ABSTRACT
Walter Benjamin is only really concerned with translation that reaches out to the pure language which is potentially present in a select body of writing in any language. For him , pure language is a force hidden within certain texts, a poetic potential , a kernel that is striving to go beyond the immediate shell of words. It is the task of the translator to reach out to and release that potentiality. Benjamin turns commonsense notions of EQUIVALENCE in translation upside down. When he asks if a work is translatable, he is not thinking at all of the communication of content or of informa tion. If the common currency of linguistic exchange abounds , that signifies the language is remote from the 'central reciprocal relation ship between languages ' ( 1 923: 72) and as such is untranslatable; a language transaction, but not a translation, is required. TRANSLATA BILITY is about finding among the readers of a particular work an adequate translator who can attempt to make the hidden significance, the potential presence, visible. This potential is the vibration of pure language, which marks the point of interrelationship where languages converge and express what is beyond expres sion and history. Such a ' kinship' of languages lies in ' the intention underlying all languages as a whole . . . an intention which no single language can attain by itself, realized only by the totality of their intentions supplementary to each other: pure language ' (ibid. : 74). This Messianic quest for a mystic language at the kernel of all languages and realized by transla tion has led George Steiner ( 1 975/ 1 992: 66-7) to anchor Benjamin - with his nostalgia for the oneness of Word, God and Matter before the Fall , before BABEL - firmly in Jewish Kabbalistic tradition.
