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"The Task of the Translator" : Walter Benjamin's Essay in English, a Forschungs

"The Task of the Translator" : Walter Benjamin's Essay in English, a Forschungsbericht Susan Ingram Just as the names and locations of the various converging two-way streets that mark English-language Benjamin studies have tended to shift with the academic tides, the name of Walter Benjamin itself has become something of a Shakespearian pearl in the quicksands of Anglo-American academia. "Nothing of him that doth fade/But doth suffer a sea-change/Into something rich and strange." Arendt chose this snippet from The Tempest to head the final section of her introduction to Illuminations (p. 38) and it is also an appropriate signpost for the intersection where Benjamin's "Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers" has crossed and been crossed by the English language.1 The rather sporadic manner in which Benjamin's works began appearing, both the original and English 1 The title of Jay Parini's recent biographical novel, Benjamin 's Crossing, is a fortuitous one with respect to the state of Benjaminiana (cf. Puttnies and Smith's Benjaminiana : Eine Biografische Recherche) and Benjamin's increasingly cult-like status. 207 translation, has become the stuff of anecdote if not legend,2 but of relatively little scholarship in English.3 There have thus far been no book-length studies devoted to the question of English-language Benjamin reception and only two major articles : loan Davies' "Approaching Walter Benjamin : Retrieval, Translation and Reconstruction," published in 1980 in the Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory; and Jeffrey Grossman's 1992, "The Reception of Walter Benjamin in the Anglo-American Literary Institution," which appeared in German Quarterly.4 Unlike Grossman's analysis, which acknowledges its indebtedness to Foucault in tracing "the importation and appropriation of Benjamin's writings into the Anglo-American literary institution" (p. 414) and identifies Marxist and deconstructionist discourse as two of the most influential tendencies in that reception, Davies' approach is that of a critical theorist, one who realizes that "of more concern for the English-speaking reader is the presentation of Benjamin in translated form" (p. 66). Whereas Grossman identifies editor Arendt's strategies of selection and containment, selecting those essays which highlight Benjamin's importance as a literary critic while containing his Marxist tendencies (p. 418- 2 Not only the two volume Schriften in 1955, edited by the Adornos, and the 1961 Illuminationen, a selection of essays taken from the Schriften, and edited by Siegfried Unseld, but also the Gesammelte Schriften, which have been appearing since 1972 under the editorship of Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, have been subject to controversy, cf. Tiedemann5 s Die Abrechnung : Walter Benjamin und Sein Verleger, and Markner and Weber's Literatur über Walter Benjamin. Kommentierte Bibliographie 1983 - 1992, pp. 234-35 for other references. For more on the "even more dubious forms" that "the presentation of Benjamin's writings in English has frequently assumed," cf. Grossman, p. 418. 3 For resource purposes, a section has been included in the references listing works in German and English on Benjamin reception. 4 And which makes no mention of or reference to Davies' earlier article. 208 19), Davies identifies the differences between British and American varieties of Benjamin : "while New Left Books [in Britain] has attempted to put Benjamin in the context of a European political-aesthetic debate, Harcourt Brace [in the US] has delivered the provocative (Jewish) essayist" (p. 67).5 Davies then incorporates these two Benjamins into his larger argument that "the significance of Benjamin's ideas as well as his contextual metaphors have been read in quite discrepant ways, that the task of translating has been bounded not so much by the perspectives of interpretation, but by the frameworks of ideology" (p. 69). Both Grossman and Davies attend to the sea-changes, and neglect the oysters. In the year which has gone down in history rampant with student unrest, protest, and flower-power, not one but two essays were published bearing the title, "The Task of the Translator." Not surprisingly, it was not the translation which appeared in the long since defunct journal Delos, but rather the one in Arendt's collected volume Illuminations, which has gone on to become canonical reading. Berman may call it "un texte devenu presque canonique" in L'Épreuve de l'Etranger (p. 21, italics added), however there can be no qualifying its current Anglo-American status. Benjamin's essay has become, as Rachel May points out in the introductory survey of translation studies in her 1994 The Translator in the Text : On Reading Russian Literature in English, a "seminal work" (p. 7). It would be a thankless task to chart every one of the increasing number of passing references made to Benjamin's translation essay in English; such examples cannot provide adequate parameters for a study of the English-language reception of Benjamin's translation essay. Rather, in providing an account of the English-language fate of "Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers" both in and out of translation studies circles, this article will attend to currents in the criticism while chronologically 5 For an accounting of the Jewish context of Benjamin's essay, cf. Jay. 209 riding its major waves, from 1975 and the hermeneutic and polysystemic turns, to 1985 and deconstruction, to 1992, the celebrations of the hundredth anniversary of Benjamin's birth and recent offerings in translation.6 The conclusion will return to the question of translation — how does the story of "The Task of the Translator," as opposed to those of "Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers," "La tâche du traducteur," et al., speak to the essay's own argument on translation? 1975 — Benjamin and Babel The year of OPEC crises and Watergate saw the Translation Studies' tide begin to rise. In the year before the Leuven colloquium joined the functional, sociocultural approaches of the Israeli polysystem and European Low Countries manipulation schools, there appeared a book which was to open up the concept of translation to interdisciplinary consideration. Until George Steiner's After Babel, as he reminds the reader in the preface to the second edition, "there had been no ordered or detailed attempt to locate translation at the heart of human communication or to explore the ways in which the constraints on translatability and the potentialities of transfer between languages engage, at the most immediate and charged level, the philosophic inquiry into consciousness and into the meaning of meaning" (p. ix-x). Benjamin figures prominently in Steiner's work as one of the handful to have written "anything fundamental or new about translation" (p. 283), as he does in Kelly's monumental The True Interpreter four years later, where his name, together with Buber's and Meschonnic's, comes to stand for the hermeneutic, as opposed to literary or linguistic, approach to translation. Kelly's prodigious 6 The story of Harry Zohn and his translation of the Benjamin translation essay has already been recounted in my "The Trouble with Harry, or Producing Walter Benjamin's Anglo-American Reception" and has therefore not been included here. 210 history of translation in the West considers it "natural, after the work of Cassirer, Buber and Heidegger, that interest would quicken in the Romantic theories of translation, and that important symbolist documents, like Benjamin (1923), would come out of obscurity" (p. 226). And out of obscurity he came, first in special issues of academic journals devoted to translation. Following on the heels, or stepping on the toes, of Steiner's book was a special Comparative Literature volume of Modern Language Notes in 1975 which included Carol Jacobs' "The Monstrosity of Translation" as part of its tribute to "Translation : Theory and Practice". Then, in 1982, Dispositio put out a volume on "The Art and Science of Translation" under the guest-editorship of André Lefevere, based on papers presented at the Third International Symposium on Translated Literature and Interliterary Communication at the University of Antwerp in 1980. The volume featured, along with articles by Translation Studies scholars such as Lefevere, Even-Zohar, and Toury, Marilyn Gaddis Rose's "Walter Benjamin as Translation Theorist : A Reconsideration." Both Jacobs' and Gaddis Rose's articles concern themselves with Zohn's practice of translation with respect to the argument in the essay itself, chastising him for "maintaining] a significant respect for his own linguistic usage" (Jacobs, p. 760; cited in Gaddis Rose, p. 164).7 Jacobs takes it upon herself to scrupulously retranslate and deconstruct key passages of the essay, such as those on the Nachreife and Ver-pflanzung of the kernel of translation (p. 758) 7 Neither would be surprised to learn that Zohn considered Benjamin's views on translation, as communicated to me in personal correspondence, "important as a stimulus and a new way of looking at translation, but I was never guided by it as I translated, and I don't think anyone else was." I am very grateful to Harry Zohn, Steven Rendall and Alexis Nouss for their generous cooperation and support with this project. I would also like to take this opportunity to thank the SSHRC for the resources which have allowed me to work on this, and other, projects. 211 and its inherently broken nature (p. 762). Gaddis Rose, on the other hand, takes her reconsideration of Benjamin a further step and compares a passage from his translation of Baudelaire with Stefan George's as well as briefly touching on the uploads/Geographie/ benjamin-walter-the-task-of-the-translator.pdf