Pure language. Walter Benjamin.
A few weeks ago I walked to Portbou. In Walter Benjamin’s and Jan’s footsteps. Back home I started reading Benjamin’s “The Task of the Translator” from 1923. http://www.ricorso.net/rx/library/criticism/guest/Benjamin_W/Benjamin_W1.htm
Some notes: I liked encountering a very “contemporary” concept of life: The concept of life is given its due only if everything that has a history of its own, and is not merely the setting for history, is credited with life. In the final analysis, the range of life must be determined by history rather than by nature...
I was also very much charmed by Benjamin’s idea of translation as a form of art concerned with what happens when one language passes into another. a translation, instead of resembling the meaning of the original, must lovingly and in detail incorporate the original’s mode of signification, thus making both the original and the translation recognizable as fragments of a greater language,
And that greater language was called pure language.
all suprahistorical kinship of languages rests in the intention underlying each language as a whole - an intention, however, which no single language can attain by itself but which is realized only by the totality of their intentions supplementing each other: pure language.
It is the task of the translator to release in his own language that pure language which is under the spell of another, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his re-creation of that work. For the sake of pure language he breaks through decayed barriers of his own language.
(Valère Novarina - creuser une langue dans la sienne.)
This pure language has biblical connotations: "For then I will restore to the peoples a pure language, that they all may call on the name of the LORD, to serve Him with one accord" Zephaniah 3: 9, and is mostly understood as a language understood by all. For me it’s an utopia, unattainable but interesting. In the project Distant Movements we reach for/play with something equally (im)possible, abstract, but stimulating called "mouvement pur” : movements devoid of intention.
Benjamin’s allmost 100 year old article still inspires also others. In her article Pure Language 2.0: Walter Benjamin’s Theory of Language and Translation Technology, Mathelinda Nabugodi asks herself: “If we merge Benjamin’s contention that translation is an art form with his later argument that the history of art forms cannot be separated from the technical standards of their time, the question arises whether the introduction of machine translation, a radically changed technical standard for the practice of translation, creates what is, in effect, a new linguistic art form.”
Provocative language :).
