The translaborative case for a translational hermeneutics

Abstract

Abstract This paper takes the notion of translaboration as a stepping stone for an exploration of some of the recent debates about translational hermeneutics. In doing so, it aims to expand translaboration’s focus beyond concrete collaborations between multiple translators, or authors and translators, and to think about, and theorise, translaboration as a possible means of framing textual agents reading and writing each other within texts. The argument presented draws on both Hans-Georg Gadamer’s and Paul Ricoeur’s conceptions of the individual subject as interpretative agent, and of translation as an object of philosophical enquiry, and adopts the concept of a “hermeneutics of decipherment” (Maitland 2017, 38) as an alternative to dialogic models of understanding and translating. Similarly, the relationship between philosophical and translational hermeneutics is interrogated and recast as a translaborative endeavour rather than as an immediately reciprocal dialogue. Translaboration, this paper argues, thus also actively furthers the move away from what Blumczynski (2016, 29) calls “an arborescent epistemological paradigm” of interdisciplinarity and contributes to animating a transdisciplinarity that is fundamentally “rhizomatic” (ibid.; see Deleuze and Guattari 2004) in nature.