The Historical Milieu of Academic Translation

The Historical Milieu of Academic Translation

In this short piece, I want to share some thoughts on the historical milieu of ac-ademic translation in light of Georges Canguilhem’s understanding of the notion of milieu. This is inspired by my recent proofreading of a Chinese translation of Canguilhem’s“The Living and Its Milieu,”originally a talk given in 1947 at Jean Wahl’s Collège Philosophique in Paris and later included in his Connaissance de la vie (Knowledge of Life) (Geroulanos and Ginsburg 155n1). In“The Living,”Canguilhem traces various origins and employments of milieu as both a concept and a technical term, including mechanical, biological, mathematical, anthropo-geographical, cosmological, and literary ones. I argue that historical time is also part of the milieu in which the translation of an academic work, such as Canguil-hem’s“The Living,”is involved and to which it must respond. Put another way, the 2008 rendition of the work (when Stefanos Geroulanos and Daniela Ginsburg’s translation of Knowledge was published) or now (i.e., 2023) will and can not be the same as one from 1952 (if there had been one) or 2001 (the year John Savage’s translation of“The Living”was issued).