The tyranny of translation

I’m struggling to translate a short summary of my book to Farsi today. I was just assuming it must be very easy, but it’s really getting torturous. Not because I have become so professionally and deeply absorbed in the world of English  language that I have lost my ability to write in my mother tongue; not yet perhaps! But I now understand that languages are not just simple linguistic means to construct meanings and express ideas; they can also shape the way we express ideas. I am rewriting the summary with a different logic! I’m not sure where I am heading for!

Perhaps the best time to detect what Derrida calls “aporias” is when we translate (?) If I have truly understood Derrida, meanings do not originate in the minds of language users but rather they are already taking place in a language. Looks to extreme and too deterministic however to me to agree with. But can I say the capacity of languages to shape our meanings must be something dynamic that evolves over time alongside the evolution of social relations? So, surely there is always something beyond the text.

It seems to me Farsi has not become familiar enough with the logic we use in English when expressing our sociological ideas, as Western sociology has been something alien to many professional English speakers. Mostly structured to reflect on what has been going on in post-Enlightenment Europe, sociology has developed its own languages that condition the meanings of many Iranian sociologists like me when expressing our ideas. So it fails to provide me with the right structure. It’s been quite a big challenge for me to develop a term for instance to express a relationship between the Self and the Other where the Self understands the Other and can work through shared practices/experiences and can find common denominations but is not required to dilute its identity. Identity becomes transversal not transcendental or egoistic. So far I have been using the term “accommodative” which does not fully satisfy me. (I’ll appreciate any suggestions).

Translation normally exacerbates the “Difference” and translation to a language with a different historical background slaughters the original meanings. When I’m reading the piece in Farsi, it’s not exactly what I said in English. Now let’s imagine how deconstructive can be the translation of the texts that are holey to many and how much space is available here in this process for power to influence. fortunately, the aporias can come to help and make Marx capable of using the classical economics when writing capital and “Allah Akbar” a slogan monopolized by fundamentalism can be heard by the pro-democracy movement in Iran (whether pragmatically or genuinely), democracy and human rights so many times abused by the US can still be a dream for the oppressed in Gaza.  How could we humans  really survive without our contradictions?!