And the Books Were Opened

Dreyer and Derrida in Translation

Abstract

Translation theory has long wrestled with notions of ‘original’ and ‘supplement’, where a translator strives to carry across some sense of meaning from one language to another.  Deconstruction, with its multiplicity of signification would appear to complicate such a task. This article, investigating possibilities of deconstructive translation, works also with the inherent impossibilities of translation, through intensifying distances between languages and media, prompted by a citation by deconstructive literary critic and cultural theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak from a discussion on the edges of language and self or “selvedges”.

Citing any text as translation of another predicts that one has been intimately, carefully, and rigorously worked through and that something has been transposed and transported from one language to another, augmenting and ensuring the survival of a text. Reading Carl-Theodor Dreyer’s 1927 silent film The Passion of Joan of Arc (Dreyer 1999)as translation of  Jacques Derrida’s text  ‘A Silkworm of One’s Own: Points of View Stitched on the Other Veil’ (Derrida 2001)  would appear to operate at an impossible spatio-temporal distance from the careful workings called for in translation. This article, through location of moments of intensity and similarities in poetic approach threading between Dreyer and Derrida, questions this distance, through an interweaving of languages from the multi-cultural background of its writer. Translations, unless otherwise stated, are my own.