Alien Translations with Benjamin and de Man

In “The Task of the Translator,” Walter Benjamin argues that the “essential quality” of a literary work transcends the utilitarian concern of standard communicative acts which he describes as the mere “imparting of information.” Paradoxically, Benjamin notes that translations which attempt to function as transmissions of this essential quality of the original are incapable of reproducing its quintessence.

Benjamin’s central claim is that the task of the translator is not the communication of information from one form to another, but rather the identification of translatability in one text and the subsequent reproduction of translatability in another. For Benjamin, translatability is the “vital” connection that grows out of the death of the original: “a translation issues from the original—not so much from its life as from its afterlife” (254).

In this way, translation as a destructive movement borders on hetero-/homogeneity. On the one hand, each translation is a moment of radical singularity that is un-transmittable in the communicative sense, and on the other, each translation is merely a crystallized moment of the vitality of expression that surges through all of history: “the original and the translation” are “fragments of a greater language” (260).

Ultimately, Benjamin seems to be primarily concerned with applying his analysis of translation as a form to a more general theory about language and signification.  His first point is that the vitality which drives language can only be expressed through language and is therefore merely a representation of that vitalism which prodded it into existence. “All purposeful manifestations of life, including their very purposiveness, in the final analysis have their end not in life but in the expression of its nature, in the representation of its significance.” Interestingly, Benjamin does not then merely make the claim that any “representing of something signified” is necessarily a reduction, but rather that it is this same life in “embryonic” form (255). Thus, the translator should not concern himself with the transmission of life, but the creation of life. A successful translation is identifiable through its ability to sustain the vital flow of life that encourages, even insists, upon further translations.

In this vitalistic scenario, life is characterized as inherently deconstructive and processual in that the act of translation not only results in a new, “embryonic” life but only does so through its divergence from, and subsequent transformation of, the original: “For in its afterlife….the original undergoes a change” (256). Much like the parasitic organisms from Alien, a translation appropriates the life of its host and, through this exigent act, negates the original. 

However, this may not be the right metaphor considering that Benjamin also refers to the way in which good translations are translucent, manifesting the spirit of the original, and not entirely destructive and parasitic. Likewise, he supports Rudolf Pannowitz’s idea that translations are more effective when they allow the original language to affect (inseminate) the translated language. Thus, perhaps a more fitting analogy would be Alien Resurrection in the way that this more explicitly invokes the human/alien hybrid.

In his response to Benjamin's famous essay, Paul de Man illuminates Benjamin's insights by differentiation translation and poetry. He writes that, for Benjamin, translation is not a relation between language and meaning but a relation “from language to language” (82). Poetry operates in a way similar to the hierarchical progression of a dialectic in that it distills the contradictory elements of the world into a singular set of signs that might refer to their worldly counterparts but nevertheless concretizes them by virtue of the static necessity of mediation. Translation, on the other hand, mediates this mediation itself, thereby (re)invigorating the original desire to re-present the radical heterogeneity and complexity of the world which language strives to become. The aim for translation is not to reproduce but to “put in motion," an action which De Man identifies in criticism as well (83).

But what is it that is being put in motion? As a leading deconstructionist, De Man seems to believe that translations (which subsume other acts such as history, criticism, and philosophy) can only “relate to what in the original belongs to language…They [translations] disarticulate, they undo the original, they reveal that the original was always already disarticulated” (84). Translation (to return to my Aliens analogy) is then less a recursive process of life/death and more of a revelation that the human, alien, and hybrid were always already indistinguishable from one another.

Near the middle of his essay, De Man mentions the distinction between grammar (wort) and meaning (satz), arguing that literal translations (such as Holderlin’s) which proceed word by word fall prey to the misconception that words convey meaning within a sentence in the same way that they convey meaning in isolation.

De Man sheds light on this disjunction between grammar and meaning, describing it as the difference between a set of meaningless letters and the word that they collectively signify. The connection between the two (grammar and meaning) is not logical but rather material. The material equivalence between “dog” and the three letters “d-o-g” is apodictic, whereas their signifying equivalence is radically different.