Invisible terminology, visible translations: the New Penguin Freud translations and the case against standardized terminology

ABSTRACT

Abstract: Consistency has become an industry expectation for the translation of terminology within scholarship and scientific writing, but such consistency may not do justice to texts where technical terms rely on polysemy for heuristic effects. This article considers the historical factors that explain why context-sensitive differential translation strategies prevailed in several recent retranslations of Sigmund Freud’s works. Freud’s twenty-first-century translators were freed from constraints of consistency due partly to the series editor Adam Phillips’s decision to rebrand Freud’s genre as literature. When Benjamin Moser reframed Brazilian author Clarice Lispector’s work as wisdom literature, some retranslations that he edited for New Directions also worked interestingly through dilemmas between context-sensitivity and consistency when translating repeated vocabulary. By claiming that these texts work on multiple genre-levels, these translations’ series editors reduced the expectation that language should function univocally as terminology in the translations.

KEYWORDS:

• Retranslation
• psychoanalysis
• Adam Phillips
• terminology
• genre

Acknowledgments

Thank you to the participants in the ‘Translation Networks’ panel held at the 2017 American Comparative Literature Association Annual Meeting, sponsored by the International Comparative Literature Association Committee on Translation Studies. Thank you especially to co-organizers Sandra Bermann, Assumpta Camps, and Isabel Gomez. Special thanks to Isabel Gomez for insights about the translation history of Clarice Lispector’s work after my presentation at the 2015 ACLA panel, ‘The Rights to Translation,’ sponsored by the same committee.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Reddick echoes Phillips’s complaint about the language of the Standard Edition: ‘Freud’s writing is to be presented not as a hot and sweaty struggle with intractable and often crazily daring ideas, but as a cut-and-dried corpus of unchallengeable dogma’ (Freud 2003a, xxxiii).

2. ‘In developing his notion that it was the child’s unconscious rather than the perversity of fathers, including his own, that caused neurosis, Freud found the path that led to dream interpretation and to the notion of psychoanalysis as the study of the unconscious’ (Kirsner 2007, 346).

3. For instance, Moser compares one of Lispector’s characters’ moral certainty with Spinoza’s formulation of an antinomy of taste: ‘For Clarice Lispector, who did not possess the professor’s moral clarity, crime could never be denounced out of hand. Spinoza wrote that “one and the same thing can be at the same time good, bad, and indifferent. For instance, music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good nor bad to the deaf”’ (Moser 2012, 220).