Willis Barnstone The Poetics of Translation History, Theory, Practice Yale University Press New Haven and London ay Problems and Parables Whoever hears translates words that sound in his ears into his intellect, that is, practically speaking, into the language of his mouth Franz Rosenzweig, Translating Literature Poetry is waiting not only for a translation but for another sensibility. Poetry is waiting for the translation of a reader. Octavio Paz, Traduccién We are digging the pit of Babel. Franz Katka, “The Pit of Babel” Meanings of a Sign, or Parable of the Greek Moving Van Alter rounding the stormy Peloponnisos, when your ship docks at the Greek port of Piraeus you will see a frenetic waterfront speckled with litte vans, some pulled by smoky motorcycles, others by small truck motors, but each bear- ing a similar logo boldly scrawled on the side panels: weracbopa. The sign means TRANSPORTATION That Modern Greek word on the van, metafora, is equivalent to Latin transla- tio, from the past participle of eransferre, and both words, metafora and translatio, have the root meaning of “carrying across,” their way of saying “transportation.” Yet translatio also means “translation,” and gave us our English word. Although the common word for translation in Ancient Greek is metaphrasis, metafora sig- nifies not only carrying across but, in ancient rhetoric, transference of a word to another sense," This latter definition is a round-about way of reaching another observation about wetaopé, our original logo on the truck panels. The sign also means TRANSLATION 1516 Introduction and General Issues Finally, the most obvious meaning of metafora is its cognate meaning of “met- aphor.” So we quickly reach the third telated meaning of the logo. The sign means METAPHOR, To sum up, metafora means “transportation,” “translation,” and “metaphor”; and, to refine the polysemy, insofar as metafora signifies carrying across, and translation is the activity of carrying meaning from one language across to an- other, in its root meaning the word metafora is itself a metaphor for translation. ‘And what is the essence of metaphor but A = B? Or in the jargon of translation practice, A is the equivalent of B. This formula of equivalence, A = B, generating an intralingual metaphor from 2 foreign source, is also what translation is about = B means that metaphor is translation. Within the notion of metaphor is translation, But equally true, within the notion of translation is metaphor. Therefore, if we use the formula for metaphor, ‘A = B, to express the general activity of translation as stated in “metaphor is translation,” we can restate the equation, reversing it to read B = A, and come up with the startling notion that translation is metaphor, or, expressed in a fuller axiom, translation is the activity of creating metaphor. Yo see metaphor as translation and translation as metaphor will be 2 most useful tool for discussing the fundamental question of translatability and un- translatability. To see translation’s method and intention as metaphor, as opposed to duplication, counters the purist argument for untranslatability, which nor- mally goes: Perfect replication in translation is desirable, but perfect replication is impossible. Hence translation itself is impossible. Perfect replication is of course possible only when there is no change, when there is simply repetition, when A = A, With any rewording, however, there can be no full synonymy. And translation, within ot between languages, requires a change in language. the meaning is “transported” from one word or one set of words to another nonidentical word or set of words. In this translatio there can- rot be identity but difference. Were there to be verbal identity with the original, there would be no translatio or movement or translation, And between languages we have not only the phonological and connotative differences of intralingual rewording but differences between language systems. In his essay “Impossibilities of Translation,” the linguist Werner Winter states plainly: “The system of form and meaning in language A may be similar to that in language B, but is never identical with it” (69). And, as we shall see, Borges proves that even when there is verbal identity, there wil still be a difference. So the aim of translators to produce identical twins must always fail.Problems and Parables In Borges’ masterful satire on reading, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quijote,” Pierre Menard copies out two chapters from Cervantes’ Don Quijote word for word as they appear in Spanish and publishes the text—apparently the same text—under his own name, claiming the superiority of his version over the Cer- vantine original. Vulgar plagiarism has no place in the puzzle of Menard’s cre~ ation. Moreover, Borges reveals that Menard’s intralingual literal transcription of a text of the Quijote cannot even be considered a mere mechanical copy of the barbarous original by Miguel de Cervantes since the new version, though ver- bally identical, is not only different, but is, in fact, deeper and more complex. Borges’ narrator states: “Menard’s fragmentary Quijote is more subtle than Cer- vantes’. The latter, in a clumsy fashion, opposes to the fictions of chivalry the tawdry provincial reality of his country; Menard selects as his ‘reality’ the land of Carmen during the century of Lepanto and Lope de Vega” (42). The narrator tells us, moreover, that although Cervantes’ text and Menard’s have the same words on the page, “the second is almost infinitely richer” (42). Indeed, he suggests that for a civilized Frenchman at the beginning of the twen- tieth century it would be impossible, despite thousands of hours and countless identical drafts, to produce a work identical for a twentieth-century reader. Borges’ intuition of the role of the reader in creating texts within a specific context establishes the basis for what is later called reader-response theory. Borges implicitly confirms the obvious yet scarcely fele fact that a text without a reader is dead ink on a page, is nothing, is not alive until each individual reader translates that perception of black on white, of shaped darkness on paper, into meaning and emotion. And each individual reader will accomplish this differ- ently, as Pierre Menard expected his readers to do. Speaking of this story, Emir Rodriguez Monegal writes, “We can see the foundation of a new poetics, based. not on the actual writing of a work but on its reading” (Borges 330). Borges writes in “Clouds (D,” one of his last poems: “The Odyssey is a cloud / changing like the sea, Something different / each time we open it” (Los conjurados). And Gérard Genette, commenting on this Borgesean insight of difference, declares, “The time of a book is not the limited time of its writing, but the limitless time of reading and memory” (“Littérature selon Borges” 132). So, in reading conventional translations or even in reading identical texts, whether by the same author or fantastic “translations” by the mad Menard, there can never be identical responses. In practice, Menard proves that when once one brings the activity of reading to the page, the texts lose stability and change. In fact, even A = A can never be true. In translation, since the A on the left side of the equation (the first reading) is always different from the A on the right (the second reading), in the end, even in a copy, the most scrupulous of all transla- tions, where the intention is replication, once we introduce the reader to the formula, we end up with A = B. Indeed, we do not even have to make a copy. Reading the same text twice proves that A = B, for with each reading a second, 17Introduction and General Issues altered text is born. Translation then, as all transcription and reading of texts, creates a difference. Or, returning to our earlier postulate on the meanings of metafora, translation is the activity of creating metaphor, which is to say, of creating differences, whose formula persists as A = B. Once it is seen that translation cannot be A = A, the mimetic assumptions of literalists fail, of those who would demand the impossible, or throw out the whole activity of translation on the grounds of ‘inexactitude and difference. Were truly literalist assumptions to prevail, translation would indeed be impossible, because in translation A = A is impossible. And only under those impossible preconditions of literality would we then have to agree with those who assert that poetry cannot be translated-—nor can prose nor any sign system. The great doubters of verse translation such as Percy Bysshe Shelley, Benedetto Croce, José Ortega y Gasset, and Robert Frost would be vindicated. But poetry is translated, sometimes {elicitously, and whether well or poorly done it can be accomplished provided there is a declaration of difference, pro- vided that A = B. Given such premises and helped by the axiom “translation is metaphor,” the act of translation can be judged not on its attainment of identity but on the quality of its difference in seeking identity and equivalence. Success or failure in translation will be judged by the quality of the newly created met- aphor, which is always the final product of translation. Often the useful term equivalence is used to cover the difference between source language and target language or between source text and target text, but equivalence in no way signifies replication. There is no equivalence without dif- ference. In poetic metaphor it is the difference, the tension between near-equal parts of a translation, that makes the poetry, since translation is the activity of creating related difference. To return to the parable of the Greek moving van and the shifts in nuance and usage of the verbal sign metafora, we observe how carrying across a word within the same language or to another language entails a complexity of ever- changing sense found in new signs with theit own lexical codes. The original significance of metafora in Greek persists, however, as either a primary factor or a secondary insinuation in its Latin and English versions or equivalents. More, these same observations on matters of intralingual primary and secondary mean- ings and interlingual change and equivalence, which all derive from that painted sign on the vans, aptly serve as an analogue—or extended metaphor—for the main questions of translation itself. Those perky vans appear and disappear, indifferent to our vision of them. But even their appearance evokes activities of the mind which require words, We read a written logo and interpret it. To find meaning in this logo or in any linguistic sign requires its “translation into some further linguistic sign,” as Jakobson stated, « formulation first articulated by C. 5. Peirce, whom JakobsonWe | Problems and Parables 19 ptaises as “the deepest inquirer into the essence of signs” (“Linguistic Aspects” 233). So one sign breeds another, there is unending process of rewording, re- telling, translation, transmutation, and wherever we turn, where meaning is sought, where mental activity takes place, we are living inescapably in the-eternal condition of translation. Which is to say, we are forever making a metaphor with its related differences. We are reading and translating ourselves and the world. Ina word, to come to Greece and find that even the moving vans run around under the sun and smog of greater Athens with advertisements for transporta- tion, for metaphor, and ultimately with signs for TRANSLATION should convince us that every motor truck hauling goods from one place to another, every per- ceived metamorphosis of a word or phrase within or between languages, every decipherment and interpretation of that logo on the panel, every act of reading, writing, and interpretation of a text, every role by each actor in the cast, every adaptation of a script by a director of opera, film, theater, ballet, pantomime, indeed every perception of movement and change, in the street or on our tongues, on the page or in our ears, leads us directly to the art and activity of translation. Translating from one language into another is a mathematical task, and the translation of a lyrical poem, for example, into a foreign language is quite analogous to a mathernatical problem. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology All poetry is translation. Harold Bloom, Poetry and Repression The human mind can do nothing but translate; all its activity consists of just that. August Wilhelm Schlegel, Translating Literature Every reading is a translation. Octavio Paz, Traduccién Translation as Part of a General Theory of Literature During the days of inflationary rhetoric in the battles between analytical philosophy and everything else (especially traditional metaphysics), the positiv- ist Rudolph Carnap once declared with cold disdain that all philosopay outside240 Theory what they omit as much as in their content—the far light of original ‘meaning. George Steiner, After Babel Walter Benjamin and His Translator-Angel Carrying a Hermetic Third Language into the Metaworld ‘Walter Benjamin has written on the task of the translator, which is the title of his single paper dedicated exclusively to translation. His few pages have taken on the quality of Scripture, for they are profound, intuitive, elusively ob- scure, and at the same time illuminating. The essay was an introduction to his own translation of Charles Baudelaire’s Tableaux parisiens. When his volume ap- peared in 1923, it was panned in the Frankfurter Zeitung by Stefan Zweig, who dismissed the translations as inadequate and the introduction as “difficult.” Until his flight from the Nazis and despairing suicide in midwinter at the Spanish border of France, Benjamin was a participant in intellectual and artistic move- ments and doctrines in Germany, France, and Austria. Loved today as are few literary figures of the period, connected by back- ground and spirit with Franz Kafka and Gershom Scholem (his close friend and personal authority on Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism), Benjamin saw translation as another proof of the idea of the world as language, a notion that identifies him with Kabbalistic thought. Although he did not have the benefit of the im- mense cache of the Nag Harnmadi Library of Gnostic Scriptures recently discov- ered, he derives distinctly from the Gnostic tradition in his fixation on contradiction and his favoring of the unanticipated other of the paradox. Steiner observes, “Echoing Mallarmé, but in terms obviously derived from the Kabbal- istic and Gnostic tradition, Benjamin founds his metaphysic of translation on the concept of ‘universal language” (After Babel 64). The summation of his beliefs, of meaning concealed between the lines of translation, is displayed in that deeply antinomic thesis with which he concludes “The Task.” The most occult and sacred knowledge is to be found in the most banal method of translation, which is scarcely translation at all: the interlinear gloss. The desirability of word-for-word literality seems to violate Benjamin's other tenet, however—rejection of mimesis as a ground for translation (in the same way, Kant bans the mimesis of reproduced images from the a priori imag- ination). The only tenable explanation for such an apparent contradiction of aim and method must lie, as we will see, in the notion that a translation is not merely a text for a reader bur a linguistic step toward a “pure language,” a universal language that contains its own philosophical and ethical secrets. (Benjamin ear- lier used the expression “pure language” in 1916, in his paper “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man.”) Benjamin's “Task” ends with his perplexingSigns of Our Time proposal: “For in some degree, all great writings, but the Scriptures in the highest degree, contain between the lines their virtual translation. The interlinear version of the Scriptures is the archetype or ideal of all translation” (82). Before examining with some care Benjamin's search for the invisible reine Sprache (pure language) that lies beoween lines and beyond readers, which is “the translation of an imperfect language into a more perfect one, and cannot but add something to it, namely knowledge” (“Language as Such” 325), I wish to recount a last parable, one in which I had an unanticipated role. | do not understand the parable, yet I suspect that were someone to have knowledge of its meaning, the meaning between Benjamin's lines might be more perceptible. In the following parable John Cage offers the secret of the ideal language. PARABLE OF THE POEM ON A SNOWY EVENING One winter evening in 1959, the composer John Cage and I were caught in a heavy snowstorm. Snow suddenly fell out of silence and for hours went on floating fat cold particles down on the grounds outside our building. We were in a small New England college where Cage was a visiting artist / scholar for the year, and where I was teaching. Cage had earlier that evening, in the same build- ing, given a concert, which included his four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence. We were friends, stayed on afterward to talk, and as the village became numb with its white burden, we were increasingly aware of being pleasantly trapped there for the night. Now, apart from being an extraordinary composer of notes and silences, ex- pert in mushrooms and Buddhist thought, Cage passes enigmas and wisdom through the bars of his namesake cage. He was speaking about random music and had just put up an exhibit of compositions based on notes determined by graphs of constellations that an Austrian professor of astronomy had given him. We turned to poetry, and then for hours, as the snow prevailed, Cage insisted that I change my ways, give up words but not poetry, and write poems without words. Fill in the total soundspace—but not with words, Songs without words are even ordinary. But poems? What do you mean? You must find out what | mean. No words? No words. ‘And then like a good modern fugue we began again, 1 demanding answers, Cage insisting, like an elusive Borges, on the word that contains all in one non- word, clear only as we move into mute death, with no chance of revelation to author or main character in the author's tale, There must be an answer, | said. There is. Before it became light the snow stopped. Stars were out over the blank page outside. There were plows beginning to mark paths. Then, after understanding 241Theory our contrary positions with perfect reconciliation, Cage apparently as happy as the eternal notes of his unsounding constellations and | pleasantly trapped as always, we stepped outside and walked together. Alter a while Cage stopped me and we gazed at the wordless snow. At that hour an empty calm filled the sound- space, and the wordless snow was perfectly eloquent. Then we forked off to our respective rooms. BENJAMIN'S BIBLE In the absence of a large central work on the theory of translation, a Confessions by Augustine or a Derridean Grammatology, we are left without a monument to applaud, obey, or contend against. Monumentality I define not by page length but uniform quality, originality, and importance. The greatest mas- terpieces of literary theory have not suffered from their lack of monumental dimensions. Aristotle's Poetics, Horace’s Ars poetica, and Wordsworth’s “Preface to the Lyrical Ballads” are in length Jellersonian pamphlets, not Russian novels. Closest to a classic volume on translation, for all its quirks and linguistic adventures, is Benjamin's “Task of the Translator.” His is a Bible exploring the most significant problems of translation theory; moreover, it also constitutes in every way a theory of language, a document in which translation theory and literary theory commingle, as they should. It does not matter that Benjamin's utopian meditations and proposals do not seem to find resolution. Nor should the reader be shaken by the difficulty of his papers on translation, “notoriously difficult” even in the eyes of the philosopher Andrew Benjamin, his most insight- ful commentator. Finally, the “pure language” quality of his own argument always risks a fall into another pre-Babelean “pure language.” Yet the obscurities, har- monies, and Heraclitean contradictions (in which similarity is error while the fusion of kindred languages, the hidden third tongue of strange reality, is the reine Sprache) keep both translation in its afterlife and his own work alive for future interpretation. “The Task of the Translator” (Die Aufgabe des Ubersetzers) is the work of a philosopher of language who has the messianic purpose of finding through trans- lation the universal language and the memory of God. And that translation must be something so essential that it need not be concerned with the response of readers any more than other arts are. Like Kafka’s hunger artist, whose physical self will wither in the service of a higher spiritual calling, Benjamin's work of art will have nothing to do with a debasing, impure, temporal “receiver”: In the appreciation of a work of art or an art form, consideration of the receiver never proves fruitful, Not only is any reference to a certain public or its repre- sentatives misleading, but even the concept of an “ideal” receiver is detrimental in the theoretical consideration of art, since all it posits is the existence and natureSigns of Our Time ‘of man as such. Art, in the same way, posits man’s physical and spiritual existence, but in none of its works is it concerned with his response. No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener. (69) How does Benjamin justify this radical disjunction between receiver and art? He rejects the idea that a literary work should impart information, for informa- tion is “something inessential.” And to communicate too much is “the hallmark of bad translations,” he tells us. In a series of questions defining the inessential, he also decisively rejects what a translation “contains in addition to information,” that is, he dismisses “the mysterious, the ‘poetic,’ something that a translator can reproduce only if he is also a poet” (70). To this enigma of what is essential in a translation, and for whom translation is (Since it is not for the reader), he offers specific answers. Translation is not related to meaning but to language itself, and to its “translatability.” Translata- bility concerns not information but story, however: not a mimetic image of a thing or event that should be forgotten but “an essential quality” (Wesentliches) of the literary work that should be fulfilled in “God's remembrance.” Information is temporal and fleeting. “Story is different. Tt does not expend itself. It preserves its strength and is capable of releasing it even after a long time” (“Storyteller” 90). As for the relation of the original to the translation, Benjamin decrees that it be dialectical, which Steiner, Andrew Benjamin, and Paul de Man all declare to be Kabbalistic. The antinomy lies in the following statements regarding a work's essence, which, as we have seen, is its translatability: “It is plausible that no translation, however good it may be, can have any significance as regards the original. Yet, by virtue of its ranslatability the original is closely connected with the translation” (“Task of the Translator” 71). But, we ask, how can a good trans- lation have no significance as regards the original yet at the same time, by virtue of its translatability, be somehow connected with the original? We immediately discover that the translation is not, after all, directly connected with the original ‘but with the afterlife of the original: “Just as the manifestations of life are inti- mately connected with the phenomenon of life without being of importance to it, a manslation issues from the original—not so much from its life as from its afterlife” (71). After such extremely exacting conditions for valuable translation, it is with relief that we are told translation’s mission: to fulfill an original work's life: “For a tanslation comes later than the original, and since the important works of world literature never find their chosen translators at the time of their origin, their translation marks their stage of continued life” (71). At every point in his grave ontological games with translation, Benjamin re- turns, by a different route, to language. Between languages there is a reciprocal relation. Languages are related a priori, not only historically, and they are inter- 24DTheory related in what they want to express. Here he is speaking of “the kinship of languages” which is demonstrated by ttanslation. And translation alters every- thing. Although a translation cannot aspire to a likeness to the original, it can cause the original to be transformed; even the words in the original can be r2- newed, and their once fixed meaning begin to grow and mature, as translation endows the original with afterlife: “For in its afterlife—which could not be called that if it were not a transformation and a renewal of something living—the orig- inal undergoes a change. Even words with fixed meaning can undergo matur- ing process” (72). In this crucial and central notion, Benjamin argues an exact analogy with Borges’ notion in “Kafka and His Precursors” that authors affect and transform thetr ancestors. The translation is to the original in Benjamin as the author is to the precursor-author in Borges. As for the original author’s style, it will change, its initial qualities will wither away, and what may have become hackneyed will, through translation, sound fresh again. Then, with Hélderlin’s treatment of Sophocles in mind, Benjamin offers the astute paradox: “While a poet's words endure in his own language, even the greatest translation is destined to become part of the growth of its own language and eventually to be absorbed by its renewal” (73). Not only does trans- lation endure, grow, and transform its mother tongue, but it is favored among literary forms with the guardian function of watching over the original and even the language of the original: “Translation is so far reraoved from being the sterile equation of two dead languages that of all literary forms it is the one charged with the special mission of watching over the maturing process of the original language and the birth pangs of its own” (72) So, clearly, that suprahistorical kinship of languages is not a product of their mimetic similarity. Disdaining mimesis (Plato's theory of imitation), Benjamin writes that “the kinship of languages is brought out by a translation far more. profoundly and clearly than in the superficial and indefinable similarity of two works of literature” (72-73). No, translation—which is the bond between lan- guages—operates neither by mimesis nor by reproducing images. Rather, it is “analogous to the argumentation by which a critique of cognition would have to prove the impossibility of an image theory” (72). Benjamin goes so far as to state that “in cognition there could be no objectivity, nor even a claim to it, if it dealt with images of reality” (72). In his essential rejection of all imagistic imitation, Andrew Benjamin speculates, surely correctly, that Benjamin has in mind Kant’ argument concerning the nature of things. Andrew Benjamin writes: “Kant’s po- sition can be found in the argument—located in ‘The Schematism of the Pure Concepts of the Understanding,’ in The Critique of Pure Reason—which advances the position that itis ‘schemata, not images of objects, which underlie our pure sensible concepts.’ For Kant, ‘the image is a product of the empirical faculty of reproductive imagination; the schema of sensible concepts, such as of figures in space, is a product and as it were, monogram, of pure a priori imagination,| Signs of Our Time through which, and in accordance with which, images themselves first became possible” (Ivanslation 91). As noted earlier, Walter Benjamin uses Kant’s banning of reproduced images from the a priori imagination as a justification for his own banning of the like- ness of images between original and translation. Now that our author has given the notion of the “kinship of languages” the primal role of orchestrating the Farger scheme of translation and the metalanguage which is its fmal realm, he needs to elaborate that notion, He does so by introducing the crucial idea of intentionality. He asks how, apart from historical considerations, two languages are related. Not in literatures or words, he responds. Then he brings in intention: Rather, all suprahistorical kinship of languages rests in the intention underlying each language as a whole—an intention, however, which no single language can attain by itself but which is realized only by the totality of their intentions sup- plementing each other: pure language. While all individual elements of foreign languages—words, sertences, structures—are mutually exclusive, these lan- guages 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. (“Task of the Translator” 74) Underlying each language as a whole is this elusive concept. In Benjamin's theory, “the intended object” refers to the signified, while “the mode of intention” is each language. So, to use his example, while “Brot and pain ‘intend! the same object,” the modes of this intention (the languages) are not the same. And in having different languages, Brot means one thing to a German and pain means something different. French bread and German bread are not at all the same; nor are French and German. Although the modes of intention of these two words are in conflict, the object of intention (the bread) is complementary to the in- tention in each language. Using his own straightforward terminology, Benjamin then makes a pivotal linguistic observation about words in their context and provides, at last, a key to resolving the connection between a multiphcity of languages and that pure language which gives eternal life to works and renews each language: “In the individual, unsupplemented languages, meaning is never found in relative independence, as in individual words or sentences; rather, it is ina constant state of flux—until it is able to emerge as pure language from the harmony of all the various modes of intention. Until then, it remains hidden in the languages. If, however, these languages continue to grow in this manner until the end of their time, it is translation which catches fire on the eternal life of the words and the perpetual renewal of languages” (74). When translation, even in its provisional way, operates well, it makes possible a “predestined, hitherto inaccessible realm of reconciliation and fulfillment of languages” (75). The longing for that universal language, like the philosopher's longing for truth, is as inherent as breathing. Benjamin turns a pronouncement 245246 Theory by Mallarmé into proof of this yearning for that language which is revealed in translation: “The imperfection of languages consists of their plurality and so the supreme one is missing” (77). The immortal word, says Mallarmé, is silent, un- uttered because of the diversity of languages, yet all could change in an instant, were it pronounced. Then truth itself would materialize. Clearly, Benjamin has found in Mallarmé a spiritual and linguistic comrade in the confrontation with linguistic plurality and desire for a pre-Babelean, uncorrupted pure language of reconstituted Paradise. Benjamin proposes translation as the vehicle for the voy- age back Now Benjamin asks what must be the primary material for the genuine tans- lator to transfer to that higher region of pure speech. It is elusive, he confesses. It is not information, though it may be story; it is certainly not subject matter. Yet whatever itis, although it appears provisional, without claim of permanence, to begin with, in the end it becomes more permanent than the original, for “translation, ironically, transplants the original into a more definitive linguistic realm since it can no longer be displaced by a secondary rendering” (75). In effect, as Benjamin moves into a sacred realm of pure speech, with an increasingly clear messianic intonation, we must agree with the late Paul de Man, who, in identifying Benjamin's Kabbalism, agrees that Benjamin has returned the sacred to literary language.* In his lectures on “The Task of the Translator” (re- corded at Cornell University and incorporated into The Resistance to Theory) de Man cites Benjamin's favoring of the author at the expense of the reader, in what amounts to a rejection of reader-reception theory. In reality Benjamin has gone even farther than that radical position. in rejecting the reader, he does not favor the author; rather, he dismisses the author, as well as the text—that is, all three elements of that sacred triad of communication undergo brief and not very im- portant existences. Benjamin favors instead translation of those three elements into that higher realm where in its afterlife the work, in proper pure speech, shines. After speaking to the “ironic” primacy of translation over its source text, Ben- jamin drops another bombshell. The word ironic leads him to think of the ro- mantics, who, scarcely recognizing the value of translation, made the grave error of esteeming criticism above it. The romantic mistake was double, Benjamin says, for criticism is distinctly secondary, “a lesser factor in the continued life of lit- erary works,” and, moreover, “their own great translations testify to their sense of the essential nature and the dignity of this literary mode” (76). The examples he cites are German, however—Luther, Johann Heinrich Voss, and Schlegel—so we do not have the paradigm of Shelley's great translations from the Greek, whose very existence is ironic, because in his self-deflating maxims Shelley is one of the memorable detractors of the art of translation. Having proposed translation as the way to a soteriological language, and at the same time having dismissed what the world traditionally understands asSigns of Our Time translation—a transfer of meaning between languages in a comprehensible fash- ion and with some degree of similarity (equivalence), whether faithful or free— Benjamin recognizes that the roads on which he has set his translator “are all the more obscure and impenetrable” (76). He muses out loud: What solution is there when a translator has “negated the reproduction of the sense”? Traditional con- cerns of fidelity and license also appear irrelevant to a theory that does not look. for the reproduction of meaning, Nevertheless, at this point Benjamin begins a critical discussion of them that will take us to his primordial analogy derived from Gershom Scholem’s analysis of Kabbalah, the analogy of language with the fragments of a broken vessel. Benjamin attacks literalness as a means of rendering meaning (for ordinary meaning in the end must be extinguished). Although in his consummate tale of translating Holy Writ, which is true language, he demands literainess and only literalness, he first demolishes it in a sophisticated linguistic manner, giving it and its confrere “fidelity” a place in the bottomless pit of language: “Fidelity in the translation of individual words can almost never reproduce the meaning they have in the original. For sense in its poetic significance is not limited to meaning, but derives from the connotations conveyed by the word chosen to express it. We say of words that they have emotional connotations. A literal rendering of the syntax completely demolishes the theory of reproduction of meaning and is a direct threat to comprehensibility” (78). ‘And if one does want meaning, a problematic desire, it is self-evident that literalness impedes the rendering of sense, Benjamin claims, citing Hélderlin's “monstrous translations of Sophocles” as examples of pure translations. Mon- strous translations, along with critical philosophy, literary theory, and history, in de Man's words “disarticulate, they undo the original, they reveal that the original was always already disarticulated. . . They kill the original, by discovering that the original was already dead” (Resistance. to Theory 84). Beyond all these intra~ linguistic impurities lie the reine Sprache and the broken vessel. Many have discussed this crucial analogy, and I wish here only to paraphrase Benjamin's epiphany. Carol Jacobs and de Man quarrel with key words as they appear in what they view as Harry Zohn’s flawed translation of the vessel pas- sage. My own interpretation owes a debt to Andrew Benjamin, who has devel- oped Jacobs’ observations on the tikkun and followed de Man's corrective retranslation of the relevant text. They, along with Walter Benjamin, all depend on Gershom Scholem’s elaboration of the Kabbalistic notion of harmony in the divine idea of creation and disturbance in the cosmic process suggested by the breaking of the vessels. The repair, or rearticulation, of the vessel is Benjamin's continuation of the Lurianic myth. Isaac Luria (1534-1572), born in Jerusalem of Spanish origin, is the single most significant Kabbalist visionary author, perhaps even more than Moses de Leén, to whom js attributed the thirteenth-century Zohar. (Zohar, meaning 247Theory “brightness” in Hebrew, is a mystical commentary on the Pentateuch, written from the second to the thirteenth centuries. It is a source of Kabbalah, and Luria’s later Zohar is itself called a book of the Kabbalah.) Luria, like Benjamin, saw language as a way to understand the relation between earthly redemption and cosmic restoration to our Adamic original state. The vessel of Luria and Benjamin is their common path to restoration and a utopian harmony, related to the miath- ematical and mystical harmony of celestial spheres first articulated in the West by Pythagoras, Benjamin's clase friend Gershom Scholem, with whom he was to have a life- long correspondence, was the source for his knowledge of Kabbalah, early Jewish Gnosticism, and jewish mysticism. Schotem’s early writings on tikka and the vessel are incorporated in this indispensable passage of his book Kabbalah The world of tikkun, the re-establishment of the harmonious condition of the world, which in the Lurianic Kabbalah is the Messianic world, still contains a strictly utopian impulse. That harmony which it reconstitutes does not corre- spond at all to any condition of things that have ever existed even in Paradise, but is at most a plan contained in the divine idea of creation. This plan, however, even with the first stages of its realisation, came up against the disturbance and hindrance of the cosmic process known as the breaking of the vessels, which initiates the Lurianie myth. (13) Now Benjamin's interpretation of the myth of the vessels leads us to difficult tdeas impossible to resolve completely because of their incomplete, ambivalent, and fascinating presentation. They have to do with the language fragments (which are presumably a plurality of tongues, including original texts and trans- lations) created by the breaking of the vessels. Just what is their significance when they come back together? Are they truly reconstituted in a harmonious totality? Andrew Benjamin, following de Man, believes that the fragments rep- resent difference that even alter their rejoining retain their difference, He cites Walter Benjamin: “Let us read the passage: ‘Fragments of a vessel which in order to be articulated together must follow one another in the smallest details, al- though they need not be like one another. In the same way a translation, instead of making itself similar to the meaning of the original, it must lovingly and in detail, in its own language, form itself according to the manner of meaning of the original, to make both recognisable as the broken parts of the greater lan- guage, just as fragments are the broken parts of a vessel” (Iranslation 100) Walter Benjamin’ passage is another way of relating translation both to the original and to the greater language. Yes, when the diverse fragments find them- selves together they do not necessarily lose their difference, and indeed there is 2 harmony, as there is in classical Pythagoras among his different, complemen- tary, mystical numbers, There is a difference though the purpose of the recon-Signs of Our Time stitution is the repair of the vessel as well as the accordance in a pure language. Yet here the analogy of vessel and language becomes troublesome. Although Ben- jamin longs for a pure language that will have the immaculate spirituality, clarity, and harmonious totality of Eden's speech, every evidence in his essay suggests that the “reconstitution” is not a return to a preexistent tongue but the creation of a tongue, through the possibilities of translation. So de Man, Andrew Benja- min, and Jacobs cite each other to suggest that Benjamin has implied, in his analogy of the vessel, a return to that Babelean original and unified language, yet the tikkun of Lurianic Kabbalah, which is Benjamin's source by way of his read- ings in Scholem, they feel that Benjarnin misuses, since he fails to see that such return is impossible in the analogy—even by means of translation. The tikkun does not presuppose an initial Babelean vessel (representing language), and An- drew Benjamin joins de Man in taking Benjamin to task for supposing that there ever was an original language, as opposed to a displaced language. Translation is a new fulfillment, not a replication of a past utopia. And if there is not a paradisiac language to return to, then its symbol, the vessel, also had no earlier existence, which is to say, the vessel too must be created. But in the Lutianic myth as it is recounted, the vessel does exist, since it consists of broken parts of a vessel but not as a Babelean creation. So Andrew Benjamin argues that while the notion of a broken vessel that can be rearticulated into a pure language is thinkable, the vessel analogy itself is faulty, since in order to be broken the vessel had once to be whole in an Edenic mythical world, and this runs counter to tikkun (Translation 101). The second, and I believe much more serious, problem with the vessel anal- ogy is precisely the nature of the fragments and how they fit mechanically. Ben- jamin is consistent in saying that the pieces “must follow each other in the smallest details although they need not be like one another” (“Task of the Trans- lator” 78). He is reiterating the idea that a translation need not be similar in meening to the original, But he maintains that the parts must join in the manner of the original as parts of the greater vessel. There is a complete breakdown here in the logic of the visual analogy of clay fragments and linguistic units. The parts of a broken vessel, whatever their ran- dom similarity or difference, fit together in a complementary manner, with no inherent memory of identity, however vague. Their only common identical qual- ity is, presumably, their sharing the same larger curvatures of the total vessel; but edges and shapes, not curvature, are being fitted together. Therefore, given any two fragments (any two language units), translation fragment B is not, was not, and can never be a replacement for the original fragment, A. With skill fragment B may be fitted to A. Yet it is not its replacement, nor its translation, close or far, even in a Lurianic Kabbalah. If the parts do not translate into each other, which Benjamin calls for in speaking of them as original pieces and their translations, we do not have a translation. 249250 Theory What do we have? Logically, we have a mess. We have an original language to which we have added its translation: in short, a bitingual version, which pre- tends, as A and B, to be one new, pure language. A plus B does not yield a new translation. Rather, A yields to, is transformed into, B, and A disappears. Huevo yields to egg, and huevo is silenced. If we retain, as Benjamin would, the original fragments of A and attach them to B, we do not have a translation but a dupli- cation of meaning in two languages: huevo-egg. Such a monstrosity is not a new, pure language but clumsy verbiage The more specifically one presses these analogies the less certain the correct referents are, and the less lucid and more ambivalent becomes the fragmentary analogy that Benjamin offers us. To find mysterious profundity in vagueness and indeterminacy is a pleasing but in the end disturbingly incomplete experience. Benjamin goes beyond the question of how pure language and vessel reach their present state—whether through translation and fitting together of parts as Benjamin originally suggests or through the assemblage of their complementary distinctions into a new linguistic totality, or complementarity, a matter that Ben- Jamin then pursues. Once having proposed that complementarity, or “greater language,” Benjamin describes the activity of translation, the ideal translation, that leads to all the good qualities of linguistic redemption. Again, we may be astounded by his paradoxes. We will discover that even his most contradictory thesis contains resolution, namely, that ideal translation, which eschews partic- ular or thematized similitude and ordinary sense or meaning, demands the method of literalness, Benjamin brings back the notion of intention, now as Latin intentio. “The meaning, the language of a translation can—in fact, must—let itself go, so that it gives voice to the intentio of the original not as reproduction but as harmony, aS a supplement to the language in which it expresses itself, as its own kind of intentio” (“Task of the Translator” 79). By harmony he means joining differences that belong together as opposed to simply repzoducing similitude. And intentio, among other things, refers to his repugnance against a translation passing as an original written in the new tongue. After denying “highest praise” to a work that has the appearance of nativity in the language of its translation, in the next lines Benjamin iterates his most profound and outrageously antinomic thesis: “The significance of fidelity as en- sured by literalness is that the work reflects the great longing for linguistic com- plementation” (79). So we have as his intentio a fidelity achieved by way of literalness and leading to “linguistic complementation.” In asking for complementation rather than sim- ilarity, Benjamin might have gone on with his shaky analogy of the vessel but fortunately does not. While the analogy is gone, its intention—complementaritySigns of Our Time as a means of regaining “that very nucleus of pure language” (79) —remains. He specifically asks for fidelity, which literalness insures, as a means of reaching linguistic complementation. How can literalness lead to linguistic complemen- tation? Complementation normally iraplies, as in geometry, adding to make a perfect whole, and the segment added is normally different in dimensions and shape, not literally the same. The circle and its complementary segments illus- trate the idea. It remains geometric magic how segments of a vessel or circle can be literalness and fidelity (implying duplication of the same shape) and at the same time be consistent with complementation (iuplying the ficcing together of unequal shapes). In Benjamin literalness does yield complementation. To understand how this magic operates we must quickly retranslate some of his terms and put them into semantic harmony. By Benjarninian linguistic alchemy, word-for-word translation is gold. Literalness in fact means disregard for similarity to achieve true comple- mentarity, These notions are not hard to reconcile, as in a moment Benjamin himself will reconcile the conflict of fidelity and freedom, giving his special dis- tinctions to each concept. Although literainess is word-for-word identification, we must remember that it does not pretend to fidelity of meaning. On the contrary, literalness works against comprehensibility, and fidelity to word works against fidelity to sense, and literalness works against literariness, demolishing literature. So, then, when literalness is accepted literally for what it promises, there is no contradiction in Benjamin's prescription. My shock and inability to believe he means what he says comes because I wonder why anyone would want translation of literature—and he uses only models of “high” literature—to be anti-literary, unreadable, and unintelligible as literature. The answer to this is also logical and consistent. Ben- jamin’ translation does not move into a language of this world but becomes a pure language of another realm. Why we should yearn for that language, the apparent gift of enlightened translation, remains the enigma. Of course, we do yearn for the impossible, “to touch the sky with my two arms” as Sappho says, so why should we not yearn with Benjamin for his reine Sprache? Although he offers no model, Benjainin does provide a wondrous description of good translation, in which he uses the metaphor of spiritual light: “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” (“Task of the Translator” 79), Clearly, his formula portends a reciprocal relation in which the translation shines equally upon the original, that is, redeems it with translated light. He also tells us bluntly how to arrive at the real translation; “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 lan- guage of the original, literalness is the arcade” (79). 251Theory The shining passage above tells us that original syntax must be followed, and word rather than sentence or sense is the primary element. As a method, then, Benjamin's imposition of foreign syntax and literal dictionary translations should yield nonsense, that is, unintelligible pure speech. ‘As he nears the end of this short, densely significant paper, Benjamin begins to draw us, even if tentatively, into the dream of his Word—and he does equate on several occasions reine Sprache with Holy Writ, with the creative word of the logos in the opening lines of John’s Gospel. At this point he adds new justification to his literalist method by redefining fidelity and freedom. Although fidelity and freedom in translation seem to conflict, they do so only when translation wishes to convey information. Then, paradoxically, fidelity fails (for literal translations make little earthly sense) and freedom could get the job done. But Benjamin has no use for information, which he deems temporal and fleeting: “Only if the sense of a linguistic creation may be equated with the information it conveys does some ultimate, decisive element remain beyond all communication—quite close and yet infinitely more remote, concealed or distinguishable, fragmented or pow- erful” (79). And freedom, paradoxically, a free translation, in which literainess is imperative, will take us there beyond information and into that infinitely remote realm. Benjamin offers his most complete paean to the mystically pure language which is translation’s end: In all language and linguistic creations there remains in addition to what can be conveyed something that cannot be communicated, depending on the context in, which it appears, it is something that symbolizes or something symbolized. It is the forme only in the finite products of language, the latter in the evolving of the languages themselves. And that which seeks to represent, to produce itself in the evolving of languages, is that very nucleus of pure language. Though con- cealed and fragmentary, itis an active force in life as the symbolized thing itself, whereas it inhabits linguistic creations only in symbolized form. While that ul- timate essence, pure language, in the various tongues is tied only to linguistic elements and then changes, in linguistic creations it is weighted with a heavy. alien meaning. To relieve ic of this, to turn the symbolizing into the symbolized, to regain pure language fully formed in the linguistic flux, is the tremendous and only capacity of translation, In this pure language—which no longer means or expresses anything but is, as expressionless and creative Word, that which is meant in all languages—all information, all sense, and all intention finally en- counter a stratum in which they are destined to be extinguished. (79-80) With the ending of this almost nihilistic hymn to purity—in which before the suprahistorical shird language, the world and its meaning, information, and expression lie extinguished in a Gétterdimmerung of temporal refuse, of reine Sprache itber alles—Benjamin instructs the translator to be relentless in releasingSigns of Our Time imprisoned language from the “decayed barriers of his own language.” Referring to that pure Adamic sphere he delineates the role of the translator: This very stratum furnishes a new and higher justification for free translation; this justification does not derive from the sense of what is to be conveyed, for the emancipation from this sense is the task of fidelity. Rather, for the sake of pure language, a free translation bases the test on its own language. It is the ‘ask of the translator to release in his own language that pure language which is under the spell of another, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his re- creation of that work. For the sake of pure language he breaks through decayed barriers of his own language. (80) As for the relation between translation and original, Benjamin uses another simile which brings in all the contradictions. It is of a tangent touching a circle at one small point and then pursuing its path to infinity. So the translation touches the circle lightly “and only at the infinitely small point of the sense” and then (though the relation to sense is minimal) it heads off on its own course “according to the laws of fidelity in the freedom of linguistic flux.” At this ino- ment the author's preferred translators are introduced again—Luther, Voss, Hélderlin, and Stefan George, “who have extended the boundaries of the German language” (80). It is not clear whether their work as translators is intended as consummate examples of pure speech; they are, we should say, cited at a key moment in the argument. By way of example, Benjamin praises Hélderlin’s versions of two plays by Sophocles. Describing them he uses the romantic cliché of the harp touched by the wind: “In them the harmony of the languages is so profound that sens: is touched by language only the way an aeolian harp is touched by the wind” (81). Because meaning in them is so fleeting, such translations cannot be re-translated. They are fixed. In a strangely infernal way he praises the way in Hélderlin’s work “meaning plunges from abyss to abyss until it threatens to become lost in the bottomless depths of language” (82). Because Benjamin's notion of pure speech lies so exaltedly beyond comprehension, its great value becomes in large part parabolic, and reducing parable to earthly instance reduces its cosmic scope to human circumference; it is limiting that any authors be made examples, however laudable their work—for even Hélderlin’s translation of Pindar's third Pythian ode cannot meet the requirements of eternal afterlife in a pute language, nor is Hlderlin’s text so devoid of reference to the Greek that it only grazes Pindar “at the infinitely small point of sense.” After such extravagance, Benjamin finally gives us a glimpse, a true glimpse, ‘of what seems at last to be pure speech, Holy Writ, “in which meaning has ceased to be the watershed for the flow of language and the flow of revelation.” The Bible is a text identical with truth or dogma, and it must be translated because of the plurality of languages. In no language are revelation and word “supposed” 253Theory to be one—except in “the true language’” of the Bible (82). At the end of Ben- jamin’s hymn to tanslation, we hear again the commandments of translation. We know them by now, but they are stated with ultimate authority and finality: “Just as, in the original, language and revelation are one without any tension, so the translation must be one with the original in the form of the interlinear ver- sion, in which literalness and freedom are united. For to some degree all great texts contain their potential translation between the lines; this is true to the highest degree of sacred writings. The interlinear version of the Scriptures is the prototype or ideal of all translation” (82). Benjamin's ideal interlinear gloss might seem to be nothing more thar. an interlinear dictionary for deciphering and returning the reader to the source text, but Benjamin paradoxically asks us to read the interlinear gloss as if it were itself a pure autonomous text. Its value lies in its literality and therefore its disregard for sense. The reader must remember Benjamin’s assertion—correct I believe— that literalness is only a means to incomprehensibility and for that reason cannot be blemished by ordinary linguistic meaning. So, devoid of sense, the translation carries the pure primitive language that the Bible requires. Not since Aquila de Pontos’ second-century Greek version of the Torah do we have such wanton disrespect of the earthly meaning of a text for the sake of sacred ideological purity. In her introduction to “The Task of the Translator,” Hannah Arendt acknowl- edges the gulf between “atilitarian or communicative functions of linguistic stud- ies” (translations that have the Babellike tumult of sense) and the pure language of incomprehensible translation that we are to understand like “the pearls and the coral in the depths” that divers bring up to us from that region under the sea where things “survive in new crystallized forms and shapes that remain im- mune to the elements . . . as ‘thought fragments,’ as something ‘rich and strange,’ and pethaps even as everlasting Urphdnomene” (51). She celebrates “noncom- municative utterances of a ‘world essence’”: “Whatever theoretical revisions Benjamin may subsequently have made in these theological-metaphysical con- victions, his basic approach, decisive for all his literary studies, remained un- changed: not to investigate the utilitarian or communicative functions of linguistic creations, but to understand them in their crystallized and thus alti- mately fragmentary form as intentionless and noncommunicative utterances of a ‘world essence’” (50). Without specific reference to the Marxist frame found in his other essays, with its empirical disdain for the decadent debris of sense and intention, and wita its high sphere of language purity, Benjamin’s dream typically reflects a relentlessly uncompromising, authoritarian cast of mind. Although authoritarian idealism in our century has in its practice been associated with disastrous consequer.ces, the utopian dream of a reine Sprache lives on with admirable persistence. Al- though a devoted application of Benjamin's formula to Holy Writ would yield aSigns of Our Time pure text devoid of meaning, which is to say, gibberish, his insightful command- ment is fully in keeping with much of religious practice throughout the world, now and in the past. The history of most religious worship consists ofa lay public reading or hearing the letters and words of foreign incomprehensible salvational Scripture—in Hebrew, Latin, Greek, or Arabic. How much better when that in- comprehensible salvational Scriprure is given to us in our native tongue. With this ends Walter Benjamin’s translation Bible. In a way, despite ambi- guities and contradictions, his Bible is, like the translations he admires most, untranslatable into commentary. It contains its best commentary within itself, just as an original great work contains the nucleus of its own pure translation between its lines, Therefore, the best critical tribute to “The Task of the Trans- lator” lies in rereading (perhaps the highest form of reading) this difficult, rich work so it can speak again, and retranslate itself before the reader. External criticism, explication, argument, and judgment all lead us back to Walter Ben- jamin and his dream of linguistic perfection. And I shall dwell in the house of the Lord for ever. Psalm 23 Truthful lips endure for ever, but a lying tongue is but for a moment. Proverbs 12 In certain regions of the Himalayas, among the twenty-two temples that represent the twenty Arcana of Hermes and the twenty-two letters of some sacred alphabets, Agarttha forms the mystic Zero, which cannot be found. A colossal chessboard that extends beneath the earth, through almost all the regions of the Globe. Saint-Yves d’Alveydre, Mission de line en Europe, 1886 Piping is our people’s daily speech, only many a one pipes his whole life tong and does not know it, where here piping is set free from the fetters of daily life and it sets us free too for a little while. Franz Kafka, “Josephine the Singer, or The Mouse Folk” Benjamin’s Parable The last parable has already been written, and unknown to all of us (my- self included) we have been reading and exploring it, seeking an answer to its enigmas. The parable is Walter Benjamin's Bible, “The Task of the Translator.” 255256 Theory Now parables should not be explained. The parable is the explanation, as the poem is the poem, not its paraphrase. When, as in religious hermeneutics, a solution or guide is imposed on a text, when “The Lord is my shepherd” takes us to dwell in eternal reward rather than to live the rest of our lives loyally in the temple around the block, this is exactly what we of faith desire and gain from the text. “The Task of the Translator” also leads us, through translation, to dwell in the pure language of a reconstituted paradise for an eternal afterlife, While we cannot explain Benjamin’ parable, “The Task of the Translator” we have already explained its purpose, its “intent,” by observing that it is parable, Were we to take it not as parable but as Gospel, see it not as Kabbalah’s vessel but as the glue of that vessels repair, read it not as philosophy of language but as theory and practice of literary translation (as it normally and reverently is read), then we would be mistreating Benjamin's parable and depriving it of its wisdon, religion, and multiplicity of meaning, it is a philosophical poem with another dimension. That dimension God explains accurately in Borges’ parable “Everything and Nothing”: “'I have dreamt the world as you dreamt your work, my Shakespeare, and among the forms in my dream are you, who like myself are many and no one" (in Labyrinths 249), “The Task,” that polysemic tower towarc the heaven of translation’s pure tongue, is Benjamin's dream, just as Shakespeare's work is his dream and Shakespeare, God's To separate dream from and confuse it again with reality is the task of the writer-—and the writer’ reader. “The Task” categorically provides no theory or Prescription for the practice of translation in our world. Could the master tell the disciple to carry to the publisher a translation which disdains similarity, clismisses the transfer of information, and whose ideal literality, to use Benjamin's own words, “threatens comprehensibility”? Surely, we should not translate “The Task” down to such a level of spiritual poverty, When in the last lines of his essay, Benjamin demands as “the prototype ot ideal of all translation” the literalness of the interlinear gloss, such a radical anti- sense, anti-literary prescription must be understood, in fairness, according to the ideals he has expressed earlier. “Thus no case for literalness can be based on a desire to retain the meaning” (77), Ordinary meaning is out. Benjamin aspires to the meaning that comes from gluing, out of the plurality of tongues, the frag- ments of a vessel into a greater language. Berjamin has no desire to fool us with the notion that a translation should convey sense and be literary, ot that it “should read as if it had originally been written in that language” (77). All that 's bad, empirical, earthly translation of texts from one finite tongue to another. A real tanslation seeks to repair the vessel, seeks entry into the nucleus of pure language, and insofar as it is itself involved in that nucleus it shines more fully upon the original. We learn, disarmingly, that literalness is the arcade to that transparency of the Pure language, and the road there is “a literal rendering of the syntax whichSigns of Our Time proves words rather than sentences to be the primary element of the translator” (‘Task of the Translator” 78), Although he specifically contradicts his earlier rid- icule of fidelity “in translation of individual words” and his scorn for literal rendering of syntax, which he says “completely demolishes the theory of repro- duction of meaning,” Benjamin is not taking us tor a ride. He is asking us to accept his anti-worldly translation as parable, not doctrine, to translate his par- able, to decode it in such a way as to be free of debts to an author, and to make translation a means of adding strangeness to our mother languages, of being absorbed into, altering, and enriching them, and of making tangible the presence of a third language of pure speech. With that yearning for the truth of language, translation becomes our ship of word units, floating upward and back to the invisible but only true paradise of the word. Kafka offers no less than Benjamin from the invisible song language of Josephine the Singer (in the last story Kafka was to write before his death) Josephine, a mouse, sang a piping language, unrecognized as song by others, yet in reality it was pearl-like, containing the paradise of lost happiness, of such pure speech that it broke the fetters of ordinary meaning and set its hearers free for a little while, ‘To read “The Task” as translation gospel, then, is deception, To be deprived of translation’s most fundamental attributes—literariness (to use the Russian For- malist concern), earthly content, and form—is intolerable. In truth those who read “The Task” may admire it, explicate it, or believe it, but they never, if they are translators or critics of translation, fatally apply it either to the creative ex- perience of translation or to its judgment. As Benjamin’s parable or dream or philosophy or religion the work remains endlessly valuable; as a decree on the ultimate importance of translation as the guardian, renewer, and messianic car- rier of literature and language, it is obviously equally valuable. That it is not a manual for practicing translators hardly ranks as a shortcoming. Recently, Umberto Eco has mapped in fiction the esoteric adventures of seers like Benjamin and Borges who seek ultimate explanation and pure language. His tone.as a novelist is closer to Borges’ existential humor and skepticism than to Benjamin's unremitting gravity. but all three literary figures coincide in their Kabbalistic search for a universal language. In Foucault’s Pendulum Eco discusses obscure manuscripts and publications, including one, Mission de Inde en Europe, by a dubious marquis, Saint-Yves d’Al- veydre. Saint-Yves d’Alveydre, Eco’s utopian dreamer, sought a political and lin- guistic formula that would lead to a harmonious society. An Afghan with an Albanian name, Hadji Schariphf, visited the Marquis d’Alveydre and “revealed to him the secret dwelling place of the King of the World, though Saint-Yves himself never used that expression: he called it Agarttha, the place that cannot be found” (Pendulum 310). We learn that the utopian goal of the king is to find a reine Sprache. When all holy languages arrive by way of cranslation at one 257258 Theory universal language, claims the king, utopia has been achieved. Eco elaborately spoofs the totalitarian aspect of all utopias, imcluding that envisioned by the five thousand sages (presumably the Templars after their dispersion) who govern the underground cities of Agarttha, and aspire to the utopian language of Vattan: “The wise ones of Agarttha study all holy languages in order to arrive at the universel language, which is Vattan, When they come upon mysteries too pro- found, they levitate, and would crack their skulls against the vault of the dome if their brothers did not restrain them” (310). Eco draws from everyone ke can lay his semiotic fingers on and imperially brings them together in his parable within a parable, But as in the best mystery tales the answer lies outside the text, Here again we have sympathetic clues tale- ing us into Benjaminian territory. Eco’s quest for meaning through arrival at a universal language is no less valid because of his parody than Benjamin’s tale, with its impeccable seriousness. The ways of Eco, Kafka, and Borges, Benjamin's literary counterparts in questing, inevitably show more imaginative resource than the works of those who are critics of imaginative literature. Benjamin's very obscurity and blatant paradoxes, however, carry him into a fiction world of theoretical discourse, where the essay’s staying power as a mod ern classic remains, Benjamin tantalizes us as he should, as do all the wise ones — Wang Wei, Laoze, the Buddha, and their Western counterparts from Eco back through John of the Cross, Meister Eckhart, and Plotinus Meaning, example, and answer when not in the text must, as in Wittgenstein, be consigned to silence. When we stray from the philosopher, however, to the literary mystic for whom these aspirations of verbal ineffability are the center— John of the Cross is the supreme example—the mystic’ job is to reveal the un- revealable by means of a text, but one which is, as John declares, a simile. Constantine Cavaly, who gave our century its foremost parables in verse, re- fuses to merge ultimate semiosis with language at the very instant that he raises the problem of meaning. Revelation, the message of vision obscured by oblivion, will not be contained in one word, nor ever fully translated and inscribed into ink, carbon ribbons, or electrical impulses. Nevertheless, in describing the quest of Odysseus, Cavafy at least informs us what the quest, what the parable, what the ineffable Ithakas mean, in the last lines of “Ithaka”: Itvaka gave you the marvelous journey, Without her you wouldn't have set out, She has nothing left to give you. And if you find her poor, Ithaka didn't fool you. Wise as you've become, with so much experience, By now you'll understand what Ithakas mean. (Poems) Benjamin, with all the extravagant aspirations of his parable, promises us even less than does Cavafy. His nucleus of pure language remains sacred but invisible.Signs of Our Time He does not assure us of wisdom. Nonetheless, though his own life tragically ends, we read him and he grants us voyage. I live yet do not live in me, am waiting as my life goes by, and die because I do not die. No longer do I live in me, and without God I cannot live; to him or me I cannot give my self, so what can living be? A thousand deaths my agony, waiting as my life goes by, dying because | do not die. Saint John of the Cross, “Muero porque no muero” My life is garbled as the tongues of Babel. Jorge Luis Borges, “Compass” The Translator’s Task THE DUTY TO BETRAY The Italian maxim traduttore, traditore (translator, traitor) is in the end correct. It is on target, to use the disciplines favorite metaphor. | had promised myself 1 would not utter this formula of betrayal in the course of this book. Now I betray that vow with the perverse and pleasant notion that I am translating the evil maxim into a prescription for imaginative translation. If one aims at absolute reproduction, one lies absolutely; if one betrays the absolute, however, one approaches the truth of literary translation. How can faithful reproduction be false and betrayal truth? When a translation passes as original, it is profound betrayal. It is making a Briton pass as French, and, as we know, weather, food, and kisses belie the notion of English and French sameness. Translation offers neither identity nor total synonymy across languages. Its art lies in the betrayal of the absolute, in the necessary difference So betray we must, otherwise the work is truly an impoverished counterfeit. Saint John of the Cross gives us an analogy for betrayal in one of his most famous poems, “Muero porque no muero” (I die because | do not die). In this illumi- nation of “the way of negation,” death (in no muero) is not physical death but spiritual death and sensorial death. In this glosa (which rewords a popular re- 259260 Theory frain), John means that he dies spiritually because he does not die sensorily, that is, he suffers spiritual exile and spiritual death because he is not detached from illusory senses and temporal time. He lives in illusion rather than nada (noth- ingness); and only in nada, im the via negativa (the negative way) where he knows nothing and és nothing, will he be free to join in absorbing union with his god- head. The analogy with translation is exact and clear. I betray because 1 do not betray. | perform a larger betrayal of meaning and art because | make the false assumption of not betraying, which is to say, I betray because I have sought and assume I have achieved true literality. But Saint John resolves the enigmatic paradox, which he conveys to us lin- guistically and semiotically on the basis of the binary meaning of muero. After enduring the multiple agonies of exile from God because of not “dying from temporal life,” he ends his poem with a desire for future triumph, when at last he can say, “Vivo ya porque no muero" (I live because I do not die): © Father God, when will it be that I can say without a lie: I live because I do not die? John of the Cross’s triumph resides in the shift in the meaning of no muero. ‘At the end of the poem we have John’s affirmative declaration: “I live spiritually with God because I do not die spiritually on earth”—a full circle away from the initial “I die spiritually from God because | do not die sensorily on earth.” Therefore, in our analogy, in place of the initial “I bet-ay because I do not betray” (meaning, “I betray the art because | do not betray the letter”), we now have “I am loyal because I do not betray” (meaning, “I am loyal to the spirit of art by not betraying it by loyalty to the letter”). The translator is loyal to the spirit, not the letter. Now we know the good meaning of traduttore, traditore. The translator must bea traitor to the letter in order to be loyal to the meaning, art, and spirit of the source text. A BRIEF MEDITATION ON THE TASK The task of the translator is to move information between languages. Whether that information is purely technical or aesthetic, expressive, and liter- ary, the purpose remains the same. Apart from the empir.cal possibility of ac- complishing the task, the word task remains problematic, for it suggests an ethical obligation, vague in purpose but nevertheless firm i. its moral resonance. Let us first look into its ethical implications. The translator carries a big ethical boulder on his or her shoulders, No serious riginal” writer is so laden. It may be a compliment to the translator to be so inspected for textual criminality. At the same time the scrutiny points up theSigns of Our Time etymological veracity of the practice of translatio and metafora, meaning “mov- ing,” “carrying burdens.” But should the good translator cart such a moral boulder around? Should the translator live by rules? Yes and no. Yes. Why should the translator not also benefit from the pains of the penal colony and the anxiety of a trial? Even in translating comedy the translator needs reasons for seriousness. And best of all is to be bound and dance in chains. Or no. The translator also aspires to sover- eignty. And whether the way be negative or luminous, why not allow him or her to climb? As long as the translator, like all writers, calls a spade an orange and acknowledges way and method, why not let the translator, an artist of great generosity to others, be free? Better a Roman libertine than a medieval scholastic slave. After the moral slogans of discipline, the debate over faith or freedom, there remains one enduring ethical principle in literary translation: the true ethical task of the translator is to be a good writer, to produce a work that is clear and beautiful, however close or distant the inspiring source voice. ANCIENT CONCERNS FOR THE “INTERPRETING CREATOR” The oldest question in translation theory, which we have looked at in diverse ways, is: Is translation possible? Obviously it is possible for it is done, the world lives by its knowledge, and it has, as Steiner declares, the “immense advantage of abundant, vulgar fact” (After Babel 250). The question can only be posed in this rhetorical manner of possibility if itis based on the curious premise that translation means a perfect reproduction of the source text by a translator who has made a perfect reading of the source and has delivered that reprodue- tion to a perfect reader. Such premises are not of our world, or should not be, although they are commonly assumed to persist and dominate. What is impossible, and all linguists agree, is synonymy or identity between languages (or for that matter within languages). The A text is never the same as the B text, despite their lurking desire for identity; identity, alas, persists as an ideal in the academy, where a “scholarly translation” of literature signifies either a crib ora literary text that presents full semantic information without regard to aesthetic form and expressive content. When such criteria prevail, whether in the classroom or the press, literary translation dies. Yet after these dark com- ments, I am happy to report that good literary translation in our time is flourishing. The notion of the good counterfeit, the necessary betrayal, remains an essen- tial epistemological paradox. The life of a translation lies as much in difference as in similarity. Translation is not a mirror. Nor is it mimetic copy. It is another creation. Of course every translation owes form and content to its source, yet it has become 261Theory a new text. Or to use the analogy with Saint John of the Cross, the translator dies not by the letter but by the spirit. The goal, at least for readers in this world, cannot be Walter Benjamin's beautiful but fatally flawed ideal of the re-creation of a third paradisial language of eternal afterlife arrived at through the “interlin- ear version of the Scripture . . . [as] the prototype or ideal of all translation” (‘Task of the Translator” 82). Rather, the translator, in keeping with the idea found in the Latin interpres, interprets, The translator transforms the sign and the object into worthy utterance, which is to say, into literature. And in harmony with Benjamin’ spirit, if not his advice, the translator thus fulfills the secular mystical obligation of translation to achieve the union of languages. Translation has a mystique: of living intimately with the source; of being alone and beginning fresh, from nothing; of remembering, interpreting, and becoming author. The traditional passage of the mystic provides a useful analogy for both the original writer and the interpreting writer in the same way that the secular acts of writing and physical love gave Saint John of the Cross similes for religious mystical union. The three stages of the mystical process, for John and for the translator, are via negativa (or purgativa), via illuminativa, and via unitiva. By passing through the night of aridity, by absorbing the ray of darkness, the trans- lator, alone with sign and object, sees, and then shapes words into an appropriate creation. At that instant the translator becomes the interpreting creator This alchemy promises all readers enjoyment from the work given to them and at the same time demands a recognition of the dignity of the translation author—who normally has the cinematic, heroic role of being a literary trans- vestite beggar at literature’s door. We have, after all, abundant proof of the orig- inal significance of translation, plain linguistic proof. Given that it is impossible to duplicate meaning across languages, that “any linguistically formed message has @ unique content inexistent outside its combination with a given expression and that consequently any translation is a new text” (Malmberg, “Arbitrary and Motivated” 23), the translator's creation at every point of the translation orbit— bestiaries, Bibles, Marie de France, Chaucer, Pope, Pound—olfers a uniquely original gift to our culture for those who have eyes to hear song and eats to see good writing,