On Translating the Untranslatable: The Greek Particles in Evidence

Abstract

Despite of Jakbson’s (1959) “dogma of linguistic untranslatability”, this article proposes to discuss the possibility of being for the foreigner in the light of the reception provided by translation’s linguistic hospitality, from the point of view of the resignification of Babel’s myth by Ricœur (2012). According to this perspective, the translator – as an active mediator of this process of bringing together the foreigner (author, work, language) and the reader – rediscovers his own place in a universal project of humanization. Translation, as a process of humanization, seeks to produce similarities whose scope is to identify oneself as another, that is, the identity under the diversity. The Greek particles constitute an emblematic example of a class of words typical of the colloquialism of the Ancient Greek Language – currently known as discursive markers – which, however, was neglected by a grammatical tradition based on the Aristotelian categories and the supposed one-to-one correspondence of the semantics, although impossible to maintain in this case. Thus, the Greek particles will be presented to exemplify the class of the traditionally so-called “untranslatable”, not in the sense of what cannot be translated, but as a class of words that, despite the contempt of the Classical Tradition, we insist on translating in many different ways, since they are low content-value words whose meanings are determined by the discourse.