Pragma

When I was angling to review this book, I was told
I could either write between six and eight hundred words or an ‘essay review’ of 2,500 words. I can make do with four: ‘buy it; read it’. What follows is therefore either flattery or padding.

The great beauty of The Philosophy of Translation is the contribution it makes to the understanding of translation as a pragmatic act. Although Damion Searls does not shy clear of translation theory, and the opening chapter is as good a summary as exists of the approaches (‘domesticating’ – yawn, ‘foreignizing’ – sigh) that have historically formed the field of translation studies, he is above all aware that translation happens, and that maybe thinking about the ways in which it does take place is more interesting than establishing a set of hard’n’fasts about how it should take place.

Although this is a largely affable and good-mannered book, it doesn’t pull its punches in making these assertions: Milan Kundera’s idea that translators should aim at ‘strict word-for-word replication’ is a ‘stupid claim’ (or one that is radically foreignizing, if those are the rose-coloured glasses you want to wear); David Bellos’s mischaracterisations of Proust are politely but firmly crunched. But Searls’s general approach – a good one – is to call on sympathetic witnesses (Look at this! Isn’t it interesting? Isn’t it fun?) as he makes his dislocating argument.

And it truly is dislocating. As someone trained in old-school translation studies, with the narrow gauge of my brain formed ...