Coat Hangers and Ex-Boyfriends’ New Girlfriends’ Parties: On Translating Michel Butor’s Essays on the Novel
A translator might first assume they can erase themselves in order for the primary writer to exist in a different language. But if I am merely a node in a network, if overlaid transparency does not exist in this flattened geography, then I must exist as myself, I cannot erase myself. It would perhaps be even more foolish to assume I could make myself into a blank, arrogant to think I would be capable of removing myself from my own existential network – my education, feelings, sensations, sensibilities, stylistic dislikes and preferences.
To translate is to rethink the notion of altruism: I don’t think it has anything to do with shoes. I don’t think we can put ourselves in another person’s place. I think we can only acknowledge everything we are not.
Mathilde Merouani reflects on her translation of Michel Butor‘s Selected Essays.
Being Metaphysical
There exists a sameness of inner truth between all great philosophers. When Heidegger describes that “inexhaustible wealth of what is one every day as if that day were its first,” he is describing the same Truth that Parmenides’s initiate hears from his goddess. True Being is One because it stands outside of time, every day, as if that day were its first—it is action that is completely new, because it must Be, and it is not overwhelmed or fragmented by thought or doubt. And yet when Parmenides’s initiate says, “It is all the same to me where I start from; for I shall come back there again,” I wonder: why travel at all?
An essay on Parmenides, Plato, and Being by Daniel Adler.