Translation

The task of the translator Illuminations Walter benjamin

After the first essay about acquiring books that have been unread, Benjamin talks about translating. There is an underlying distrust of meaning that seems to continue from the first essay. Before Benjamin was denying that books had any kind of content and objects to collect, now they are allowed to have words and are giving a nature of being alive because they are given attention.

In a sense we have been firstly prompted that we have a collection of essays and now we are being reminded that understanding is difficult. It is not said directly but I feel he is relating reading comprehension to translation, too. Before we assign meaning to what we are reading there is this energy that is frantic and archaic that informs us what this thing outside of us could possibly mean. The phrase 'pure language.'

There is this one sense of intense fascination while at the same time a distance that is set apart from meaning. Benjamin illustrates this by describing the role of a translator as someone who shouts from outside a forest waiting for an echo to bounce back. All the vegetation and growth come from somewhere else and the translator has become bat like.

He also describes it as an esoteric practice where some are gifted with the ability while others struggle or do not consider it at all. Language itself is an ability that is within all humans but deriving meaning and replicating beauty are not. And to demonstrate the idea he considers that we read the same words but differ in experience of them.

I do not know exactly what he is talking about and I have little insight about translating languages. What seems to be most prominent about this essay is that meaning is something that comes about by contemplation rather than in the word itself it it can be discerned at all.