ABSTRACT
Liu's theory "quasi-Benjaminian", and summarize her position as claiming that "any two languages get the bilinguals who speak both to translate back and forth between them, in order to explore, establish, stabilize, and ultimately to universalize equivalences", it should come as no surprise that she has praise for Benjamin's 1923(/1972) introduction to his translation of Baudelaire, "Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers". Walter Benjamin's "task of the translator" and Derrida's reading of the same in "Des Tours de Babel" are among the few bold attempts in the twentieth century to rethink the problem of meaning outside the purview of semantics and structural linguistics. Benjamin's essay is intensely frustrating, because it is mostly about other matters, die Übersetzbarkeit "the translatability" of a text even when no human can translate it, die Intentionen "the Intentions" of languages, die reine Sprache "pure language", and so on. However, Benjamin's essay is not only not frustrating; it is infinitely productive.
