1 Călin-Andrei Mihăilescu Translation and Mutual Transcendence Persistent and futile are the theories of translation. But so are those of the fantastic or the acts of public piety. From the posturing of a judgmental above or an insidious aside, little of substance has been said about the swarming, sharp work of translation. As if there were a general of translation, not having to whom to delegate the work of difference across the clouds, the sun gets bored upon seeing than everything underneath is the same. To be sure, there is no interesting theory of translation as long as ‘theory’ and ‘translation’ keep within the dominating sphere of sameness (the orders of being, telos, and deduction). Had Immanuel Kant descended upon translation as a topic of reflection, he would have probably concluded that the impossibility of forming specific concepts for this or that translation relegates translation to the realm of art: universal, yet lacking a concept. Yet Kant was relentless in his sculptural attempt to polish language until only concepts were left of it. Translation occurs as eventful practice; this means that the semantic losses it incurs on the road from “source” to target” may be recuperated or mimicked pragmatically: Mother is mère est Mutter ist cara madre es mamma. Mater, если you are aceeaşi partout, Ich auch werde ceea ce seré sein, que quasi lo dit dieu en hébreu. Even if a chasm separates mère from Mutter and Brot from pain, even if the Rhine River is wider than both North- and South Atlantic, simple translation will attempt to bridge the gaps regardless of their breadth. Simple translation works on a pattern that is not foreign to that of common definition, by seeking to point to mère and Mutter’s mutual representability across sense, chasms and their echoes. This is the stuff of analogy, and contemporary imaging techniques showing where things happen in the brain stem from the same anxiety of difference, which they call “the not yet known.” Under the conditions of representational military appeal of simple translation, the subject will retain the means of orientation towards its own sameness, as both source and target, while commuting between the two. This proleptic subject is an appropriated mechanism meant and oiled for capturing unmanageable difference, holding its prey tight and trading it off for other proleptic subject’s use, joy and abuse. Such a repetition in advance, superimposed on unreflected Platonising reminiscences, has the structure of superstition: the subjection to the stuff of religion, magic and everything else that requires, for its own self-preserving functioning, an operative transcendental, which comes in handy for magi, priests, bankers, lobbyists and lesser middlemen to juggle with. Call this trite translation. Benjamin named it bad translation, as it focused on pimping information and creating both rapacious and apathetic infomaniacs. Trite translation empowers the middleman to take home a percentage, accumulate power and capital, thus gnaw at the world from the middle of traffic. As the middleman rules the day, it makes it mediocre enough for it to need to be too spiced up with superlative stars: Super-, Bat- and Spidermen. A punch at the