The Translator’s Invisibility

This method of symptomatic reading can be illustrated with the translations of Freud’s texts for the Standard Edition, although the translations acquired such unimpeachable authority that we needed Bruno Bettelheim’s critique to become aware of the discontinuities. Bettelheim’s point is that the translations make Freud’s texts “appear to readers of English as abstract, depersonalized, highly theoretical, erudite, and mechanized—in short, ‘scientific’—statements about the strange and very complex workings of our mind” (Bettelheim 1988:5). Bettelheim seems to assume that a close examination of Freud’s German is necessary to detect the translators’ scientistic strategy, but the fact is that his point can be demonstrated with no more than a careful reading of the English text. Bettelheim argues, for example, that in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1960), the term “parapraxis” reveals the scientism of the translation because it is used to render a rather simple German word, Fehlleistungen, which Bettelheim himself prefers to translate as “faulty achievement” (Bettelheim 1983:87). Yet the translator’s strategy may also be glimpsed through certain peculiarities in the diction of the translated text:

I now return to the forgetting of names. So far we have not exhaustively considered either the case-material or the motives behind it. As this is exactly the kind of parapraxis that I can from time to time observe abundantly in myself, I am at no loss for examples. The mild attacks of migraine from which I still suffer usually announce themselves hours in advance by my forgetting names, and at the height of these attacks, during which I am not forced to abandon my work, it frequently happens that all proper names go out of my head.

(Freud 1960:21)

The diction of much of this passage is so simple and common (“forgetting”), even colloquial (“go out of my head”), that “parapraxis” represents a conspicuous difference, an inconsistency in word choice which exposes the translation process. The {26} inconsistency is underscored not only by Freud’s heavy reliance on anecdotal, “everyday” examples, some—as above—taken from his own experience, but also by a footnote added to a later edition of the German text and included in the English translation: “This book is of an entirely popular character; it merely aims, by an accumulation of examples, at paving the way for the necessary assumption of unconscious yet operative mental processes, and it avoids all theoretical considerations on the nature of the unconscious” (Freud 1960:272n.). James Strachey himself unwittingly called attention to the inconsistent diction in his preface to Alan Tyson’s translation, where he felt it necessary to provide a rationale for the use of “parapraxis”: “In German ‘Fehlleistung,’ ‘faulty function.’ It is a curious fact that before Freud wrote this book the general concept seems not to have existed in psychology, and in English a new word had to be invented to cover it” (Freud 1960:viiin.). It can of course be objected (against Bettelheim) that the mixture of specialized scientific terms and commonly used diction is characteristic of Freud’s German, and therefore (against me) that the English translation in itself cannot be the basis for an account of the translators’ strategy. Yet although I am very much in agreement with the first point, the second weakens when we realize that even a comparison between the English versions of key Freudian terms easily demonstrates the inconsistency in kinds of diction I have located in the translated passage: “id” vs. “unconscious”; “cathexis” vs. “charge,” or “energy”; “libidinal” vs. “sexual.”