Translation as Conquest, Part II
Walter Benjamin’s Jetztzeit or now-time appropriates Nietzsche’s conquest of history. In Thesis XIV of On the Concept of History, Benjamin writes:
History is the subject of a construction whose site is not homogeneous, empty time, but time filled full by now-time. Thus, to Robespierre ancient Rome was a past charged with now-time, a past which he blasted out of the continuum of history. The French Revolution viewed itself as Rome reincarnate. It cited ancient Rome exactly the way fashion cites a bygone mode of dress. Fashion has a nose for the topical, no matter where it stirs in the thickets of long ago; it is the tiger’s leap into the past. Such a leap, however, takes place in an arena where the ruling class gives the commands. The same leap in the open air of history is the dialectical leap Marx understood as revolution. [1]
The diagnosis of the past’s pregnancy with now-time is far from self-evident. Only if it is constructed — or acted upon as material — does its potential appear. Detonating the continuum of history coincides with our taking possession of the past. It’s more forceful than a “working through.” As Benjamin says in Thesis V: “The true image of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image that flashes up at the moment of its recognizability and is never seen again.” [2] In this image, all of the past is condensed into a monad. Today’s ahistorical outlook (a species of historicism) is not only a liability. It may also mean that everything can be resolved or brought to the court of judgment in one fell swoop. We have squandered countless such opportunities and will continue to unless and until we “grasp the constellation into which [our] own era has entered, along with a very specific earlier one.” [3] That relation between the past and present is there for our apprehension. We are afraid to lay hold of it and stop it in its tracks.
What Marx in the Eighteenth Brumaire called the bourgeois revolutionaries’ act of “anxiously conjuring up the spirits of the past to their service” was for Benjamin the fully legitimate citation of history. Citing something introduces it into a new context — like what I’m doing here. It allows what is cited to come into its own, to claim attributes belonging to it that must first be given to it. This citation opens the past up for both use and abuse. But truth has legs to run away from us; the spirits we enlist might not keep quiet. They might ask to be wrested from wherever they’ve been lately embedded — not to go back to where they came from, but to reanimate another corpse. Marx drew attention to the necessary misrecognition that accompanies any such conquest of the past. When the bourgeois political revolutions caught up to the transformation that society had already been bringing about, the historically new was still blinded by its own light; Robespierre had to wear the Roman toga before his age could weave its own garments. Marx compares this leap to the movement in and between languages: “In like manner, the beginner who has learned a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue, but he assimilates the spirit of the new language and expresses himself freely in it only when he moves in it without recalling the old and when he forgets his native tongue.” Only when the toga no longer fits will it fall away.
The now-time is both the eternally present in the past and that which we make present in it. In Benjamin’s own translation of this text into French, he renders the Jetztzeit as the à-present. The preposition points up the image character of what has been — the frozen aspect of its discretely reified moments that continue piling up. Benjamin’s French contains echoes of Bergson’s philosophy and Proust’s recherche in the subtle but unmistakable (critical) appropriation of time-space. All of this and more is embedded in the German Jetztzeit (but only actualized in its translation), growing as it does out of the methodology Benjamin developed through his massive and unfinished construction of 19th-century Paris in the Arcades Project. Benjamin doesn’t opt for a literal translation of himself, as you might expect if you have (mis)read The Task of the Translator. Even though French doesn’t stitch words together the way German does, Benjamin still might’ve gone with maintenant-temps. Unlike Jetztzeit, à-present is an adverb. English options of “presently,” “currently,” and the literal “at present” all display the fact that it modifies a verb. The now-time is the way change might take place. It’s the way history — and translation — might take place.
“Un éclair, puis la nuit! —Fugitive beauté…” Like Baudelaire’s woman on the street, “L’image vraie du passé passe en un éclair.” “For it is an irretrievable image of the past which threatens to disappear in [mit/avec] any present that does not recognize itself as intended in that image.” The past doesn’t disappear into the present but thunders into oblivion along with it. The present is meant by the past, even if it’s not the future that the past had in mind. Benjamin’s French is visé; right now is presently aimed at and targeted by history. Its sights are set, but what about ours? //
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Read my discussion of Baudelaire’s Poe translations in Parts III and IV.
Jean-Marc Côté, A l’école(At school) from En L'An 2000(In the Year 2000), 1900.
Keith Waldrop, Collage. From: Passages.
gemeint/visé
[1] Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings: Volume 4, edited by Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings. (Harvard, 2004), 395.
[2] ibid., 390-91.
[3]ibid., 397.
