Sixth Plateau: The Leopards (and the Wasps) of Translation

This plateau engages Kafka’s parable “Leoparden” / “Leopards” through another exchange of performativities and circulation of intensities (the wasp and the orchid) in a loosely associative (second) exploration of norms. It was a student suggestion that Andrew Chesterman’s expert-based theory of translational norms reminded him of the Chinese philosopher Xunzi (荀子, c. 310-after 238 BCE) that sent me deeper and deeper into ancient Chinese philosophical thinking about norms: first Xunzi, then Mengzi (孟子, 362–289 BCE), then Sunzi (孙子, speculatively 544–496 BCE). Sunzi’s remarks on army discipline and the making of an effective general then led me back to one of my favorite novels from my teen years, Joseph Heller ’s Catch-22 . Heller’s Yossarian is manifestly a norm-breaker in the U.S. Air Force in World War II; the “leopards” from which he is running are stacks of antiaircraft flak that Yossarian says are trying to kill him. The upshot is that while the tension between obeying and disobeying the norms (of translating, or anything else) can be binarized so as to make obedience seem like the only reasonable thing to do and disobedience seem like childish petulance and contrariness, escalating that tension into military contexts where obedience means being willing to die for one’s country and disobedience means the desire to live and let live casts a whole new light on translational norm theory.