The Violence of Translation
"From these cases we may draw a powerful lesson for the present: the
transfer of a written heritage from one medium to another, from the codex
to the screen, would create immeasurable possibilities, but it would also
do violence to the texts by separating them from the original physical
forms in which they appeared and which helped to constitute their
historical significance. Imagine that, in a more or less distant future,
the works of our tradition could be communicated or understood only via
electronic representation. There would be enormous risk of losing the
intelligibility of a textual culture in which there was a long-standing
and crucial association between the idea of the text and a particular
form of the book: the codes. Nothing better demonstrates the power of
this association than the traditional Western metaphors that represent
the book as a figure for destiny, the cosmos, or the human body. From
Dante to Shakespeare, from Raymond Lull to Galileo, the book used
metaphorically was not any book: it was composed of quires,
constituted by leaves and pages, protected by binding. The metaphor of
the Book of the World, the Book of Nature, which has been so powerful in
the early modern era, is secured by immediate and deeply rooted
representations that associate the written word with the codex. The
universe of electronic texts necessarily signifies a distancing from the
mental representations and intellectual operations that are specifically
tied to the form that the book has taken in the West for seventeen or
eighteen centuries. In truth, no 'order of discourse' is separable from
the 'order of books' with which it is contemporaneous" (Chartier 22-23).
volume 2, issue 2
SN 167
