Translation Studies Diary of June 19, 2024

What is the task of the translator?

According to Walter Benjamin, a German philosopher, it is to produce 'pure language'.
He said translation did not belong to the original text, but were interconnected.
The purpose of translation is to reveal inherent relations that remain hidden unless translated, but are certainly present, and to express the most intimate relationships between languages.

I seems a bit metaphysical.
In other words, this harks back to ancient philosophy, and is not a groundbreaking idea.
Yet he fulfilled an important task of the philosophers in that he opposed the primacy of the original text.