For Walter, the translation is a form of artistic writing alongside poetry and not a secondary derivative of literary art. Benjamin’s main argument is that the appreciation of art does not rest on interpreting its content to derive a moral or lesson from it. Art is not primarily about communication: “No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the audience”.While art is clearly meaningful for the person enjoying it, its primary intention is not to inform, instruct, or even delight this person. no translator needs to concern himself very much with what the original means, or so Benjamin claims. Rather the translator’s work should “ultimately serve the purpose of expressing the innermost relationship of languages to one another”.Benjamin’s famous concept of “pure language” invokes an amalgam of all the languages of the world, and it is precisely this aggregate language that is the medium in which the translator should work. The relationship between languages can naturally never be experienced in a single language, and it is precisely for this reason that translation, which passes “from one language into another through a continuum of transformations” , is uniquely situated to reveal this relationship.

In the work ‘On Language as Such and on the Language of Man’, Benjamin presents an unusual, theologically inflected theory of language. According to Benjamin, every expression of life is a kind of language. Language is a way of communicating ‘mental life’ or ‘meanings’. Every natural thing partakes of language because it communicates mental meanings of a sort. Language is basically expressive, and all expression is a type of language. This is counterpoised to the ‘bourgeois’ or instrumental view of language, in which language simply communicates facts.

A particular language, such as German, is not simply a means to communicate another content. It itself expresses something. The frontier of language is expressed by its linguistic being, not the meanings it can communicate. Benjamin seems to be saying that each language conveys a particular zone of meaning, a form of life, or a particular social unconscious. For Benjamin, translation does not seem to be about ‘losing’ something; On the contrary it seems as a way of ‘gaining’ something through the creation of a text which will not be a pale copy of the original but will have the potential to ‘harmonize’ originally conflicting intentions by transforming the translating language, to release a ‘greater’ language.

He presented his stylistic concerns in "The Task of the Translator", wherein he posits that a literary translation, by definition, produces deformations and misunderstandings of the original text. Moreover, in the deformed text, otherwise hidden aspects of the original, source-language text are elucidated, while before obvious aspects become unreadable. Such translational change of the source text is productive; when placed in a specific constellation of works and ideas, newly revealed affinities, between historical objects, appear and are productive of philosophical truth.

Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Task of the Translator,” the most widely cited twentieth-century philosophical statement on translation, is commonly seen as one of the most opaque and misunderstood essays in the field. This paper uses a close reading of Benjamin’s doctoral thesis, “The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism,” to throw light on his thoughts on translation. I argue that the German Romantics’ definition of art, and art’s relation to criticism, are crucial to understanding why Benjamin conceived of translation as an “afterlife” of the work of art, why he believed that translatability is an innate quality of the work of art, and why he speaks of translation as moving the work of art onto a higher plane. I read Benjamin’s own essay on translation as a sort of “criticism” which seeks to “translate” the philosophical ideals of the Romantics, and thus give them an afterlife, and then say upon the implications for translation studies today.

Translation is a mode. To comprehend it as mode one must go back to the original, for that contains the law governing the translation: its transferability. The question of whether a work is translatable has a dual meaning. Either: Will an adequate translator ever be found among the totality of its readers? Or, more pertinently: Does its nature lend itself to translation and, therefore, in view of the significance of the mode, call for it? In principle, the first question can be decided only contingently; the second, however, politically. Only superficial thinking will deny the independent meaning of the latter and declare both questions to be of equal significance. It should be pointed out that certain correlative concepts retain their meaning, and possibly their foremost significance if they are referred exclusively to man. One might, for example, speak of an unforgettable life or moment even if all men had forgotten it. If the nature of such a life or moment required that it be forgotten, that predicate would not imply a falsehood but merely a claim not fulfilled by men, and probably also a reference to a realm in which it is fulfilled: God’s remembrance. Analogously, the translatability of linguistic creations ought to be considered even if men should prove unable to translate them. Given a strict concept of translation, would they not really be translatable to some degree? The question as to whether the translation of certain linguistic creations is called for ought to be posted in this sense. For this thought is valid here. If the translation is a mode, transferability must be an essential feature of certain works.

THE TASK OF THE TRANSLATOR  language. Although translation, unlike art, cannot claim permanence for its prod­ucts, its goal is undeniably a final, conclusive, decisive stage of all linguistic creation. In translation, the original rises into a higher and purer linguistic air, as it were. It cannot live there permanently, to be sure, and it certainly does not reach it in its JJ entirety. Yet, in a singularly impressive manner, at least it points the way to this region; the predestined, hitherto inaccessible realm of reconciliation and fulfilment of languages. The transfer can never be total, but what reaches this region is that element in a translation which goes beyond transmittal of subject matter. This nucleus is best defined as the element that does not lend itself to translation. Even when all the surface content has been extracted and transmitted, the primary concern of the genuine translator remains elusive. Unlike the words of the original, it is not translatable, because the relationship between content and language is quite different in the Original and the translation. While content and language form a certain unity in the original, like a fruit and its skin, the language of the translation envelops its content like a royal robe with ample folds. For it Signifies a more exalted language than its own and thus remains unsuited to its content, overpowering and alien. This disjunction prevents translation and at the same time makes it super­ fluous. For any translation of a work originating in a specific stage of linguistic history represents, in regard to a specific aspect of its content, translation into all other languages. Thus translation, ironically, transplants the original into a more defini­ tive linguistic realm since it can no longer be displaced by a secondary rendering. The original can only be raised there anew and at other paints of time. It is no mere coincidence that the word "ironic" here brings the Romanticists to mind. They, more than any others, were gifted with an insight into the life of literary works which has its highest testimony in translation. To be sure, they hardly recognized translation in this sense, but devoted their entire attention to criticism, another, if a lesser, factor in the continued life of literary works. But even though the Romanticists virtually ignored translation in their theoretical writings, their own great translations testify to their sense of the essential nature and the dignity of this literary mode. There is abundant evidence that this sense is not necessarilv most pronounced in a poet; in fact, he ma)" be least open to it. Not even literary .historv suggests the traditional notion that great poets have been eminent translators and lesser poets have been indifferent translators. A number of the most eminent ones, such as Luther, Voss, and Schlegel, are incomparably more important as translators than as creative writers; some of the great among them, such as Holderlin and Stefan George, cannot be Simply subsumed as poets, and quite particularly not if we consider them as translators. As translation is a mode of its own, the task of the translator, too, may be regarded as distinct and clearly differentiated from the task of the poet. The task of the translator consists in finding that intended effect upon the language into which he is translating which produces in it the echo of the ori­ginal. This is a feature of translation which basically differentiates it from the poet's work, because the effort of the latter is never directed at the language as such, at its totality, but solely and immediately at specific linguistic contextual aspects. Unlike a work of literature, translation does not find itself in the center of the language forest but on the outside facing the wooded ridge; it calls into it without entering, aiming at that Single spot where the echo is able to give, in its own language, the reverberation of the work in alien one.