Translating foreign-language UFO reports and UFO reports in general

Copyright 2018, InterAmerica, Inc.

A  review of  the Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s translation of Jacques Derrida’s monumental Of Grammatology was slipped online by Bryan Sentes at Facebook.

The review by Geoffrey Bennington (Asa Griggs Candler Professor of French and Professor of Comparative Literature at Emory University in Georgia, United States, and Professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland) can be read here:

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/embarrassing-ourselves?htm_content=buffer262e9&utm_medium=social&utmsource=facebook.com
&utm_campaign=buffer#!

As you read, in the review, Professor Bennington is more incensed by Judith Butler’s contribution(s) in the Introduction, but doesn’t let Ms. Spivak off the hook either:

“Far from enhancing Derrida’s book or even reflecting the progress that has been made in understanding deconstruction since 1976, the Introduction, the Afterword, and — most importantly — the revisions to the translation all represent significant steps backward.

[And] the decision [to attempt a contemporaneous rendering] has produced an unfortunate result: the added Introduction is, as a matter of fact, riddled with vagueness, inaccuracies, misunderstandings, and plain errors.”

Bennington isn’t averse to translators or translations, as such, but does offer this to position his righteous indignation with Spivak’s new translation:

“Nor does it mean that Derrida could not complain (in the recent 1964-5 Heidegger course, for example), that a given mistranslation can transform the text into a bouillie pour les chats (p. 35) or, as the translator chose to render it, a pig’s breakfast.”

Okay, now that I placed most (all?) of you in the arms of Morpheus, let me make my point…

My pal Bryan loves this kind of ramshackle, academic, scholarly effusion. He’s addicted to it, and enlivened by it, even sustained by it. But it (such brilliant obfuscating “nonsense”) is outside the regular, daily mental confrontations that most intelligent humans contend with. It’s gilding the intellectual lily.

I am a Derrida fan boy, as some of you know. I’ve touted his maxim, “there is nothing outside of the text” a few times here (and elsewhere).

And Bryan reminded me, at the Facebook colloquy, that Derrida is “a tough cookie” which I know, so I present him with caution.

But taking Bennington’s criticism of Ms. Spivak (and Judith Butler) as an obdurate attempt to enshrine Derrida by attacking the few errant mistranslations of the ladies in question got my goat.

We can all get the gist (or try to) of Derrida’s thought and proposals, and we should salute the simplicity of his truth: “there is nothing outside of the text.”

This applies to my view(s) of how UFOs should be examined or studied.

I have, admittedly, insisted that UFO investigators (researchers) be forensic in their examination of UFO reports, looking for the minuscule clue that may put the reported sighting in an explained column.

But that doesn’t mean we have to translate foreign reports (or even messy home-grown reports) in a way that makes the report heavy-headed.

I was excoriated early on in my UFO endeavors for providing a slew of UFO accounts from media and other sources without dates for those accounts.

It was a cavalier stupidity on my part but, as it turns out (from my current perspective), dating UFO sightings seems to have little to do with what they are.

The essence of UFOs is not, it seems to me, to be dictated by when they are seen.

Ufologists will adamantly disagree and did when I produced a booklet, without dates, for their edification.

Now I accept that some sightings need time to help in the explanation as when Venus is mistaken for a UFO, for instance. But that is only date-related if one wants to determine if Venus was in the sky at the time of the sighting.

Otherwise, dating is superfluous and unnecessary pretty much.

We need the gist: something odd was seen, by a witness who is either delusional or keenly observant.

Mistranslating a word or two, such as bowl-like for saucer-like, doesn’t really get to the explanation.

It’s the “text” itself: something odd was seen by a witness. It flew or landed and beings – extraterrestre or semblable -- emerged, dressed in metal suits.

Translating “beings” correctly helps in explaining what the witness saw: an alien (extraterrestrial) or a fellow human. The translation is key here. The text “sacred” in this instance if we want to explain the particular UFO sighting.

But pressing the word “semblable” for a more accurate or different rendition by an ET believer or accepting it as it is, a definition of a being that seemed to be a fellow human goes to the heart of translation.

Bennington writes about Spivak’s use of reference rather than referral: “There might be good reason to translate renvoi here not as ‘reference,’ but as ‘referral,’ if only to avoid the specific sense that ‘reference’ has in the philosophy of language, where it is in any case ambiguous between the action or process of referring to something, and the something thus referred to.”  [Bold italics mine]

You see here that Bennington, like an ET believer, is pressing for his view, taking Ms. Spivak’s translation to task for not allowing his view to prevail.

(But what has Derrida to say about that? That’s the question, the point.)

Translating foreign or convoluted home-spun UFO reports are grist for translation, but the person translating has to be competent and objective as one can possibly be when it comes to translating another’s work.

Biases can’t enter the “translation” as is often the case in ufology, and biases in linguistic methodology are just as misaligned as those in the quaint UFO hobby.

The academic sport of clamoring for the head of those whose views differ from another has always been a taint in academia.

My pal Bryan thrives on it. Ufology lives for it.

But one has to be reserved when attacking someone as academically credentialed as Ms. Spivak, University Professor at Columbia (or Judith Butler, the Hannah Arendt Chair at the European Graduate School).

And one has to be wary of interpretations of UFO reports, especially those from outside one’s bailiwick.

If a brilliant a person as Geoffrey Bennington can go off half-cocked about a few allegedly mistranslated words in a book of 441 pages of them, most incomprehensible to mere mortals, what hope is there for the few cock-eyed ufologists who presume to speak for the enigmatic phenomenon and those who are acolytes of it?

RR