Living substance conquers the frenzy of destruction only in the ecstasy of procreation.
Walter BenjaminRead
It is the task of the translator to release in his own language that pure language that is under the spell of another, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his re-creation of that work.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The translator's role is to free the original language's essence and express it in a new language.
Walter Benjamin's quote emphasizes the profound responsibility of translators to not only convey words from one language to another but to capture and express the original's nuanced spirit and meaning. It highlights the art of translation as a creative process, where the translator becomes a re-creator who reinterprets and liberates the original text's intrinsic beauty and depth in their own linguistic framework.
Themes
TranslationLanguageArtCreativityInterpretation
In practice
Example use cases
In a lecture on the importance of translation in literature, this quote can illustrate the depth of a translator's work.
More from Walter Benjamin
All quotes →The illiterate of the future will not be the man who cannot read the alphabet, but the one who cannot take a photograph.
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If mythic violence is lawmaking, divine violence is law-destroying; if the former sets boundaries, the latter boundlessly destroys them; if mythic violence brings at once guilt and retribution, divine power only expiates; if the former threatens, the latter strikes; if the former is bloody, the latter is lethal without spilling blood
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Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.
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Nothing is poorer than a truth expressed as it was thought. Committed to writing in such cases, it is not even a bad photograph. Truth wants to be startled abruptly, at one stroke, from her self-immersion, whether by uproar, music or cries for help.
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I am unpacking my library. Yes I am. The books are not yet on the shelves, not yet touched by the mild boredom of order.
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