III
As both Paul de Man and Jacques Derrida point out, Benjamin's essay demanded, and continue to demand, a complete transformation of the way we commonly think translation. Benjamin seems to be arguing that the genius of translation as a mode is obscured when the problem is restrictively posed as one of the transmission or reproduction of meaning. Instead of simply transporting the meaning of the original, a translation must "lovingly and in detail, incorporate the original's mode of signification, thus making the original and the translation recognisable as fragments of a greater language..."(B 78). In translation, the mode of signification of one language comes into engagement with that of the other, and in the process shows "in the original a mobility, an instability, which first one did not notice" because the original presents itself as univocal, complete, identical to itself. Benjamin’s metaphor teases the question open. He writes (and we cite the passage here in Derrida' s translation): "While content and language form a certain unity in the original, like a fruit and its skin, the language of translation envelops its tenor like a royal cape with large folds. For it is the signifier of a language superior to itself and so remains, in relation to its own tenor, inadequate, forced, foreign" (D 193 -4) This is why, Benjamin writes "a real translation is transparent: it does not cover the original, does not block its light, but allows the pure language, as though reinforced by its own medium, to shine upon the original all the more fully"(B 79)
A translation can never be, nor should it aspire for, mere repetition. It represents the "afterlife" (Uberleben, Fortleben) of the work: in it the original finds new life; it grows, matures, is supplemented. 'Nacbreife' is the term he uses for the process. Post-maturation. Benjamin cautions us against domesticating the idea of life by reading the metaphor in a secondary sense, as biological or psychological, and demands that we read the term in the "only way life can be understood,” as denoting history. ”The concept of life is given its due only if everything that has a history of its own, and is not merely the setting for history, is credited with life. In the final analysis the range of life must be determined by history rather than by nature, least of all by such tenuous factors as sensation and soul. The philosopher’ s task consists of comprehending all of natural life through the more encompassing life of history(B 73) " What is this life of history that constitutes this afterlife or survival of a text in translation? A brief discussion of what Benjamin terms ” pure language"will help us search the answer in Chandumenon's experiments with translation.
Derrida leads us into his reading of Benjamin through a discussion of the Babel story, which, we cannot forget, is central also to his own enterprise -that of critiquing a metaphysics based on the notion of a "transcendental signified," a concept, he writes elsewhere, that is formed "within the horizon of an absolutely pure, transparent, an equivocal translatability" . Liewise in the Babel story the dream of a unified language and of universal transparency is interrupted by ”the inadequation of one tong ue to the other. . 【and】the need for figuration, for myths, for tropes, for twists and turns for translation inadequate to compensate that which multiplicity denies us"(D 165); interrupted, in other words, by Babel. Babel forbids and imposes translation. It compels us into the domain and the Iogic/ law of (pure) language which Derrida aligns with the realm of what he calls writing and the logic of difference. "The pure untranslatable and the pure transferable here pass one in to the other. . ”(D 190). To translate is necessarily to shift away from the idea of transfer.
A series of questions follow: What happens when the "transfer of a truth from one language to another without any essential harm being done", is no longer available as the ground on which we may think translation? On what ground can translation take place "if the restitution of meaning given is for it no onger the rule?(D 178). Does it recede with unquestionable finality? Posed thus, the questions exude an aura of loss around what Benjamin (and Derrida) clearly do not regard as loss but as gain: ”if the task of the translator appears in this (transcendental) light, the paths of its accomplishment risk becoming obscure in an all the more impenetrable way"(D 177) Released from the burden of the transmission of meaning (an impossibility), the translator can attend to a mode, the mode of signification or representation; attend, in other words, to the text as writing and therefore as difference and history. This is the genius/genus of translation, for it is a mode in which difference is thematic. The language of the original is most likely to appear transparent, for a familiar signifier is experienced as fitting the signified like the skin on a fruit. In a translation the signifier drapes, rich and loose. It has the grandeur of a royal robe.
It is this idea of translation as ex-change in the currency of signification, representation and differance that Benjamin elaborates in the other important concept that runs through the essay, that of the "afterlife,” the ”living-on," of the original in translation. The task of the translator, which arrives as an imperative from the original: a call , a debt ( Derrida) a claim Niranjana), is to create, or rather, find the right after-life for the text. Derrida chooses to explore the notion ”in communication,” he writes, with the concept-metaphors of filiation and dissemination.He suggests that the translator is an heir, a survivor with an obligation to decipher the original and make its writing legible(again); that translations represent successive stages in the "maturation" of the original seed; that the translation contract is an alliance between two foreign (different) languages "with the promise to produce a child whose seed will give rise to history and growth"(D 191)
Tejaswini Niranjana takes issue with Derrida' s restriction of afterlife or sur-vival to the scene of kinship and inheritance in a manner that renders the translator a , “survivor in a genealogy. ” She chooses instead to link “survival to historiography, " in order to open up the correspondence between the task of the translator and that of another figure who transits through the Benjamin oeuvre: the critical historian. In the hands of the critical historian the concern with the past is a concern with its revolutionary potential (148). According to Benjamin, the historian creates a configuration or constellation of past and present when s/he catches sight of "a revolutionary change in the fight for an oppressed past.” The notion of afterlife, Niranjana argues, can be read as setting up a similar constellation between the original and the translation. As it takes measure of and signifies the original , the translation displaces both itself and the original in the realm of history. Consequently translation is an act of history. Why is it, she asks, that Derrida who has often "spoken of the need to reinscribe the notion of history by revealing its discontinuous and heterogeneous nature." swerves away "from the statements that modify Benjamin’s existentialist positions in the direction of the later writings on materialist historiography” (161)?
Niranjana reads pure language as a necessary fiction. Translations, she writes, are aimed at the domain of pure language, but that is only a posited redemptive horizon in which the ”fragments of the amphora" are pieced together, since -and here too she cites Benjamin - our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of redemption" (157). It is a reconciliation posited but never attained, indeed never attainable. It might be useful, we suggest, to retrieve the idea of pure language also for a critical historiography. The result would be a history mapped as initiatives and struggles in the field of representation; history as translation. Indulekha will serve us as gloss for that claim.
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