![\"bread-621_640\"](\"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/bread-621_640.jpg\")
<\/p>\nWalter Benjamin once proposed that the \u201chistory of every art form has critical periods in which the particular form strains after effects which can be easily achieved only with a changed technical standard–that is, a new art form.\u201d (\u201cThe Work of Art\u201d 118). Technological innovation does not simply improve on existing art forms, but is capable of generating new art forms by offering new media for artistic creation. But before he starting thinking about art forms and technology, Benjamin was thinking about art forms and language. His 1921 essay \u201cThe Task of the Translator\u201d is an attempt to conceive of translation as a form of art; an art form, moreover, whose unique concern is what happens when one language passes into another. \u201cTranslation is a form\u201d is the founding premise of Benjamin\u2019s essay (254), by which he means to say that translation is form of artistic writing alongside poetry rather than a secondary derivative of literary art. If we merge Benjamin\u2019s contention that translation is an art form with his later argument that the history of art forms cannot be separated from the technical standards of their time, the question arises whether the introduction of machine translation, a radically changed technical standard for the practice of translation, creates what is, in effect, a new linguistic art form.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Task of the Translator\u201d opens with a discussion of \u201cthe appreciation of a work of art or an art form\u201d (253). Benjamin\u2019s main argument is that the appreciation of art does not rest on interpreting its content to derive a moral or lesson from it. Art is not primarily about communication: \u201cNo poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the audience\u201d (\u201cThe Task\u201d 253). While art is clearly meaningful for the person enjoying it, its primary intention is not to inform, instruct, or even delight this person. Only after this overture into non-intentional aesthetics do we encounter translation proper: \u201cIf the original does not exist for the reader\u2019s sake, how could the translation be understood on the basis of this premise?\u201d (Benjamin, \u201cThe Task\u201d 254). The counterintuitive argument that the translation does not exist for the sake of the reader who does not read the original language is Benjamin\u2019s first step in establishing translation as an art in its own right. His second step is an exploration of the repercussions that viewing translation as an art has for our conception of the translator–whose task Benjamin is out to define: \u201cJust as translation is a form of its own, so, too, may the task of the translator be regarded as distinct and clearly differentiated from the task of the poet\u201d (\u201cThe Task\u201d 258). More or less all previous theorization of this task has been directed towards establishing how the translator best communicates the original\u2019s meaning in the receiving language, be it word-for-word or sense-for-sense; this is, in Benjamin\u2019s eyes, a futile procedure whose best possible outcome is the \u201cinaccurate transmission of an inessential content\u201d (\u201cThe Task\u201d 253). Translation should not seek to communicate the meaning of the original because the communication of its content is not in the least essential to our appreciation of it.<\/p>\n
Therefore, no translator needs to concern himself very much with what the original means, or so Benjamin claims. Rather the translator\u2019s work should \u201cultimately serve the purpose of expressing the innermost relationship of languages to one another\u201d (Benjamin, \u201cThe Task\u201d 255). Benjamin also terms this a \u201csuprahistorial relationship between languages\u201d that consists in the fact that \u201cin every one of them as a whole, one and the same thing is meant. Yet this one thing is achievable not by any single language but only by the totality of their intentions supplementing one another: the pure language\u201d (\u201cThe Task\u201d 257). Benjamin\u2019s famous concept of \u201cpure language\u201d invokes an amalgam of all the languages of the world, and it is precisely this aggregate language that is the medium in which the translator should work. The relationship between<\/i> languages can naturally never be experienced in a single<\/i> language, and it is precisely for this reason that translation, which passes \u201cfrom one language into another through a continuum of transformations\u201d (Benjamin, \u201cOn Language\u201d 70), is uniquely situated to reveals this relationship. But, of course, no translator can possibly be expected to tackle all the languages of the world in a single work of translation and in practical terms the task of the translator is somewhat provisional: he or she only marks the intersection of two languages in the vast linguistic mass which is the sum total of all languages, the pure language.<\/p>\n
It is here that modern computing enters the picture–the introduction of computer memory suddenly makes the grand goal of placing all the world\u2019s languages in a single continuum much more practically viable. After all, computer memory can achieve that which no single human can, namely to store and retrieve previously unimaginable masses of linguistic information in multiple languages. Could we not see these linguistic databases as a technological approximation of pure language, made possible by the massive memory capacity of modern computing? And furthermore, since online translation tools use precisely these vast stores of linguistic material in order to produce translations–does this not imply that online translations are quite literally powered by pure language? Certainly the ideal that many translation programmers work towards is to make all the world\u2019s languages mutually translatable at the click of a button, thereby technologically overcoming the curse of Babel that necessitates translation in the first place.<\/p>\n
To clarify the relationship between languages encapsulated in pure language, Benjamin introduces a distinction between what is meant, das Gemeinte<\/i>, and the manner of meaning it, Art des Meinens<\/i>. In Benjamin\u2019s own example the French word pain<\/i> and the German word Brot<\/i> are two manners of meaning bread<\/i>: they are merely different ways to denote the same object–bread.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The three words pain<\/i>, Brot<\/i>, and bread<\/i> are thus all related in the sphere of pure language because they all mean \u201cone and the same thing,\u201d even if they mean it in different manners. The various words of the world\u2019s different languages show the myriad ways in which the same thing may be meant and the translator should seek to show in his own language the manner in which other languages mean (Benjamin, \u201cThe Task\u201d 261). In other words, the translator should not simply translate the words pain<\/i> or Brot<\/i> as bread<\/i>, but show that bread means differently in French and German. For instance, the German word Brot<\/i> incorporates the shorter word rot<\/i>–meaning the colour red. This is mirrored in the sound of the English bread<\/i> that likewise rhymes with the colour red<\/i>. Such a relationship between bread and redness is, however, wholly absent in the French equivalents pain<\/i> and rouge<\/i>. This may appear nonsensical, because we do not think of red as related to bread–except that sometimes we do, for instance when reading Charles Reznikoff\u2019s poem \u201cThe bread has become moldy<\/a>:\u201d<\/p>\n The bread has become moldy The dead woman has forgotten her comb The \u201cbread\u201d of the first line echoes in the \u201cred\u201d of the fourth line, whereas the allusion to dyeing wool anticipates the dying, or indeed the four already dead who populate the second stanza: woman, cobbler, butcher, carpenter. Dyed red, died red, dead. But also dyed black, which is, of course, the colour of death, and perhaps also the colour (dye) of the eye-paint that the dead woman has forgotten. Perhaps Reznikoff is also alluding to the superstition that the person who places shoes on a table (as cobblers do) risks death to a family member, the butcher of course more explicitly deals with death in his vocation, whereas the carpenter may well use his adze to manufacture coffins. The sonic metamorphosis from moulding bread to red to dead is clearly central to the poem\u2019s thematic development of death and decay: Reznikoff consciously employs the manner of meaning–the relations between bread and red, dyed and dead–in the English words that he selects for his poem. Benjamin sought to expand this characteristically poetic mode of attending to the manner of how words mean to encompass translation as well. It follows that for him the form, Art des Meinens<\/i>, is more important in translation than the content, das Gemeinte,<\/i> because it is the manner of meaning that is unique to that other language, whereas what is meant is ultimately the same in all languages. The translation, then, should reveal not what the original is about, but its manner of meaning.<\/p>\n \u201cA 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\u201d (Benjamin, \u201cThe Task\u201d 260). This transparency not only reveals in the receiving language how the foreign language means, but also, conversely, underlines the unique manner of meaning found in the original. The only hands-on advice that Benjamin offers in the entire essay is that the desired transparency of translation \u201cmay be achieved, above all, by a literal rendering of the syntax which proves words rather than sentences to be the primary element of the translator. For if the sentence is the wall before the language of the original, literalness is the arcade\u201d (\u201cThe Task\u201d 260) .The sentence, with its linear progression of words that builds up into a meaningful utterance, is the non-essential and hence obstructing element in the work of a translator. In reading a sentence we are drawn to what it communicates at the expense of the manner in which it means, its construction as it were. To fulfil the task of translation, one must disregard what the foreign text is about, and instead decompose its sentences into their building blocks, words and grammatical relations, and then transfer these relations–these foreign manners of meaning–into one\u2019s own language through a literal rendition of the syntax.<\/p>\n It is here that translation engines come into their own: they are as excellent at literalism as they are bad at communicative interpretation–in machine translation the meaning-laden significance of the literary text is lost and the text becomes nothing more than a task to resolve. In generating a translation, the online engine, unlike the human translator, approaches the original language merely as form, a code to be decoded and recoded (in fact, machine translation arose out of the code-cracking technology used during the Second World War). While the human translator has to struggle against the hermeneutic imperative to interpret what he reads, the machine goes straight for the syntactical relations between words, finds their dictionary equivalents and jumbles together a sentence that is, more often than not, heavily indebted to the word order of the original language. This approach prioritises the meanings of individual words over sentences or phrases–which also explains the clunky and unidiomatic nature of such translations. (However, in recent years, Google\u2019s translation engineers have pioneered a wholly statistical approach to online translation that makes do without dictionary definitions and relies solely on the size of Google\u2019s database of linguistic samples.) Incapable of operationalizing the reader\u2019s understanding of what the original would communicate, machine translation truly lets meaning plunge \u201cfrom abyss to abyss until it threatens to become lost in the bottomless depths of language\u201d as Benjamin approvingly says of H\u00f6lderlin–the only translator whose work he unreservedly embraces in his translation essay (262).<\/p>\n H\u00f6lderlin\u2019s translation practice–that perhaps not wholly fortuitously sought to counter enthusiasm in art with a strict concept of mechane<\/i>–seems to anticipate \u201cthe world according to Babelfish, a place where meaning sometimes seems to show up only by coincidence, and information frequently declines to show its face at all.\u201d The words are Julian Dibbell\u2019s and come from his blog post \u201cAfter Babelfish<\/a>,\u201d where Dibbell invokes the spirit of Benjamin\u2019s theory of translation to assert that \u201cwe certainly can say that where, throughout its history, translation has veered between the two extremes of license and literalism, seeking at its best a middling compromise, Babelfish manages the unprecedented feat of attaining both extremes simultaneously. As an algorithmic process it is rigidly literal, with not a single degree of freedom in it, and yet in its effects it wanders wildly adrift of its original text.\u201d In accordance with Benjamin\u2019s dictum about the literal rendition of the syntax, it is precisely by staying senselessly faithful to the syntax and the individual words of the original that the translation engine plunges us into the depths of language where meaning is lost: \u201cIn this pure language–which no longer means or expresses anything but is, as expressionless and creative Word, that which is meant in all languages–all information, all sense, and all intention finally encounters a stratum in which they are destined to be extinguished\u201d (Benjamin, \u201cThe Task\u201d 261). Benjamin describes this extinction of meaning in celebratory terms as an \u201cemancipation\u201d from the communicative, non-essential aspects of language: only when language no longer communicates is it purely language.<\/p>\n Dibbell was one of the first people (if not the first) to recognise the elective affinity between Babelfish and Benjamin\u2019s theory of translation. To illustrate his argument, Dibbell uses the Babelfish translation engine to translate a poem by William Butler Yeats back and forth into Portuguese until it stops altering. Having let the machine \u201csettle into a final draft\u201d he then compares it to the experimental writing of Mallarm\u00e9, Khlebnikov, the Dadaists, Surrealists and William Burroughs, with rather unfavourable results: \u201cBabelfish makes even the hard core of the literary avant-garde look tepid and palely meaningful.\u201d So Dibbell. Yet in \u201cSurrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia\u201d Benjamin also has something to say of the members of the \u201cliterary avant-garde\u201d that Dibbell dismisses as tepid in comparison to Babelfish translations. In their works, Benjamin writes, \u201clanguage seemed itself only where sound and image, image and sound, interpenetrated with automatic precision and such felicity that no chink was left for the penny-in-the-slot called \u2018meaning\u2019\u201d (\u201cSurrealism\u201d 208). Of course, the poet\u2019s task is different from the translator\u2019s, yet both of them are obliged to use language so that it no longer communicates meaning. And if Benjamin commends Dadaist poetry for employing \u201cautomatic precision\u201d to create a \u201c\u2018word-salad\u2019\u201d containing … every imaginable kind of linguistic refuse\u201d (\u201cThe Work of Art\u201d 119), then why should a translation be condemned for doing the same?<\/p>\n Dibbell translates his poem back and forth until the translation stops altering. A comparable idea has been conceived by the creators of the webpage www.translationparty.com<\/a>. Its raison d\u2019\u00eatre<\/i> is to translate English sentences back and forth into Japanese until \u201cequilibrium\u201d is reached. The concept of equilibrium is fairly unheard of in traditional translation theory, which conventionally agonises about various degrees of equivalence (a concept that Benjamin emphatically rejected). In fact, equilibrium only makes sense as a concept when one has access to the kind of instant, constantly altering, back-and-forth translation that only machines can provide. \u201cEquilibrium,\u201d in this sense, is digital to the core. As the translations between Japanese and English appear in front of the viewer\u2019s eyes, meaning is visibly being extinguished with every back-translation until the engine hits upon a sentence that does not change in its back-translation. The process of the two languages being brought into equilibrium, made to touch and inflect one another, is made visually manifest and often with poetically evocative outcomes. For instance, the first three lines of Reznikoff\u2019s poem, that already in the original effuse a haiku-like simplicity (\u201cThe bread has become moldy \/ and the dates blown down by the wind; \/ the iron has slipped from the helve\u201d), is pared down to a sparse imperative: \u201cBread mouldy. Has become. Reduce the Helve iron wind.\u201d<\/p>\n Matthew Battles has written a fictional report, \u201cI After the Cloudy Doubly Beautifully<\/a>,\u201d on the discovery of an \u00dcbersetzungsmaschine<\/i> in the heavy suitcase that Benjamin was carrying on his fateful attempt to cross the French-Spanish border. Inspired by Dibbell\u2019s piece, Battles develops the idea that Benjamin\u2019s translation theory lends itself to machine translation. However, not content with translating back and forth between a language pair, he takes a psalm by Milton on a tour through all the languages covered by the machine: \u201cEnglish to French to German to Portuguese to Spanish and back home to English.\u201d The result is acutely unreadable: the psalms opening sentence \u201cBless\u2019d is the man who hath not walk\u2019d astray \/ In counsel of the wicked, and ith\u2019 way \/ Of sinners hath not stood, and in the seat \/ Of scorners hath not sate\u201d is transformed into \u201cBless \u2019 d \u00e9 human beings, em avocats that moinhos you conseils misdirected \u2019 athd n\u00e3o v\u00eaem or bad and do ith \u2019 do innershath n\u00e3o caught and not scornershath do assento, em ordem for n\u00e3o to satisfer itself.\u201d Nonetheless, the procedure is clearly ambitious: Battles does not rest satisfied with letting two languages pass through one another, but aims to encompass a greater chunk of the totality of languages that Benjamin termed \u201cpure language\u201d than any merely bi-lingual translation can ever hope to do.<\/p>\n This may be a somewhat flippant way of approaching Benjamin\u2019s theory of translation and it would be easy to argue that the examples I have given you are mere surface similarities that have nothing substantial to say about Benjamin\u2019s thought or about the art of translation. The first and foremost reason for this may be found already in the opening paragraph of Benjamin\u2019s essay that dismisses the communicative element in art. Communication is, on the other hand, the primary (profit) motive behind machine translation. Prominent machine translation scientist Franz Josef Och, who is also the creator and head of Google translate, emphasises precisely the spread of information as the main goal of his research. In an interview from 2010 he says<\/a>: \u201cThe language barrier is really a very big problem for communication. \u2026\u00a0The idea is, can we with the help of technology and machine translation–can we break down the language barrier?\u00a0 So that anyone can access any information–any text out there–independent of the language\u201d (Sarno). It is precisely the communication of information that Benjamin saw as the \u201cinaccurate transmission of an inessential content\u201d (\u201cThe Task\u201d 253).<\/p>\n Och\u2019s statement may well indicate the dividing line between the art of translation and machine translation, at least in terms of Benjamin\u2019s theory. Of course, we may disregard the intentions of Google translate\u2019s creator, just as we disregard those of the literary author in analysing his work. However, it is not wholly gratuitous that the figure of the creator appears here–even if we accept that Babelfish and Google translate may, against the intentions of their programmers, be capable of producing avant-garde translations, the reason why we do not consider these to be works of art may reside in the fact that they are not intentionally created. The crucial difference between H\u00f6lderlin\u2019s Sophocles translation and a version by Babelfish is found in the abyss that separates one of the most skilled artists of the German language and a code-breaking machine, no matter how sophisticated. The fact that a poem is created, that every word is deliberately and carefully chosen, is perhaps the most decisive characteristic of poetry. On the other hand, recalling the 19th<\/sup> century arguments that photography could never become an art because a technological apparatus had replaced the hand holding the brush, may suggest that it is premature to dismiss the creative potential of translation machines just because no person does the actual translating. It may seem implausible to think of a poet who will write texts deliberately for processing on online translation engines or texts that employ such translation as part of their genesis–but this is in fact what Battles has done as \u201cI After the Cloudy Doubly Beautifully\u201d is now included in his published short story collection The Sovereignties of Invention<\/i>. Just as today\u2019s painters cannot ignore the existence of photography, so today\u2019s literary translators may do well to keep online translation engines in mind when working at their task.<\/p>\n Works Cited<\/p>\n Battles, Matthew. The Sovereignties of Invention. <\/i>Red Lemonade, 2012. Print.<\/p>\n —. \u201cI After the Cloudy Doubly Beautifully.\u201d Hilobrow<\/i>. 2009 Web. 14 May, 2014 <http:\/\/hilobrow.com\/2009\/06\/02\/i-after-the-cloudy-doubly-beautifully\/<\/a>><\/p>\n Benjamin, Walter. \u201cThe Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility.\u201d Selected Writings Volume 3<\/i>. Ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W Jennings. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002. 101\u201333. Print.<\/p>\n —. \u201cThe Task of the Translator.\u201d Selected Writings Volume 1 1913-1926<\/i>. Ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996. 253-63. Print.<\/p>\n —. \u201cOn Language as Such and on the Language of Man.\u201d Selected Writings Volume 1 1913-1926<\/i>. Ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996. 62-74. Print.<\/p>\n —. \u201cSurrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia\u201d Selected Writings Volume 2 1927-1934<\/i>. Ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999. 207-218. Print.<\/p>\n Dibbell, Julian. \u201cAfter Babelfish.\u201d FEED Magazine<\/i>. 2000. Web. 14 May, 2014. <http:\/\/www.juliandibbell.com\/texts\/feed_babelfish.html><\/p>\n Sarno, David. \u201cFranz Josef Och, Google\u2019s Translation \u00dcber-Scientist, Talks about Google Translate.\u201d Los Angeles Times<\/i> 10 Mar. 2010. Web. 14 May, 2014 <http:\/\/latimesblogs.latimes.com\/technology\/2010\/03\/the-web-site-translategooglecom-was-done-in-2001-we-were-just–licensing-3rd-party-machine-translation-technologies-tha.html#sthash.bE9BI23Z.dpuf<\/a>><\/p>\n Reznikoff, Charles. \u201cThe Bread Has Become Moldy.\u201d The Poetry Foundation<\/i>. n.d. Web. 14 May 2014. <http:\/\/www.poetryfoundation.org\/poem\/182077<\/a>><\/p>\n
\nand the dates blown down by the wind;
\nthe iron has slipped from the helve.
\nThe wool was to be dyed red
\nbut the dyer dyed it black.<\/p>\n
\nand tube of eye-paint;
\nthe dead cobbler has forgotten his knife,
\nthe dead butcher his chopper,
\nand the dead carpenter his adze.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n