What is it about?
The article contests the narrative that says translators should be more "visible," which is to say perceived as more heroic. It extols the virtue of "ninja" translation, and especially playing with identifies as ready-mades for the purpose of aggravating the target reader. It also contains a full avant-garde translation of Walter Benjamin's 1923 article on the task of the translator, "Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers."
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Why is it important?
The "visibility" narrative has set up an unfortunate binary: translators are either "invisible" and so passive and submissive, or "visible" and active hermeneutic agents. The article uses the dialogue genre to contest that, and then launches an avant-garde translation of Walter Benjamin's 1923 "Aufgabe" using the radical etymologically literal (cognate) strategy that Benjamin himself champions in the essay.
Perspectives
This began as a very personal contribution to Asymptote's special issue on world literature; when Alex Lukes found it there and wanted to reprint it in her brilliant edited essay collection Avant-Garde Translation, I was thrilled, but also sent her some other things that she might want to use instead, including The Experimental Translator and the cognate translation of Benjamin. She asked me to incorporate the Benjamin cognate translation into the article. Bliss!
Professor Douglas J. Robinson
Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: An Alphabet of Avant-Garde Perspectives on World Literature and the Translator’s (In)visibility, September 2023, Brill,
DOI: 10.1163/9789004681804_011.
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