The Age of Translation

A Commentary on Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Task of the Translator'

Antoine Berman, Chantal Wright

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138886308
• eBook ISBN: 9781317502487
• Topic: Sprachen & Linguistik
• Subtopic: Sprachwissenschaft

The Age of Translation is the first English translation of Antoine Berman's commentary on Walter Benjamin's seminal essay 'The Task of the Translator'. Chantal Wright's translation includes an introduction which positions the text in relation to current developments in translation studies, and provides prefatory explanations before each section as a guide to Walter Benjamin's ideas. These include influential concepts such as the 'afterlife' of literary works, the 'kinship' of languages, and the metaphysical notion of 'pure language'. The Age of Translation is a vital read for students and scholars in the fields of translation studies, literary studies, cultural studies and philosophy.

The commentary

CAHIER 2

In Cahier 2, where Berman’s commentary on the letter of Benjamin’s text begins in earnest, the lacunae between the German verbs gelten and verlangen and their French and English translations demonstrate how thinking Benjamin’s text trilingually may help draw attention to key conceptual nodes within it. The verb gelten, which first occurs – in the third person singular form – at the end of Benjamin’s first paragraph, ‘Denn kein Gedicht gilt dem Leser, kein Bild dem Beschauer, keine Symphonie der Hörerschaft’ (Benjamin 1991a:9, emphasis added) [No poem pertains to the reader, no painting to the viewer, no symphony to the audience], and then again immediately at the opening of the second, ‘Gilt eine Übersetzung den Lesern, die das Original nicht verstehen?’ (ibid., emphasis added) [Does a translation pertain to readers who do not understand the original?], has no natural English equivalent. Gelten can be a transitive or intransitive verb and has a variety of meanings. Possible English renderings, depending on the context, are ‘to be valid’, ‘to count’, ‘to be worth’, ‘to apply’; or ‘to be considered as’, for example die Fahrkarte gilt in allen Bussen (the ticket is valid on all buses); ihre Stimme gilt (her vote counts); das Geld gilt nicht viel (the money isn’t worth much or doesn’t carry much weight); hier gilt die StVO (the Highway Code applies or is applicable here); er gilt als Fachmann (he’s considered an expert). The relevant meaning in ‘The Task of the Translator’ is that of gelten as an intransitive verb meaning ‘to be addressed to or destined for’ with an overtone of one of its other meanings ‘applies to’. The verb is often used with the impersonal subject ‘es’ in a similar fashion to the French verb valoir [‘to be worth’, ‘to have value’], that is, il vaut or ça vaut, and valoir is the translation Berman suggests here. Berman points out that Gandillac’s decision to render gelten with the verb faire (‘to do’ or ‘to make’), while essentially leaving the meaning of Benjamin’s text unchanged, fails to respect its weft. The need to be attentive to the patterns and rhetoricity of prose (and the frequent failure of translation to do so) is a familiar concept in Berman’s work. We find it expressed in the negative analytic formulated in his essay ‘La traduction comme épreuve de l’étranger’ (1985), translated by Lawrence Venuti as ‘Translation and the Trials of the Foreign’ (2000). The verb gelten has a grammatical subject in Benjamin’s text (Gedicht, Bild, Beschauer, and then Übersetzung) but it has no subject in the sense of an agent – and that is precisely the point. Benjamin is unpicking our desire to conceive of the work of art as a message (eine Mitteilung or Aussage), and as Berman underlines, a message consists of three parts: ‘transmission by somebody, transmission of something, transmission to somebody’ (2008:47). Through his choice of verb, Benjamin begins his dismantling of the notion of message by removing the transmitter, the agent, at the same time as he dismisses the importance of the receiver. Benjamin rejects the notion that works of art are or should be preoccupied with their audience, thus questioning the notion of the work of art as a communicative act and positioning himself against contemporaneous views of language as a communicative tool. In my translation of gelten, I have opted for the verb ‘pertain’, in the sense of ‘belonging to’ (as a legal right or a privilege), but also ‘relating to’. Like gelten, pertain’s sense of agency is vague and it avoids the subject implicit in verbs such as ‘mean’, ‘intend’ or ‘aim’.

Benjamin defines Übersetzbarkeit, translatability, on two levels: the first level has to do with whether a literary text is able to find its appropriate translator; the second – the more important of the two translatabilities – has to do with whether the text permits translation and accordingly also demands it (‘demnach […] auch verlange’, 1991a:10). The most common contemporary meaning of the verb verlangen is ‘to demand’, but it can also mean ‘desire’, particularly in its nominalised form Verlangen. Berman translates verlangen as ‘désirer’ throughout, a verb which favours the element of desire over the element of demand. There is no verb in English in which these two meanings coincide. Desiring translation and demanding translation are two very different things; the imperative to translate is stronger in the latter and since Benjamin’s text argues that translation is necessary – not for the original text, but for the attainment of pure language – I have opted for ‘demand’. But Berman’s choice calls attention to the element of desire in the German verb that English cannot reproduce, an element that I might otherwise have overlooked or repressed. Again the trilingual approach makes visible latent meanings.

Finally, I have rendered the highly enigmatic statement ‘Übersetzung ist eine Form’ as ‘Translation is a form’. Harry Zohn’s translation, which for copyright reasons was dominant in the English-speaking world for several decades, rendered this as ‘Translation is a mode’ (2000:16), which leads the reader along a very different trajectory. The other three English translations all opt for ‘form’ and Berman too opts for forme. The opacity of the statement, which Berman discusses at some length, seems best served by the semantic bounty of the word ‘form’, which is how I have translated Form throughout. The most prominent meaning of this Form appears to be that of ‘incarnation’ or ‘morphological variant’, in the sense that each translation is a fresh version of a text, and translation as such productive of such variants.

We have situated Benjamin’s thinking on translation within the framework of his metaphysics of language, listed defining characteristics of his thought and considered his general relationship to translation. We have also approached ‘The Task of the Translator’ from the perspective of the paradoxes manifest in its status as a prologue and in its title. What has emerged is that this text, which is the preface to a translation of Baudelaire, makes no reference whatsoever to this translation and conversely, that the translation fails to embody the statements found in the prologue. Consequently, there is a gap between Benjamin’s experience-of-translation and his discourse-on-translation.

This gap extends far beyond Benjamin. It begs the question: what kind of discourse on translation can simultaneously do justice both to the essence of translation and to its empirical forms?

A second gap has emerged with respect to the text’s title and its relationship to the body of the text. The title of the prologue announces that the text will be a reflection on the translator, but there is no trace of the translator in the preface. The focus is purely on translation. This brings us back to the fact that, conventionally, translation theory makes an abstraction of the translator. Or rather, the translator features in translation theory as the negative (deforming) element in the translation process, even though it is apparent that translation cannot exist without the translator.

Then we tackled the concept of the task that features in the title by going back to the German term Aufgabe.

We noted that this term, which translates conveniently into French as ‘tâche’, acquired a specific meaning during the German Romantic era (in Novalis), and that Benjamin’s title has to be read against this background. Here, ‘task’ implies the resolution or dissolution, Auflösung, of certain dissonances. Through the choice of the term Aufgabe, the task of translation is implicitly established as the resolution of certain dissonances in the order of langue or langage,¹ and not as the transmission – viewed either ethically or aesthetically – of a text from one language to another. Given that the dissonances in question have to do with the essence of language, the task of the translator is of a metaphysical order. The very title of the prologue shows that Benjamin’s thinking about translation takes place within the framework of his speculative reflection on language.

Today the commentary will focus on the first three paragraphs of ‘The Task of the Translator’. At the very beginning we encounter a series of statements which set out, in categorical fashion, the sphere within which the text will operate:

translation is the translation-of-literary-works;

the essence of translation derives from the essence of the literary work;

the essence of the literary work is not communication.

The first point draws an implicit line. The field of translation does of course extend beyond that of literary works: there are other, equally indispensable fields of translation such as legal translation and even, sometimes, scientific translation. But Benjamin’s concern lies with literary translation. At the end of the text there is discussion of ‘sacred’ texts. We can therefore assume that his thinking relates – as the fragment from One-Way Street will go on to indicate – to the translation of profane (literary) texts and to the translation of sacred texts.

The distinction between the two is not absolute, however, because, for Benjamin, certain poetic works of art approach the sphere of the sacred (Hölderlin, Stefan George). The great translators invoked in the text – Luther, Voss, Hölderlin, A.W. Schlegel, Stefan George, Borchardt – straddle these two spheres. This, for Benjamin, is the domain of translation.

Nor is ‘The Task of the Translator’ a reflection on translation ‘in general’. This type of thinking – which would resemble a translation theory in its structure – is alien to Benjamin.

If translation is exclusively the translation-of-literary-works, then it can only be grasped in terms of their essential nature. Since the literary work is a work-of-language, reflection on translation is necessarily reflection on language – on language as it is revealed and embodied in the text. Here Benjamin stands in radical opposition to all conventional theories of language, of the literary work and of translation.

As we have noted already, these theories understand language, the literary text and translation in communicative terms. Language is an instrument of communication, the text is a communicative act, a message, and translation is the interlingual transmission of that communication. This is why a number of theorists see translation as the ‘communication of a communication’.

‘The Task of the Translator’ immediately dismisses this thinking. It immediately asserts that the literary work is not structured like a message. In a phrase that is so paradoxical (at first sight) that the French translator either forgot it or cut it, Benjamin says:

Denn kein Gedicht gilt dem Leser, kein Bild dem Beschauer, keine Symphonie der Hörerschaft.

(p.9. para 1)²

No poem pertains to the reader, no painting to the viewer, no symphony to the audience.³

aucun poème ne vaut pour le lecteur, aucun tableau pour le spectateur, aucune symphonie pour l’auditoire.

(Berman)⁴

[Literal translation of Berman’s French translation:

no poem is valid fo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Epigraph
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Translator’s introduction
• French editor’s note
• My seminars at the Collège
• Overture
• The commentary
• Index