With a classic philosophical author such as Aristotle, Descartes, or
Kant one is often faced with a number of different translations of their key
works to choose between. While some readers will want to pick just one
translation, others will enjoy being able to consult two or three different
translations of the same work, even if they do not possess the linguistic skills
to assess their relative merits. By seeing how different translators have
rendered the same original text into English it is possible for the
mono-lingual reader to get a more rounded sense of the possibilities suggested
by the original text.

With more recent foreign-language
philosophers we are rarely afforded the luxury of multiple translations. The
commercial acquisition of potentially lucrative translation rights means that
in many cases we get just one translation with little hope of another in the
foreseeable future. Consequently there is a great responsibility on those who
make translations of recent European philosophical works to ‘get it right’
first time.

On the whole Gilles Deleuze has not
been served too badly by his translators. Although there will always be minor
points over which one might disagree or minor errors that might creep in, the
translations of Deleuze’s published books serve his readers well. It is
unfortunate that the same cannot be said for the translations of the two volumes
of his previously uncollected shorter writings that have come out recently.

In 2002 and 2003 Editions de Minuit
issued two volumes edited by David Lapoujade collecting together Deleuze’s
shorter pieces and interviews from 1953-1974 and 1975-1995. Both volumes have
now been translated into English and published by Semiotext(e). The first of
these volumes, Desert Islands, has already been reviewed by Alistair
Welchman for Metapsychology in issue 9:21, who comments on the
translation, "The critical apparatus is extremely patchy and the
translation sloppy and unreliable, especially on philosophical issues. I
counted sixteen translation worries in 25 pages, after which I lost count."
The present volume under review is the second of these volumes, Two Regimes
of Madness.

This volume (like its predecessor,
named after its opening piece) collects together Deleuze’s shorter works from
1975-1995. I shall not attempt to describe all of the contents, which inevitably
form a heterogeneous collection that span the full range of Deleuze’s wide
intellectual concerns. The period covered overlaps with Deleuze and Guattari’s A
Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze’s two books on cinema, and his book on Michel
Foucault, and the shorter pieces collected here reflect this. It also coincides
with Deleuze’s increasing international reputation and so there are a number of
prefaces to English and Italian translations of his works. There are also a
number of pieces dealing with political issues of the day and we shall return
to some of these shortly.

Although these may only be minor
pieces within Deleuze’s oeuvre, they will nevertheless be of great
interest to his existing readers. It is a great pity, then, that this volume
suffers from some major flaws. I shall focus on two. The first of these is
simply the quality of the translation. One hardly need know French at all in
order to be able to see the deficiencies. Here are a few examples. In replying
to an interview question about what he thought he was doing in A Thousand
Plateaus, Deleuze replies ‘Philosophie, rien que de la philosophie, au sens
traditionnel du mot’ (Deux régimes de fous (hereafter DRF) 163).
When quoting this text in the introduction to his own translation of Deleuze’s Essays
Critical and Clinical (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997),
Daniel Smith translates this as ‘philosophy, nothing but philosophy, in the
traditional sense of the word’ (p. xii). Indeed, how else could he have
translated it? In our volume we get instead ‘It’s just plain old philosophy’ (Two
Regimes of Madness (hereafter TRM) 176). This is not a translation;
it is paraphrase.

There are numerous examples of changes
in tense (e.g. ‘est toujours’ (DRF 187); ‘has always been’ (TRM
203)), changes in word order (e.g. ‘différence de nature, hétérogénéité entre
micro et macro’ (DRF 114); ‘heterogeneity, a difference in the nature
between micro and macro’ (TRM 124)), and changes in style (e.g. ‘Et la
situation n’était peut-être pas meilleure pour la répétition’ (DRF 281);
‘Repetition has perhaps fared no better’ (TRM 301)). While many of these
are trivial they are nevertheless unnecessary and inexplicable. They betray a
surprising level of indifference towards what is actually printed in the French
text. It almost seems as if there has been a deliberate policy to reject the
most obvious and natural English equivalents. For instance ‘multi-billion
dollar Western’ (TRM 333) stands in for ‘super-production d’Hollywood’ (DRF
311), when something like ‘Hollywood blockbuster’ would be closer to the mark.

Some of the texts in this volume have
been translated before. In the majority of cases I would recommend hunting down
the earlier translations rather than relying upon the ones in this volume. The
shorter prose pieces are on the whole done better than the interviews, however,
and it is in the interviews that some of the worst cases of paraphrase occur
(e.g. ‘La ritournelle, par exemple’ (DRF 356) becomes ‘How about the
ritornello?’ (TRM 381), while ‘attention’ (DRF 199) is turned
into ‘Hey, folks’ (TRM 215)). There seems to have been a deliberate
attempt to suppress Deleuze’s own style and to make him speak like a chatty
American. Christian Kerslake, reviewing this book in Radical Philosophy
138 (2006), 57-9, likens Deleuze’s new imposed persona to the Dude in The
Big Lebowski. I join him in saying that this volume needs to be
retranslated.

I now move on to the second major
flaw. The French edition is comprised of 62 texts, numbered in chronological
order. This volume has only 61 texts; one has been lost along the way. The
missing text is entitled ‘Grandeur de Yasser Arafat’, first published in the Revue
d’Etudes Palestiniennes in 1984. This is omitted without comment and the
subsequent texts are renumbered leaving no indication that something is
missing. At first glance this looks deeply suspicious. While there are a number
of other texts in the volume that touch on potentially sensitive political
issues, including on the plight of the Palestinians (e.g. DRF 179-84,
311-12; TRM 194-200, 333-4), the title alone of this missing text is
enough to make one consider the possibility of deliberate political censorship.
If the omission of this text was a deliberate editorial decision by either the
translators or the publishers then this is deeply disturbing. Thankfully the
text has been translated already by Timothy Murphy and published in the journal
Discourse 20/3 (1998), 30-33.

I have contacted Semiotext(e) to find
out more. Their reply explained the absence of this text as a production
mistake. While I have no reason to doubt their sincerity, the fact that the
only text lost in production was this one creates the impression
that more sinister forces might have been at work. If it was indeed merely the
consequence of a production mistake then this is an unfortunate impression. But
if so, such a production mistake, combined with the poor quality of the
translation, makes this a doubly flawed volume. Rather than a complete
translation, all we get is an incomplete paraphrase.

© 2006 John Sellars

John Sellars, Ph.D., is a Junior Research Fellow at Wolfson College,
Oxford.

Categories: Philosophical