Walter Benjamin’s “The Task of the Translator” provokes a strange mixture of fascination and skepticism every time I return to it. Benjamin conceives of translation as a formal procedure based on the notion of translatability between different languages. He argues that a translator’s concern should not only involve capturing the meaning of the original text. Rather than aiming to give the ideas in the original their own lives through a smooth translation, a translator should aim to preserve traces of incompatibility, tension, and negotiation which emerge from the contact between languages. 

In other words, instead of translating the meaning or communicative intention of the original, a translator might at times reproduce “literal” versions of the original’s syntax even if it feels awkward or unnatural. Benjamin’s account is energized by a messianic conception of language. By staging rapprochements between different languages with seemingly incompatible grammar or syntax, a translator may manage to provide a glimpse of the universal,  “pure” language. 

There remains the nagging question: How could we understand or derive aesthetic pleasure from, say Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, if the translator cares so little about approximating the meaning of the original? Could we tolerate a version of Crime and Punishment which transplants the Russian original into English word-for-word, with the same syntax?

In Benjamin’s account, the concern with conveying the sense or meaning of the original is imagined as a momentary touch or contact:

Just as a tangent touches a circle lightly and at but one point — establishing, with this touch, rather than with the point, the law according to which it is to continue on its straight path to infinity — a translation touches the original lightly and only at the infinitely small point of the sense, thereupon pursuing its own course according to the laws of fidelity in the freedom of linguistic flux. [1] 

This metaphorical language is similar to how Benjamin describes encounters in urban contexts and the kind of enjoyment a flâneur derives from collecting impressions. This connection makes its way into Benjamin’s essay when he uses the arcade as a metaphor for the formal “transparency” desirable of a translation. “[I]f the sentence is the wall before the language of the original, literalness [Wörtlichkeit] is the arcade.” [2] 

Arcades, the glass-roofed shopping centers of consumerist performance, are distinctive for Benjamin because they constitute liminal spaces that reject any neat distinctions between the interior and the exterior. Entering these urban shopping avenues, the flâneur might comfortably inhabit a commodity-oriented awareness, comparing each impression based on their exchange values, and grow aware of himself as one commodity among others. But this awareness does not entail a complete separation from the world outside. The semi-enclosed architecture of the arcades represents transparency and exposes the fact that the flâneur’s behavior in the arcades is not unique to this seemingly partitioned interior location. It is a more universal condition that has come to regulate every practice in the age of capital. 

Benjamin’s comparison of “literalness” to an arcade may also turn the flâneur into a metaphor for the translator. The translator also collects impressions which will inevitably come to have value in relation to one another, even if the syntax used to group them together sounds foreign or unnatural. Rather than trying to convey what is seen through a sentence in the original, the translator should replicate the structure of seeing — the syntax — since this structure registers the most elemental sense of the intention behind the original. Though Benjamin hoped to advance more explicit dialectical mediation between them, his montages in Arcades Project may be considered radical versions of this attempt. He brings together quotations from different sources to demonstrate how their intention becomes more transparent in newly forged contexts.

When it comes to translation, Benjamin’s focus on sense is minimal and formal structure maximal: “A translation touches the original lightly and only at the infinitely small point of the sense.” The minimum and the maximum here invite two versions of skepticism that we often encounter in translation studies. One form of skepticism would defend Benjamin by asking: How could we realistically task a translator with identifying a correct meaning? If meaning is unstable and all translations are interpretations, what virtue is there in expecting a translator to convey the sense of an original in the first place? Better to translate the formal structure that energizes a desire for meaning.

The second form of skepticism would start with the same claim — interpretation is inevitable — but this time outline the virtues of making surplus subjectivity explicit. Rather than impeding the understanding and smooth appreciation of a text, isn’t it preferable to foreground subjectivity? This skepticism was voiced most convincingly by Theodor Adorno in a letter to Benjamin in 1938, with an incomplete understanding of the balance Benjamin ultimately hoped to strike between montage and interpretation. Worried that Benjamin’s fascination with transparency and literalness at “the exclusion of theory confirms the empirical,” he asks: “[D]oesn’t the pragmatic content of these subjects, if isolated, conspire almost demonically against the possibility of its interpretation?” [3] 

Just as the “absence” of explicit interpretation may provide selections with unexpected transparency, translators can also make an effort to foreground the “supplementary” layers of their interpretive gestures. For Adorno, in the age of all-pervasive capital, trusting the empirical to deliver a radically transformative shock effect is rather too optimistic, just as the flâneur may comfortably complete his daily stroll in the arcades without experiencing any such demand. Therefore it is much more preferable to risk speculation and the leap of interpretive participation, and to invest in explicating the nature of this leap.

Whether a translator holds back and replicates the grammar of the original or actively interprets and creates the intuited meaning of the original, there is always going to be the inevitable fact of a contact between the writer and the translator, between the original and the translation. So despite all my confusion about the practice of translation espoused in Benjamin’s essay, I keep returning to the metaphor of a tangent that he uses to imagine this contact, “establishing, with this touch, rather than with the point, the law according to which it is to continue on its straight path to infinity.” That he takes pains to distinguish between the touch and the point shows that Benjamin believes in the importance of disclosing the affective resonance which results from the encounter between two languages. 

Unlike Benjamin’s more characteristic vocabulary of mental sensations, a translator’s contact with the original is imagined as a more bodily form of encounter. This is how a translator may differ from a flâneur. As Adorno worries, the impressionistic expedition of the flâneur may not always be powerful enough to deliver the experience of shock that Benjamin desires. But the work of translation — again, whether it involves holding back or active interpretation — has to culminate in some kind of action. Therefore the contact above all constitutes a vigorous and affective threshold, where physical or corporeal awareness becomes indispensable to the process of recognition. Even though Benjamin characterizes the contact as an “infinitely small point,” it elicits some of the most vivid and delicate images in the essay: “... sense is touched by language only the way an aeolian harp is touched by the wind.” Benjamin’s affective register tasks the translator with capturing the force of this threshold right before the new language launches on “its straight path to infinity”, and with leaving traces of the negotiation that results from that contact between languages. 

I want to turn now to Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Man of the Crowd” which is not necessarily a work of translation, but a translational text that subverts linguistic expectations through instances of contact between different languages. [4] This text is important for Walter Benjamin for its translational history through Charles Baudelaire. When Baudelaire translated this text, he “was moved to equate the man of the crowd… with the flâneur. It is hard to accept this view. The man of the crowd is no flâneur,” since he is “deprived of the milieu to which he belonged.” [5] Unlike Baudelaire’s bourgeois flâneur, Poe’s characters are more restless and display heightened motor and somatic responses upon coming into contact with the mysterious and the unknown.

In Baudelaire’s reading and translation, Poe’s story attains a stronger sense of visuality and phantasmagoria. For example, though the grammatical maneuvers in Poe’s story contribute significantly to the story’s powerful dramatic irony, Baudelaire describes the story as a “picture” in “The Painter of Modern Life”: “a picture (it really is a picture!), painted — or rather written — by the most powerful pen of our age.” [6] In Baudelaire’s analysis the corporeal recedes into the background and the transformations in the mode of desire are narrativized in a more convivial fashion: “Curiosity has become a fatal, irresistible passion!” [7]

This interpretive surplus in Poe is perhaps what leads Benjamin to ascribe a latent futurity to the original: “A magnificent touch in Poe’s story is that it not only contains the earliest description of the flâneur but also prefigures his end.” [8] This futurity also exposes itself if we pay attention to the dramatic irony which pervades Poe’s story due to an epistemic discrepancy between language and character. While the narrator’s language demonstrates an active responsiveness to the demands produced by the contact between different languages, the character does not grow into this awareness until the very end.

The story is narrated by a man sitting at a London coffeehouse, reading the daily newspaper. After spending some time failing to concentrate on the reading, he slowly raises his head, looks out the window and begins to watch the crowd. For a while he just watches, making assumptions about other people’s lifestyles and places in the social ladder. Soon “a decrepit old man” in the crowd draws his attention. He finds himself strangely unable to make speculations about this stealthy figure who somehow manages to simultaneously attract his attention and still remain a part of the masses. The narrative gradually develops into a horrifying mystery as the narrator chases this inscrutable man across the city.

Early in the story, the narrator cynically and impatiently categorizes the individuals that he encounters. “There was nothing very distinctive about these two large classes beyond what I have noted.” His comments advance a clear distaste for industrial society and the automated lives of the masses, a feeling that Poe himself must have shared. As Walter Benjamin observes, 

Poe’s text helps us understand the true connection between wildness and discipline. His pedestrians act as if they had adapted themselves to machines and could express themselves only automatically. Their behavior is a reaction to shocks. “If jostled, they bowed profusely to the jostler.” [9]

As the story develops, Poe concentrates his efforts more decisively on delineating the narrator’s troubled perspective. Despite his humorless judgements about the machinery of social norms and automated behaviors, the narrator fails to recognize that his own practice of reading other people might also be caught up in a mechanical mode of responsiveness to his surroundings. “At first my observations took an abstract and generalizing turn. I looked at the passengers in masses, and thought of them in their aggregate relations.”  This “generalizing” gaze eventually fails the narrator and becomes the foundation for his anxiety in the second part of the story, as he turns his attention from the crowd toward the enigmatic old man. In contrast to the sweeping generality of his earlier vision, the narrator now records feeling “singularly aroused, started, fascinated.”

His journey between these disparate modes of responsiveness follows a rather linear trajectory. But if we pay attention to the various translational efforts and resistances that Poe masterfully builds into the language, we can catch throughout the story flashes of a demand for a different way of reading and responding to the other. These resistances involve contact between different languages. Here is the first sentence: “It was well said of a certain German book that  ‘er lasst sich nicht lesen’ — it does not permit itself to be read.” In a story that deals with the restless anxiety about not being able to read, translate, or explain the other, starting with a German phrase about inscrutability should strike a reader. The narrator’s attempt at translation, however, extends well beyond this single sentence. This contact with German comes to have an uncanny and generative force on the narrator’s language.

The reflexive verb in the German sentence unsettles the grammatical texture of the English text. In German, the reflexive form (sich + verb) often changes the verb’s principal meaning and creates an entirely different semantic unit, whereas in English the reflexive is less common and it is simply formed by adding a reflexive pronoun to a transitive verb (i.e. enjoy oneself). The next few lines in the story fail to disengage from the reflexive mode: “There are some secrets which do not permit themselves to be told. Men die nightly in their beds, wringing the hands of ghostly confessors, and looking them piteously in the eyes — die with despair of heart and convulsion of throat, on account of the hideousness of mysteries which will not suffer themselves to be revealed.” The apparent awkwardness of the grammatical constructions reveals how the narrator’s language goes through a period of adjustment after its contact with another language.

Poe does not treat code-switching as a local gesture, but uses it as a tool to disturb and transform the texture of the narrator’s language. This way, he encodes a structural anxiety into the narrator’s idiom. Though the narrator initially ignores or overcomes differences by translating his perceptions into preconceived patterns of interpretation, this linguistic anxiety maintains a tense undercurrent. That this German phrase has caused a disturbance in the narrator’s language becomes even more obvious when he returns to it in the very last line: “… and perhaps it is but one of the great mercies of God that ‘er lasst sich nicht lesen.’” We know what this line might mean because the narrator had offered a translation at the beginning. Nonetheless it is curious that he decides to use the German phrase instead of his own translation. After his encounter with the indecipherable old man, the phrase seems to have taken on a different level of meaning. It has become a sort of amulet.

Translation gives us an opportunity to discern the affective resonance of the contact between different languages and registers. Shock and disturbance may apply to the effect German has on Poe’s narrator, but in other contexts and places, this contact may need to be imagined in other ways. As touch, for instance, wound, slip, scar, vision, or friction. Benjamin’s essay is an invitation for translators — which includes all of us — to find ways of recording the nature of this contact. As Howard Nemerov once wrote in a poem called “Translation”: “It still can draw a tremor and a tear / Sometimes, if only for its being gone, / That untranslatable, translated world.” [10]  //

[1] Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 1: 1913-1926, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard UP, 1996), 261.

[2] Benjamin, 260.

[3] Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol 4: 1938-1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard UP, 2006), 99. 

[4]  Edgar Allan Poe, “The Man of the Crowd,” in Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe: Tales and Sketches 1831-1842, ed. Thomas Ollive Mabbott (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard UP, 1978), 506-518.

[5] Walter Benjamin, The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire, (Cambridge, Mass: The Belknap Press, 2006), 188.

[6] Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life,” in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. Jonathan Mayne, (London: Phaidon Press, 1995), 7.

[7]  Baudelaire, 7.

[8] Walter Benjamin, “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol 4: 1938-1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard UP, 2006), 31.

[9]  Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in  Selected Writings: 1938-1940, 329.

[10] Howard Nemerov, “Translation,” Poetry 126, no. 5 (August 1975): 292.