Miller’s Hegel in Transformance

Introduction

Miller’s Hegel in Transformance is the companion website to Translation and Hegel’s Philosophy: A Transformative, Socio-narrative Approach to A.V. Miller’s Cold-War Retranslations (Charlston 2020), published by Routledge in the book series Routledge Advances in Translation and Interpreting Studies. Ideas introduced in the book are the product of collaborative research with Miller’s daughter, Mary Lettington, who has also contributed to this website. These ideas are taken considerably further here. Indeed, based on the enriched understanding of the context surrounding Miller’s work offered in the book, the website invites reader participation in the complex processes of translating Hegel’s philosophy, encouraging critical as well as affirmative responses, comments, questions, insights and transformative suggestions. A central concern underlying this project regards the extent to which the translation of philosophy is entangled with rigid, antiquarian or essentialist conceptions of translation.

The Posts section of this website contains a selection of images with questions which are investigated further in the book. The images are derived from my research. In some cases, I am still trying to determine if the images are covered by copyright. I would appreciate any information.

The site is structured around the menu topics. These correspond with the three theoretical foci driving the research behind the book: Narrative theory, as expounded in Translation and Conflict (Baker 2006/2018); Bourdieu’s sociology in the context of translation studies (Hanna 2016); and relevant aspects of Feminist Translation Studies (FTS) (Flotow 2011; Shread 2019). Neither the book nor the website claims to engage comprehensively or in detail with the theories referenced; instead, they draw inspiration, courage and exploratory energy from these important research directions. This plurifocal theoretical framework serves to generate overlapping insights into the fascinating but under-recognised story of A.V. Miller (1899-1991), the most prolific of Hegel’s translators. Between 1969 and 1986, Miller published translations and re translations of six Hegel titles, which, as the book and the website aim to show, made a significant contribution to religious, political and philosophical discourse during the Cold-War era.

A strong restorative, curatorial function is evident at many levels in Miller’s translations, through his aspiration to be faithful to Hegel’s text, through explicit statements in the translatorial and editorial peritexts and through Miller’s personal correspondence and archived papers. Miller was committed to undoing the interpretive interventions perpetrated by his predecessors. But Miller’s own strategies for reframing Hegel were neither consistent nor neutral. Comparative analysis of different translations of Hegel’s Science of Logic and Phenomenology of Spirit finds evidence for Miller’s primary, curatorial strategy and source-text orientation in some but not all cases. However, the findings reported in chapters 7 and 8 of Translation in Hegel’s Philosophy also identify a different translation strategy or set of strategies. The most striking example is the divergence in Miller’s handling of aufheben/sublate in his retranslations of Hegel’s Wissenschaft der Logik [Science of Logic] and Phänomenologie des Geistes [Phenomenology of Spirit].

In 1969, in the Science of Logic, Miller translated aufheben consistently as sublate/sublation. In 1977, Miller adopted a different strategy when translating the same term in the Phenomenology. It wasn’t just that he used a different word or even a few different words; he summoned up remarkable creative imagination, generating no less than 44 different translations and/or paraphrases for the same German lexical item. Although it is interesting to speculate, we will probably never fully understand Miller’s reasoning behind this dazzling display of lexical inventiveness. Nevertheless, the secondary, more creative strategy suggests that, under some circumstances, in some contexts, Miller had reservations about the appropriateness of the primary strategy. It suggests that, sometimes, flexibility and imagination are as necessary or expedient in the translation of philosophy as uniformity and rigid consistency. This in turn suggests the possibility and the validity of subsequent heuristic, transformative engagements with translated philosophy through multiple, differently situated, performative acts of translation. Changes in context necessitate reframing and retranslation.

The three theoretical approaches drawn upon expose much of the detail in the narratives, social dynamics and performative psychology surrounding Miller’s life and work. But they are not intended as a basis for hasty, essentialist judgements about the quality or accuracy of the translations. Instead, they reveal the depth and complexity of the linguistic and cultural context which informed the language and the reframing strategies identifiable in Miller’s translations. Most importantly, the resulting analysis suggests that, while Miller’s personal commitments generally seek to shadow Hegel’s position as Miller understood it, they often diverge strongly from progressive, late-20th century and early-21st century views, especially regarding the position of women in society, the hierarchical, patriarchal, Eurocentric structuring of society and the overlapping narratives which articulate this structuring. Like Hegel’s philosophy, Miller’s personal views and his understanding of Hegel’s philosophy are culturally and historically situated. Miller’s translations and retranslations constitute the performative re-enactment by an elderly Englishman, born in London at the very end of the Victorian era, of identity-forming views he considered not only appropriate but vitally necessary for the time during which he worked on the translations. Like many of his generation, he probably felt reluctantly complicit with the tragedies of the recent past and co-responsible for preventing their recurrence. He sought to reassert the traditional values of Western, Judeo-Christian civilisation, contesting selected manifestations of decolonialisation, women’s liberation, scientific and technological progress, radical political change and sexual permissiveness. But, with hindsight, the benevolent paternalism and liberal conservatism implied by the Cold-War Hegel revival as construed by Miller and his colleagues seems more closely entwined with the problems of the Cold-War and post-Cold-War period than with any reasonable focus on solutions. Miller’s translations and retranslations are of their time, but they have become increasingly untimely as many of the traditional commitments he sought to defend have been challenged, abandoned or relativized.

As Translation and Hegel’s Philosophy shows, Miller’s views and commitments are encoded subtly in the language of the translations, but not so subtly that they cannot be identified through careful analysis with reference to the theoretical framework presented in the book and explored further under the relevant menu headings. The final main menu heading, Transformance, elaborates the possibility of an affirmative engagement with specific details of Miller’s work, inviting readers to suggest modifications to Miller’s translations in response to their understanding of changes in the contemporary context. This part of the website takes the concept of ‘transformance’, which is introduced in the section on FTS, in a practical and participatory direction by opening an online space for participation in intersectional, feminist-informed transformance of selected passages from Miller’s translations and retranslations of Hegel. For example, Miller’s reinforcement of misogynist and racist narratives in his retranslations of Hegel can be explained with reference to his own situated performance of a role he considered both faithful to Hegel and appropriate to the context of the translations. Conscientious contemporary readers and/or translators need to balance these factors differently because the social context has changed so dramatically in the intervening decades. The worked examples are designed to give readers an opportunity to explore this challenge by developing their own translation strategies, which might range from a simple lexical substitution to extensive grammatical or textual restructuring or the addition of explanatory notes. Further examples will be added in due course and feedback from comments received will be integrated into the discussion on the relevant pages.