ABSTRACT

In Cahier 2, where Berman’s commentary on the letter of Benjamin’s text begins in earnest, the lacunae between the German verbs gelten and verlangen and their French and English translations demonstrate how thinking Benjamin’s text trilingually may help draw attention to key conceptual nodes within it. The verb gelten, which first occurs – in the third person singular form – at the end of Benjamin’s first paragraph, ‘Denn kein Gedicht gilt dem Leser, kein Bild dem Beschauer, keine Symphonie der Hörerschaft’ (Benjamin 1991a:9, emphasis added) [No poem pertains to the reader, no painting to the viewer, no symphony to the audience], and then again immediately at the opening of the second, ‘Gilt eine Übersetzung den Lesern, die das Original nicht verstehen?’ (ibid., emphasis added) [Does a translation pertain to readers who do not understand the original?], has no natural English equivalent. Gelten can be a transitive or intransitive verb and has a variety of meanings. Possible English renderings, depending on the context, are ‘to be valid’, ‘to count’, ‘to be worth’, ‘to apply’; or ‘to be considered as’, for example die Fahrkarte gilt in allen Bussen (the ticket is valid on all buses); ihre Stimme gilt (her vote counts); das Geld gilt nicht viel (the money isn’t worth much or doesn’t carry much weight); hier gilt die StVO (the Highway Code applies or is applicable here); er gilt als Fachmann (he’s considered an expert). The relevant meaning in ‘The Task of the Translator’ is that of gelten as an intransitive verb meaning ‘to be addressed to or destined for’ with an overtone of one of its other meanings ‘applies to’. The verb is often used with the impersonal subject ‘es’ in a similar fashion to the French verb valoir [‘to be worth’, ‘to have value’], that is, il vaut or ça vaut, and valoir is the translation Berman suggests here. Berman points out that Gandillac’s decision to render gelten with the verb faire (‘to do’ or ‘to make’), while essentially leaving the meaning of Benjamin’s text unchanged, 54fails to respect its weft. The need to be attentive to the patterns and rhetoricity of prose (and the frequent failure of translation to do so) is a familiar concept in Berman’s work. We find it expressed in the negative analytic formulated in his essay ‘La traduction comme épreuve de l’étranger’ (1985), translated by Lawrence Venuti as ‘Translation and the Trials of the Foreign’ (2000). The verb gelten has a grammatical subject in Benjamin’s text (Gedicht, Bild, Beschauer, and then Übersetzung) but it has no subject in the sense of an agent – and that is precisely the point. Benjamin is unpicking our desire to conceive of the work of art as a message (eine Mitteilung or Aussage), and as Berman underlines, a message consists of three parts: ‘transmission by somebody, transmission of something, transmission to somebody’ (2008:47). Through his choice of verb, Benjamin begins his dismantling of the notion of message by removing the transmitter, the agent, at the same time as he dismisses the importance of the receiver. Benjamin rejects the notion that works of art are or should be preoccupied with their audience, thus questioning the notion of the work of art as a communicative act and positioning himself against contemporaneous views of language as a communicative tool. In my translation of gelten, I have opted for the verb ‘pertain’, in the sense of ‘belonging to’ (as a legal right or a privilege), but also ‘relating to’. Like gelten, pertain’s sense of agency is vague and it avoids the subject implicit in verbs such as ‘mean’, ‘intend’ or ‘aim’.