Jose Ortega y Gasset::The misery and the splendor of translation
1.The misery
During a colloquium attended by professors and students from the College de France and other academic circles, someone spoke of the impossibility of translating certain German philosophers. Carrying the proposition further, he proposed a study that would determine the philosophers who could and those who could not be translated.
"This would be to suppose, with excessive conviction," I suggested," that there are philosophers and, more generally speaking, writers who can, in fact, be translated. Isn't that an illusion? Isn't the act of translating necessarily a utopian task? The truth is, I've become more and more convinced that everything man does is utopian. Although he is principally involved in trying to know , he never fully succeeds in knowing anything. When deciding what is fair, he inevitably falls into cunning. He thinks he loves and then discovers he only promised to. Don't misunderstand my words to be a satire on morals, as if I would criticize my colleagues because they don't do what they propose. My intention is, precisely, the opposite; rather than blame them for their failure, I would suggest that none of these things can be done, for they are impossible in their very essence, and they will always remain mere intention, vain aspiration, an invalid posture. Nature has simply endowed each creature with a specific program of actions he can execute satisfactorily. That's why it's so unusual for an animal to be sad. Only occasionally may something akin to be observed in a few higher species - the dog or the horse - and that's when they seem closest to us, seem most human. Perhaps nature, in the mysterious depths of the jungle, offers its most surprising spectacle- surprising because of its equivocal aspect - the melancholic orangutan. Animals are normally happy. We have been endowed with an opposite nature. Always melancholic, frantic, manic, men are ill-nurtured by all those illnesses Hippocrates called divine. And the reason for this is that human tasks are unrealizable.The destiny of Man - his privilege and honor - is never to achieve what he proposes, and to remain merely an intention, a living utopia. He is always marching toward failure, and even before entering the fray he already carries a wound in his temple.
