últimas corrientes teóricas en los estudios de traducción - Gredos ...

GABRIEL MOYAL–SCIENTIFIC TRANSLATION IN THE 19 TH CENTURY: P. PINEL
majesty and after a few months is sane enough to be released – without relapse (Pinel
1801: 196-197).
In her excellent Console and Classify (1987) 9 , Jan Goldstein has described
“theatricality” as the thread common to Pinel’s unusual cures. Pinel and/or his assistant,
Pussin apparently staged little dramas which, at the same time as they humoured the
fantasies of the patients, used the fantasy’s own inner logic to convince the patient to
abandon it. This is better exemplified in the case of “the guilt-ridden tailor” (as summarized
by Jan Goldstein):
For having openly expressed some less than patriotic opinion about the execution
of Louis XVI, a tailor briefly fell under suspicion during the Terror. The tailor convinced
himself that he was about to be tried and executed, became despondent, unable to sleep
or eat and constantly fearful. Pinel’s treatment consisted at first of employing him to
repair the clothing of the other patients. But after a brief term of enthusiastic dedication
to his task, the tailor became melancholy yet again. This time Pinel had his assistants
stage a mock trial in which three of them dressed up as judges pretended to interrogate
the tailor and examine in detail his political conduct and opinions after which they
proclaimed him a decent patriot. This bit of staging relieved the tailor of his symptoms –
at least temporarily 10 .
Undoubtedly, these bits of drama qualify as “pious frauds”, as Goldstein refers to
them 11 . But they manifest yet another property which may be of relevance to translation:
they involve a leap of faith, an expectation of meaning where sense seems at first to have
been alienated, a conviction that “alternity of statement”, as Steiner would say, does not
cancel out meaningfulness. Unlike Champollion who needed the Rosetta stone to fall into
his lap before he could ascertain the sense of hieroglyphics, Pinel anticipated the
idiosyncratic or chance “click”,the point at which delirium and idiom would coincide.
The conviction that some access, some path from lunacy to reason could be traced likely
has something to do with his particular and long practice of translation, with the patient
and tireless rehearsal of another’s perspective and of another mode of expression for it.
9 “The most striking feature of the treatments employed in several of these cases is their theatricality: Scenes and
spectacles are staged. The patient, however, is not aware of their fictive nature or […] of their deliberate and planned
nature” (p. 84).
10 See Pinel (1801: 233-37) and Goldstein (p. 83) whose summary of this case is here abridged. See also the case
of the famous Parisian clockmaker who, apparently obsessed by dread of the Terror had become convinced that he had
been tried, condemned and decapitated; that he had afterward been pardonned but had mistakenly been given back
someone else’s head. Here again is Goldstein’s summary of the case:
To “combat and destroy” the delirious idea about the alleged change of heads, the complicity of a convalescent
lunatic at Bicêtre was enlisted. This jovial man began to discuss with the clockmaker the miracle of Saint Denis, who
carried his head in his hands and covered it with kisses as he walked. The clockmaker strongly defended the possibility of
such an event, citing his own decapitation as confirmation. His partner now burst out laughing and said in a derisive
tone: “Madman that you are, how do you think Saint Denis would have been able to kiss his head; was it wih his
posterior? This unexpected reply struck the clockmaker sharply and he retreated in confusion from the mocking laughter.
He no longer spoke of his alleged mishap at the guillotine, and serious work at his clockmaker’s occupation over the next
several months fortified (raffermir) his reason. He was returned to his family and never had a relapse.
11 Goldstein (p. 84).
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