guest
lectures by contentious speakers on university campuses. All phenomena can and should be subjected
to critique of this nature just as textual theory can and should be used to tackle the hardest questions
and most difficult issues of our age. ‘Distance’, Kaplan explains, ‘opens the possibility for critique
within hermeneutics. We never belong to our horizon and tradition to the extent that we cannot reflect
on the limits of our own understanding’ (2012, p. 38). We must respond because we can respond –
productively, imaginatively – so that we can establish our own position as opposed. Without the
opportunity to enter into interpretive debate across the terrain of difference we cannot identify the
contours of our own position with regard to ideology, much less seek to challenge it. Unless we
respond to those who challenge us – in other words, by participating in the conflict of interpretations
– we cannot take up a position opposed to them.

Translating ideology back to itself

We have moved from the critique of the subject towards its own transformation, through thoughtful
engagement with ideology. To go from here to a place where real opposition to ideology can be
effected, we must remember that it is only when a subject’s illusions are exposed through the
interpretive detour across the terrain of otherness that the fallibility of their own presumptions to
knowledge can be exposed as a result. By translating back to the agents and institutions of ideology
their own ideologically marked translations of others, in other words, by placing them in the position
of interpreting subjects, enmeshed within a circle of conflicting interpretations in which their
hermeneutic guesses must be articulated, defended and validated, we take the first steps towards
operationalizing interpretation for emancipatory purposes in the domain of the real. On hermeneutics
and the critique of ideology, Kaplan writes:
Any critique is raised from someplace and must be expressed in language, that is, in terms of a concrete, historical context. The
critique of ideology is made on the basis of a creative interpretation of a cultural heritage. It is an interpretation prejudiced by the
idea that domination and exploitation are unacceptable. Hermeneutics presupposes something different and better in terms of which
the object of interpretation is explained and understood. (Kaplan, 2012, p. 40)

Kaplan writes that the critique of ideology proceeds from a particular ‘creative interpretation’ that
takes place within a concrete historical context and which starts from the presupposition that
something ‘different and better’ exists to challenge ‘domination and exploitation’. In the context of the
DUP ‘conscience clause‘, what assumptions of domination and exploitation would a critique of
ideology seek to expose? What would a hermeneutics-based critique of ideology actually look like
and how would it pose something different and better?
If, as Ricoeur claims, the dialectic of distanciation and appropriation is the ‘last word in the
absence of absolute knowledge’ (1976, p. 44), then the answers lie in a return to the mechanics of
interpretation itself. Remember that interpretation is predicated on an act of judgement. Once a
distance of time and space opens up between the object of interpretation and the interpreter herself,
‘meaning’ no longer coincides with the intentions of the object’s originator. The interpreter must make
a stand vis-à-vis the object of interpretation and engineer its meaning for herself. In effect,
interpretation represents our best ‘guess’ at the opportunities for meaning the object presents to us.
But this does not give us free rein over the object for interpretation. Our guesses should be based on
solid detective work and not all guesses are equal. They should follow thoughtful engagement with
and detailed analysis of all the available information. They should stand up to scrutiny. It is the
interpreter’s job to show that her guess is the most likely, the most probable, the most solid case that
can possibly be built in the light of everything that is known about the object of interpretation. The
interpreter must therefore offer an evidence-based argument for the interpretation and they must
defend it against alternative views. In short, our guesses must be submitted to a process of validation
and it is a process that they must pass.
In the case of the DUP ‘conscience clause’, two competing interpretations appear to be in force –
on the one hand, that of the DUP and Ashers Baking Company; on the other, the Northern Ireland
Equality Commission on behalf of Gareth Lee. On 6 November 2014 the Commission issued a press
release in which it confirmed that it had written to solicitors acting for Ashers to set out the grounds
on which unlawful discrimination had been alleged. The press release noted: ‘This case raises issues
of public importance regarding the extent to which suppliers of goods and services can refuse service
on grounds of sexual orientation, religious belief and political opinion. The Commission has issued a
civil bill in this case and a decision as to whether or not discrimination has occurred will be a matter
for the court’ (Equality Commission, 2014). Following the judgement that the company had
discriminated against Lee on the grounds of sexual orientation, meanwhile, the general manager of
Ashers, Daniel McArthur said:
We’ve said from the start that our issue was with the message on the cake, not the customer and we didn’t know what the sexual
orientation of Mr Lee was, and it wasn’t relevant either. We’ve always been happy to serve any customers that come into our
shops. The ruling suggests that all business owners will have to be willing to promote any cause or campaign no matter how much
they disagree with it. Or as the Equality Commission has suggested, they should perhaps just close down, and that can’t be right.
But we won’t be closing down, we certainly don’t think we’ve done anything wrong and we will be taking legal advice to consider
our options for appeal. (Christian Institute, 2015)

Where the translational model becomes properly critical, therefore, is in the sense of interrogating the
argumentational platform on which these hermeneutic guesses are predicated.
To view as guesses both the ‘conscience clause’ and the claim that the refusal to fulfil the order for
a cake with a message ‘support gay marriage’ was an act of discrimination places the translator in the
role of validator and the DUP and Equality Commission in the role of interpreters – of issues of
tolerance, religious and moral freedom, human rights and equality of opportunity in general and the
gay cake case in particular. We therefore activate a critique of ideology on two levels. First, by
conceiving of both the conscience clause and the case against Ashers as but two approaches to
constructing this landscape out of many, we open up the possibility for a critique of the illusions of
the subject. Second, precisely by construing the conscience clause as a hermeneutic guess we require
each interpreter to submit a case for support by which its own particular view could be tested and
validated. One might claim, for example, that the refusal of goods or services within this terrain could
be construed not as an act of discrimination against a gay person but as a lack of endorsement for
homosexuality as an idea. In this sense, the refusal to provide goods or services could be viewed as
the exercise of private conscience, and, in this sense, any legal requirement to provide goods or
services in contravention of one’s deeply-held beliefs would be an illiberal intrusion into the
Christian business-owner’s right to a private life. As commentator Fionola Meredith wrote in the
Belfast Telegraph at the time:
If Ashers had refused to serve Gareth Lee, the LGBT activist who ordered the cake, because he was gay, then that would have
been a clear act of discrimination, and the bakery’s owners would have deserved to be prosecuted and fined. But that’s not what
happened. The message, not the customer, was the problem for Ashers. (Meredith, 2015)

By this view, what is packaged ostensibly as the enforcement of equality of opportunity law confuses
actual discrimination with the exercise of one’s right not to be forced to express approval for a
political position with which one does not agree. The concern here is with the limitation of personal
freedoms and the risk that with the pursuit of equality sometimes comes the limitation of freedom of
belief. This view holds that what is intended as an attempt on the part of the Equality Commission to
defend values of tolerance, justice and freedom of expression, in reality has the effect of limiting the
freedom to disagree politically with positions that are at base political. This would reduce all
diversity of opinion to a singular model, no less ideological, but which, even worse, is packaged as
neutral and ‘right’. It is on this basis that the DUP’s bill was formed. Some equality legislation, Givan
notes in the consultation document, ‘passed with the intention of protecting minorities, is having an
adverse effect on those with religious belief when it comes to the provision of goods and services. I
believe that this is wrong and that there should be legislation in place that strikes a balance between
the rights of people not to be discriminated against and the rights of conscience of religious believers’
(Givan, 2014, p. 1).
What would a counter-claim to the DUP’s position look like? What would happen, in other words,
when we test the DUP’s claim by bringing under hermeneutic scrutiny the ‘validity’ of its
interpretation and its understanding of the situation? One might view the case not as a matter of
religious conscience, for example, but as one where the exercise of conscience appears to conflict
with the provision of goods and services which, according the law, must be provided to all people,
regardless of their sexuality. Under the provisions of the DUP’s bill, Christian-run catering outlets,
banks and hotels could lawfully deny a same-sex couple any service that could be perceived as
endorsing or facilitating same-sex relations. A bill purporting to support the rights of a religious
group could in turn restrict the rights of another group on the basis of their sexuality. But remember
that the language of the bill is more generalized than this:
Nothing in these Regulations shall make it unlawful (a) to restrict the provision of goods, facilities and services; or (b) to restrict the
use or disposal of premises, so as to avoid endorsing, promoting or facilitating behaviour or beliefs which conflict with the strongly
held religious convictions of A or, as the case may be, those holding the controlling interest in A. (p. 11)

By this measure, the same bill that could also allow catering outlets, banks and hotels to deny any
service that could be construed as supporting same-sex relations could also be used to lawfully
restrict the provision of goods and services to anyone exercising ‘behaviour or beliefs’ felt to
conflict with the unspecified but ‘strongly held religious convictions’ of a particular business.
Another view on this case questions whether the exercise of conscience should have any role in the
provision of goods and services, which must be provided to all people regardless of sexuality. By
this measure, the provision of goods and services need not be confused for endorsement of political
opinion. One might claim, for example, that plenty of alternatives are available to Christian business
owners faced with the prospect of providing goods or services in ways that are contrary to their
religious beliefs. Other options could include continuing to provide the service while reserving the
right not to reproduce wording deemed ‘offensive’; forwarding the delivery of a service to an internal
colleague not offended by the wording or outsourcing the service entirely; or advertising clearly the
business’s Christian values or displaying clear public notices that the provision of a particular
service does not imply endorsement. Moreover, if the only way to validate a hermeneutic guess is
through argumentation and if the eventual ruling by Judge Brownlie is construed as a form of
hermeneutic judgement over the merits of two competing interpretations of questions of equality of
opportunity, access to equitable provision of goods and services, religious conscience, homosexuality
and same-sex marriage, then every interpreting party itself, as the interpreting subject engaged in
witnessing, and responding imaginatively to the phenomenon of the gay cake court case, must be
required to argue for the validity of its interpretation. According to the judge’s ruling, which is
subject to appeal, the refusal to fulfil the order for the cake was unlawful. If, as Ricoeur says,
hermeneutics can offer a critique of ideology because ‘the subject of which it speaks is always open
to the efficacy of history’ (2008, p. 33), then to place the conscience clause within this wider context
of competing interpretations is to construe it as only one possible way of responding to the case
among many. The validation process has the effect of placing every interpreter’s position among a
galaxy of other selves, each taking a different position on the same social phenomena.
Ricoeur’s view of the critique of ideology is that the self can only retrieve itself ‘through the
exodus of oneself-as-another’ and that ‘this return of self (moi) to itself (soi-même) carries with it an
additional charge: a call to action’ (Kearney, 1996, p. 1, original emphasis). With this a third level of
critique begins to crystallize and it is based on a return to the transformative potential interpretation
brings for the interpreting subject. Ricoeur notes that if every text contains its own possibility of
escape from the finite intentional horizon of its original author through its recontextualization in the
new world of the reader then ‘thanks to writing, the “world” of the text may explode the world of the
author’ (2008, p. 80, original emphasis). Remember, further, that one of the key lessons from the
practice of interlingual translation is of the purposefulness and directionality that characterizes the
work of the translator. Though predicated on an act of appropriation across a distance, releasing any
number of interpretive possibilities to be read into the text-for-translation, the direction of travel is
always towards an imagined audience, an implied reader who will receive the translation.
Simultaneously, then, that which starts out as the opening up and expansion of horizons terminates in
the closing down of interpretive possibilities and the eventual fixing of just one way of looking among
many. A translation is therefore as hermeneutic a guess as any interpretation, but it is also a
hermeneutic guess which is designed deliberately in order to fulfil a particular purpose and to
address a particular need on the part of an audience. What, then, would it mean to place the DUP and
Equality Commission in the position of ‘author’– to face, in other words, the interpretations of others
as they engage in ‘reading’ them? What would it mean, in other words, to translate back to the
interpreter the interpreter’s own translations of others? Such back-translations might include signing a
petition alongside over 285,000 others calling for the amendment to be dropped and to share the
petition on social media; joining the over 11,000 ‘likes’ for a Facebook campaign group against the
bill; hiring a no-conscience clause billboard to go on tour across Northern Ireland, as the All-Out
group had done following a successful crowd funding effort; tweeting to over eleven million
followers that the bill is ‘sick’, as Stephen Fry had done; or holding a demonstration march against
the conscience clause, as the Rainbow Project had done, using a poster with the slogan, ‘No dogs, no
blacks, no Irish, no gays?’, condemning the denial of goods and services on the basis of sexuality by
satirizing the historical refusal of goods and services to people on the basis of race and ethnicity. To
present the interpreter with a subversive, oppositional, resistant interpretation of itself is to enter into
a conflict of interpretations by which translators such as Stephen Fry, the Rainbow Project and others
not only view the DUP’s actions as a text-for-interpretation, but also return the self-same
interpretation back to the interpreter through the power of social media. By bringing the interpreter
into the hermeneutic circle in this way, it is made to become an interpreting subject – as much of its
own actions and interpretations as it ever was of the actions of others.
This kind of cultural translation – where ideologically motivated interpretations are interpreted for
subversive reasons, and these, in turn, are returned to the authors of ideologically marked
interpretation as subversive and oppositional interpretations-of-interpretations – ushers in what
Steiner terms an ‘alternate existence, a “might have been” or “is yet to come” into the substance and
historical condition of one’s own language, literature, and legacy of sensibility’ (1998, p. 351). By
requiring the authors of ideology to confront themselves through the very interpretations with which
they confront the world, they too are placed at a distance from these ‘texts’ of their own making and
must take an appropriative stand before their own interpretations. By glimpsing something of the
tentativeness of their own claims to understand, they must also relinquish something of the certainty
with which they view themselves and others. To place the author of an ideologically motivated
interpretation of the world in the position of interpreter in this way is, in Steiner’s terms:
To experience difference, to feel the characteristic resistance and ‘materiality’, of that which differs, is to re-experience identity.
One’s own space is mapped by what lies outside; it derives coherence, tactile configuration, from the pressure of the external.
‘Otherness’, particularly when it has the wealth and penetration of language, compels ‘presentness’ to stand clear. Working at the
point of maximal exposure to embodied difference, the translator is forced to realize, to make visible, the perimeters, either spacious
or confined, of his own tongue, of his own culture, of his own reserves of sensibility and intellect. (Steiner, 1998, p. 381)

It is this quality that gives cultural translation its resistant potential, for if the others that we wish to
resist are, in turn, required to become interpreting selves in the face of their own ideologically
marked interpretations, there is the possibility that they too can be humbled by the hermeneutic
journey outwards. Through the mechanics of interpretation, resistant cultural translation of this nature
places powerful institutions, the promoters of ideology, in the position of selves-being-interpreted. In
this position, they must not only read themselves; they must meet themselves coming back through the
hermeneutic detour across the terrain of reading. By operationalizing translation’s purposeful,
targeted, audience-driven gestures for oppositional ends, translation becomes ‘critical’ not only in the
sense that it offers an incisive running commentary on what it sees but also in the sense that it requires
its objects of opposition to question the very authority with which their own particular stance is
thought to represent the situation to which it relates.
What would it mean to make similar instances of ideology subject to hermeneutic critique in this
way? We need only look to other examples where protests, counter-movements and online activism
start from the presumption that the ideologically marked interpretations of certain agents and
institutions constitute vehicles of domination and exploitation. As a critique of ideology, cultural
translation presumes in turn to pose something different and better; a different way of viewing things;
a contrapuntal construction of events; a different characterization of the lead characters; a different
presumption of authority with which to represent the views of others. To do this, cultural translators
view the ideologically marked interpretations of others as ‘source texts’, that is, as examples of
conflicting interpretations to be engaged with and interrogated. By interpreting back to the agents and
institutions of ideologically marked interpretation, cultural translation places them in the position,
above all, as interpreters of themselves. As Kaplan notes:
A new kind of critical theory is taking shape that is less concerned with allegiances to any particular philosophical tradition than with
examining and criticizing power, authority, gender, race, culture, ethnicity, the political economy, the environment, and other issues
having to do with social justice. Critical theory challenges power and authority everywhere it resides, especially in public policy,
mass media, the law, multinational corporations, and global economic and political organizations. It is interdisciplinary, empirical,
normative, practical, and emancipatory. It is practiced not only by academics but journalists, social scientists, public advocates,
grassroots organizers and activists, and others connected with social movements. (Kaplan, 2012, pp. 153–4)

By translating for political reasons we can put critical theory into practice and it becomes a practice
that anyone can take up: from the University of Syracuse student, who, on seeing a woman standing on
a street corner at the university campus holding a sign that read, ‘Homosexuality is a sin, Christ can
set you free!’, took action by constructing his own sign, ‘Corduroy skirts are a sin’, and standing next
to the same woman (Fbomb, 2009) to the decision by non-profit organisation Planting Peace to site
their rainbow-painted headquarters, Equality House, directly opposite the headquarters of Westboro
Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas (Erbentraut, 2015) or to the erection of a so-called equality bakery
in the same neighbourhood as an Oregon bakery that refused to make a wedding cake for a same-sex
couple (Wong, 2015). When translation enables the ideologically marked interpretations of others to
be viewed as ‘texts’ to be interpreted, the possibility for critique is opened. By placing the agents and
institutions of ideology within the hermeneutic circle in this way, that is, by ‘othering’ their very
interpretations of otherness, the same authors of ideology become interpreting subjects themselves.
Confronted with a range of competing views translation requires them to undertake an interpretive
detour across the terrain of otherness. In so doing, translation functions as a reminder of the fallibility
of the presumption to knowledge, for an ideologically marked interpretation is only one interpretation
among many. To bring the agents and institutions of ideology into dialogue with the conflict of
interpretations, in this way, is to interpret-back, through purposeful, directed translation, the
possibility of a new and different way of understanding the world around us. By bringing to
awareness of the existence of such a way, and with it the expansion of the horizons of the ideological
subject, translation encourages the first steps towards a critique of the self, and with it, ideology.
 Conclusion
Cultural translation: Saving us from ourselves?

In the domain of the real, cultural translation is the manifestation of interpretive gestures of
distanciation, incorporation, transformation and emancipation we associate most closely with the
practice of interlingual translation, and as such, it is a hermeneutic enterprise par excellence. But it is
also so much more. With hermeneutics, Ricoeur’s ultimate project was to find a way to address some
of the most vexing problems of our time. In an age of violence, his was an ethics of responsibility,
concerned primarily with the ethical and political dimensions of human action, animated by a belief
in the power of discourse over violence. He believed that reflection was the point de départ for the
renovation of our political imagination. The guiding principle throughout this book has been that
interlingual translation, as both a creative process and a cultural product, is at its most insightful
when construed as a locus of intercultural encounter: between a translator, the text-for-translation and
an audience. As thinking, feeling, beings in the world, embedded socially, culturally, politically and
historically, the subjectivity of translators means that the process of translation is above all one of
cognitive outreach. It is a thoughtful journey outwards, across the terrain of otherness and back again.
Always at a distance from the objects of interpretation, translators must make imaginative leaps into
the unknown. When pen meets page, the resulting translation reveals more about the translator’s own
subjectivity than the reality of translation’s object itself. Underlying each of these chapters is the
insistence that as an interpretive regime, translation means transformation. It means mediation. It
means change. In effect, and in answer to those who would force a separation of interlingual
translation from its cultural pretentions, all translation is cultural translation, since no act of
interlingual translation remains outside the hermeneutics of variance and contingency that radically
alter the form and function of texts when they are translated. Mediated through the subjective ‘gaze’ of
the translator, the hermeneutics of translation issues a challenge to protectionist claims to the
interlingual sovereignty of the discipline, precisely because regimes of cultural translation are
implied in the very thing such claims seek to protect. To embrace the transformative nature of
translation is to take the first steps towards the ethical project that exists at the heart of cultural
translation.
For Ricoeur, the hermeneutic dimension of human life means that, as with the text-for-translation,
the world is a mystery to be engaged with and understood. And, as with the text-for-translation, the
psychological intentions of the world of others remain forever out of reach. It is in the dialectical
relation through which we engage with the other and the incommensurable mystery for which they
stand that we unfold an understanding of ourselves. By bringing into our horizons of understanding
meanings that are not our own and which we cannot fully understand, we expose ourselves to these
other horizons and transcend something of our own limitations. Crossing the borders of the familiar,
we open ourselves up to the world of others – other people, other ideas, other ways of living and
acting in the world. It is in the journey outwards that we come to understand not only something about
the world but also something about our own place within it. Through this circular hermeneutics, the
point of the journey from the self to the other and back again is to arrive at self-understanding.
Reflection is therefore critical to our existence because it is only through an active, critical,
engagement with the mysteries of other people that we grasp the activity of existence in the first place.
In the language of hermeneutics, we achieve selfhood only in the hermeneutic detour, through the fact
of being distanced and through the process of appropriating.
Interpretation is therefore so much more than the means by which we interact with and create the
world. It is through interpretation that every social actor makes sense of the world and it is through
our expressions of life that we seek to understand ourselves, for the desire to understand is a basic
human impulse. It is a key dimension of human existence. If it is the contingency of the translator’s
interpretation that impedes translation from reaching a full understanding of the texts it attempts to
approximate, then it is the self-same contingency that reminds us not just of translation’s fallibility to
understand across a distance, but also of the resistance that our objects of interpretation project in the
face of interpretation. Precisely because the possibility of a ‘perfect’ translation is forever suspended,
it is the interpretive mechanics of translation responsible for distanciation that offers a solution to the
very problems it creates. If every translation is contingent upon the subjectivity of the translator
behind it – a hermeneutic guess – then no translation can stand as final. A resistant veil will always
separate the translator and the text-for-translation. Because the guesswork of interpretation reminds us
of the fallibility of our capacity to perceive, we suspend judgement about what we can understand
about the world through direct perception.
It is this resistance to the certitude with which we might presume to understand in the world that is
the first step towards a critique of ideology, for it is through hermeneutic doubt and the fact that we
can only ever posit – the fact that we may be wrong! – that we take the first steps towards saving
ourselves from the totalism that accompanies our own attempts at understanding. Hermeneutics, then,
is less about understanding than it is about ontology, for the quest for understanding and the
acquisition of being correspond dialectically. It is only by stepping outside of ourselves, to place our
knowledge within the context of the knowledge of others that we find our being transformed, enriched
and enlarged by the journey. Hermeneutics teaches that we displace ourselves in the appropriation of
the text. By displacing ourselves we take the first steps towards critique, removing something of the
certitude with which we attempt to construct the world. If we do not understand the world directly
except through the engagement with the texts and human actions of the world around us, then we must
employ cultural translation if only to learn something about who it is that we are and what it is that we
know and understand.
In Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes famously translated the ancient Greek aphorism, ‘know thyself’,
transliterated into Latin as nosce teipsum, as ‘read thyself’. In the language of hermeneutics, this
injunction might be better expressed in more cyclical terms – ‘read others, read thyself, know
thyself’. Before cultural translation can be operationalized for resistant ends, we must enter into
thoughtful, reflective engagement with the phenomena of the world around us, not just to foster debate,
to satirize, to parody, to mock, to resist or to otherwise oppose, but to discover first and foremost
who we ourselves are. The lesson for cultural translation is not just that the translator’s distanciation
from the object of interpretation means a certain transformative dimension will always abound; or
even that this transformative dimension can be harnessed for political, resistant or oppositional
reasons. It is that we must translate – to learn something about where we stand, to locate for
ourselves a position in the world, without which emancipation cannot be achieved. This is the first
step towards a critique of ideology and the last word in absolute knowledge.
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 Index

A History of the World in 100 Objects (2010) here, here

Abrams, J. J. here
Achilles and the Tortoise, paradox of here
Adam here
Adams, Amy here
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1869) here, here
All American Men of War here, here
allegory here
ambiguity here, here, here
American Hustle (2013) here
amplification here, here
Angel of the North here
anthropology here
anti-immigration here
anti-metaphor argument here, here
appropriation here, here
art-selfie as here
as containment here
as counterpart of distanciation here, here
over time here
reader-focused emphasis here
and self-understanding here, here
subjectivity of here
Arendt, H. here
Aristotle here
Arnoult, Gareth here
Arquette, Patricia here
art-selfie here
artworks
art-selfies as appropriation here, here
photography of here
‘re-enactments’ of here, here
reproduction of here
Asad, Talal here, here, here
Ashers Baking Company here, here
audience here, here, here, here
of human action here
needs of here
online here
reboot here
of re-enactments here, here, here
unclear here
of written discourse here, here
author, posthumous ‘fame’ of here

Babel here
Bachmann-Medick, D. here, here
Belzoni, G. here
Benjamin, W. here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here
Bery, A. here
Bhabha, H. here, here, here, here
Bibliotheca historica here
Bland, A. here
Booooooom blog here
Borges, Jorge Luis here
breastfeeding here
Britain First here
Britain Furst here
British Museum here
‘Bruce Springsteen & Jimmy Fallon: “Gov. Christie Traffic Jam” (“Born To Run” Parody)’ here
Buden, B. here

Cambyses here
camera phone technology here
cartography here
Chesterman, A. here, here, here
Christie, Chris (Governor) here
citizenship test here
clues, in text here, here
colonial encounter, with cultural difference here
Compton, Sarah here
‘Concept of Cultural Translation in British Social Anthropology, The’ here
conscience clause here, here
‘Consultation on the Northern Ireland Freedom of Conscience Amendment Bill’ here, here
Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (1989) here
‘Conventional Metaphors and Anthropological Metaphysics: The Problematic of Cultural Translation’ here
Conway, K. here
Crapanzano, V. here
‘creative interpretation’ here
criticism, of translation here, here
anti-metaphor argument here, here
ethical perspective here
critique of ideology here, here, here, here, here, here
translation’s role in here, here, here
cultural translation, defined here, here, here
‘Cultural Translation: An Introduction to the Problem’ here
cyber attack here

da Vinci, Leonardo here

Davis, K. here
Dawkins here
Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) here, here
de-psychologization, of meaning here, here, here
detractors here
dialogue, see ‘discourse’, spoken
‘discourse’, spoken here
‘eventful’ dialogue here
interlocutors here, here
referential co-dependency here
resolution of mystery in here
spatiotemporal co-situation here
subjectivity of speaker here
tripartite structure here
see also ‘discourse’, written
‘discourse’, written
audience of here
‘double historical reference’ here
freedom from authorial intention here
freedom from historical context here
human action here
problem of interpretation here
semantic autonomy of here
speculation here
see also ‘discourse’, spoken
discrimination, on grounds of sexual orientation here, here
distanciation
and appropriation here, here
in cartography here
condition of here
consequences of reader’s here
of self from itself here
and self- understanding here, here
Dreamtigers (1964) here
Duchamp, M. here
DUP , see Democratic Unionist Party (DUP)

Egypt here
Egyptian Sculpture Gallery here
Equality Act (Sexual Orientation) Regulations here
Equality Commission for Northern Ireland here, here
ethnographer, and Hermes here
Europe, refugee immigration here
Eve here
exposure, here

Facebook here, here, here

Fallon, Jimmy here
‘fallacy of the absolute text’ here
‘familiar’, being here
familiaris here
Farage, Nigel here
film, as translation here
Fry, Stephen here

Gall, James (Reverend) here

galleries here
Garden of Eden here
Geertz, C. here
gender, differentials in pay here
George Washington Bridge (GWB) here
Germany, citizenship test here
Girl With a Pearl Earring (c. 1665) here
Givan, P. here, here
Golding, Paul here
Gormley, Anthony here
Grease here
Greenpeace here
Guardians of Peace here
GWB, see George Washington Bridge

Ha, K. N. here, here

Habermas here
hack here
Handbook of Translation Studies (2012) here
Heidegger here
hermeneutics here
as theory of text here
thought involved in here
Hermes here
and ethnographer here
etymology of here
Herodotus here
Histories here
homosexuality here, here
Huggan, G. here
human action
autonomy here
and text here
human behavior, ‘imaginative acts’ of here
human life, meaning of here

‘imaginative variations’ here

imitation here
immigration, of refugees here
Instagram here
interlocutors here
interpretations here
conflict of here
‘creative’ here
judicious here
self-knowledge through here
Interview, The (2014) here
Islamophobia here

judges, discretionary powers here

July, Miranda here

Kaplan D. here, here, here, here, here

Keesing, Roger here
Kierkegaard here
Kim Jong-un here
knowledge-creation here

‘landmarks’, of place here

language
concealment of meaning in here
and metaphor here
Larsson, Stieg here
Late Night programme here
Lawrence, Jennifer here, here
Lee, Gareth here
‘LEGO: Everything is NOT Awesome’ here
‘liberal ironist’ here
Lichtenstein here, here
‘linguistic function’ here

Location of Culture, The (1994) here

Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, The (2001) here
MacGregor, Neil here, here
maps here
Marx here
McArthur, Daniel here
meaning here
attribution to other languages here
and communication here
construction of here
de-psychologization here, here, here
of human life here
multiplicity of here, here
surplus of here, here
memes here
Mercator, Gerardus here
Meredith, Fionola here
‘messy’ theorization here
metaphor here
translation as here, here
‘middle’, between the text and the reader here
Milliennium series (2005–7) here
mindfulness here
‘Ministry of Silly Walks, The’ here
minorities, protection of here
‘Mischief Reef’ here
Mona Lisa (c. 1503–9) here
Monty Python’s Flying Circus (1970) here
museums here
myth here

Nancy here
narrative here
National Gallery here
Nietzsche here
‘non-substantive translation’ here
Northern Ireland here
Nowotny, S. here

‘On Empiricism and Bad Philosophy in Translation Studies’ (2010) here

‘On Language as Such and on the Language of Man’ here
‘On Rigor in Science’ here
‘One does not simply walk into Mordor’ here
Ordnance Survey here
otherness, encounter with here

parody, viral video here

‘Bruce Springsteen & Jimmy Fallon: “Gov. Christie Traffi c Jam” (“Born To Run” Parody)’ here
‘LEGO: Everything is NOT Awesome’ here
Participatory Museum, The (2010) here
pastiche, translational here
Pathé News
pay, gender differentials in here
Peters, Arno (Dr) here
‘petition of concern’ facility here
Physics here
places, as ‘translations’ here
Pratt, M. L. here, here, here
Psammenitus here
Pym, A. here, here
survey here
Rainbow Project here
Ramesses II here, here, here
Ramesseum here
Rawls here
reading
act of judgement here, here
consequences of distanciation from text here
dialectic between trust and suspicion here
dimensions of here, here
self-understanding here, here
ways of approaching text here
‘reboot’ here
‘reciprocity of intentions’ here
‘re-enactments’, art here, here
‘Remember Lee Rigby’ here
renovation, translation as here
reproduction, of art work here
resistant potential, of cultural translation here
revolution, translation as here
rewriting, translation as here
Ricoeur, P. here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here
Rigby, Lee here
Romantic view here
Romney, Mitt here
Rorty, R. here, here, here, here
Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies (2009) here, here
Rushdie, Salman here, here

Salt, Henry here

Satanic Verses, The (1988) here
sculpture
transience of here
wonderment of here
‘second naiveté’ here
Second World War here
Selfish Gene, The (2006) here
self-understanding here
encounter with otherness here
through interpretation here
semantic autonomy of written ‘discourse’
freedom from authorial intention here
freedom from historical context here
sexual orientation, discrimination on grounds of here, here
Shell here
Shelley here, here, here
Siculus, Diodorus here
signs here
as negative truth here
Simms, K. here, here
Simon, Nina here
Sinn Fein here
‘snowclone’ here
solidarity, human here
Sony Pictures Entertainment here
sovereign authority, translation as exercise of here
Spivak here
Spratly Islands here
Springsteen, Bruce here
Star Trek here
Steiner here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here
storytelling here
Sturge, K. here, here, here
subjectivity, displacing here
Sunflowers (1888) here, here
surveys of cultural translation here
‘suspicion’, and ‘trust’ here
symbols here, here
allegory here
memes here
plurivocity of here, here
Synchronoptische Weltgeschichte – Sychronoptic World History here

tangent, of translation here, here

‘territorial sea’ here
text
clues in here
consequences of distanciation from here
‘fallacy of the absolute text’ here
hermeneutics as theory of here
human action and here
ways of approaching here
Theron, Charlize here
transformation, translation as here
translatability here
translation
as change in form here
as exercise of sovereign authority here
film as here
as metaphor here, here
‘non-substantive’ here
pastiche here
places as here
power to illuminate here
‘proper’ here
as renovation here
as revolution here
‘as total counterpart’ here
as transformation here
transportational etymology of here
as ‘transposition’ here
validity as theory here
translator here
role of here
Travolta, John here
Trivedi, H. here, here
‘truncated ontology’ here
‘trust’, and ‘suspicion’ here
Twitter here
Tymoczko, M. here

UK Independence Party here

UKIP, see UK Independence Party
understanding, human
border-limits of here
object of here, here
quest for here
United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea here

validation here
validity, as theory of translation here
Van Gogh here, here
Vermeer here

Whaam! here, here

‘Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, The’ here
writing here

X- Files, The (1993–2002) here

Young, R. here, here, here, here
Younger Memnon here, here
YouTube here
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