fiefoe | Walter Benjamin, another essay

"The Task of the Translator" from "Illuminations".

This is a topic rather close to my heart. Benjamin's notions are a bit quixotic, but bracingly so.

No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener.
One might,... speak of an unforgettable life or moment even if all men had forgotten it. If the nature of such a life or moment required that it be unforgotten, that predicate would not imply a falsehood but merely a claim not fulfilled by men, and probably also a reference to a realm in which it is fulfilled: God's remembrance.
Translation thus ultimately serves the purpose of expressing the central reciprocal relationship between languages.
Translation is so far removed from being the sterile equation of two dead languages that of all literary forms it is the one charged with the special mission of watching over the maturing process of the original language and the birth pangs of its own.
It stands to reason that kinship does not necessarily involve likeness.
The task of the translator consists in finding that intended effect [Intention] upon the language into which he is translating which produces in it the echo of the original.
A real translation is transparent; it does not cover the original, does not block its light, but allows the pure language, as though reinforced by its own medium, to shine upon the original all the more fully. This may be achieved, above all, by a literal rendering of the syntax which proves words rather than sentences to be the primary element of the translator.
Just as a tangent touches a circle lightly and at but one point, with the point setting the law according to which it is to continue on its straight path to infinity, a translation touches the original lightly and only at the infinitely small point of the sense, thereupon pursuing its own course according to the laws of fidelity in the freedom of linguistic flux.
The basic error of the translator is that he preserves the state in which his own language happens to be instead of allowing his language to be powerfully affected by the foreign tongue.