2 Except where otherwise indicated, all translations from the German are my own. The other interesting challenge to the usual reading of Benjamin’s title as promising to specify a “task” to be performed by a human being called a “translator” comes from Paul de Man (1986, 2000). Drawing our attention to Benjamin’s self-admitted failure as a practical translator himself, of Baudelaire and Proust, de Man notes that in the normative understanding of the work the translator fails by definition: “The translator can never do what the original text did. Any translation is always second in relation to the original, and the translator as such is lost from the very beginning” (2000: 20). Hence de Man’s suggestive retranslation of die Aufgabe as “the surrender, the giving up.” That is, after all, what the word means morphologically, and how it is used in certain contexts:
If the text is called “Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers,” we have to read this title more or less as a tautology: Aufgabe, task, can also mean the one who has to give up. If you enter the Tour de France and you give up, that is the Aufgabe—“er hat aufgegeben,” he doesn’t continue in the race anymore. It is in that sense also the defeat, the giving up, of the translator. The translator has to give up in relation to the task of refinding what was there in the original. (20)
This obviously flips the whole title on its head, and from that upside-down position actually reflects the passivity that Berman, de Man, and Vermeer insist Benjamin more or less casually assigns to the translator much better than the translation of die Aufgabe as “the task.” The only real task in the essay is performed by “the languages,” as vitalistic agents with transcendental intentions; those agents are inadvertently triggered by translations, and translations are rather haplessly cobbled together by translators.
Now this reading of the title and the essay it problematically encapsulates is plausible, and attractive; I myself argued a similar case in Robinson (1996: 201). Working on this commentary, however, has directed my attention much more closely to the text than on previous readings, and that has changed my mind. The fact is that Benjamin does specify that the translator’s task is to translate literally, so as to transfer source-textual syntax (rather than sense) into the target language and in that way to maximize the friction between the two languages; and he gives us several quite practical takes on that.
In #44, for example, he says that “the task of the translator lies in finding that target-language intention that awakens the echo of the source text”—a task that sounds a bit strange, perhaps, and not immediately accessible to practical application, but not impossibly mystical. The phrase could very well awaken the imaginative translator’s practical sense to new possibilities.
In #69 “it is the translator’s task to transcreate the source text in which pure language is imprisoned, in order to unleash in the target language that pure language that is spellbound in the source language.” That sounds not only mystical but like a task set the hero of a fairy tale; but Benjamin goes on to illustrate his definition of that task with actual examples: “For pure language’s sake the translator smashes through the target language’s rotten barricades: Luther, Voß, Hölderlin, and George all pushed back the boundaries of the German language.” Again, the reference to pure language sounds mystical, but if we read that in the opposite direction, he seems to be saying that the translator’s task is to push back the boundaries of the target language, and that that does serve pure language. (Certainly it would seem a stretch to argue that in translating the Bible Luther was guided by a mystical translation strategy.3)
And finally, when he tells us in #76 that Friedrich Hölderlin’s German translations from the ancient Greek of Pindar and Sophocles are “prototypes of their Form,” we learn that the translator’s task is to do what Hölderlin did—translate not only literally but etymologically, so that the sense of the source text drops away and leaves only the letter, fidelity to the letter, or radical literalism. He also gives us a chilling account of the phenomenology of that task: in those brilliant translations “lurks the most appalling primal peril of all translation: that when the gates of language have been so savagely sprung they may slam shut and enclose the translator in silence. The translations of Antigone and Oedipus Rex were Hölderlin’s last work. In them sense plunges from abyss to abyss until it risks losing itself in the bottomless pit of language.” This would be the most radically extreme version of the translator’s task; and, according to Benjamin, the willingness to incur that spiritual risk made Hölderlin’s translations prototypical, better (and holier) even than “the most perfect translations.”
So upon further reflection I think Berman is wrong about replacing every reference to “the translator” with “translation”; his reading works with most of those references, but not with all. I also think that de Man was partly wrong about Benjamin conceiving the translator’s task as “giving up,” and that I too was partly wrong to follow de Man in Translation and Taboo. Throughout most of the essay, yes, the agents with a “task” to perform are not translators or translations but vitalistic languages, which are only triggered indirectly by translation and more indirectly still by translators; but that is not the only approach Benjamin offers to the phenomenology of translating. It now seems to me, therefore, that Derrida was also right: Benjamin does in the end—not all the way through, but at least in the end—write “The Task of the Translator” about the task of the translator.
3 But see Louth (1998: 9) for the suggestion that in his Bible translation Luther extended not only elite literary German by mobilizing colloquial German for literary use but also low colloquial German by translating key passages literally—and, further, that in so doing Luther was simply putting into practice Jerome’s claim in the letter to Pammachius that he translated sense for sense except in translating scripture, where even the word order contains a mystery. Antoine Berman (2008/2...