What Is a Jewish Classicist? by Simon Goldhill;

Author:Simon Goldhill; [Goldhill, Simon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781350322554
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 2022-04-06T00:00:00+00:00

ii Walter Benjamin meets Henry Montagu Butler

Walter Benjamin begins his seminal essay on translation with a bold statement that strikes at the heart of any theory or practice of reception studies. ‘When seeking knowledge of a work of art or an art form, it never proves useful to take the receiver into account.’23 For Benjamin, it would seem, the art work exists in and for itself, an inheritance of his conflicted intellectual roots in German idealist philosophy. No Rezeptionsgeschichte here: ‘Not only is every effort to relate art to a specific public or its representatives misleading,’ he continues, ‘but the very concept of an “ideal” receiver is spurious’ (1971: 151). It could generously be allowed that the multiplicity of audiences, the complex dynamics of misunderstanding and contingency that an audience’s engagement also involve, and the evident ideologically charged and self-interested projection of art’s ‘ideal’ audience, are likely, indeed, to make all too many declarations of what an audience must see or comprehend, seem crassly oversimplified critical assumptions. But Benjamin more challengingly goes on: ‘no work of art presupposes [human] attention. No poem is meant for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the audience’ (1971: 151).

This opening paragraph is foundational for his influential discussion of translation that follows. Benjamin discusses translation at a theoretical level that largely avoids any historically framed examples; but he also focuses almost entirely on the production of translation, on how the foreignness of languages to each other is the necessary condition of the impossibility of fulfilled translation. He writes simply and beautifully of how connotations – his example is brot in German and pain in French – are not transferable between words in other languages. He seeks to escape from his melancholy sense of alienation and loss by imagining a sort of translation that seeks to go beyond the foreignness of languages to reach towards a greater or pure language of art, a domain where ‘languages are reconciled and fulfilled’ (1971: 158). Translation, he argues, ‘must lovingly, and in detail, fashion in its own language a counterpart to the original’s mode of intention, in order to make both of them recognizable as fragments of a vessel, as fragments of a greater language’ (1971: 161). It is not by chance that on the same page Benjamin quotes the opening verse of the Gospel of John, and, indeed, concludes his essay with the surprising claim that: ‘The interlinear version of the holy scriptures is the prototype or ideal of all translation’ (1971: 165). The paraphrase or translation of scripture is an ideal because it presupposes, in Benjamin’s view, that revealed scripture, the sacred text, is constituted precisely as the sought-after language, where meaning so far transcends the mere materiality of expression that translation can proceed without loss, without deficit. Benjamin’s melancholy comes not so much from the simple failure of one language to capture the connotations of another but from the inevitable inability of language to fulfil its own potential of translatability. Benjamin’s conclusion

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