The ecological force and function of literary translation

This article proposes: that translation, with its peculiar combination of expanding consciousness and situational specificity, is an agent of ecological action; that translation institutes a process of ecological embedding which is relational rather than identitarian, vocative rather than accusative; that translation promotes a certain kind of ecological understanding which is developmental and mutational. All these issues are examined, and the guiding propositions pursued, through a sequence of interconnected inquiries: into the notions of idiolect and ‘alternity’, as handled by Steiner, into page-space as a modality of environmental inhabitation, into the force of situated presentness in translation, into the drawbacks of conservation, into the body’s translational indispensability. The application of this sequence of inquiries is then tested in a translation of Victor Hugo’s ‘Fenêtres ouvertes’ (L’Art d’être grand-père, 1877). In conclusion, the article argues that different dimensions of ecology can only find their fruitful connections and ramifications through transversal thinking, a function peculiar to translation. But this function must be properly capitalised upon, if translation is fully to realise itself as a model of ecological relating.