ABSTRACT
The concept of pure language originates in Walter Benjamin’s essay Die Aufgabe des Ubersetzers, best known in English in Harry Zohn’s translation as ‘The Task of the Translator’. The essay was first published as a preface to Benjamin’s translation of Charles Baudelaire’s Tableaux Parisiens; its translation first appeared in Illuminations–a posthumous collection of essays edited by Hannah Arendt. If the German tradition of philosophical poetics is one component in the concept of pure language, another important component is Benjamin’s interest in theological perspectives on language. If ‘language as such’ is captured in the image of a vessel, pure language is a vessel that has been shattered and glued together–it is a language assembled from the broken fragments of the various languages of man. Pure language emerges when different languages supplement one another with regards to the same thing that they mean.
