• Conrad's Mystic Writing Pad:Translation and the Unconscious Labor of the Text
• Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan (bio)

Translation has long been a generative concept for psychoanalytic theories, beginning with Freud's polysemic deployment of the German "Übersetzung" to denote diverse, albeit related terms like "translation," "transposition," "metaphor," and "transference," whose complex affinities of these terms were highlighted by Patrick J. Mahony in an inaugural essay on translation and psychoanalysis (1980/1987). Mahony intriguingly relates to translation as "a unified field concept which illustrates the interaction of intrasystemic, intersystemic and interpsychic phenomena" (p. 3), but he stops short of articulating the dynamics of this interaction, nor does he explore the relations between the textual and the psychic as they come to the fore in translation. The following discussion would offer one possible conceptualization of these relations through a literary prism, engaging with Freud's essay on the "mystic writing pad" (1925) as an interpretative model for a reading of three novels by Joseph Conrad. The distinctive commonality of these novels is, I suggest, a form of self-translation or mistranslation, which may yield some productive insights into the unconscious labor of the text.¹

The most recent and extended post-Freudian engagement with the nexus of translation and the unconscious has been offered by Jean Laplanche, whose early work, written in collaboration with Serge Leclaire (1972/1999), inaugurated a life-long project of recovering the "Copernican" thrust of the Freudian revolution by reformulating Freud's initial conception of the unconscious as the "drive for translation" [a traduire] [End Page 691] (Benjamin, 1992, p. 139). That-which-is-to-be-translated becomes, for Laplanche, the very definition of the unconscious, as originally presented by Freud in a letter to Fliess on December 6, 1896, where he equates repression with "a failure of translation" (Laplanche, 1992/1999c, p. 157). Laplanche's essays of the late 1980s and early 1990s discard much of the tradition of classical psychoanalysis, which he views as overly deterministic inasmuch as it conceives of the past as "containing the truth of" the present text, and of analytic work as a project of recovery (Laplanche, 1990/1992, p. 170). Psychoanalysis, he writes, "is not a translation but a de-translation, a dismantling and a reversion of the translation […] so as to permit a 'better' translation; that is to say one that is more complete, more comprehensive and less repressive" or "less symptomatic" (pp. 170–171). Undoing existing self-translations presented by the patient in his/her life, dreams, and symptoms, the analytic cure consists of a movement of "detranslation-retranslation" (p. 173; see also Laplanche, 1989; Laplanche, 1992/1999c; and, for a broader theoretical context, Laplanche, 1992/1999). Notably, Laplanche's reformulation of the unconscious as a traduire is still profoundly Freudian in its focus on the "double inscription" which characterizes the unconscious, and the "radical opacity" of the cogito to itself (Laplanche & Leclaire, 1972/1999, p. 227). This opacity is precisely what calls for the analytic work that "aims at bringing into relief the nodal points ('Knotenpunkte') in the patient's speech; points of intensity, of absence of intensity, lacunae, hollows" (p. 230), through which the "radical heterogeneity" of the unconscious finds expression (p. 232).

Translation theories have, for their part, taken up the concept of the unconscious mostly as a force to be reckoned with in the dynamics of the translator's work or the analysis of the translated text. Translational choices, which sometimes produce ambiguities or errors are, it is argued, neither accidental nor technical, but are often generated by the translator's unconscious relations with the source texts or with their authors (Frota, 2004; Basile, 2005; Quinney, 2004). Most comprehensively, Laurence Venuti (2002), a prominent theoretician of translation, takes up Lecercle's concept of "remainders" (1990) and relates it to the process and the product of translation. The "remainder," according to Lecercle, might be considered "the [End Page 692] linguistic equivalent of the Freudian unconscious, excluded or repressed by the rules of grammar, but trying to return in jokes, slips of the tongue, solecisms, and poetry" (Lecercle, 1990, p. 23). Venuti suggests that such linguistic effects that direct the reader's attention to the "utter heterogeneity...

• 康拉德的神秘书写板：翻译和文本的无意识劳动
• Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan（生物）

长期以来，翻译一直是心理分析理论的一个创生概念，始于弗洛伊德对德国“Übersetzung”的多义性展开，以表示不同但相互关联的术语，例如“翻译”，“换位”，“隐喻”和“转移”，它们具有相似的相似性Patrick J. Mahony在有关翻译和心理分析的第一篇论文（1980/1987）中强调了这些术语。Mahony有趣地将翻译称为“一个统一的领域概念，它说明了系统内，系统间和精神间现象的相互作用”（第3页），但他没有阐明这种相互作用的动力，也没有探讨文本之间的关系。以及他们在翻译中脱颖而出的心理。下面的讨论将通过文学的角度对这些关系提供一种可能的概念化，并与弗洛伊德在“神秘的书写板”（1925年）上的论文相结合，作为约瑟夫·康拉德读三本小说的解释模型。我认为，这些小说的独特共性是一种自我翻译或错误翻译的形式，可能会对文本的无意识劳动产生一些富有成效的见解。^1个

让·拉普兰奇（Jean Laplanche）提供了弗洛伊德后期以来与翻译和无意识联系的最新，最广泛的联系，他的早期工作是与谢尔格·莱克莱尔（Serge Leclaire）合作编写的（1972/1999），启动了一项旨在恢复“通过将弗洛伊德将无意识的最初概念重新定义为“翻译的动力” [哥白尼式]的推力[传统] [完第691页]（本杰明，1992，第139页）。对于拉普兰奇来说，要翻译的东西就变成了无意识的定义，正如弗洛伊德在1896年12月6日给弗莱斯的信中最初提出的那样，他将压抑等同于“翻译失败”。 （Laplanche，1992 / 1999c，第157页）。拉普兰奇（Laplanche）在1980年代末和1990年代初的论文放弃了古典精神分析的许多传统，他认为这是过分确定性的，因为它认为过去“包含”了当前文本的真相，而分析工作则是对“精神分析”的一个项目。复苏（Laplanche，1990/1992，p.170）。他写道，心理分析是“不是翻译，而是翻译的取消，拆除和还原[…]，以便允许“更好”的翻译；也就是说，更完整的翻译，悲剧仍然是弗洛伊德人深刻的焦点，它着重于描述无意识的特征的“双重题词”和自身的“自由基不透明性”（Laplanche＆Leclaire，1972/1999，第227页）。这种不透明正是需要进行分析工作的原因，即“旨在减轻患者言语中的结点（' Knotenpunkte '）；强度点，缺乏强度，腔隙，空洞”（第230页）潜意识的“自由基异质性”找到表达（p。232）。

就翻译理论而言，翻译理论主要将无意识的概念作为翻译者工作动态或翻译文本分析中不可忽视的力量。有人认为，有时会产生歧义或错误的翻译选择既不是偶然的也不是技术上的，而是翻译者与源文本或其作者之间无意识的关系所产生的（Frota，2004； Basile，2005； Quinney，2004）。 。最全面地讲，著名的翻译理论家劳伦斯·韦努蒂（Laurence Venuti，2002）采纳了莱切尔克的“余数”（remainders）概念（1990），并将其与翻译的过程和产物联系起来。根据Lecercle的说法，“剩余”可能被认为是“ [End Page 692] 相当于弗洛伊德语的无意识的语言学意义，被语法规则所排斥或压制，但试图以玩笑，舌头滑脱，自言自语和诗歌形式返回”（Lecercle，1990，p。23）。将读者的注意力引向“完全异质性...