A Touch of Translation: On Walter Benjamin’s “Task of the Translator”

SAMUEL WEBER

TRANSLATING “TRANSLATION” IN AN AGE OF GLOBALIZATION

If one were to search today for a way of reflecting on the destiny of language and literature in an age dominated increasingly by electronic media, there is probably no better place to start—and perhaps even to end—than with the question of translation. This might seem a somewhat surprising assertion to make, given the widespread tendency to associate the rise of electronic media with what is usually called the “audiovisual,” as distinct from the linguistic, discursive, or textual. Such an association is, of course, by no means simply arbitrary. In 1999, the dollar value produced by the sales of video games, considered on a global scale, for the first time surpassed that of computers—and to be sure, sales of printed matter were not even close to either. Given such developments, how is it possible to claim that the question of translation can serve as a valuable index of the changing signification of language and literature in an age of electronic media?

The answer to this apparent paradox cannot be simple, of course. Translation as such covers a wide variety of activities, most of which are aimed at making texts accessible to people who do not know the language in which the text is written. Thus, for most translation activities in this sense, what is decisive is the goal of rendering a text written in one language understandable in another language. Meaning is thus the informing goal, a meaning generally held to transcend individual languages the way universality transcends particularity. There are, however, other kinds of translation—poetic, literary, philosophical—in which the transmission of meaning cannot be separated from the way that meaning is articulated or signified. And although this sort of translation may be statistically and economically far less important than the first kind, it may also in many ways be more revealing of the relationship between the linguistic medium and other media.

At any rate, my initial assertion is concerned with this latter type of translation, in which the “what” cannot be separated from the “how.” The what—that is, meaning—may be conceived as existing apart from its specific linguistic localization; the how is not. Its transmission, transport, or translation thus inevitably raises the question of how one moves from one relatively restricted linguistic system to another. Usually, the linguistic systems between which translations move are designated as “natural” or “national” languages. However, these terms are anything but precise or satisfactory. “Portuguese,” for instance, although named for a specific nation, is no more a “national” language than is “English,” “French,” “German” or “Spanish.” Yet, to call these languages “natural” is perhaps even more unsatisfactory than to designate them as “national.” The imprecision of such terms is in direct proportion to the linguistic diversity they seek to subsume. To be sure, such diversity does not exclude the fact that individual language systems exist and are distinct from one another. But such distinctions and the language systems they differentiate, are by no means as homogeneous as their names might tend to suggest. The difficulty of finding a generic term that would accurately designate the class to which individual languages belong is indicative of the larger problem of determining the principles that give those languages their relative unity or coherence—assuming, that is, that such principles really exist.

This work was previously published in Estudos De Tradução em Portugal, Novos Contributos para a História da Literatura Portuguesa, Colóquio realizado na Universidade Catôlica Portuguesa em 14 e 15 Dezembro de 2000, Organização Teresa Seruya, Universidade Católica Editora, Lisboa 2001, pp. 9–24.

The fact that the names of individual language systems are not generally considered to be problematic is indicative not of the absence of such problems but rather of an established but largely unconscious decision not to acknowledge them in everyday practice. This decision is destabilized, potentially at least, whenever anything like “translation” is attempted. Such destabilization has to do with the fact, already mentioned, that translation always involves not merely the movement from one language to another, but from one instance—a text already existing in one language—to another instance, that does not previously exist, but that is brought into being in the other language. The tension between the generality of the language systems and the singularity of the individual texts is reflected, but also concealed, by the ambiguity of the very word “translation” itself, which designates both a general process, involving a change of place, and a singular result of that process: translating in general, and (a) translation in particular. The tension between the general process and the individual product tends to be obscured by an attitude that regards translation as an instrument in the service of the “communication” of meaning or of a message. This attitude privileges the generality of the process at the expense of its singularity.

Such a tendency is reinforced today by the spread of what is known as “globalization.” The figure of the globe suggests an all-encompassing immanence in which singular differences are absorbed into a generalized whole. Nevertheless, precisely because of its homogenizing tendencies, “globalization” also exacerbates the need for differentiation. In facilitating circulation, transmission and contact, globalization brings the most remote and diverse areas and languages into contact with one another. Such contact, while clearly increasing the need for translation, does it in a way that is no less ambivalent than globalization itself. The following remarks seek to explore certain aspects of the ambivalent contact of languages that is never very far from the surface when they are touched by translation.

The history of translation is marked by a tension between two inseparable and yet incompatible motifs: fidelity and betrayal. Both result from the split relationship of translation to its own history, which is to say, to its “origin.” Translation, translatio¸ does not merely signify carrying-across, transporting, transferring in general: it also entails a specific, singular relation of texts to one another, and more particularly, of a text to that which it transports, its origin or original. The status of this terminus ab quo, the original, has been radically transformed by the spread of electronic media, and in particular, by the development of digital modes of presentation and transmission. The very notion of “medium” is changed by this extension of digitalization. Aristotle, for instance, defined a medium (metaxos) as a diaphanous interval that allows a certain transmission to take place.1 The medium was thus construed as an intermediary between two places. Movement through the medium was—and in most people’s minds still is—defined through the implicit reference to and contrast with the fixity of the places between which it moves.

This, then, becomes the model of what is known as the “senses” and their “perception.” The classical example cited by Aristotle in the passage quoted is that of an ant in the sky being visible only by virtue of the action of the intervening medium, which allows light to pass through.

The discussion of the medium is thus associated, from the very beginnings of Western philosophy, with sense-impressions in general, and with the sense of sight in particular. That continuing power of this association is reflected even today in the widespread use of a term such as “television” to designate a process that involves audition as much as vision. This privileging of the visual can also be observed in the current tendency to equate “multimedia” with “audiovisual.”

With the development of media technology over the past half century, the traditional conception of the medium as an interval both separating and linking a subject to an object via the physical senses has become increasingly problematic.2 Correlatively, the notion of “origin” and of “original” has also been affected. The ramifications of this change, however, can only be correctly evaluated by contrast with that which it is altering: the traditional notion of origin. Doubtless the most influential articulation of this notion for the cultural tradition of the “West” is to be found in the first book of Genesis, where origin is understood as creation. I propose therefore to reread briefly a few passages from this text, in order to discern certain traits that will continue, until today, to leave their imprint on what we call “translation.”

I begin, therefore, with “the beginning,” in the King James Version:

In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth, and the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. (I.1)

Creation, in the biblical account, operates above all through a series of dichotomies, beginning with the distinction between unbounded space (“heaven”) and limited place (“earth”). At first, the limitation of place, “earth,” is purely abstract, establishing the minimal dichotomy necessary for a distinction, but one that is otherwise wholly indeterminate, “without form and void” and hence totally obscure. Only in a second phase, as it were, is the abstract dichotomy of heaven and earth defined through a series of oppositions that progressively differentiate the place called earth. In addition to this general tendency to describe the creation of the world through a series of dichotomies, there is another aspect that does not exactly fit in, but that will turn out to be quite significant. The second sentence of Genesis I.1, recounts how, after the initial creation of heaven and earth, “the spirit (ruach: breath) of God moved upon the face of the waters.” This kind of movement is very different from that implied by the oppositions that otherwise predominate: it suggests a quasi-tactile moment, in which Creator and Creation no longer are clearly distinguished or separated from one another. Rather, there is a certain convergence and contact between the two, without any sort of merging or fusion taking place. This unusual event is quickly submerged, as it were, by the introduction of temporal succession as the medium through which the creation moves toward its completion. This temporal progression culminates, on the Sixth Day, with the creation of man:

God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness … So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. (I.26–27)

The biblical account of the creation of “man” introduces two conditions that will be of particular significance for the problem of translation. Taken separately, each is familiar enough by itself, but their interaction has perhaps not been sufficiently considered. First, in contrast to all other living beings, “man” is made in the “image” of God, a relationship that is interpreted, in the King James Version at least, as “likeness.” In more contemporary terms, one could say that the ruling role of man in the Creation is a consequence of his “analogical” relation to his divine origin.

This, however, is only half of the story. For there is a second trait that distinguishes human beings from other animate beings in the biblical account, gender: “Male and female created he them.” To be sure, the distinction of gender can be judged as already implied in the creation of other living beings, insofar as they are admonished by the Creator to be “fruitful and multiply.” The fact remains, however, that it is only with respect to man that gender is mentioned explicitly.

That the gendered creation of human beings is anything but self-evident is suggested in the biblical text by the somewhat awkward addition of a second, more elaborate version of the creation of man, in chapter 2 of Book 1. In this expanded account, man is created not directly by the word of God, but indirectly, formed out of “the dust of the ground.” The association of man with earth and “dust” anticipates the Fall, the expulsion from Eden, and the advent of human mortality. At the same time, however, this second version of the creation links man’s destiny to his origin, now understood not to be purely divine, but as also earthly and hence, bound up with a place. To be earthbound is above all to be determined by one’s location.

This topographical aspect of the second story of the creation of man is reinforced by the geographical details and place-names that now proliferate in the ensuing account. Man is “put” into a “garden” that is “planted … eastward in Eden.” Through this garden flows a river that subsequently divides “into four heads.” Each of these four rivers receives a proper name linked to the name of a country or region. In this second account of man’s creation, woman is created from a rib “taken from man,” in short, as the result of a bodily mutilation.

All of this complicates the initially “analogical” relationship of man as the image and likeness of the creator. It introduces an unbridgeable distance and difference that clashes with the relationship of man to God implied by the notion of “image” as “likeness.” Man and woman are no longer created ex nihilo, as in the first chapter of Genesis, but rather out of already existing matter: dust and rib, earth and body. Creation, in this second version, is a process of transformation. It no longer implies an absolute beginning or a pure performance, but rather almost a translation—almost, but not quite. It is not yet a translation for two, interrelated reasons. First, because there is still no place available that would make a traversal—the “trans-” of translation—either necessary or even thinkable. Despite the growing sense of separation of the created from the Creator, the only place inhabited by man is still the Garden of Eden. Second and correlatively, just as there is still only one place, so there is still only one language: the language of the Creator is the language of man.

This situation changes radically, of course, with the expulsion from the Garden of Eden. Of this momentous event, I want here to point out only one or two traits that are pertinent for our discussion. First, when Eve, having been accosted by the serpent, responds, she repeats the words of the Creator prohibiting her and Adam from eating of the Tree of Knowledge. But when she recites the divine prohibition, which modern biblical translations usually render as a direct citation, she adds something not found in the “original” version of God’s words:

And the woman said unto the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden: But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die. (I.3:3, my emphasis)

Here is the original account:

But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die. (I.2:17)

What Eve, herself the product of a bodily transformation, adds in her ostensible citation of the words of God, is the apparently anodyne detail of touch: “Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die.” Could this be the first case, in the Western tradition at least, of the famous formula, traduttore–tradditore? Yes and no. No, insofar as Eve’s quotation is not “properly” a translation, insofar as the repetition takes place within a single language rather between different ones. Yes, insofar as her rendering of the words of God involves a change of place, even if that place is still the Garden of Eden.3

In short, the divine prohibition, as recited by Eve at least, involves not just eating from the tree of knowledge, but touching it as well. A second instance of touching, which like the first we will leave suspended, but not for very long.

Shortly thereafter, when God has discovered that Adam and Eve have eaten from the tree of knowledge, he responds as follows:

And the Lord God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever: Therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden. (3:22–23)

Adam and Eve are banished from the Garden of Eden not just as a punishment for what they have done, but as a way of preventing them from doing what Eve precisely had already acknowledged in her response to the serpent: touching and not simply eating.

However, this is a very different kind of “touching” from that encountered at the beginning of the creation, when the “spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” For the “touching” of the Tree of Life is a means of taking possession, and thereby of becoming “as one of us.” Touching here, then, becomes a form of taking, turning likeness into sameness.4 It is also associated with a certain form of knowledge: the dichotomous-hierarchical knowledge that distinguishes between Good and Evil. This sort of knowledge turns touching into taking, thus collapsing analogy into equality, likeness into sameness, difference into identity, and it is this that causes God to intervene once again, in the process redefining what is involved in touching:

And the Lord God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life. (I.3:14)

The serpent will thus “crawl on its belly and eat dust” (New Jerusalem Bible), touching the earth but not taking it. Similarly, man will no longer touch the earth in order to possess it, but rather be touched and taken by it, back to the formless form of dust:⁵

In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return. (I.3:19)

Conflict and struggle thus seem to be programmed by the biblical story of the creation. On the one hand, man is said to be created in the image of God, or at least as his likeness. On the other, however like the Creator he may be, man is still part of the creation and hence irrevocably different from its Author. The first chapters of Genesis tell the story of man’s efforts to reduce the differences that separate the human from the divine, and the ensuing reinforcement of that separation. In the process, the first of two necessary conditions for translation emerges: a certain distance. Yet a second condition is still required, and this brings us to the second biblical event commonly associated with translation: the Tower of Babel. In the perspective just elaborated, however, we will discover that in a certain sense it is a replay of the Fall:

 

And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech.

And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there….

And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.

And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded.

And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.

Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.

So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city.

Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth; and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth. (Gen. 11:1–9)

If the original Fall befell “man” and “woman” as such, its repetition now affects fallen men and women as members of a community or group. Their project now is not to touch and eat from the Tree of Knowledge, but rather to build both a “city” and a “tower, whose top may reach unto heaven.” This effort here is to re-create a place that will be as perfectly self-sufficient as that from which they have been banned. Once again, then, they seek to be like God, who is One, only this time as a “people.” To be united, however, a “people” must possess a proper place, a city, but also a “name, lest we be scattered abroad.” One people, one city, one name, and one tower reaching to the Heavens. And above all, one language. It is this ambition that provokes the second intervention of God, after the expulsion from the Garden of Eden, but with a similar result. The result is another expulsion, “scattering” the people “abroad,” all over the “face of the earth.” However, such scattering is the result not of brute force, as it were, but of the “confounding” of what up to then was the single language of man. The institution of languages, in the plural, is thus tied to the dispersion of the community. No longer do they dwell in one place but in many. No longer do they bear one name, but many; no longer do they speak one language, but different languages. It is this splintering of human unity, which at once entails a dispersal of political unity, that marks the origin not of “language” in the singular, but of languages in the plural.

It is only from this point on that translation will become an inevitable, but also impossible—that is, never perfectly achievable—condition of human existence. This, however, in turn means that “human” existence is no longer simply “human” because it has no single proper name. “Man” is now one name among many, ambiguously designating diversity, particularity, singularity—of peoples and communities and groups as much as of individuals.

This significance of “Babel” and of its consequences can be gauged in terms of the transformations it imposes upon the “name.” The initial project aims at constructing a city and a tower that would reach to—which is to say, touch—the skies. In this respect, it recalls the transgression committed in the Garden of Eden, that of touching of the Tree of Knowledge. To touch is to reduce the distance and difference between human and divine, created and creator, to the barest minimum. Such touching is thus the effacing of the most decisive and constitutive of all limits—that between mortals and immortal, as the latter recognizes: “They have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.” To touch the skies means to surmount diversity and acquire the attribute reserved to the One God: unity. It also means to have the power to make a name that is proper. The divine response, therefore, is to “confound” all names and languages, thereby instituting a medium in which touching will never simply be a means of taking (possession). This transformation begins with the name of Babel itself, which means both confusion, imposed by God upon language, and “gate of the god.”6 In this name, meanings touch one another but do not fuse into unity. Rather, they stand in tension to one another. The gate of the god is thus marked by the confusion of names, and languages. It is a gate that does not lead back to the single language of Eden, but rather that opens onto the impossible and henceforth ineluctable task of translation. In view of this history, the task of translation can be described as that of touching without taking.

The phrase, “task of translation” touches on the last text to be discussed in this paper. In a certain sense, this essay has already informed much of the previous discussion, without being named or quoted directly. “The Task of the Translator” is of course the title of an essay written by Walter Benjamin in 1921, to accompany his translation of Baudelaire’s Tableaux parisiens. Were there space enough and time, I would have liked to introduce this essay via another, somewhat later text of Benjamin’s, in which he elaborates a notion of “origin” that is very helpful in understanding the way he construes the relation of translation to the “original.” Instead, however, I will simply quote a short passage that hopefully will suggest the rather unusual way in which Benjamin construes the notion of origin. This passage is found in the “epistemo-critical Preface” to his ill-fated study of German Baroque Theater, written in 1924. In this passage, Benjamin insists that the notion of origin must be understood historically. What he means by “history” however turns out to be quite different from the way that word is commonly understood:

Origin, although an historical category through and through, has nevertheless nothing in common with emergence [Entstehen]. In origin what is meant is not the becoming of something that has sprung forth [das Werden des Entsprungenen], but rather the springing-forth that emerges out of coming-to-be and passing away [dem Werden und Vergehen Entspringendes]. Origin stands in the flow of becoming as a maelstrom [Strudel] that irresistibly tears (reißt) the stuff of emergence into its rhythm. In the bare manifestation of the factual, the original is never discernible, and its rhythm is accessible only to a dual insight. It is recognizable on the one hand as restoration, as reinstatement, and on the other, precisely therein as incomplete, unfinished.⁷

The notion of origin that Benjamin articulates in this passage contrasts sharply with the creatio ex nihilo—or more precisely, creation out of formlessness—that informs the biblical text of Genesis. By contrast, in the passage just quoted the notion of origin—and hence, the notion of the original—is construed not as an absolute beginning, nor as the passage from formlessness to form, nor as the result of anything like the intervention of a divine logos. It is also not conceived as a function of becoming (Werden) or of its dialectical counterpart, passing away (Vergehen).

As something that neither “comes to be” nor “passes away,” which Benjamin designates with a participial noun as “Entspringendes,”8 the origin is an event involving both singularity and repetition. This paradoxical combination is never to be found in the merely “factual,” Benjamin asserts, since what it entails is less a self-contained phenomenon than a complex relationship that is described as a “rhythm,” thus emphasizing both its repetitive and temporal aspect. This rhythm of the origin, he states, in what can only be a deliberate mixing of metaphors (and senses), is accessible

“only to a dual insight. It is recognizable on the one hand as restoration, as reinstatement, and precisely in this, as on the other hand, incomplete, unfinished.”⁹

An “origin” is historical in that it seeks to repeat, restore, reinstate something anterior to it. In so doing, however, it never succeeds and therefore remains “incomplete, unfinished.” Yet it is precisely such incompleteness that renders origin historical. Its historicality resides not so much in its ability to give rise to a progressive, teleological movement, but rather in its power to return incessantly to the past and through the rhythm of its ever-changing repetitions set the pace for the future.

By thus determining “origin” as the insistent but unachievable attempt to restore an anterior state, Benjamin’s 1924 text suggests that something like “translation” is already at work in the “rhythm” of the original, insofar as it is historical. This account of origin thus illuminates, retroactively, the discussion of translation he had undertaken three years earlier, in the “Task of the Translator.” The necessarily incomplete attempt to restore and reinstate what has been, which defines the original, indicates how and why translation can never attain an existence that would be independent of its origin. Since the original defines itself historically through the ever-incomplete attempt to restore and reinstate itself, it is from the start, as it were, caught up in a process of repetition that involves alteration and transformation, dislocation and displacement.

This conception of the original explains why Benjamin should approach “The Task of the Translator” not in terms of translation, understood as a self-contained process or structure, but in terms of what he calls the “translatability” of “the original.” Translatability is not simply a property of the original work, but rather a potentiality that can be simply realized or achieved, and that therefore has less to do with the enduring life usually attributed to the work than with what Benjamin calls its “after-life” or its “survival” (Nachleben, Fortleben, Überleben). With respect to this afterlife, the original is already irrevocably departed and is thus not directly affected by the factual history of its translations. Its historical significance, however, is inseparable from its translatability. This is because translatability is never the property of an entity, such as a work, but rather of a relation. And relations, Benjamin warns, should not necessarily be judged in exclusively human terms, such as the needs of actual human beings to understand works written in a foreign language:

Only superficial thinking could declare both for essentially the same…. Against such a conception it must be pointed out that certain relational concepts (Relationsbegriffe) receive their good, indeed best meaning when they are not a priori and exclusively applied to human beings…. Correspondingly, the translatability of linguistic structures (Gebilde) would still deserve consideration even if these were untranslatable for human beings. (Origin, 254)

If, then, “translatability” is to be understood as a “relational concept,” but not as one that cannot be “a priori and exclusively applied to human beings,” how is it to be thought? To what does translatability relate?

Benjamin’s response is double. First, he argues, languages relate to one another. Second, they relate not to human needs, which is to say, to meanings or messages, but to what Benjamin calls “pure language.” Contrary to what one might suppose, pure language is not prelapsarian language, not the unified and performative language of the Creative Logos. Pure language emerges out of the interplay of what Benjamin, invoking a scholastic term, calls “way (or mode) of signifying” (Art des Meinens). Languages are distinguished, he argues, not by their referents but by the way they refer to them, by their mode of signifying. It is the differential interplay of these diverse ways of signifying that constitutes the medium of translation, and the “task of the translator” is to render this interplay legible by revealing how each self-contained unit of meaning is always exceeded by the way it is meant:

There remains in all language and its manifest structures (Gebilden) apart from that which is communicable something incommunicable, which, always according to the (specific) context in which it occurs can be either Symbolizing or Symbolized. Symbolizing merely in the finite structures of languages; symbolized, however, in the becoming of the languages themselves. And that which strives to expose itself, indeed to produce itself (sich darzustellen, ja herzustellen sucht) in the becoming of languages is the nucleus of pure language itself…. If that ultimate essence, that is, pure language itself, is in language bound only to language and its transformations, in works it is charged with heavy and alien meaning. To free it from this charge, to make the Symbolizing into the Symbolized itself, to reconquer pure language in structured form (gestaltet) for the movement of language–this is the powerful and singular ability (Vermögen) of translation. (Origin, 261, my emphasis)

Although it cannot be demonstrated here, the distinction Benjamin draws, between the “movement of language” as signification on the one hand, and the resulting work as a repository of meaning on the other, continues a line of thinking that he developed first in his thesis on German Romanticism and continued in his study of German Baroque Theater. In both cases, Benjamin sought to uncover the dynamics hidden within the ostensibly stable status of the self-contained, meaningful work—whether as the work of art or as the “good works” of redemption. At the same time, he never mistook the necessity of some sort of instantiation or taking place. This is why translation, or rather translatability, functions in his writings as a kind of paradigm indicating the necessity of defining a work or construct that would not be self-contained or lasting, but rather only the stopping place of an ongoing movement.

The passage under discussion is obviously extremely enigmatic and dense, and would require much more time and space to unpack than is available here. Instead, I will simply present my interpretation of its main gist, by reducing it to the formula, “make the Symbolizing into the Symbolized.” What translation does is not communicate meaning but point to—signify—the movement of symbolization itself, as it is at work already in the original, and then more obviously between the original and its displacement, repetition, and dislocation by and as translation. Translatability is the never realizable potential of a meaning and as such constitutes a way—way of signifying—rather than a what.

But if it is a way, if it makes its way, where is it headed? Not simply back to the original or to the origin, but rather away from it. In moving away from the original, translation unfolds the ways of meaning by moving words away from the meanings habitually attached to them, and which are generally construed as points of arrival rather than of departure. Meaning is generally conceived as a self-contained, self-standing universally valid entity, one that precedes the words that express it. Translation’s way to go, by contrast, leads in the direction of other words and other meanings, exposing a complex and multidimensional network of signification in which word occurrences are inevitably inscribed. The ways of meaning that emerge in and as translation assign a determining function to syntax over semantics. Benjamin’s formula for this decisive aspect of translation—one that despite its speculative character has eminently practical implications—is “literalness (wordliness) of syntax”:

It is therefore … not the highest praise of a translation to read like an original in its language…. True translation is translucent (durchscheinend), it does not cover up the original, does not stand in its light, but rather allows pure language, as though strengthened by its own medium, to fall all the more fully upon the original. This is accomplished above all by literalness (Wörtlichkeit: literally, “wordliness”) in the rendition (Übertragung) of syntax and it is this that reveals the word, not the sentence, to be the primary element of the translator. For the sentence is the wall before the language of the original, wordliness the arcade. (S. 18, “Task of the Translator,” 261)

Benjamin’s notion of the word, although it echoes the celebrated beginning of the Gospel of St. John, “In the Beginning was the Word,” is anything but traditionally theological. For the word to which Benjamin here refers, is not the Creative Word of God but a word that gestures toward other words and that is therefore defined not by its semantic content but by its syntactic position.

The syntactical literalness of the interlinear translation is his model. The interlinear translation comes close to its original, almost touching it, and yet it remains irreducibly distant from it. For the repetition of syntax excludes semantic resemblance. It results not in an analogical relation of translation to original, based upon shared meanings, but rather in a positioning that inevitably strains the grammatical coherence of the translation. This relation of words to one another results in a relation of translation to original that Benjamin describes with a remarkable figure, one that sums up much of our previous discussion:

The pure language that is banned in the foreign tongue—to redeem it in one’s own … that is the task of the translator. For its sake he breaks the brittle limits of his own language: Luther, Voss, Hölderlin, George have extended the limits of German.—What remains of this for the relation of translation and original can be formulated in a figure. As the tangent fleetingly touches (flüchtig berührt) the circle only in one point and as it is this touching (Berührung), not the point, that governs its trajectory into the infinite, so the translation touches the original fleetingly and only in the infinitely minute point of its meaning, in order to pursue its own course (Bahn) following the law of fidelity, in the freedom of the movement of language. (my emphasis)10

Practically speaking this does not mean that translation simply ignores the meaning of the original, something that would be hard to imagine. It means precisely what Benjamin states that it means: namely, that the translation that follows “syntactical literalness” pursues a course that leads it to fleetingly touch—glancing off—the meaning of the original and then to follow the trajectory that results. The angle of that trajectory is determined by the tangential encounter of two different languages at a specific historical time and place. The vector that results from this tangential encounter involves the interplay of the different possible meanings of the original text and of the translation. That interplay results not in a single meaning but rather in a difference of meanings that, like a difference of opinion, signifies precisely through its disunity.

Since this remains rather abstract, it may be helpful to close with an example. In the previous discussion, I have translated Benjamin’s German word, “Berührung” variously as “touching” and “glancing.” But in German, it can also signify, paradoxically, the “state of being moved,” as by an emotion. In his essay, Benjamin links his remarks on “way of meaning” to what is called an “emotional tone” (Gefühlston, p. 17). The glancing movement of translation moves whatever it touches, but above all, it moves the language in which it takes place and those who depend on it.

And yet, translation “moves” only by arresting movement. By reproducing the syntactic arrangement of words from one language to another according to the precept of “syntactic literalness,” the movement of translation disrupts the grammatical rules that create meaning and institutes in their stead a sequence that does not add up to a whole. Translation thus grazes the original, touches it without taking hold, like the interlinear translation that runs parallel to the original text without ever merging or resembling it. What it resembles, by reassembling it, is the spacing of the words, a certain positioning. By reassembling and dispersing the original, the translation touches a chord in it that causes it to resonate, “like an Aeolian harp is touched by the wind of language” (“Task of the Translator,” 21). Or like that wind, ruach, “sweeping over the waters” (New Jerusalem Bible) before the creation of the world.

Translation thus suggests a conception of medium that would be very different from that of the transparent interval between two fixed points. Instead of diaphanous transmission and transparency, translation brushes up against a past and in so doing opens itself to the future. Any attempt to interpret the media today would do well to reckon with the draft that such an encounter can produce.

NOTES

1. In his text, On the Soul, Aristotle writes: “Democritus misrepresents the facts when he expresses the opinion that if the interspace [to metaxou: the medium as interval, that which is in between] were empty, one could distinctly see an ant on the vault of the sky; that is an impossibility. Seeing is due to an affection or change of what has the perceptive faculty and it cannot be affected by the seen color itself; it remains that it must be affected by what comes between. Hence it is indispensable that there be something in between—if there were nothing, so far from seeing with greater distinctness, we should see nothing at all.” The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes, vol. 1 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 667; 419a 15–21.

2. Marshall McLuhan’s equation of “medium” with “message” marked a first contemporary assault upon this tradition. McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994).

3. The Word of God that creates the world, man, and the Garden of Eden, is not “placed” within it as are Adam and Eve.

4. The editors of The New Jerusalem Bible note that the word for “likeness” already introduces a distancing from the more intimate relation implied by “image” (The New Jerusalem Bible, Garden City: Doubleday, 1985, p. 19). Note: “ ‘likeness’ appears to weaken the force of image by excluding the idea of equality.”).

5. Benjamin’s description of the “dusty fata morgana” that covers the glass ceilings of the Winter Garden, can be read in this context: “dust” appears as the material manifestation of temporal transience (W. Benjamin, “Das Passagenwerk,” Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1982, p. 217; F 3, 2).

6. See The New Jerusalem Bible, op. cit., Genesis I. 11, p. 15, note.

7. Walter Benjamin, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1963), p. 30; English translation by John Osborne (London: Verso Books, 1977), p. 45 (my translation).

8. Benjamin’s word echoes Hölderlin’s description of the Rhine, in his poem of the same name, as “Reinentsprungenes”—except that he significantly replaces the past with the present participle (“Der Rhein,” Hymns and Fragments, intro. and trans. Richard Sieburth (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 70.

9. Walter Benjamin, Origin of the German Mourning Play, trans. John Osborne, (London and New York: Verso Books, 1977), p. 45.

10. Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” p. 20.