ABSTRACT
In “The Task of the Translator” Walter Benjamin reminds us that a ‘literary’ or ‘poetic’ work says “very little, to a person who understands it” (Benjamin [1923] 2012, 75). This is a statement I often quote to my literary translation students on the MA programme at the University of East Anglia, especially in the first months of their course, to remind them of what is distinctive about literary translation. For Benjamin “[n]either message nor information is essential to it” (75). As literary translator and scholar Chantal Wright says, quoting Antoine Berman, Benjamin is “questioning the notion of the work of art as a communicative act and positioning himself against contemporaneous views of language as a communicative tool” (Wright 2016, 60). Regardless of whether or not we agree with this position, it is important to acknowledge that when writing a literary translation, we must not only focus on what the text says, but also on how the literary text has been made, constructed, put together (and here we can use a number of verbs, or rather, metaphors which point to the process of creation of the literary text), that is, the poetic, and aim to ‘translate’ it as an integral element of the text. Literary translators are the first to admit the complexity of translating literary texts and the fact that this process is not just anchored in a linguistic transfer: “any attempt at being faithful to the original piece of writing should entail making something that lives,” says award-winning literary translator Daniel Hahn (Hahn 2014, n.p.) and he hastens to add “it should have the same pulse as the original did”. This metaphor of the literary text as a live organism, with its own pulse or live rhythm, is clearly pointing away from an emphasis on the semantic level of the text to focus on what the text is as a whole and thus, what it achieves, what it does to us as readers. And to look at what the text does is precisely to ask the question how it does rather than what it says.
