Translation as a Mode: Response Paper on Walter Benjamin's The Task of the Translator

It is difficult to assess Walter Benjamin’s essay ‘The Task of the Translator’ without taking into account the reason it was written for, that is, as an introduction to his translation of Baudelaire’s Tableux Parisiens. For the first concept that strikes the reader from the very beginning is that art is not intended for its viewers/listeners, and that any form of it, including literature, has an essential substance which cannot be expressed trough words, and above all, it is just ‘for the sake of art’, with no designated, dedicated or even ideal reader. This was exactly the kind of attitude that considered the Functionalist approaches to translation as superfluous and to which scholars like Hans Vermeer and Katharina Reiss responded with very solid arguments that any type of writing, even pure aesthetical, has an intended, though granted unconscious sometimes, reader.

But Walter Benjamin was a man of his time and we must not forget that the comparative linguistic approach to translation was the mainstream thinking and it mainly regarded what would Even-Zohar call ‘high literature’.

I would suspect Benjamin constructed this discourse around the prestige of Baudelaire, and perhaps sometimes as a form of excuse if he couldn’t – or thought he wasn’t able to - manage to fully render the multitude of shapes, meanings and artistical expressions the poetry embeds in its form and structure. Such a source-oriented approach holds the case for Antoine Berman as well, who had very strict opinions about what is good and what is bad translation, an approach which would seem somewhat outdated nowadays, when we contextualize translation and take into account a series of sociocultural aspects along with the micro level of the process per se.

Going back to Les fleurs du mal (and it is interesting to see that internet references in English keep the French title almost all the time), Benjamin argues that translation, as a mode, reveals itself to only those worthy of understanding the translability of a work of art, and this translability comes as a natural connection with the original by transcending the boundaries of languages into an ideal, pure form:

While all individual elements of foreign languages – words, sentences, structure – are mutually exclusive, these languages supplement one another in their intentions. Without distinguishing the intended object from the mode of intention, no firm grasp of this basic law of a philosophy of language can be achieved. The words Brot and pain ‘intend’ the same object, but the modes of this intention are not the same. (2000:18)

I believe the author is mainly concerned with the semiotic aspect of Baudelaire’s discourse, and he stresses on the importance of distinguishing between various signifiers of the same signified across languages, which carry out infinite and barely perceptible nuances according to every emotional and historical utterance a word may bear. He wants to make sure that the reader fully understands the frisson nouveau, as Victor Hugo put it, of the poems, their sheer expression of the aesthetics of the ugly, and doesn’t fall into the category of those who are shocked by the eroticism and decadence themes, but manage to see beyond the syntactic surface. Benjamin therefore puts a lot of effort in trying to explain how an iconic effect must be achieved when rendering such a high expression of art form, how fidelity can never reproduce the original meaning but carries it on in the afterlife through its image, just like the pieces of a vessel glued together, so that the translation would thus ‘incorporate the original’s mode of signification’ while ‘refraining from wanting to communicate something’ (2000:21).

I would argue that nowadays we would take a more sociological approach when translating Baudelaire, that we would tediously seek every intimate connection between his work and his life, we would want to see how much of his past and personality was embedded in his poems, and therefore search for alternative meanings in connection with his persona and sociocultural background, while striving to reflect all these into translation. No one is to say however that we would be able to do a better job than Benjamin Walter.


References:

Walter Benjamin, ‘The Task of the Translator’, published in The Translation Studies Reader, edited by Lawrence Venutti (Routledge, 2000)