Translation as a Form: A Centennial Commentary on Walter Benjamins The Task of the Translator

This is a book-length commentary on Walter Benjamins 1923 essay "Die Aufgabe des bersetzers," best known in English under the title "The Task of the Translator." Benjamins essay is at once an immensely attractive work for top-flight theorists of translation and comparative literature and a frustratingly cryptic work that cries out for commentary. Almost every one of the claims he makes in it seems wildly counterintuitive, because he articulates none of the background support that would help readers place it in larger literary-historical contexts: Jewish mystical traditions from Philo Judaeuss Logos-based Neoplatonism to thirteenth-century Lurianic Kabbalah; Romantic and post-Romantic esotericisms from Novalis and the Schlegels to Hlderlin and Goethe; modernist avant-garde foreclosures on "the public" and generally the communicative contexts of literature. The book is divided into 78 passages, from one to a few sentences in length. Each of the passages becomes its own commentarial unit, consisting of a Benjaminian interlinear box, a paraphrase, a commentary, and a list of other commentators who have engaged the specific passage in question. Because the passages cover the entire text of the essay in sequence, reading straight through the book provides the reader with an augmented experience of reading the essay. Robinsons commentary is key reading for scholars and postgraduate students of translation, comparative literature, and critical theory.