Battle for truth and beauty: the agon of translation
Battle for truth and beauty: the agon of translation

Summary/Abstract: Kenneth Burke no doubt offered one of the most profound insights into the discrete structural and functioning principles of language considerd as a reality of the highest importance for humanity, namely as symbolic action. Language thus implies by its very nature two fields: scientism and dramatism. The first points to language as definition, the latter to language as action, but both are self-referentially implied irresistibly by each other (since a definition itself is an action, and any action is based on a process whereby boundary conditions are set for defining the reality in which the action is to take place). In the context of creativity studies, we hereby propose a double incursion: 1) an expedition into the very foundations of Burke’s system of thought, with emphasis on the striking similarities that can be established between his notion of dramatistic symbolicity and Alfred Korzybski’s concept of abstractiveness as a potentially infinite chain (of event, perception, description, conclusion, creed, action-as-new-event); 2) an exploration of the views on translation such as expressed starting with Cicero and ending with 20th century authors who dealt with this issue, thus adding contribution after contribution to a research field that is quickly growing, but seems to move in a vicious circle between the translation school embracing the word-for-word method, that adopting the sense-for-sense strategy, and those advocating the middle path between the two in rendering texts from one language into another. (In this sense, the best and most comprehensive source available to date in which this veritable agon of translation is reflected is Weissbort and Eyssteinsson’s edition: Translation – theory and practice: a historical reader; first published in 2006 – a veritable treasure house for the field of translation studies, a book that will most likely be recognized as the “bible” of the field). Our main purpose is thus namely to ask the essential question: is there a way out? Is there a practicable solution when dealing with translation from any language into any other, since any verbal language is first and foremost a symbolic action? Can the /word-for-word versus sense-forsense/ conceptual loop be surpassed? And most importantly: can Burke’s dramatistic approach and Korzybski’s non- Aristotelian approach help us in any way in such an attempt? The reader is invited to assess just that by perusing the present paper that finally proposes “quantum gravity” linguistics as the possible workable solution.

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