This chapter considers the contribution that can be made to our discovery of solidarities through the experience of translation. Specifically, I shall focus on the responsibility that Gadamer suggests we have to foster a robust global culture of translation. Thus, again in this chapter, the concern is with a mainstay of hermeneutics – the idea that our experience of translation can displace our prejudices, this time, the very prejudices embedded in the language of one's speech or a text. In what follows, I will argue that the experience of translation contributes to the discovery of solidarities with those from linguistic traditions other than our own. As we shall see, such solidarities are not primarily of ‘crosscultural’ or ‘cross-linguistic’ significance, in the sense of making a person's speech or a text from a foreign ‘source’ language accessible in a ‘target’ language with which we are familiar. Indeed, as we shall see, Gadamer's hermeneutics of translation suggests that such an approach misses the crucial issue: namely, that translation is itself always what he will call a ‘betrayal’ of its source. In view of this, translation contributes to the discovery of solidarities not primarily as a cross-cultural or cross-linguistic practice, but, as I shall argue, through the ‘increase’ of meaning that a translation can donate to its source text. In this sense, I shall suggest, translation, precisely as an experience of language at the limits of betrayal, underscores the ethical dimensions of Gadamer's attempt to advance Heidegger's ontological turn with a further turn to language. For here, in Gadamer's approach to one of our most extreme experiences of language, we find nothing less than an emblem of the responsibility that attends factical life.

This chapter's concern for the contribution that can be made by translation to our discovery of solidarities is timely. It speaks to what may be called a crisis in the culture of translation in the Anglophone world of publishing (the world through which the present enquiry has come to press). In her recent book already cited in the previous chapter, Edith Grossman lays out the evidence of this crisis in no uncertain terms: ‘The sad statistics indicate that in the United States and the United Kingdom, for example, only two or three percent of books published each year are literary translations.’