Translation and Mysticism: The Rose and the Wherefore

BCLT Research Seminar – Translation and Mysticism: The Rose and the Wherefore This book launch seminar took place on 20th November 2024. In this seminar Philip Wilson discusses his monograph Translation and Mysticism: The Rose and the Wherefore (Routledge, 2024) with Alice Leal (Wits University, Johannesburg) and Shyam Ranganathan (York University, Toronto). Translation and Mysticism examines how mysticism can tell us about translation and translation can tell us about mysticism, addressing the ancient but ongoing connections between the art of rendering one text in another language and the art of the ineffable. The volume represents the first sustained act of attention to the interdisciplinary crossover of these two fields, taking a Wittgensteinian approach to language, and investigates how mystics and their translators manage to write about what cannot be written about. Three questions are addressed overall: how mysticism can be used to conceptualise translation; the issues that mysticism raises for translation theory and practice; and how mystical texts have been and might be translated. Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Translator’s Task’ is considered in detail as a controversial example of dialogue. Translation examples are given in a range of languages, and six major case studies are provided, including a close reading of Exodus and an analysis of a recent radical translation of Lucretius. Philip Wilson is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Translation at the University of East Anglia. His previous books include the monograph Translation after Wittgenstein (Routledge, 2016) and co-edited volumes Literary Translation: Redrawing the Boundaries (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) and The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Philosophy (2018). He is a founding editor of the new Routledge journal Philosophy and Translation. Alice Leal is Associate Professor and Head of the Department of Translation and Interpreting Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. She is the author of Is the glass half empty or half full? Reflections on translation theory and practice in Brazil (Frank & Timme, 2014) and English and Translation in the European Union (Routledge, 2021). Shyam Ranganathan teaches at York University, Toronto, in the Department of Philosophy and York Center for Asian Research. His translated edition of Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtra was published by Penguin Books in 2008, and his most recent monograph, Hinduism: A Contemporary Philosophical Investigation, was published by Routledge in 2019.