Cover not available
Article published In:
Literary Translation in the Era of Artificial Intelligence: Challenges and Its Future Prospects
Edited by Wang Ning and Wang Hongtao
[Babel 69:4] 2023
► pp. 499–528

Walter Benjamin as translator as John Henry

Competing with the machine

| Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen

The article invokes John Henry’s fatal competition with the rock-driving machine, a legendary exemplar of resistance to automation, as a speculative analogue of Walter Benjamin’s 1923 essay “Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers,” read as a metaphysical attempt to develop a workable alternative to the kind of mechanizable translating he hated. Benjamin’s practical work with Baudelaire and Proust and the others is read tentatively as the forerunners to machine translation eighty-plus years later – working with the meanings of individual words in sentential chunks, striving to organize them along the lines of statistical usage in the target language, and incrementally learning with each translation job to assimilate actual reproductions of sentential meaning more and more accurately to statistical usage. “Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers” by contrast, read as his anti-MT manifesto, opens up to a somatic phenomenology of felt (super)human life.

Keywords: metaphysics, phenomenology, feeling-tone, Dada, translation chain
Article outline
  • Walter Benjamin as translator as who, now?
  • Walter Benjamin, take one
  • Machine translation, take one
  • Walter Benjamin, take two
  • Machine translation, take two
  • Other paths of most resistance
  • Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 24 July 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/babel.00329.rob
References (56)
Adolphs, Ralph
2002 “Neural Mechanisms for Recognizing Emotion.” Current Opinion in Neurobiology 121: 169–178. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Agamben, Giorgio
2000 “Languages and Peoples.” In Means Without End: Notes on Politics, by Agamben, translated by Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino, 63–71. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Benjamin, Walter
(1923) 1972 “Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers.” In Kleine Prosa, Baudelaire-Übertragungen, edited by Tillman Rexroth, 9–21. Vol. 41, Part 11 of Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.Google Scholar
(1935) 2007 “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” translated by Harry Zohn. In Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, edited by Hannah Arendt, 217–251. New York: Schocken.Google Scholar
1999 Kleinere Übersetzungen: Tristan Tzara, D’Annunzio, Aragon, Proust, Léon Bloy, Adrienne Monnier, Saint-John Perse, Balzac, Jouhandeau, edited by Rolf Tiedemann, Hermann Schweppenhäuser, with the collaboration of Theodor W. Adorno and Gershom Scholem. Supplement 1 of Gesammelte Schriften. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.Google Scholar
Brault, Jacques, and E. D. Blodgett
1998 Transfiguration. Ottawa: BuschekBooks.Google Scholar
Bury, Stephen
2019 “The Artist’s Book in the Age of Digital Reproduction: Walter Benjamin and the Artist’s Book.” Arts 81: 1–4. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Butler, Judith
1991 “Imitation and Gender Insubordination.” In Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, edited by Diana Fuss, 13–31. London and New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Button, Peter
2006 “(Para-)humanity, Yellow Peril and the Postcolonial (Arche-)type.” Postcolonial Studies 9 (4): 443. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Damasio, Antonio R.
1994 Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. New York: Putnam.Google Scholar
2003 Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain. New York: Harcourt.Google Scholar
Gasché, Rodolphe
1986 “Saturnine Vision and the Question of Difference: Reflections on Walter Benjamin’s Theory of Language.” Studies in Twentieth Century Literature 11 (1): 69–90. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hamacher, Werner
(2001) 2012 “Intensive Languages,” translated by Ira Allen with Steven Tester. MLN 127 (3): 485–454. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hynd, James, and E. M. Valk
trans. (1968) 2006 “The Task of the Translator,” by Walter Benjamin. In Translation – Theory and Practice, edited by Daniel Weissbort and Astradur Eysteinsson, 298–307. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Impola, Richard
trans. 1991 Seven Brothers, by Aleksis Kivi. New Paltz: FATA.Google Scholar
Kilpi, Volter
(1944) 1993 Gulliverin matka Fantomimian mantereelle [Gulliver’s voyage to the Continent of Phantomimia], edited by Vilho Suomi. Helsinki, Finland: Kensington.Google Scholar
Liu, Lydia H.
1995 Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity: China, 1900–1937. Stanford: Stanford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
ed. 1999 Tokens of Exchange: The Problem of Translation in Global Circulations. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Matson, Alex
trans. 1929 Seven Brothers, by Aleksis Kivi. New York: Coward-McCann.Google Scholar
Melby, Alan K., with C. Terry Warner
1995 The Possibility of Language: A Discussion of the Nature of Language, with Implications for Human and Machine Translation. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Melnick, David
1983  Men in Aida, Book One. Tuumba 471. [URL]
2015 Men in Aida. The Hague and Tirana: Uitgeverij.Google Scholar
Rampersad, Giselle
2018 “Building Our Own Warships Is Australia’s Path to the Next Industrial Revolution.” The Conversation 3 November. [URL]
Rendall, Steven
trans. 1997 “The Translator’s Task,” by Walter Benjamin. TTR: traduction, terminologie, rédaction 10 (2): 151–165. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Robinson, Douglas
1991 The Translator’s Turn. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2003 “Cyborg Translation.” In Translation Translation, edited by Susan Petrilli, 369–386. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2008 Estrangement and the Somatics of Literature: Tolstoy, Shklovsky, Brecht. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2012 First-Year Writing and the Somatic Exchange. New York: Hampton Press.Google Scholar
2013a Displacement and the Somatics of Postcolonial Culture. Columbus: Ohio State University Press.Google Scholar
2013b Feeling Extended: Sociality as Extended Body-Becoming-Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2013c Schleiermacher’s Icoses: Social Ecologies of the Different Methods of Translating. Bucharest: Zeta Books. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2015 The Dao of Translation: An East-West Dialogue. London and Singapore: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2016 The Deep Ecology of Rhetoric in Mencius and Aristotle. Albany: SUNY Press.Google Scholar
2017a Aleksis Kivi and/as World Literature. Leiden and Boston: Brill. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
trans. 2017b The Brothers Seven, by Aleksis Kivi. Bucharest: Zeta Books.Google Scholar
2017c Critical Translation Studies. London and New York: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
trans. 2020 Gulliver’s Voyage to Phantomomia, by Volter Kilpi. Bucharest: Zeta Books.Google Scholar
2022a “The Affordances of the Translator.” In Cognition and Hermeneutics: Convergences in the Study of Translation, edited by Douglas Robinson. Vol. 21 of the Jahrbuch für Übersetzungshermeneutik/Annual for Translational Hermeneutics. Hildesheim: Hildesheim University Press and Olms Verlag.Google Scholar
trans. 2022b “The Translator’s Task: Communicative or Experimental?” Translation Studies Forum 15 (2).Google Scholar
2023 Translation as a Form: A Centennial Commentary on Walter Benjamin’s “The Task of the Translator.” London and New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Forthcoming. “An Alphabet of Avant-Garde Perspectives on World Literature and the Translator’s (In)visibility: With an Avant-Garde Translation of Walter Benjamin’s ‘Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers’.” In Translating the Avant-Garde, Avant-Garde Translation, Alexandra Lukes. Leiden, Netherlands, and Boston, MA: Brill. DOI logo
Rothwell, Andrew
2009 “Translating ‘Pure Nonsense’’: Walter Benjamin Meets Systran on the Dissecting Table of Dada.” Romance Studies 27 (4): 259–272. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sakai, Naoki
1997 Translation and Subjectivity: On “Japan” and Cultural Nationalism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
2009 “How Do We Count a Language? Translation and Discontinuity.” Translation Studies 2 (1): 73. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sakai, Naoki, and Jon Solomon
2006  Translation, Biopolitics, Colonial Difference . Traces 41. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.Google Scholar
Scholem, Gershom, and Theodor W. Adorno
eds. 1978 Walter Benjamin, Briefe I. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.Google Scholar
eds. 1994 The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 1910–1940. Translated by Manfred R. Jacobson and Evelyn M. Jacobson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Searle, John
1980 “Minds, Brains, and Programs.” The Behavioral and Brain Sciences 31: 417–457. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Simon, Sherry
2006 Translating Montreal: Episodes in the Life of a Divided City. Montreal: McGill/Queens University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Solomon, Jon
2014 “The Postimperial Etiquette and the Affective Structure of Areas.” Translation: A Transdisciplinary Journal 41 (Spring): 171–201.Google Scholar
2020 “Crash Test Dummies, Autonomous Weapons, and Capital’s Native Language: Towards Rebellious Translation.” The Contemporary Journal 11 (February): 1–8.Google Scholar
Tarkiainen, Viljo
(1915) 1950 Aleksis Kivi: Elämä ja teokset (“AK: The Life and Works”), 5th edition. Porvoo and Helsinki: WSOY.Google Scholar
Underwood, J. A.
trans. 2009 “The Task of the Translator,” by Walter Benjamin. In One-Way Street and Other Writings, by Benjamin, 29–45. London: Penguin.Google Scholar
Weber, Samuel
2008 Benjamin’s -abilities. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Zohn, Harry
trans. (1968) 2007 “The Task of the Translator,” by Walter Benjamin. In Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, edited by Hannah Arendt, 69–82. New York: Schocken.Google Scholar
Zukofsky, Celia T., and Louis
trans. 1969 Catullus (Gai Valeri Catulli Veronensis liber). London: Cape Goliard.Google Scholar