Morris distinguishes between mechanical translation and expressive translation, arguing in fact that expression is translation in the paradoxical sense in which an original text becomes orginal only by being translated. He says "below the turn of experience the representational relation between subject and object is one of mechanical translation: representation amounts to a shift of content from one form to another in an already established system. At the turn of experience the relation between subject and object would instead involve expression [i.e., expressive translation]" (Sense, p. 84, my emphasis). Does translation have a pilgrimatical quality? Does the meaning of the pilgrimage, enigmatically, come from a within? Morris maintains that expressive translation elaborates a plane of meaning from within. Where does that take us?
Labels: expression, Morris, peregrinations, translation
When Corradi Fiumara speaks of metaphoricity implying a "physiological" transformation of meanings she is not merely giving us an analogy (Metaphoric, p. 55). "The use of metaphoric language," she says, appears to be "profoundly interwoven with the actual development of our inner life" (ibid.). She implies that the recognition of personal uniqueness logically requires the recognition of the metaphoricity of language (p. 52). Are "inner messages" then born of a lived metaphoricity? Do we possibly know personal uniqueness prior to language, or does it even make sense to speak of prelinguistic knowledge? How broadly does one defines language? So broadly as to merge linguisticity with hominization, as Corradi Fiumara seems to do, to see them as interwoven in an evolution of meanings? Of course this kind of knowledge of language would be premised upon access to a metaphoricity—a mode of a speaker's paradox.
If contextual linguistic knowledge itself expresses a metaphoric potential of language, to draw the most from Corradi Fiumara's rejection of the idea of any naturally occurring zero-context utterance (pp. 156-157, note 12), then there is a sense in which linguistic capacity is interwoven with metalinguistic capacity. We see language as being about the interpersonal world. Translation would by this account not be premised on metaphoricity in a way that would allow us to isolate its conditions of possibility from those of language so much as the translative would represent one of the modalities of the metaphoric process of contextualization. The translational encounter, the allusion between "languages" (the emblamaticized formal representations of phatic communities), provokes transformational awarenesses, decipherments, which give rise to the within of language, the recognition of an ipseity in speaking—here I may be significantly departing from Corradi Fiumara, though we both agree on the (eudaimonial, therapeutic, epistemological, affective, human) importance of listening to inner messages, for my intuition is that the withinness of the personal is created. It's a metaphor, or to speak "metaphorically" though not merely so, a translation.
Labels: Corradi Fiumara, metaphor, physis, pragamatics, translation