Was Locke addressing Hobbes or Filmer? How a classical question in the history of political thought may become a tool for understanding the translation of historical texts

ABSTRACT

This article aims to rethink the relationship between history and translation by questioning the methodological presuppositions underlying dichotomies taught in Translation Studies, especially that of domestication and foreignization. To this end, we assess the validity of this dichotomy in the case of the translation of historical texts. We argue that research in this field demands a deeper reflection on what could be called “addresseeship”. To engage this claim, we begin by discussing how the classical debate between “textualist” and “contextualist” approaches to the history of political thought can be brought to bear on the issue by virtue of the distinctions that it draws among the various addressees of political texts. We then illustrate this new avenue in the translation of history with a critical account of an original dichotomy proposed by the linguist Dubravko Škiljan between retrospective and prospective translations.

KEYWORDS:

• History of translation
• history of political thought
• Leo Strauss
• Quentin Skinner
• methodology in translation studies

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Note on contributors

Simon Labrecque completed his PhD in political science and in cultural, social, and political thought at the University of Victoria, in British Columbia. He works on the relationships between aesthetics and politics, on methodological issues in the history of Western political thought, and on the roles of experts and amateurs in the production of authoritative claims about political life. He has taught political theory at the University of Ottawa, and teaches Quebec politics at Université Laval (Québec City).

René Lemieux is an assistant professor at University of Sherbrooke. He holds a PhD in semiology from Université du Québec à Montréal. His dissertation focused on the translation of Jacques Derrida in America. He is currently completing a Masters degree in law at University of Ottawa, where he studies the translational relationships between Canadian state law and Indigenous legal orders. He has taught translation of the social sciences and humanities, as well as history of translation and sociopolitical contexts of translation (on Canadian Indigenous language translation).

Notes

1. O’Sullivan also refers to Adams (1999), who is interested in the translation of historical texts, where “historical” means belonging to the discipline of history. This discussion, which tries to develop the “good way” to translate, can be linked to Wallerstein’s chapter (1981) on the translation of social sciences texts.

2. See Venuti ([1995] 2008), especially chapters 1 (“Invisibility”, 1–42) and 3 (“Nation”, 99–147). For a textbook account of Venuti’s dichotomy, see Paloposki (2011, 40–42). See also Schleiermacher ([1813] 1997).

3. “Prospective” and “retrospective” were also used by a little-known professor of Humanities named John P. Postgate in his (1922) book Translation and Translations. Keeping in mind the distinction between version and translation (i.e. translating from dead languages to English and from the latter to Latin and Greek), Postgate redefines the Schleiermacherian dichotomies with the terms “prospective” and “retrospective”, which will be used in different senses in translation studies (see also Fawcett 2001). We did not find any evidence that Škiljan was aware of Postgate’s terminology. Škiljan claims to have taken the terms from de Saussure, who preceded Postgate.

4. This text was reedited as the first chapter after the introduction in Strauss (1952). In 1988, the University of Chicago Press reissued this book which has been translated in a number of languages, including French and Spanish.

5. The article has been included, along with other key methodological writings, in the collection by Tully (1988). To our knowledge, it has not yet been translated.

6. For an overview of the Straussian canon of political philosophy, see Strauss and Cropsey ([1963] 1987). As indicated below, the canon of the Cambridge School can be said to amount to the texts included in the series Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought, published by Cambridge University Press. The two canons overlap but they are not strictly identical.

7. For an account of the construction of the canon that insists on its Straussian version, see Gunnell (1978, 122–134).

8. A facsimile of this title page can be seen in Locke (1988, 135). Laslett’s long introduction to Locke’s Two Treatises can be read as an example of the Cambridge School reading of Locke, although it preceded (and inspired) the school. For Strauss’s reading of Locke, see Strauss (1963). The peculiarity of taking Locke’s addressee as an example, here, resides in two facts: Locke, Hobbes and Filmer all wrote in English (and sometimes in Latin), and Hobbes and Filmer were contemporaries.

9. See Laslett’s introduction in Locke (1988), especially pages 3–15.

10. The version truncated by Mazel is still the most usual translation published in France today and the paperback version read by students under the title Traité du gouvernement civil (“treatise” in the singular), as reviewed and corrected in Paris in Year III of the Republic (1795). According to Simone Goyard-Fabre (1992, 127), the translation was only slightly modified in accordance with Laslett’s modifications: “Despite its flaws, however, we have preserved it [the early translation] because it reflects, in the way of transposing the literality of Locke’s work, the type of concern with which the reception was happening in France in the 18th century” (our translation). Other translations in French exist but are not adapted for students: Locke (1994) (only the second treatise), and Locke (1997) (to our knowledge, the latter edition is the first and only translation of Locke’s first treatise in French).

11. Interestingly, Skinner’s reference is a translation by Allan Gilbert (1965) in which virtù was translated by “virtue”.

12. We acknowledge that multiple attempts to understand and complicate this dichotomy were produced in recent years. See for example Koskinen (2000) and Venuti’s second edition of The Translator’s Invisibility ([1995] 2008). For short essays describing critics of Venuti’s theory, see also Emmerich (2013) and Paloposki (2011). As indicated in our introduction, however, we are most interested in how this distinction tends to be taught in contemporary classrooms.

13. The notion of audience theorized, for example, in Mason (2000) can be of interest here, but we have to keep in mind that the case we discussed inextricably involves two audiences: that of the original political philosophers and that of the contemporary commentators or translators. The “true” historical audience is precisely what is at stake in the debate. It cannot be presupposed or assumed as a given; indeed, such a presupposition or assumption of “the true audience” would already situate oneself on one side of the debate, depending on whether one privileges “the past for itself” or “the past for the present”, negating the validity of the other option.