Translation. For Walter Benjamin, in moving between two languages, or standing in the second and susceptibly attuned to echoes from the first, we somehow sense a ‘pure language’ prior to both. According to some readings this ‘pure language’ is no more than a kind of necessary fiction needed to account for the very ability to translate. It enables us to measure the distances between languages and maybe between language and the reality.
Anyway, some related thoughts, occasioned by the previous post on Adorno in English:
In attempting to translate a text from say French, one of course first consults the existing translations. Say there are three of these, three ‘approximations’. None of these approximations is quite ‘it’; the variations are all failed answers, and unavoidably so.
Imagine, then, that you do not have the original text but only the 3 translations and their variations. One is able to sense the ‘conundrum’, the hard knot of the untranslatable 'X' responsible for these variations – one infers the ‘Real’ of the ur-text through the necessary failures, the ‘disturbances on the surface', of the translations.
Is this not close to being a nice metaphor for what Lacan means by the Real – that which resists being translated - not, now, into one particular language, but into language per se. Each deflected attempt to translate, to bring to Symbolic articulation, attests to a stubborn ‘X’ responsible for those very deflections.
The next post will be on football.