What is it about?
The article invokes John Henry’s fatal competition with the rock-driving machine, a legendary exemplar of resistance to automation, as a speculative analogue of Walter Benjamin’s 1923 essay “Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers,” read as a metaphysical attempt to develop a workable alternative to the kind of mechanizable translating he hated. Benjamin’s practical work with Baudelaire and Proust and the others is read tentatively as the forerunners to machine translation eighty-plus years later.
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Why is it important?
Walter Benjamin is important, and machine translation is important, and the importance of each pulls in the opposite direction of the other. It is useful to think of the two as a mutual resistance.
Perspectives
The special issue of Babel was themed "literature and machine translation," and Walter Benjamin may be our most metaphysically extreme defender of literary translation.
Professor Douglas J. Robinson
Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen
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This page is a summary of: Walter Benjamin as translator as John Henry, Babel Revue internationale de la traduction / International Journal of Translation / Revista Internacional de Traducción, July 2023, John Benjamins,
DOI: 10.1075/babel.00329.rob.
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