Jacques Derrida and „the sacred“ in translation
Jacques Derrida a pojem posvätného v preklade

Summary/Abstract: Only a part of Derrida’s philosophical articles deals with the topic of translation. However, his contribution to French thinking on translation is undeniable. Mainly he focuses on translation as a process and within this area he ponders limit possibilities and boundary translation situations: above the „relevance“ of translation, limits of traductibility and also the phenomena that can be denominated as „sacred“ in translation. Reading Derrida’s key essays on translation, such as Des Tours de Babel (Towers of Babel, 1984), Théologie de la traduction (Theology of Translation, 1985) and Qu‘est-ce qu’une traduction «relevante»? (What is a „relevant“ translation?, 1998) as well as some experimental texts probing the limits of traductibility, like the parallel texts Journal du bord/Survivre! (Bord log/Survive!, 1986) we composed the paper in order to delineate certain traits of Derrida’s „philosophy of translation“ and more importantly to show how he perceived „the sacred“ in the text and then in the original and translation, as he deems it in the scope of classic German philosophy and thinking of the literary critic Walter Benjamin. The second question to answer, which is closely bound with the term, is to what extent we can attribute the dimension of sacredness to the very process of translation in direct and also indirect sense. Direct sense means that we, along with Derrida, understand translation in three forms, as they were set by Roman Jakobson (Interlinguistic, intralinguistic ans intersemiotic). And maybe even more interesting is to note how is this phenomenon treated in figurative sense, that is to view translation as a transfer, a transaction, as any semantic operation that analyzes text and metaphorically interprets the world.

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