A brief note on interpretation as translation

I’ve come to think of interpretation as a kind of translation, and translation doesn’t use description. When you translate from, say, Japanese into English, you don’t first describe the Japanese utterance/text and then make the translation based on that description. You make the translation directly. So it is with interpretation. I’ve come to think of the devices used to make the source text present into the critical text (quotation, summary, paraphrase) as more akin to observations than descriptions. Of course, we also have a descriptive vocabulary, the terms of versification, rhetoric, narratology, poetics, and others, but that’s all secondary.

Hence the longstanding practice of eliding the distinction between “reading” in the ordinary sense of the word and “reading” as a term of art for interpretive commentary. We like to pretend that this often elaborate secondary construction is, after all, but reading. Even after all the debate over not having immediate access to the text we still like to pretend that we’re just reading the text. Do we know what we’re doing? Blindness and insight, or the blind leading the blind?