Manners of Mistranslation

IF TRANSLATION, TO BUILD UPON THE SUGGESTIVE THOUGHT OF WALTER Benjamin, 1 serves the angelic purpose of sustaining the essential kinship of languages, and thus the possibility of a universal pure language, then translation must inevitably perform its own undoing. Although the translation may appear secondary or parasitic to the original work-of-art, the original also comes to depend upon translation for its continued existence (its "afterlife"). The good translation effectively re-creates the originality of the original, and in doing so, surpasses the original in its ability to reconcile the sign to its intentio. In other words, translation increases the level of transparency between language (all language) and its intentions, in much more profound ways than the original itself. The "successful" translation should be no mere sycophant to its original, but rather a new original that exceeds the power of the old original. Yet translation in this sense only seems to imply power relations of dominance and dependency: the original source-text comes to rely upon its once-sycophantic translation in order to realize its true originality. Thus, one might quibble with Benjamin that implicit within the angelic aims of translation lurks a sort of demonization, some [End Page 297] diabolic fall from pure language incapable of avoiding inter-linguistic disequilibrium. If one is willing to accept the semantic contradiction of a "new original," then the task of the translator may well be mistranslation

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• Difference in translation

  Joseph F Graham•Difference in translation•1985

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