MELANCHOLIA, MOURNING AND THE TASK OF THE TRANSLATOR
By Adam Rosen
Throughout
his essay, "The Task of the Translator," Walter Benjamin seems impelled
by an anxious repulsion from the irredeemable loss that enables his text/task;
yet the force of this repulsion is not enough to prevent Benjamin from
continually approaching various figures of this foundational loss that
problematize his most crucial arguments. Benjamin
appeals to the force of a certain Law whereby he seeks to resolveóbut
ultimately obscuresóthese tensions and the loss from which they stem.
However, since this Law can, at best, only suppress and displace the text/task's
tensions, Benjamin is bound to confront the return of the repressed, and
in order to do so, he invokes symbolic images designed to bridge over
and explain away these recurrent tensions. Both the Law and the images,
then, may be read as modes of passing over certain profoundly unsettling
moments rather than seriously working through them, thereby evading a
decisive confrontation with precisely those issues that recurrently trouble
Benjamin's text/task: loss, desire, and authority.
In
the very first paragraph, Benjamin laudably attempts to stave off a vulgar
psychologism that would grant too much weight to culturally
embedded authority and the aesthetic judgments that arise therefrom
as he works toward an explication of art's resistance to present constellations
of authority. For Benjamin, considerations of art are not to attend to
the subjective responses of the "receivers," since art is precisely that
which can keep culture moving by exceeding its compensatory economy and
articulating new values and world-historical orientations that defy the
standards of any particular cultural formation. "Any reference to a particular
public or its representatives [is] misleading," on Benjamin's account,
in that it would either amount to an unnecessary focus on the original's
content or merely reproduce the judgments of a regime of cultural-aesthetic
normativity (253). Either way, such a focus
would occlude the ways in which the works themselves operate as radical
critiques of (any particular) established values and world-historical
orientations. In other words, the productive, positive dimensions of the
absence of Authority is central from the very beginning.
Considerations
of the receiver must be ignored, presumably, because they would detract
attention from the "ways of meaning" that operate in a text, thereby debilitating
the politico-historical task of translation: decentering
the present linguistic community. By explicitly attending to these "ways
of meaning," translation, on Benjamin's account, disrupts the very self-presence
of the contemporary linguistic community; for, the present linguistic
community tends to take itself and its ways of meaning as natural ó which
is to say, it (often) does not take its historical situatedness
into consideration at all. By opening the linguistic community to its
own historicity, that is, by disrupting its naturalized self-presence,
translation can resist the auto-authorization of this community and its
ways of meaning, thereby allowing for a future that is not a mere succession
of the Same.
And
yet, by thoroughly denying the import of audience-based analyses, Benjamin
elides a serious confrontation with the irredeemability
of these productive losses, thereby initiating a subtle conservatism that,
in a certain psychoanalytic vocabulary,Ý
symptomatizes a persistent melancholia. Benjamin disallows
a confrontation with the audience's indefinite plurality of perspectives
from which he could garner the inexorable fragmentation of any language
or work. In compulsively taking the "wholeness" of languages and works
as given1, Benjamin conserves the authoritative wholeness of works and
languages by operationalizing the assumption of their presence. By thoroughly
dismissing the audience as a mere sedimentation of established values
and judgments, Benjamin is unable to consider the audiences as amalgamations
of perspectives that point to the irredeemable loss of authority at the
very heat of language. Although at times Benjamin appears to understand
the (re)iterablity of languages and the (re)readability2
of works as arising from a failure of authority, he ultimately denies
the permanence of this loss, determines languages and works as coherent
"wholes," and eventually goes on to suggest that translators can redeem
the loss at the heart of language by way of a progressive purification
that culminates in a "pure language."
Clearly,
then, the evacuation of the audience from the scene of translation allows
the translator to forego a self-accounting that would situate her/his
desire for a unified object of investigation as productive of the very
coherence of the work. By disavowing the desire for authoritative coherence,
the translator is able to confront the works as themselves authoritatively
whole and ignore her/his enactment of the very authority of that which
he/she takes as given. Just as Benjamin figures history as "an irreversible
process of decay that can be comprehended only from the perspective of
some possible redemption," he situates the translator as working from
the site of redemptive coherence rather than constituting this coherence
and the progress that it supposedly gives rise to (Niranjana 111). Although it appears that the translator is
confronting the loss of meaning, unity, and presence, it is disavowed
as such: "translation transplants the original into a more definite linguistic
realm" (258). The translator, then, tending toward a psycho-political
conservatism in which loss is either denied or thoroughly redeemed, confronts
an "original" (language or work) rather than a retroactive constitution
arising from her/his own desires. By locating original meaning or coherence
in a linguistic past, the translator is able to deny her/his production
of this mythic origin and displaces loss into an economy of recovery.
Loss is thoroughly denied and the work of mourning obviated.
In
the next paragraph, a certain aporia begins
to take shape, roughly, the shape of the beyond. However, the aporia
soon loses its status as such and becomes a mere problem all too amenable
to solution. After Benjamin contends thatÝ
"we...generally regard that which lies beyond communication in
a literary work...as the unfathomable, the mysterious, the ëpoetic',"
he establishes this "beyond" as the way of meaning that is merely dormant,
waiting to be found, named, and taken up into the work of translation.
As Benjamin proclaims, "translatability must be an essential feature of
certain works" in that their "nature lend[s] itself to translation, and...call[s]
for it" (254; emphasis mine). What remains of the "beyond" after Benjamin's
insistence on its modal character is its negativity, that is, its contestatory
disposition that is irreducible to particular, determinate ways of meaning.
And it is precisely this negativity that is in severe tension with the
compelling and authoritative quality of these "ways of meaning."
Benjamin
imagines a "way of meaning" as an element of a dominant discourse taken
to be so absolutely dominating as to be the only, or the only legitimate,
or the only translatable discourse; this would allow him (at least temporarily)
to ignore the contestatory status of language,
establish the work as inherently authoritative with respect to the translation
that it demands, and think languages as a plurality of "wholes" rather
than domains of perpetual struggle and constitutively incessant contamination.
As a result of his abjection of the readership and the concomitant failure
to think through the failure of authority as that which is "beyond," behind,
and at the very foundation of language, what is unfathomable for BenjaminÝ ó but intensely poignant for many marginalized
speakers/readers/writers of any language, and perhaps certain translators
ó is the manner in which language is a hegemonic formation that requires
forever inadequate attempts at discursive domination. Recognizing this
contestatory status of language is that it would
allow Benjamin to emphasize that certain texts call out for a translation
that would refine their ways of meaning by way of juxtaposition to other
languages, while simultaneously acknowledging that this refinement need
not end in pure language. The ways in which the identity of a language
is perpetually secured by "opening itself to the hospitality of a difference
from itself or with itself" need not be figured as an inter-linguistic
endeavor3 (Derrida 10). In other words, what Benjamin cannot think is
language as a site of generative conflict in which the "language itself"
is subject to destructuration and restructuration.
Although Benjamin recurrently acknowledges loss as an enabling condition,
it seems as if he is only willing to do so if, in the final analysis,
this loss is redeemed by the translator's progressive purification of
language.
Displaced
onto and sedimented as the "original" work,
the authority desired by Benjamin's translator is conceived as foundational,
originary, and law-giving: "the laws governing the translation
lie within the original" (254; emphases mine). The translator heeds this
Law, enacts its biddings, and is properly a translator only when subject
to this Law. The Law, then, as the site of absolute authority, is precisely
the disavowed objectification of and displaced ground for the authority
of the translator. Instead of naming the failure of authority as the condition
of possibility for translation or acknowledging the translation as bestowing
authority upon the original as such, authority is staged as external to
the act of translation; it is expelled, exteriorized, embodied elsewhere
as the "original," the Law, the work, the way of meaning, the language,
etc. What is staved off at all costs is an acknowledgement of the productive
power of translation and the endless task that this implies; for, if this
productivity were to be accounted for, the translator would have to face
up to her/his alignment with the various members of a linguistic community
whose perspectives are endless, whose interpretations are interested,
and whose activities are enabled by the failure of any law to determine
a text's reception and secure a progressive movement toward "pure language."
What
is occluded, then, is the irredeemable loss of authority inscribed in
the very heart of language. The translator seems to be subject to a double,
and apparently contradictory injunction to at once obey and deny the Law.
On the one hand, the translator must heed the external authority of the
original and allow the Law of progress embedded in this original to compel
and certify the progression enacted by her/his translation. On the other
hand, the translator must deny the givenness
of an originary and overwhelming authority;
for, if the Law were absolutely compelling and authoritative, the translator
could just sit back and wait for progress, thereby eliding her/his task.
Paradoxically, authority is that which must be lost in order for the work
of translation to proceed as if it were present.
In
effect, Benjamin's translator stabilizes and renders dominant precisely
that which she/he takes to be text's "way of meaning." In their endeavors
to think through the ways in which particular texts mean, translators
unknowingly produce the authoritative status of this way of meaning while
simultaneously covering over this productive aspect of their practice
by appealing to original "intent."4 Pure language, as the aim of translation,
generates an origin by way of positing a telos:
if the aim is the progressive approximation of the reine
Sprache, the original text/language is such
only by virtue of its enframing within this
messianic project. Ultimately, the essential productivity of translation
inscribes an originary contamination that precludes
ascension to "pure" language. So, to give the aporia
one last formulation: the translator who believes in the authority of
the Law may fail to heed her/his task, while the translator who denies
the Law and is open to alternative tasks is the only one who can progress
toward "pure language." Without the undecidability
of progress, there can be no decision to embrace the Law.
Benjamin
approaches this originary loss when he explains
that the ways of meaning figured by translators (who deal with the afterlife
of works) are more or less engaged in an extension of the interpretative
unfolding of a work concurrent with its life: through translation, the
afterlife of "the life of the originals attains its latest, continually
renewed, and most complete unfolding" (255). This incessant renewal of
the original seems to suggest a fluidity between the life and afterlife
of a work that would situate the work not as originarily
finite and authoritatively binding, but rather as subject to an unfolding
enacted by readers during the work's life and translators in its afterlife.
Yet again, Benjamin seems poised to acknowledge the failure of authority
as an profoundly productive and unavoidable condition of textual inheritance.
However,
this alliance of life and afterlife, interpretation and unfolding, reading
and translation, is framed by the Law that enfolds this "unfolding" within
an unavoidable progressivism. On this account, the work itself, imbued
with the authority of Law, seems to compel a certain progressive unfolding
that relegates the readers and translators to mere instrumentalization
in the face of the Law of progress. The dissonance between the legislative
demands of the text and the constitutive failure of authority evokes a
tension which Benjamin quickly marks, if only to resolve. He soon qualifies
the aforementioned passage, and claims that "the relationship between
life and purposiveness"óthat is, relationship between the life (or
afterlife) of a text and its ability to implicate its own unfolding ó
is "almost beyond the grasp of the intellect" (255; emphasis mine). Although
the relationship between life and purpose may be difficult to explore,
it is, like the "beyond," ultimately amenable to determinate cognition
Although
certain commentators obscure the tension inherent in the confluence of
the religious and the cognitive by contending that Benjamin's notion of
progress is a regulative ideal or an impossible perspective of divine
omniscience that sets pure language on the ever distant horizon, such
commentary fails to account for the intellect's role in this revelation.
If the radical disjunction between revelation and cognition were indeed
unbridgeable, the divine perspective would be heterogeneous to the order
of intellection and Benjamin would be hard pressed to explain how the
"ultimate purpose" sought in the "higher sphere" is revealed as that which
is "almost beyond the grasp of the intellect," which is to say, not beyond
the grasp of the intellect (255). The ability to grasp the "higher purpose"
of progress suggests the translator's ascension to the perspective of
divine knowledge that would resolve the tension between the intelligible
and the revealed by positing their equivalence before the divine gaze.
Yet this "solution" generates a new tension between the revealed and the
demonstrable which is simply another form of the religious-cognitive tension.
Although particular translators "cannot possibly reveal or establish this
hidden relationship itself," it is revealed to them (255). Ultimately,
the tension between the revealed and the demonstrable is irresolvable
and Benjamin, at pains to expiate this tension, is driven to claim that
although translators cannot prove what is revealed, they can "represent
it in embryonic or intensive form" (255; emphasis mine).
The
embryo serves as an explanatory bridge that covers over the tensions inherent
in each coupling and thereby allows for a fluid textual procession. Crucially,
the embryo is the figure of promise and mystery. Although the embryo is
far from the mature form, it is understood, from the perspective of full
development, to contain the law of this development. This retroactive
determination of "inherent law" is precisely what Benjamin must obscure
in order to situate translation as subject to a Law that compels linear
progression. For, the law of endogenous development is, on Benjamin's
account, revealed via translation but is utterly nondemonstrable
in that there are an indefinite plurality of perspectives from which one
can understand the history of translational unfolding. Thus, eliding the
standpoint of the readership once again, Benjamin must redirect our attention
onto an image that is generally understood as containing the laws of its
own development: the embryo.
This
image obscures the tension between the religious and the cognitive. The
problem with understanding the embryo is not a problem of understanding
the developmental process of zygote to embryo to fetus. Rather, it is
a problem of understanding where these developments arise. Even though
the specific steps of embryological development can be traced from conception
onward, the reasonóif there is oneó that certain interminglings
of chromosomal material lead to further reactions that can be described
as embryological development remains essentially mysterious. Its "higher
purpose" (i.e., why the embryo develops in the way that it does rather
than in some other way) is thoroughly inexplicable.
The
image of the embryo also provides passage over a profound tension that
haunts Benjamin's text/task: that of the desire for and irredeemable loss
of authority. What the image of the inherently lawful embryo forecloses
is a recognition that although the translator vehemently desires a totalizing
authority, the translator also desires this authority so much that he/she
is willing to think that she/he merely finds rather than produces this
authority. This myopic stance resists the ways in which translation is
a profoundly productive activity. There is no fundamental law that secures
an inevitable progress. The loss of authority is an irredeemable loss
that itself enables the endless activity of translation, and ultimately
that the desire for this lost authority condemns the translator to a perpetual
melancholia in which she/he is unable to name his/her motivational loss
as such and therefore is unable to begin the work of mourning that would
re-direct the task of the translator to take into consideration the translation's
essential productivity.
Insofar
as this melancholia remains unacknowledged and the productivity of translation
is obscured, Benjamin's task/text tends toward a radical psycho-political
conservatism. The translator seems to be one who desires mediated yet
definitive access to the Other (be it cultural or linguistic), and seeks
to speak on this Other's behalf while at the same time denying this essentially
appropriative gesture by claiming that their actions are governed by the
law of translation. Such translators are unable to acknowledge that they
produce their objects as much as they "find" them. This notion of translation,
then, turns upon a repression of the tension between the constative
and performative elements of language in the
interest of securing unitary "ways of meaning."
The
key question, then, is not what is the status of translational transformations
with respect to change over time, but rather, "how far removed is...hidden
meaning from revelation" and "how close can it be brought by knowledge
of this remoteness"? (257). Figuring proper translation as a function
of a certain submission to the Law tacitly held in the "original," Benjamin
avers, "the history of the great works of art tell us about their descent
from past models, their realization in the age of the artist, and what
in principle should be their eternal afterlife in succeeding generations"
(255). The hope for eventual revelation and disavowal of the ethico-political
responsibility of the translator culminates in a conservative psycho-political
endeavor that generates significant tensions with the more liberatory
moments of Benjamin's account.
Translation,
Benjamin contends, "is...charged with the special mission of watching
over the maturing process [Nachrife] of the
original language and the birth pangs [Wehen]
of its own" (256). Through these images, the original language is markedly
distinguished from the translator's language, thereby consolidating the
distinctions between the life and afterlife of the work, the mature original
and the embryonic translation, and the chronologically anterior and the
posterior. However, a tension is inscribed at the very heart of this image
that threatens to complicate if not dissipate these distinctions; for
it is not that the translator is coextensive with her/his language; she/he
is, in a certain sense, external to and watching over it. It seems that
just as translation is enabled by the distance from the "original" that
disrupts its naturalizing grasp, the translator's relationship to her/his
own language is marked by a crucial distance. The translator, so it seems,
is only able to attend to the ways of meaning operational in her/his own
language and juxtapose these ways of meaning to those of another language
along the path toward reine Sprache
as a result of the non-authoritative status of her/his own language. Once
again, Benjamin seems poised to face up to the loss of authority as the
condition of possibility for translation and reading, and even the movement
toward pure language itself, yet this abyssal moment is quickly evaded.
Ultimately,
in that the work of translation is guided by an all-powerful Law, the
responsibility for particular translations is displaced onto the Law of
progress itself. There is what amount to a "slaughter bench of history"
thesis working here in that whatever the implications of translation may
be, they are presented as inevitable and perhaps even justified by their
inevitability. Regardless of the status of justification, an exploration
of which would take us far beyond the confines of this paper, the predestined
status of translation tends toward a radically conservative psycho-political
acquiescence with the status quo in that whatever the implications of
translation may be, they are justified as part of the "higher purpose"
and essentially "progressive" movement. The translators to whom this "higher
purpose" is revealed (translators...what a strange species of prophets!)
seem to be condemned to a morose acquiescence with what is, simply because
it is óa state of affairs suggestive of extreme melancholia. As responsibility
is abdicated in favor of a submission to the Law, translators are divested
of any culpability ó they were "just following orders"ó for, on Benjamin's
account, they are only responsive to this Law, and necessarily so, not
in any way responsible for it. Significantly, the task (Aufgabe)
of the translator can also be translated ("internally" to Benjamin's own
language) as "one who has given up." This is not to say that Benjamin's
text/task is inherently conservative, but simply to suggest that the refusal
to leave the status of progress undecidable
generates profound tensions between the liberatory
and conservative thrusts of this text/task.
Adam Rosen is a second-year student in the Philosophy department at the
GF. He
is currently working on a study of the intersections of feminisms and
psychoanalysis
and a project considering the viability of a politics without sovereignty.
1
See pages 257 and 259, where Benjamin explicitly refers to languages as
"whole."
2
What distinguishes reading from propagandistic indoctrination, I take
it, is the inability for any authorial intention to compel a particular
understanding. Although texts may be coded with certain demands that either
facilitate or impede particular readings, such encoding can never determine
the reception of the text such that the authorial intent is guaranteed
to be passively accepted. Similarly, what enables translation, and Benjamin
is fully aware of this, is the failure of the "original" way of meaning,
that is, the authority of the originary formulation
of the text, to compel its repetition through translation.
3
Decisively on the point of privileging inter- above intra- linguistic
difference, Benjamin declares that "the kinship of languages is brought
about by a translation far more profoundly and clearly then in the superficial
and indefinable similarity of two works of literature" (256).
4
Benjamin even goes so far as to define "pure language" as the harmonious
supplementation of the various intentions embodied by particular languages
(257).
Works
Cited
Benjamin,
Walter.Ý "The Task of the Translator." In Selected Works
of Walter Benjamin, Vol.1.ÝCambridge:
Harvard UP, 2000.
Derrida,
Jacques.Ý Aporias.Ý Stanford: Stanford UP, 1993.
Lienhardt,
Godfrey.Ý The Institutions of Primitive
Society.Ý Oxford:Ý Basil
Blackwell Press, 1961.
Niranjana,
Tejaswini. Citing Translation.Ý Berkeley: California UP, 1992.ÝÝÝ