Remains. On Survivance in Translation and Literary Criticism
Remains. On Survivance in Translation and Literary Criticism

Summary/Abstract: The article proposes a reading of Jacques Derrida’s concept of “remains”as a way of approaching the question of being true to the original both in translationand in critical readings of texts that seem to assume the unchangeable presence of theirobjects of attentiveness. Although I mainly concentrate on the issues of translation, theaffinities between the two spheres of literary interest are only too obvious, and I graduallyapproach them in this paper through Derrida’s reading of what seems to be an Alaskancase of coffining of the dead. This coffining, as way of treating remains, is rhetoricallyrelated to reading and interpretation, and also to translation, as a tribute to what is leftbehind, unspoken or untranslated. What I attempt to bring to the fore in this paper are thecomplexities and intricacies involved in linguistic and artistic mythologies of presentingand articulating the world as simply present and living, at the cost of discursively coffiningwhat remains.

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