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Translation and transference — although these two concepts have acquired different meanings in modern English specific to the contexts of language and psychoanalysis, they can be traced back etymologically to the same Latin roots — the past participle of transferre being translatus, meaning bear/borne — and to the Greek metaphor.[2] These concepts evoke motion, direction — not simply bearing or carrying as one does a child or a burden, but carrying that something across, relocating it somewhere tangential, somewhere new. Motion intimates that translation and transference can be theorized both as metaphor and metonymy, as an interstice of the two, not a “mere representation… but [also] a continuation, as derived metonymically from the past… and metonymically related too to the interpretive discourse that combats it” (Chase, p. 218). This article charts parallel developments in translation studies and psychoanalysis, relating the concept of transference at each of the successive psychoanalytic ports of Freud, Lacan, Deleuze and Guattari, and Jung with a corresponding view of translation, and concludes by highlighting the theoretical potential that is generated by the paradoxically violent yet potentially healing nature of these types of uprootings.

Transference is the Fundament, the foundational and fundamental concept in Freudian psychoanalysis:

The enormous importance that Freud attached to the transference phenomenon became clear to me at our first personal meeting in 1907. After a conversation lasting many hours there came a pause. Suddenly he asked me out of the blue, 'And what do you think about the transference?' I replied with the deepest conviction that it was the alpha and omega of the analytical method, whereupon he said, 'Then you have grasped the main thing.'

Jung, p. 8

Introduced already in Freud and Breuer's 1895 Studies on Hysteria,[3] the concept serves as grand finale to Freud's concluding essay “Psychotherapy of Hysteria,” where he describes it as playing “an undesirably large part in the carrying out of cathartic analyses such as these” (S.E. II, p. 301). Freud soon found this mésalliance, this “false connection” or disruption between the patient and physician, to be an inevitable and necessary part of treatment. The war-like rhetoric of his 1912 essay “The Dynamics of the Transference”[4] suggests that the “great annoyance” to which he confesses in the earlier essay[5] has not in the least abated. Indeed, the rhetoric and the annoyance do not abate during the course of Freud's career, as can be seen in such passages as, from the 27th lecture on transference in the Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis:

It is a battle between two forces of which one has succeeded in coming to the level of the preconscious and conscious part of the mind, while the other has been confined on the unconscious level. That is why the conflict can never have a final outcome one way or the other; the antagonists meet each other as little as the whale and the polar bear in the well-known story.

S.E. XVI, p. 440, italics added

We have succeeded in revivifying the old battle of the repression again.

S.E. XVI, p. 445, italics added

The new fact which we are thus unwillingly compelled to recognize we call TRANSFERENCE.

S.E. XVI, p. 449, italics added

and from the 1937 essay “Analysis Terminable and Interminable”:

It would scarcely be surprising if constant pre-occupation with all the repressed impulses which struggle for freedom in the human mind should sometimes cause all the instinctual demands which have hitherto been restrained to be violently awakened in the analyst himself. These are 'dangers of analysis', threatening not the passive but the active partner in the analytic situation, and it is our duty to face them.

S.E., XXIII, p. 251, italics added

The rebellious over-compensation of the male produces one of the strongest transference-resistances.

S.E., XXIII, p. 254, italics added

Freud's understanding of transference, with its subtle implications of mastery in servitude, has interesting parallels with the more traditional, Proust's grandmother-type of attitude towards translating.[6] Just as for Freud transference is not only possible but inevitable, so, according to Proust's grandmother, is translation. How else could she read the Odyssey or The Thousand and One Nights if they had not been translated into a language she knew? (ibid., p. 2) Just as Freud could only imagine one final solution to the mystery of a patient's ailments, so too was Proust's grandmother only prepared to recognize one translation of her favorite works, the one from her childhood in which the names and titles were not deformed. (ibid., p. 1) And just as Freudian analysis unleashes a dreadful force in order to have it recognized and then mastered into new insights of the past, so too does the traditional translator in translating go to the well, wrestle its demons and, in an act of mastery, produce an authoritative view of the original. Here the translator functions more as patient than doctor, theoretically the center of attention like the patient, but forced by the process into taking a backseat to the past, to the original. While the translator remains invisible,[7] a handmaiden to the original, the translation is fetishized by the reader, becoming the new and implicitly accepted view of that past. An example of such a translator/patient would be Norman Shapiro, cited in Venuti as saying, “Certainly my ego and personality are involved in translating, and yet I have to try to stay faithful to the basic text in such a way that my own personality doesn't show” (p. 8). Shapiro's typically traditional stance is comparable to Dora et al's involvement in Freudian analysis. He feels himself to be, as Freud's patients were, in a position of operating according to an imposed goal, that of establishing a “faithfulness” to the past in such a way that would account for, and some have argued in the case of Dora subsume,[8] present realities.

These rather positivist formulations of transference and translation were to find revision at different historical junctures in the development of their respective disciplines. American psychoanalysis and especially ego psychology continued very much within Freud's framework with respect to transference, and it was this trend which was to draw the wrath of Lacan. Using Thomas Szasz's musings on the crisis in analysis at that time as a point of departure, Lacan particularly objects to Szasz's understanding of transference :

It is quite striking that an author, who is indeed one of the most highly regarded in his circle […] should regard the transference as nothing more than a defense on the part of the psycho-analyst, and should arrive at the following conclusion — the transference is the pivot on which the entire structure of psycho-analytic treatment rests. [9]

p. 132, italics in original

What Lacan finds striking about this Freudian formulation is that it rests on an assumption of the integrity of the analyst (p. 137), that it implies “the non-recognition of the illusory effects of the transference which led in ego psychology to the shoring up of the analyst's power” (Gallop, p. 306). Lacan is not disagreeing that transference is an essential phenomenon in psychoanalysis (p. 231), but rather than as a pivot,[10] in his model of psychoanalysis as a process of signification, transference is seen as a manifestation of the unconscious that results from interaction between two Cartesian subjects of whom one is held to be an S.s.S., a sujet supposé savoir : “As soon as the subject who is supposed to know exists somewhere… there is transference” (p. 232). Further, “if… by opening up the dialectic of the transference, we must establish the notion of the Other with a capital O as being the locus of the deployment of speech… it must be posited that, produced as it is by an animal at the mercy of language, man's desire is the desire of the Other” (1977, p. 264). For example, in the case of Anna O., Lacan interprets Anna's desire for Breuer and her nervous pregnancy as reflecting not Anna's but Breuer's desire (pp. 157-58).[11]

While one might at first be tempted to ally Lacan's “the unconscious is structured like a language” semiotics with the equivalence-oriented Universalientheorie of tertium comparationis, an examination of the consequences of Lacan's position for translation places him squarely against the linguists. Lacan's reworking of transference asks us to consider whose desire is at stake in translation. Because it is only through the Other that desire is revealed, translation is revalued as not only an important but a crucial, life-giving activity.[12] At this point, it is appropriate to address the rather polemical questions that Harold Bloom, drawing on Jean Laplanche, raises in “Reading Freud: Transference, Taboo, and Truth”:

Why should it be genuinely therapeutic to generate an illusive relationship merely in order to dissipate it? Is there any analogue available to us that might illuminate so odd a transaction? How has psychoanalysis won social acceptance of so knowing an illusion, of so imaginary and consciously deceptive a false connection?

p. 309

Bloom finds an analogue with “Totem and Taboo”; his hypothesis —that transference is a version of taboo and the analyst a version of totemism (p. 313) and, therefore, the forces which threaten the analyst are “less those of Eros than of Thanatos, for they are the forces, now internalized, that destroyed the totem-father” (pp. 326-27). Lacan makes a similar leap when he points to the danger in analysis that the analyst, as Other, will be deceived (p. 133), drawing on the same section of Freud that Bloom does, the final words of “The Dynamics of the Transference”, in absentia, in effigie (Lacan, p. 254; Bloom, p. 323). However, instead of “for in the last resort no one can be slain in absentia or in effigie”[13], we find in Lacan (or better said, Sheridan's rendering of Lacan):

We should point out here, then, something that is always avoided, which Freud articulates, and which is not an excuse, but the reason of the transference, namely, that nothing can be attained in absentia, in effigie. This means that the transference is not, of its nature, the shadow of something that was once alive. On the contrary, the subject, in so far as he is subjected to the desire of the analyst, desires to betray him for this subjection, by making the analyst love him, by offering of himself that essential duplicity that is love. The transference effect is that effect of deception in so far as it is repeated in the present here and now.

p. 254, italics added

Lacan's Fehlleistung[14] leads us to ask why the reason for transference is attained in slaying. Is not much more at stake than tradutore, tradditore? Is it not what deconstructionists argue is attained by a translation — the sur-vival of the translation?[15] A translation, like Valery's text (which is ashes until the reader sparks it with her reading) and Lacan's subject (pp. 203-15), is founded in alienation and cannot be generated by itself:

If the young subject can practice this game of fort-da, it is precisely because he does not practice it at all, for no subject can grasp this radical articulation. He practices it with the help of a small bobbin, that is to say, with the objet a. The function of the exercise with this object refers to an alienation, and not to some supposed mastery, which is difficult to imagine being increased in an endless repetition, whereas the endless repetition that is in question reveals the radical vacillation of the subject.

Lacan, p. 239

Thus, it should not surprise Bloom that it is genuinely therapeutic to generate an illusive relationship merely in order to dissipate it. He should realize that it is not a matter of mastery but of alienation, of vacillation, and that without dissipation, generation is not possible.

To return to our first model of translator as patient, following from a Lacanian perspective the original author becomes an S.s.S. and the translation process a revealing of, among other things, the original's unconscious. As Lacanian transference “is a phenomenon in which subject and psycho-analyst are both included,… (t)o divide it in terms of transference and counter-transference… is never more than a way of avoiding the essence of the matter” (p. 231).[16] Whether the translator is analyst or analysand becomes immaterial because the interaction of the translating process will necessarily reveal both the unconscious of the translator and of the original. What are the consequences for the translator of such revelation? How does a translator function with this ambivalence? For Isabelle Garma-Berman, an “original bilingual” who learned both French and Spanish at the same time, it is a way of life :

Dans le cas du bilingue (dans le cas d'un bilinguisme originel), à être possédé par deux langues (deux langues qui n'ont évidemment pas le même statut), il est placé vis-à-vis de la traduction dans une relation de distance et de difficulté (car il lui manque l'illusion d'étrangeté de la langue étrangère). Pourtant cette relation s'accompagne d'une familiarité particulière avec l'acte de traduire. Le bilingue en 'sait long' sur le passage d'une langue à une autre, sur la différence abolie et constamment réaffirmée de ces langues. Expérience qui semble le double, l'image inversée de celle du traducteur mais à laquelle manque évidemment la 'pulsion de traduction' qui s'enracine plutôt dans l'étrangeté familière de la langue à traduire. C'est ainsi que, soumise à cette expérience de la traduction des Sept Fous de Roberto Arlt, je me sentais plus traduisante que traductrice.

p. 104, italics added

Far from being in an authorial position when translating, Garma-Berman rather feels herself to be what is translated. She is always already in translation, there is no “before” to translation for her: “Et c'est dans cette traduisante que s'est effectuée la lecture du livre, une lecture-de-traduction… Ce n'est pas une lecture critique ou une lecture interprétative. Dans ce lire-pour-traduire, on est déjà dans la traduction, pas du tout 'avant' elle” (p. 104). Being in this state of already having been translated, she approaches the reading of a text to be translated with each reading a further act of translation. These texts, these readings, serve for her the function of Freud's grandson's bobbin. They are her objet a and translation a fort/da game, not one of mastery, but an endlessly repeated exercise which reveals the radical vacillation of the subject in language.

This essentially Lacanian model also allows for greater explanatory power vis-à-vis the experience of Proust's grandmother qua reader. Whereas in Freud's conception of transference we were limited to focusing on the translator, Lacan's more comprehensive model allows us to turn our attention to the process of reading a translation. The reader who remains loyal to the translator from her childhood views that translator, from a Lacanian perspective, as an S.s.S. and just as those names and titles becomes hers, so too the translator's desire. Confronted with a new, different translation, she could only accept it by “transferring” her allegiances, that is, by renouncing her own desire, which is really the desire of the first translator — not an ordeal the old lady is likely to inflict upon herself.

A further refashioning of psychoanalysis is the schizo-analysis of Felix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze.[17] Although Guattari initially had a “friendly and attentive rapport with [Lacan] during the first years” (Guattari, p. 8), in the course of his training at the clinic of La Borde, he “learned about psychosis and the impact that institutional work could have on it” (ibid., p. 187) and became increasingly convinced that Lacanian theory simply did not measure up in the non-authoritarian clinical setting : “the truth is completely different and access to neurosis, psychosis and perversion requires other routes” (ibid, p. 204). The focus of critique became the individual focus of the Lacanian approach:

psychoanalysis of the Lacanian stamp with its esoteric, pretentious character, cut off from all apprehension of the terrain of psychopathology entertains the idea that only an individual treatment allows access to the “symbolic order” by transcendent routes of interpretation and transference.

ibid., p. 204

Thus seen, transference is, along with interpretation and familialism, one of the tools of psychoanalytic reductivism :

The rule of the game is that everything that comes up is to be reduced in terms of interpretation and mommy-daddy images; one need only proceed to the ultimate reduction of the signifying batter itself, which must henceforth function with a single term: the silence of the analyst, against which all sorts of questions are to lean.

ibid., p. 177

The solution which Deleuze and Guattari propose to counter these reductivist tendencies is a revisioning of the psyche as “resultant of multiple and heterogeneous components” (ibid., 204), hence their interest in schizophrenia. It offers them a way out of the endless Oedipal narrative that they see psychoanalysis having become (cf. Deleuze, p. 85; Guattari, pp. 79-80). Picking up on the unease or discontent (Unbehagen) that Freud himself felt towards the end of his career: “something is amiss in psychoanalysis, something is stalled. Psychoanalysis is becoming, Freud thought, an endless narrative, an endless treatment that leads nowhere” (Deleuze, quoted in Guattari, p. 79), Deleuze and Guattari perform their own return to Freud. Unlike Lacan, however, they find that the psyche:

engages, assuredly, the register of language, but also non-verbal means of communication, relations of architectural space, ethological behaviors, economic status, social relations at all levels, and still more fundamentally, ethical and aesthetic aspirations.

Guattari, p. 204

In the case of Schreber, for example:

it hardly matters whether we call him a paranoid or a schizophrenic. (His memoirs) contain a kind of racial, racist, historical raving. Schreber raves about continents, cultures, races. It is a surprising delirium, with a political, historical, cultural content.… The psychoanalysts tell us that the father is important precisely because Schreber doesn't talk about him. We reply that we have never seen a schizophrenic delirium that is not firstly about race, racism, politics, that does not begin in all directions from history, that does not involve culture, that does not speak of continents, kingdoms, and so forth. We state that the problem of delirium is not connected to the family.… The real problem of delirium lies in the extraordinary transitions from a pole which we could define as reactionary or even fascist — statements like “I belong to a superior race” appear in all paranoid deliriums — to a revolutionary pole.

Deleuze, quoted in Guattari, pp. 80-81

The kind of transference possible in this new, revolutionarily-oriented psychoanalysis is “a transfer of the analytical function” (Guattari, p. 91). No longer “a churn used to cream the reality of desire, (which) makes the subject sink in a dizziness of abolition” (ibid., 177), this transfer is “literally a cry, a kind of verbal slip, which interprets the alienation, not of the schizophrenic himself, but of the (others)” (ibid., p. 91).[18] The schizophrenic, thus seen, is the hysterical symptom of the capitalist body, whose transfer manifests not only the political, social and historical desires of the culture but also its dis-eases.

What potential models, then, does schizophrenic transfer offer for translation? Venuti, for example, sees himself as translating very much in the Deleuze and Guattarian spirit:

My translations of De Angelis's poetry obviously can never be completely free of English and the linguistic and cultural constraints which it imposes on poetry and translation; that line of escape would preempt any translation and is no more than a capitulation to the major language, a political defeat. The point is rather that my translations resist the hegemony of transparent discourse in English-language culture, and they do this from within, by deterritorializing the target language itself, questioning its major cultural status by using it as the vehicle for ideas and discursive techniques which remain minor in it, which it excludes.

pp. 305-06

Similarly, Barbara Godard sees translation as an opportunity for feminist emancipation, a way of “transform(ing) scientific discourse and its poetics of transparency” (p. 88). Attacking theories of translation based on equivalency for ignoring “the extreme difficulty in translating meaning because of the importance of co-textual and contextual relationships” (p. 91), she sees the potential of translation lying in the attention that can be drawn to cultural, hegemonic realities, and their unstated, unconscious norms: translation is “production, not reproduction”; it “makes visible the place of women's exploitation by discourse” (p. 90). Just as the schizophrenic speaks the repressed political, so too does translation, or at least it has the potential to do so:

A translated text should be the site where a different culture emerges, where a reader gets a glimpse of a cultural other, and resistancy, a translation strategy based on an aesthetic of discontinuity, can best preserve that difference, that otherness, by reminding the reader of the gains and losses in the translation process and the unbridgeable gaps between culture.

Venuti, p. 306

Translation that does not realize its political potential, such as that of Shapiro, is thus akin to catatonic schizophrenia, “a secondary state, brought about by a society which medicalizes schizophrenia, blocks it off and turns it in upon itself” (Harland, p. 175). However, just as “the schizophrenic still has the essential capacity of being able to let go and give himself up to the motion and multiplying and machine-like force of meaning” (ibid., p. 175), so too does translation.

The final revisioning of transference to be discussed here is that of Carl Jung, which in its critique of Freud's attention to the individual can be seen to parallel Deleuze and Guattari's of Lacan. However, whereas Deleuze and Guattari focus on post/modern, late-capitalist consumer society, Jung's concern is more universal:

Freud, as we know, observes the transference problem from the standpoint of a personalistic psychology and thus overlooks the very essence of the transference — the collective contents of an archetypal nature. The reason for this is his notoriously negative attitude to the psychic reality of archetypal images, which he dismisses as 'illusion.'… My handling of the transference problem, in contrast to Freud's, includes the archetypal aspect and thus gives rise to a totally different picture. Freud's rational treatment of the problem is quite logical as far as his purely personalistic premises go, but both in theory and in practice they do not go far enough, since they fail to do justice to the obvious admixture of archetypal data.

p. 21, no 34

Thus, Jung shows how analogous the patient/analyst bond is to both the bonds of alchemy, such as the “royal marriage” of chemicals signifying the meeting or collision of opposites, and those typical of tribal societies, such as the rules governing kinship marriage. Transference for him is a protracted social drama, and the symbolism that emerges during analysis an indicator of where the patient's unconscious locates itself during this process of transformation. For example, his interpretation of a patient's dream about “a beautiful little child, a girl of six months,… playing in the kitchen with her grandparents and myself, her mother” (p. 19) is that the child is a symbol of the self. The precise age of the child “made me ask the dreamer to look in her notes to see what had happened in the unconscious six months earlier” (p. 20), at which point he discovers she had done some paintings with symbolic content:

The serpent represents the hissing ascent of Kundalini, and in the corresponding yoga this marks the first moment in a process which ends with deification of the divine Self, the syzygy of Shiva and Shakti. It is obviously the moment of symbolical conception.… This case, and more particularly the last image, is a classical example of the kind of symbolism which marks the onset of the transference.

p. 21

However obvious this symbolism might or might not appear, the technique is more typical to psychoanalysis than one might expect, as the following example illustrates:

A woman arrives at a consultation.… (She) continues: 'I was in the Resistance.… I was a go-between.' The doctor asks her to explain. 'Well, yes, don't you understand, doctor? I went to a café and I asked, for example, is there something for René? I would be given a letter to pass on.' The doctor hears “René”; he wakes up: 'Why do you say, “René”?' It's the first time he asks a question. Up to that point, she was speaking about the metro, Hiroshima, Vietnam, of the effect all that had on her body, the need to cry about it. But the doctor only asks: 'Wait, wait, “René”… what does “René” mean to you?' René - someone who is reborn (re-né).… The Resistance means nothing to the doctor; but renaissance, this fits into a universal schema, the archetype: 'You want to be reborn.' The doctor gets his bearing, at last he's on track. And he gets her to talk about her mother and father.

Deleuze, quoted in Guattari, p. 71

While Deleuze and Guattari may be justified in this attack on the familial nature of psychoanalysis, their project of schizo-analysis is not without its own blindspot:

If our book has a meaning, it is that we have reached a stage where many people feel the psychoanalytic machine no longer works, where a whole generation is getting fed up with all-purpose schemas — Oedipus and castration, imaginary and symbolic —which systematically efface the social, political and cultural contents of any psychic disturbance.

Guattari, p. 72, italics added

Their disillusionment with all-purpose schemas in general causes them to lose sight of the potential understanding of collective phenomena that Jung's archetypal approach provides. The final section of the article takes rhetorical violence as its example in order to indicate this potential for translation studies.

An archetypal element in the discussions of transference recounted thus far, but conspicuously absent in Jung, is that of ritual stylistic violence. From Freud's war-like rhetoric to Deleuze and Guattari's revolutions, one doesn't so much chart the theorizings on transference as chronicle its battles. Derrida's purportedly playful punning on tranche-fert, tranche being the analysis a practicing analyst will sometimes do with a colleague, reverberates with the violence of chopping and slicing. Deleuze and Guattari, in self-reflexively addressing the ethico-political roots of their brand of analysis and its call for rupture and revolution, target the hostile nature of psychoanalysis:

The fact is that psychoanalysis talks a lot about the unconscious — it even discovered it. But in practice, it always diminishes, destroys and exorcises it. The unconscious is understood as a negative, it's the enemy.… We say, on the contrary: you haven't got hold of the unconscious, you never get hold of it, it is not an 'it was' in place of which the 'I' must come.

Deleuze, pp. 77-78, italics added

Repression itself is an aggressive, controlling act[19] expressing the desire to forcibly distance one's consciousness from that which would cause it anxiety or discomfort.

Seeking an explanation for aggressivity, one could turn to Lacan, where one would find it linked with the imagos of the fragmented body (1977, p. 11):

It is in this erotic relation, in which the human individual fixes upon himself an image that alienates him from himself, that are to be found the energy and the form on which this organization of the passions that he will call his ego is based.

p. 19

Thus seen, the aggressive discourse on transference simply reflects its inherent alienating qualities, its metonymic otherness. One's desire is not one's own, and neither is one's language. Translation merely manifests this otherness and is thus a continuation of the violence inherent in the post-structural view of language.[20]

However, translation is metaphor as well as metonymy. And just as metonymy points to disjunction, so does metaphor to bridging. Lacan's focus on otherness and the essential duplicity of love is in marked contrast to Jung's on the healing power of the symbols of coniunctio. I have chosen to end with Jung because his model of transference is a profoundly humane one for which there is only a utopian equivalent in translation studies and because, written in 1945 in Switzerland, it is particularly sensitive to cultural manifestations of aggressivity and, thus, particularly timely:

We live today in a time of confusion and disintegration. Everything is in the melting pot. As is usual in such circumstances, unconscious contents thrust forward to the very borders of consciousness for the purpose of compensating the crisis in which it finds itself. It is therefore well worth our while to examine all such borderline phenomena with the greatest care, however obscure they seem, with a view to discovering the seeds of new and potential orders. The transference phenomenon is without doubt one of the most important syndromes in the process of individuation; its wealth of meanings goes far beyond mere personal likes and dislikes. By virtue of its collective contents and symbols it transcends the individual personality and extends into the social sphere, reminding us of those higher human relationships which are so painfully absent in our present social order, or rather disorder.

pp. 160-161

Translation, like transference, is a borderline phenomenon of great cultural significance, and the translator an archetypal liminal figure thrust forward to the borders of cultural consciousness as compensation for the repeated crises brought on in part by the metonymic aggressivity inherent in language. What Jung argues of the psyche, I would argue holds for the translator as well:

It is as though the psyche were the indispensable instrument in the reorganization of a civilized community as opposed to the collectivities which are so much in favour today, with their aggregations of half-baked mass-men. This type of organization has a meaning only if the human material it purports to organize is good for something. But the mass-man is good for nothing — he is a mere particle that has forgotten what it is to be human and has lost its soul. What our world lacks is the psychic connection; and no clique, no community of interests, no political party, and no State will ever be able to replace this.

p. 161, italics in original

Translation by definition offers a form of intercultural connection. Moreover, by providing hermeneutic distance to its practitioners, it offers them a way of refocusing on their own horizons, of reappraising their psychic connections with the cultures to be bridged, of avoiding succumbing to the temptations of ideology and the power discourse.[21] In instigating this constant reassessing and revaluing, translation acts to prevent its practitioners from becoming “half-baked mass-men,” for it encourages, even challenges them to approach culture on its own terms. Again, even if not all are up to its challenge, from the Jungian perspective its liminal status nevertheless serves an important compensatory function for the cultural unconscious.

Necessitated by its own impossibility, a translation both is and is not the original text in the target culture, neither a mere representation, nor a metonymic continuation, but both simultaneously. However imperfect, I would prefer to see it as a form of cultural coniunctio, of negotiating cultures and finding compromises between them. A comparison with the developments in theorizing psychoanalytic transference has highlighted different translational strategies, from the self-effacing to the alienated, the politically radical and the harmoniously bridging. What has emerged is a plurality of possibilities sliding from metaphor to metonymy and back again, possibilities which are as theoretically suggestive in terms of providing models of intercultural interaction as the models of transference are in understanding interpersonal interaction:

The passing moment can thus endure the pressure of centuries and preserve itself intact, remaining forever the same 'here and now.' You need only know how to extract that 'here and now' from the soil of Time without harming its roots, or it will wither and die.

Mandelstam, p. 58