Walter Benjamin on Translation:
"(A literary work's) essential quality is not statement or the imparting of information. Yet any translation which intends to perform a transmitting function cannot transmit anything but information—hence, something inessential. This is the hallmark
of bad translations. But do we not generally regard as the essential substance of a literary work what it contains in addition to information—as even a poor translator would admit—the unfathomable, the mysterious, the "poetic," something that a translator can reproduce only if he is also a poet?"
"The Task of the Translator"
(Introduction to his translation of Baudelaire's Tableaux Parisiens)
1923
"(A literary work's) essential quality is not statement or the imparting of information. Yet any translation which intends to perform a transmitting function cannot transmit anything but information—hence, something inessential. This is the hallmark
of bad translations. But do we not generally regard as the essential substance of a literary work what it contains in addition to information—as even a poor translator would admit—the unfathomable, the mysterious, the "poetic," something that a translator can reproduce only if he is also a poet?"
"The Task of the Translator"
(Introduction to his translation of Baudelaire's Tableaux Parisiens)
1923
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