The Untranslatability of Dreams

Abstract

This short meditation on dreamwork-narrative wonders why dreams are not easily translated. It takes off from Derrida’s remark in Writing and Difference that “since the materiality of the signifier constitutes the idiom of every dream scene, dreams are untranslatable†(210). Working through a secular, a Hindu and a Buddhist parable respectively, this essay considers 5 possible explanations for the untranslatability of dreams. It proposes that there might be no material to translate, as in the fiction whose “materiality†we assume and which we are used to reading and interpreting in broad daylight. Dreams however continue to be immaterial while the translator works away at his desk. We haven’t yet known it as either material “work†or “text,†so there might yet be no need to trouble ourselves with the death of its author.