# Translation and the Kinship of Languages

Speaker: Eli Friedlander
Course: Walter Benjamin: Language, Memory, History
Watch: https://ergo.org/videos/eli-friedlander-translation-is-not-about-meaning
Transcript: https://ergo.org/videos/eli-friedlander-translation-is-not-about-meaning/transcript/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lH1sdZwOssA

When quoting, name the speaker and link to the watch URL.

In this lecture, Eli Friedlander offers a close reading of Walter Benjamin's celebrated essay "The Task of the Translator," originally written as a preface to Benjamin's translation of Baudelaire's Tableaux Parisiens. Friedlander shows how for Benjamin translation is not about reproducing content but about revealing the kinship between languages, one that points toward what Benjamin calls "pure language." Through vivid metaphors, including the broken vessel, the royal robe, as well as the wall and the arcade, the lecture unpacks how translators must navigate the tension between fidelity and freedom, fragmentation and transparency. Friedlander also connects the essay to Benjamin's broader intellectual project, showing how the emphasis on translation, technological reproduction, and quotation in works like The Arcades Project and writings on Kafka and Proust all reflect Benjamin's resistance to the cult of originality. This resistance, Friedlander argues, carried deep political stakes in the context of rising fascism and reactionary philosophies of life in Germany.

## Introducing The Task of the Translator

So today's lecture is going to be devoted to another very famous essay of Benjamin's, entitled *The Task of the Translator*. This is actually his preface to a translation he made of Baudelaire's *Tableaux Parisiens*, which are part of the *Flowers of Evil*, *Fleurs du Mal*. It's an essay that received quite a lot of attention. You have writings on it by Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Jean Laplanche, a lot of French thought, devoted to that essay.

Now, what I want to suggest is that in order to bring out the depth of that essay, the philosophical depth of this translator's preface, it's anything but the usual translator's preface, we have to read it against the essay on language,

## The Fall, Babel, and the Multiplicity of Languages

which I discussed in the last lecture. To put it very generally in terms of the reading of Genesis that Benjamin gives, basically considering the relation he forms between the Fall and the Tower of Babel, which is explicit in his essay. It suggests that this problem of expressing, or actualizing nature in language, will demand, after the Fall at least, addressing the multiplicity of languages. So we don't have the language of man. We have languages, and therefore, in some way, the task is going to be linked to the problem of translation.

## Translation as Showing Kinship Between Languages

The ambition of this text, I think, can be gleaned from the way Benjamin characterizes the task of the translator, and I think this is something that's neglected often in reading the essay. Of course, the translation is a translation of a specific literary work, in this case poems of Baudelaire. But the task of the translation, through the translation of the specific work, is to show the kinship between languages.

And kinship, again, it's a very important term in many writings of Benjamin. Affinity, kinship. He has an essay on Goethe's *Elective Affinities*, a very famous essay. But this kind of relation is not simple similarity, and it cannot be explained in the case of translation by thinking of a common root of two languages. Rather, I would say that in translation, we establish the kinship between languages and show how both of them partake in what we called in the context of the language essay, language as such. Benjamin also will speak here of

## Pure Language and Its Philosophical Context

Presenting through translation, through the recognition of the kinship between languages, what he calls the pure language. The poetic work, in other words, is an occasion to show something that pertains to language altogether or to language as such or to the pure language.

Now, the term pure language, of course, brings to mind various philosophical endeavors from Leibniz's universal characteristics to Frege's *Begriffsschrift*, and Benjamin's closest friend, Gershom Scholem, studied around that time with Frege. And Benjamin does not, of course, like Frege, lay down principles for a pure language of thought, but rather he takes the kinship shown between languages to express this higher origin. So let's see a bit how that is elaborated and worked through in that essay.

## The Small Refracting the Whole

First of all, think of this idea that we engage with the specific poetic work, but show something that pertains to language as such. It's as though the small literary work can, of course, by way of its translation, refract something that pertains to language as such. So, as it were, a part of the pure language.

This idea that the small refracts the whole is something that returns in the writings of Benjamin. We'll encounter it in various contexts. If you think of it, and we spoke at the beginning about the arcades project, well, the arcades are this limited, small spatially, temporally small expanse, but it's supposed to refract history as such. And here too, we have this idea that the small work refracts through translation something that pertains to language as such.

Benjamin calls it sometimes an embryonic presentation, like the embryo of the small is a model of the large. But more importantly, later he will refer to it as a monadological presentation. And we'll talk about this use of Leibniz's language of monads. So the small literary work harbors within itself, or has the potential in itself to present, to refract something that's way beyond its original unity of meaning, something that pertains to language altogether.

## Life and Afterlife of the Work of Art

And Benjamin thinks of this idea of the potential of a work, the potential for translatability, in terms of the concept of life. It is to be understood as something that has the temporal dimensions of life. It is, well, we can say the life of meaning that inheres in that work. I'll read a couple of lines from that essay. "A translation issues from the original, not so much from its life as from its afterlife. The idea of life and afterlife of works of art should be regarded with an entirely unmetaphorical objectivity."

So let's think about this idea of the life of a work. And sometimes we speak of the organic unity as the form of unity of a work of art. So something that belongs to the form of the organism is also used to explain the specific kind of unity of a work of art. This is something, again, you would find in Kant's *Critique of Judgment*, which has, of course, two parts, one devoted to beauty, to the work of art, let's say, and the other devoted to the organism and teleology. And Kant shows the analogies between those two.

But Benjamin, I think, suggests that the kind of unity of life, this kind of nature that inheres in the work at its birth, like when the genius brings it to the world, also has a future. We spoke of it in terms of the way criticism fulfills or actualizes the meaning of a work. One might say that we should distinguish between the unity of life of the initial moment of the work and something that is revealed in time, in history, let's say, through acts of criticism or, and specifically, through translations.

## Translation as Destruction and Afterlife

Translation, as it were, actualizes the life that inheres in the work. It brings the work to, as it were, a higher level of meaning. More than that, something about the initial unity of life of the work is destroyed in translation. The condition of revealing this higher life that inheres in the poetic work is in part destroying the natural unity it has, destroying the organic unity it has, destroying the context of life which the genius gives it.

Something like the death of that initial life is presupposed in order to reveal something higher in the translation. That's why Benjamin speaks here of that temporal dimension as the afterlife of the work. So afterlife is, after you die, there's the afterlife. Something like that relation is also at play when we think of the translation of the literary work.

## Ways of Meaning vs. What Is Meant

How do we describe the work that the translator does in light of this formulation of the task? Well, Benjamin would say there's one and the same world. The world is unique, but different languages have each their own way of relating to that same world. They mean the same, but have different ways of meaning it.

This distinction between what is meant and the way of meaning it can bring to mind Frege's distinction between sense and reference, or sense and meaning. And in Frege it's, of course, an intralinguistic distinction. For Benjamin, it becomes a distinction between the two languages. Each language has its own way of meaning, and they lead, as it were, to the same meaning in the world, but each in its own way.

The work of the translator must be keyed not to the sense, but to the way of meaning in the original language. So the translator seeks to reproduce the way of meaning of the original in the translation. Why is this problematic? Why is this a challenge? Why is this a task?

Well, the assumption is that, as we said, the ways of meaning differ. Benjamin says they even tend to exclude one another. So there would be, in the target language, in the language of the translation, no ready-made intentional unity that corresponds to the way of meaning in the original. It's as though the translator needs to supplement in his language something that is lacking. He must draw on the resources of his language, I would say, as a whole, in order to reproduce something like the unity of the way of meaning in the original. Now, let's try to explicate that.

## Morning Star and Evening Star: An Example

Let's take a, I don't know, it's a bit of a simplistic example which I adapted from Frege, but maybe it can be a little bit helpful to clarify what the actual task of, the actual work of the translator is. Suppose we have two languages, two ancient cultures. One of them venerates the morning star, and the other venerates the evening star. The cult of one of those cultures that is associated with the morning star is all about revival, awakening, hope, and so on. And the cult associated with the evening star is that of mourning and loss and so on.

Now, let's say that at some point even the two cultures recognize that this is in fact the same star and find a common name for it. Let's say Venus. Now, in translating a poem in which Venus appears in the original, the translator must realize that for the culture who developed with the sense that Venus is the morning star, the way of meaning that is associated with Venus is imbued with revival, awakening, hope, and so on. But in his own language, if he merely puts Venus, that would evoke mourning and loss and so on. So he would need to evoke in other ways that dimension of hope in the original in his translation.

How would he do that? In what sense does it use the resources of his own language as a whole? Well, maybe we should think of it that way. He should take other words in the poem and inflect them with this association of hope, revival, awakening, and so on. So it's not like there's a one-to-one translation of the way of meaning in the original to the way of meaning in the translation. Rather, the way of meaning of the original is spread out over all the words of the translated poem. It's supplemented by the resources of this other language. It's broken apart. Refracted in the words of the rest of the poem in the translation.

By the way, just to mention it, this example of the morning star, the evening star, and Venus, without, I think, any knowledge of Frege, is actually very central to the last paragraphs of Benjamin's essay on Goethe's *Elective Affinities*, where he indeed reflects on the nature of hope, and it's a wonderful interpretation of this figure.

## Echo, Royal Robe, and the Broken Vessel

Very schematically, we can say that what was an intentional unity of the original is now dispersed in the translation, refracted in all the words or the other words of the poem, using thereby the resources of the translation language as a whole. And Benjamin has various figures to express this difference between the unity of the original and this dispersion of meaning in the translation. He speaks of the unified intention of the poet that is echoed in the translation. So the echo is the breaking apart of that unity of the voice and spreading it over the different words in the translation.

He also says the way content and language fit together in the original is like a fruit and its skin. They're tied together. But in the language of the translation, it's as though there is a royal robe with ample folds that covers the content. And finally, a famous figure that was interpreted in many, many ways, he says, "Well, it's like a broken vessel."

Think of a vessel you find in an archeological dig. You have, let's say, a few very large fragments, two or three large fragments, and many, many, many small fragments. Now, those small fragments are in no way similar to the large fragments, so there's no similarity between the way of meaning of the original and how it is reproduced in the translation. Nevertheless, when you reconstruct the vessel, the small fragments can fit perfectly the two or three large fragments along the breaking lines. So they come together without, in any way, being similar.

## Fidelity and Freedom in Translation

Benjamin opens the essay on translation with a short discussion of two misguided views on what translation is. It can be formulated through the opposition between fidelity and freedom. According to the first view, the translator is merely a humble servant that aims to communicate the sense of the original to people that don't know the language. He has to do the most literal translation possible. According to the second view, the translator must himself be something like a poet in order to freely express in his own language something that cannot be captured by literal translation, cannot be captured merely by this attempt to reproduce the sense of the original.

Now, for Benjamin, those are two misguided views about translation, but nevertheless, he returns in his essay to this issue of fidelity and freedom and reformulates them in what he thinks is the correct way. As we saw, fidelity, the very slow and painstaking work of the translator is in no way an attempt to communicate the sense of the original to someone who does not know the language, but rather, as we saw, to mirror the way of meaning of words, which is a completely different kind of work. It, we can say, destroys the structure of unity of the original or disregards something like the unity of sense of the original, the sentential unity.

What is a bit more complex to grasp is how Benjamin understands freedom in translation. Because freedom for him is not the freedom that the translator takes for himself. Rather, Benjamin formulates the issue in terms of what is freed in the translation. So something was obstructed by the unity of the original, by the unity of sense, by, let's say, something like the sentential unity. And as we saw, the translation tends to destroy that original unity and thereby lets something express itself. Something is freed from those constraints of the original.

## Transparency, Literalness, and the Arcade

Let me read again a famous figure interpreted in different ways in which Benjamin describes this obstruction and the freeing of something from it. "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. For if the sentence is the wall before the language of the original, literalness is the arcade."

It's not easy to understand, but let's start with the claim that there's a way in which literalness is not the fidelity of reproducing the sense. Literalness is first of all reproducing the syntax of the original language. Now, this would take care of something and put, as Benjamin says, the weight on something completely different. If there's no issue about the syntax, about the form of the sentence, if you just leave that as it is, then all the weight is put on the words, and that corresponds to what we saw originally. The unity of intention in the original must be refracted in all the words of the translation.

So there's something that is taken apart, something like the solid boundaries of the original, and by taking it apart, by putting all the weight on the word, which is, as Benjamin says, the passage in the wall, something flows through. Let's develop a little bit this figure of the light shining there, the light of the pure language.

## Light, Refraction, and Pure Language

Light that shines on something allows to see that thing, but we see the thing, the unity that is visible. We do not see the light. The light is, so to speak, the condition of possibility of seeing something. The pure language is, as it were, the background of our possibilities of making sense, of saying this and that and so on. But it itself is not visible in our making sense in language.

On the contrary, Benjamin says it is blocked by the kind of unity that we associate with sense, so that breaking apart that unity, the walls of sense, is letting that light go through. Now, this still does not explain exactly how do we make that light visible, but let's go back to. We talked about colors in the context of Goethe.

Think of it this way: When do we see light? Well, maybe when it's refracted, when we get something like transparent color phenomena that are produced through the breaking of light. And so if we think of breaking the walls of sense? Maybe along the breaking points, along those openings, we can have a refraction of that light. We can start to see it, as it were, like the borders of, the colored borders of a transparent crystal, say, or prism and so on.

Here we might say that the figure of the echo, which Benjamin used earlier, is now serving in as a visual metaphor to explicate how the pure language, the light of the pure language shines through and becomes visible, not in the original, but in the translation.

## Recovering the Flow of Revelation

What is seen, what is allowed passage, what is refracted in that passing is what we spoke about in the context of the early essay on language. That's what he called the flow of revelation. The task of the translator continues and complements the essay on language.

We can say that translation recovers in the sphere of the fallen language of judgment something that pertain to naming, to what gives expression to the creative force in language. It's not the originality of the poet that is at issue here, but rather revealing something about the creator by way of showing the kinship between languages in translation.

## The Turn to the Secondary

To conclude, I want to use the task of the translator to delineate, to discuss, a general feature of Benjamin's thought, which I want to call his turn to the secondary. Consider how this appears in the essay. We spoke of an original, like the work of genius, which has a certain character, which has certain unity of meaning, which has a certain organic form, let's say. And also we said that that unity is in some sense destroyed by the translation, and yet also raised. And yet translation also raises language to a higher level. It presents for us the kinship between languages, something that the original cannot do.

The translator is considered secondary in relation to the creator, to the genius and so on. And yet Benjamin in some sense gives the secondary position a central role. And I think something like that is reflected in many parts of Benjamin's corpus of writings. Take for instance his most famous essay by far, *The Work of Art in the Age of Technological Reproducibility*.

## Art in the Age of Technological Reproducibility

So here the focus is what happens to the work of art when it is reproduced, when something like the original, as it were, the product of genius, the immortal work, can now be replicated. The focus is on the instrument, the technology. And when you say instrument, when you speak of the instrumental, you think of something secondary. You think of the means to produce something, the means to bring about a certain end. So the technical, the technological is secondary in relation to the higher end, the original and so on.

And yet for Benjamin, that becomes the focus of his essay, how this entrance of the technological into the production of art, not only the replication, not only the technological reproducibility, but the way in which technology enters into the creative process changes completely the character of art. How the instrumental, how the instrument receives something like the primary importance in that essay.

Take another example. We mentioned at the beginning *The Arcades Project*, and I said Benjamin gathers in convolutes quotations. And somehow this is not a preliminary stage, but he's actually giving quotations a certain role in the way he constructs the image of that time, that place, that historical era. He does not come forward with his own views, so to speak. Takes what others said, and now in the secondary position arranges the original. Takes the reproduction and works with it, takes the quotations and works with them.

## The Arcades Project and Quotations

## The Secondary in Kafka, Proust, and Beyond

This idea of the secondary plays an important role also in some of his essays on literary figures such as Proust or Kafka, in the world of Kafka. He said, "Well, you can find hope in the figure of the assistant or the assistants in that world." So again, someone who's secondary to whoever is actually trying to act there. Or he speaks of not the one who acts, but the actor, that is the one who reproduces actions, who plays, in that case, he says, plays himself. Which is a strange way of thinking of reproducing something.

What are we to make of this? It might be interesting to note that, around the same time, there's another philosopher who sees himself in that position of the secondary, and this is Wittgenstein. For Wittgenstein, philosophical work always begins with the words of the other. You let the other utter something metaphysical, and then you go to work on whatever he said and clarifies it, shows it maybe to be nonsensical. But you're who is not first, but second in philosophy.

And he speaks also about himself in *Culture and Value*. He says, I'm not a genius. I'm talented. I take the work of others and clarifies it for them. So it's almost as if this is characteristic of a certain sensibility in philosophy, which I assume belongs to the zeitgeist.

## Against the Cult of Originality and Fascism

And for Benjamin, of course, this way of emphasizing the secondary is something to be understood against this celebration of life, which you find in various appropriations of Nietzsche. This idea of returning to original life, to connection and authentic life that is, of course, hidden in modernity by conditions of existence, which include technology. Technology takes us away from this connection to nature, to life. The big city, the masses. So there's this reactionary, I would say, mood of finding different ways to lead back from those alienating conditions of modernity back to a more profound connection with life and nature.

Benjamin says this feeds into fascism. And as a first attempt to clarify his position, we should say that this emphasis on the secondary, on technology, on reproduction, on quotes, on really trying to go against the cult of originality is part of his struggle against this kind of, sometimes it's called Lebensphilosophie in Germany of the times, the philosophies of life. We'll return to that when we speak of the arcades project.