Untranslatables, intraduções and temporalities in Barbara Cassin and Augusto de Campos

Abstract

The debate surrounding translatability has recently been reignited by the publication of the Vocabulaire européen des philosophies : Dictionnaire des intraduisibles, under the auspices of Barbara Cassin. After all, it had become a truism to state that everything is always translatable. This paper scrutinises the notion of untranslatable in Cassin’s philosophy while also drawing insight from the parallel – originally suggested by Fernando Santoro – between Cassin’s untranslatables and Augusto de Campos’s “intraduções”, Campos’s well-known neologism from the 1970s. To what extent do Cassin’s untranslatables stem from a nostalgic notion of originality as completeness and “ground zero” of a given word? Are Cassin’s untranslatables undergirded by a logocentric, outdated notion of translation, as put forth, for example, by Lawrence Venuti? Can Campos’s “intraduções” shed light on Cassin’s untranslatables, both as results of translators’ interventions and as temporary translations caught between languages? How do “intraduções” and untranslatables fit into the temporality of a word? And, finally, does it make sense to speak of untranslatability today, or any word to this effect does a disservice to translation studies? These are the main questions that permeate this paper.