Norns and Norms

We often hear that certain words or texts are “untranslatable.” At the root of this judgment lies an exaggerated respect for the native language, which must not be altered by contact with other languages. Against this superstition, it is here argued that translation is one of the great movers of change in language, and accomplishes this precisely through the rendering of difficult and unidiomatic texts. At another level, a purported ethics of translation urges that translations should be “foreignizing” rather than domesticating: this too evidences a normative idea of the integrity of the language and culture of the foreign text. Against such defences of purity, a sense of both language and translation as inherently hybrid, and literary language in particular as macaronic, should open to examination the historical individuality of encounters that every translation records. Examples from Western European languages indicate how this hybridity is to be understood.