Of translation: the conceptual work of multilingualism in David Hume

ABSTRACT

Although David Hume never addresses translation at length, he regularly invokes an interlingual movement at decisive moments in his work. Each of this article’s three sections addresses a pair of such moments. The first argues that translation establishes the association of ideas in A Treatise of Human Nature and An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding. The second analyzes translation as the ground of both the rational and the emotional arguments for God in the Dialogues concerning Natural Religion. The third and final section addresses translation as a highly regulated object of criticism in the History of England before turning to the Essays where it launches the search for the standard of taste in all criticism. Because translation thus intervenes not only in Hume’s criticism, where one might expect it, but also in his historiography, theology and epistemology, this article concludes by formalizing the interdisciplinary perspective translation opens in Hume’s work.

KEYWORDS:

• David Hume
• associationism
• theology
• history
• taste
• interdisciplinarity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Ian Simpson Ross (1995, 238), for instance, excludes “issues of translation” from the very system of skeptical language.

2 Among the contributors to The Reception, Emilio Mazza (2005, 182) stands out by recognizing that “Hume is not indifferent to the problems of translation”, but his historiographic agenda prevents him from pursuing Hume’s disparate comments on translation systematically.

3 Following convention, I cite Hume’s Treatise, both Enquiries and the Dialogues by book (where relevant), part, section and paragraph. I cite all other works by page number.

4 On the problematic status of Hume’s imagination, see Johnson 2012 (ch. 2). Although he takes his point of departure in Jorge Luis Borges and therefore doesn’t engage translation according to Hume himself, Johnson confronts Hume’s Treatise systematically, perhaps for the first time, with the question of translation.

5 This point could underwrite Andrew Chesterman’s suggestion that the genetic fallacy in translation studies “would take us back to Nazi or Stalinist science” (2014a, 84), but see also the debate to which Chesterman’s claim leads (Ricci 2014, 93; Wakabayashi 2014, 101; Susam-Saraeva 2014, 336; Chesterman 2014b, 350). Neither in history nor in principle, to be clear, am I suggesting that universality or translation escapes violence. In his philological notes doubling as survivor testimony, to cite only one harrowing example, Victor Klemperer (2013, 29) records the moment in 1933 when the Third Reich began to label publications in German by Jewish authors as “translations from Hebrew”. The alleged universality of translation, in sum, operates both an unconditional opening to alterity and a force of violent exclusion.

6 Kyle Conway (2012, 277) provides an illuminating example insofar as he entrusts “an empirical approach” with demarcating the entire field of “cultural translation” in which he intervenes.

7 Commentators rarely focus upon this instance and, when they do, tend to ignore multilingualism (Tweyman 1979, 266) or consider it irrelevant for determining the cause of a voice (Soles 1981, 113). The factors they consider more essential, however, cannot be attributed to the voice until a global translation project verifies that, in fact, everyone in the world received the “same” message.

8 See Hume (1932 [1], 16; 1994, xxxiv). On the curriculum in Hume’s day, see Stewart (2005, 18–24). On the later period in which Hume began acquiring Italian (1731–1734), see also 33, 37, 40.

9 On Hume’s attempts to cater to his own public, see Box (1990).

10 On these tensions, see Rundle (2012).

11 To name only a few, standardists include Jeffrey Wieand (1984, especially §III), Marc Hester (1979, 296, 302n7), James Shelley (1994, 442) and Susan Hahn (2013, 386, 388); judges include Peter Kivy (1967, 59; 2011, 111), Richard Shusterman (1989, 213, 215, 218), Jerrold Levinson (2002, 227, 232) and Amyas Merivale (2019, §11.2, §12.4). None of these commentators refer to the five opening paragraphs on language – and translation – in “Of the Standard of Taste”.

12 See Jones (1976a, 333–334), (1976b, 58), (1978, 121); Wieand (1984, 134–136); Shusterman (1989, 217–218); Levinson (2002, 229, 233, 234); Kivy (1967, 60–63), (2011, 113); Merivale (2019, §§11.3–4).

13 On translation and morality, see Hume (1994, 228). For context, see also Hume (1975b, 1.10 and 9.6; also 5.3 and 5.42), “A Dialogue” ¶2 and Appendix 1.21.

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Notes on contributors

D. J. S. Cross

D. J. S. Cross is Visiting Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at the University at Buffalo. He is the author of Deleuze and the Problem of Affect (2021). His most recent translations include Catherine Malabou’s Formations, Early Writings 1986–2003 (forthcoming), Pablo Oyarzun’s Between Celan and Heidegger (2022) and Marc Crépon’s The Trial of Hatred (2021).