Foreign Language

Irving Wohlfarth on Walter Benjamin:

Contrary to received opinion, the task of the translator [is not] to assimilate another language to one’s own but to render both foreign to themselves.

This operation curiously reminscent of Deleuze’s idea of a minor literature, which always involves the “rendering foreign” of received (Major) language. The writer, suggests Deleuze (quoting Proust), is always a kind of foreigner in his own tongue. And this ‘foreigner’ activates or sets in motion what the familiarity of his host language has repressed.

This idea of “rendering foreign” does not mean colouring what is familiar with a particular foreign content (e.g. what is English is coloured with a certain French or Germanic tint); rather English, for example, is made unfamiliar to itself, some virus of ‘pure difference’ is introduced into it, without anchorage.

The assumptions underlying Benjamin’s notion are, of course, rather different. Wolf. adds the following to his reflections on Benjamin’s translation essay:

Like the “stranger” who disrupts the community’s false sense of symbiosis, translation accentuates an alienation that is endemic to all fallen languages. In estranging them from such estrangement, it prepares for their ultimate “integration”.

Thus the making foreign of language (the estrangement of estrangement) is really the making visible of a foreignness (an alienation) already in place, but a foreignness that adumbrates a lost homeland.