ABSTRACT
Cahier 1 is Antoine Berman’s ‘overture’ to his commentary on ‘The Task of the Translator’ and offers a general introduction to Walter Benjamin’s thought. Berman argues for the suitability of the commentary form on two grounds, one of which has to do with the complexity of Benjamin’s text which is ‘not quotable, nor can it be summarised’ (2008:31); and the other with the traditional link between translation and commentary, a link that Berman is keen to reinstate. The commentary contains re-translations by Berman (into French) of excerpts from Benjamin’s text, which are sometimes directly contrasted with Gandillac’s self-revised 1971 translation but more frequently stand independently. Berman argues, in an early articulation of the controversial ‘re-translation hypothesis’ that would be proposed by Berman and Paul Bensimon in the journal Palimpsestes in 1990, that re-translation is the ‘most critical, most accomplished vein that translation has to offer’ (2008:20). The dual notion that re-translations necessarily represent an improvement on previous translations and that subsequent translations become more foreignising may be highly problematic, but some aspects of the re-translation hypothesis do merit further consideration. Re-translating a text when one has access – if indeed one chooses to access – previous translations is undoubtedly a task of a different order than translating a text that has never been translated before. Expectations of the translation are also of a different order. The translator does not come to the text unaffected by earlier readings and may well be influenced – deliberately or unconsciously – by the language of earlier translations. But acknowledging the influence of previous translations does not imply acceptance of teleological improvement. A more important point, and one that is illustrated more fully later on in the commentary, is that Berman’s thinking on re-translation is ultimately a reflection on the relationship of tension that a literary text has with 26the natural language in which it is written at the time of its appearance, and on the translator’s ability to represent that tension in the translating language. The re-translation hypothesis is ultimately founded on an enquiry into literariness that cannot be as easily dismissed as the hypothesis that grows out of it.
