Found in Translation

The following is a presentation made somewhat after my work in translating Jacques-Alain Miller's L'os d'un cure / Analysis Laid Bare for the work of the School, and perhaps I would have wished that this book had been produced in the manner described below, whilst it had been supported by the work of a team of others which was much appreciated.

The presentation was made at a Cartel Study Day of the London Society of the New Lacanian School, a Cartel being a central organ of transmission in the School, a gathering around an agreed subject of study for no more than two years of between three and five participants, four being a fair number, plus one as an extimate to the group, decompleting the group effect that a cartel can produce.

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The cartel was put to work initially by Lacan as an organ of the then new School, to work on themes imminent to its formation. We might tend to think cartels as devices principally for each to study for themselves, but it is also a device for production for the School, and it is in this direction, for the work of the Society at least, that I was part of a ‘translation cartel’. We called it that, but in it was a cartel for the correction, development, reworking, of a translation I’d undertaken for the work of the London Society, A Course of Jacques-Alain Miller, an important text for our orientation. I will try to say a little about the use of a cartel for this purpose. Why is a cartel useful in developing a translation? What consequences for participants, and what consequences for the resultant production?

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Translation involves decisions and priorities, we hope for a style, an orientation. One can for instance make a beautiful text which varies substantially from the original. One can make a dry text, precise on many points, that does not invite reading, even of a presentation that itself was lucid and lively. One can translate as an academic, or as an analyst. Whichever way one works, interpretation of the text is involved, and this varies in approach and detail. Translations of key texts in our field have typically been completed by individuals, and tend to bear the mark of their translator – kind of auteur translators we could say. How to make of this a work in cartel which retains the work of each, the style of each, in a way that might be more than the work of each?

Our cartel was a diverse group, all analysands, some also analysts. Each with a seriousness about our field. Some more academic, some clinicians, with varied abilities in French, and not all native English speakers. Some more steeped in Lacanese, both the language and the ideas, some with great deftness in English.

I translated in collaboration with an online algorithmic translator, checking and working each paragraph the algorithm suggested against the original, and in my style and with what I know such as it is, and then once complete, re-checking and correcting the text some days later. This product was passed between two fellow cartelisands with good French, who, in advance of our cartel meetings, on Google docs would make basic corrections, and suggest many more. All the workings of these corrections were visible to all. We’d meet weekly, to read aloud through the developing translation, each following in their own way, and to discuss issues as they arise, agreeing on corrections and changes.

We wanted to retain something of the liveliness, the lucidity, pace, and wit of the original – something of this lucid style lends itself to the transference that the presentation induces, and without this there is no use – this meant a certain amount of flexibility with regard to the original. And we were also concerned to be good readers of the text, trying to find what the text does, trying not to mask the valences, sometimes polyvalences, of the text.

In reading together, each would read in a completely different way. One with limited French would attend to the French text alongside and would raise questions as to the pertinence of a given word. This lead to many considerations which better French speakers would miss. Another would attend to the grammar and legibility of the English. The original being a lecture, with run-on sentences which do not lend themselves well to the page. A great deal of clarity could be found in his work of restructuring, but each had their part in that too. If there were some with areas of greater depth of knowledge in Lacanian discourse, in French, or in English, their comfort with this knowledge was balanced by the questions, the reposing of ideas or expressions, of those for whom certain things were less self evident. The result did not simply come from each attending to their area of expertise, but just as often, the openness of the less expert teaching each including the specialist. This required that each of us be at ease in being wrong, not holding our expertise too preciously.

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The Lacanian field lends itself to auteurs. Much of transmission in our field is not a matter simply of passing on knowledge as if it were a coin that could be passed from one to the next. We might think it that way sometimes, with our proclivity to quote little idiomatic phrases of Lacan or Miller as if they were self evident proofs. No, rather each time in transmission a logic is offered which must be reconstructed anew, albeit never without effects of transference. This is related to the idea that psychoanalysis must be reinvented anew with each analyst, with each session even. We know that to be a reader of Lacan (as it had been for his students), even a clinician who calls themselves a Lacanian analyst, in no way guarantees a shared orientation, because an orientation is not something passed on like a coin, it is reconstructed, one by one. It can be noted that this is true for Millerian Lacanians too (for whom the word 'orientation' is something of a master signifier). No guarantee of an orientation, because the reconstruction of Miller’s teaching too, one by one, can also lead in a variety of directions, but we are for all that not without the proposition that there is an orientation to psychoanalysis, even if not in all analysts. So psychoanalysis is a field, in a way, of auters, and the translation of texts is a point where this is quite vividly highlighted.

It is, in principle, in relation to the School that we hope that something of the orientation of psychoanalysis, sometimes despite psychoanalysts, can be lodged. It depends on the School being not identical to its membership, since its members are almost all the psychoanalysts, for whom an orientation is not in the end quite guaranteed. We see the nature of the guarantees of the School for instance in the Pass which is currently being rethought, since as an interesting kind of guarantee, it is itself not for all that, guaranteed. And the cartel is a device that can make results that welcome the work of each, with all the questions of orientation that come with that, in relation to the School. The School as a site for orientation, perhaps even defined as such more than as an institution, and hopefully sometimes a site of orientation.

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Our cartel was a device for the well regarded work of each, but in which each could also be wrong, could learn from a decompletion effected in the work. Its product is all the better in that as a product of each, of their work, their style, their way of reconstructing this vital presentation of the School’s, of Jacques-Alain Miller’s work, it is not in the end, the work of any one of the cartelisands alone, nor of a committee or institution which might suppose of itself a totality, and aimed at securing their place as right.

I came out of the cartel not only thinking that it’s a very useful device for a translator such as I am, who knows too well the limits of their ability, but that we would do well to use the device of the cartel in the translation process of all long-form and important translations in our field. A decompleting link between the auteur and the School as a site for orientation.

Alasdair Duncan

www.alasdairduncan.com