An Approach To The Ideas Of Walter Benjamin’s Literary Translation

Influenced by metaphysics, the western traditional philosophy, the target text opposes the source text in an unbalanced binary opposition according to the traditional translation thoughts. Binary opposition is the heart of the western traditional metaphysical philosophy, that is, Logocentrism, advocated by Socrates, Plato, Immanuel Kant and Claude Levi-Strauss. However, Walter Benjamin wasn’t heavily burdened by this tradition.Walter Benjamin did research in Immanuel Kant, Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller, and Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche in his earlier days. And then, he followed the ideas of young Hegelians. Later, impacted by his friend, Gershom Gerhard Scholem, the founder of the academic study of the Kabbalah and of Jewish mysticism, Benjamin had an obsessive interest in Judaism. In 1924, he began to read the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and turned to Marxist views of art and literature from his earlier view of metaphysical and linguistic philosophy in the 1930s, mainly due to the influence of the Ernst Bloch, a German Marxist philosopher, and Asja Lacis, a Bolshevik Latvian actress and theatre director. He felt negative about the ideas of Immanuel Kant, eager to break the limitation of the spiritual world and in pursuit of equality. All of these were fully embodied in his ideas of literary translation. Specifically speaking, different from previous ideas, the relationships between the target text and the source text are defined as tangent, complement and afterlife relationships by Walter Benjamin. The tangent relationship indicates that the target text firstly infinitely touches the source text, then deviating from it while rendering the meaning. The complement relationship refers to that the target text and the source one, one target text and other ones complement each other in different languages. And the afterlife relationship represents that the target text is the continuing life of the source one. And in these three kinds relationship, the target text is of equal standing with the source text. They are not in the long-rooted unequal original-copy relationship, but in the relations of equality and mutual complementary. This is why, in Walter Benjamin’s point of view, literature translation is hedged around with a lot of rules, regulations and factors, but still allied to the original, can be classified as a kind of artistic creation. What’s more, the task of translation is not to copy the messages or the contents of the original in another language mechanically, but to transfer the essence of the original into another culture. This essence is aura. The aura of the original, on the one hand, flashes attribute to history; on the other hand, it fades out in historical changes. Vulnerable as it is, it is still one of the major concerns for translators. Translator should try every means to grasp and represent the aura the original. In that case, the life of the original can go on and be renewed.These three ideas, though, were not brought up and demonstrated straightly and clearly by Benjamin himself. I still could refine and deduce them from his words, after carefully reading his works on translation, linguistics, philosophy, and literary theories over and over again. And I added my analyses and demonstrations as well. One of these three ideas is that translation is a creative art with its limitation. The second one is there are three different kinds of relationships between the source text and the target text. And the last one is the transmission of the aura of the original in translation. The first one is the basis of the next two. And the last one is closely connected with the second one.Normally, the studies about Benjamin’s translation ideas have been always focusing on the discussions of his theoretical terms "pure language" and "translatability", and his relationship with the deconstructionism, rather than extracting his systematic ideas about literature translation from his elusive obscure theoretical writings. But actually, it would be possible. The innovation of this thesis lies in that I summed up three interconnected ideas about literature translation from his theoretical works by analyzing his words, classifying his ideas, tracing back to the origins of the ideas, as well as finding the connections between them. Specifically speaking, the discussion of each idea about literature translation can be divided into six parts in general:1) the background; 2) the sources of the idea in Benjamin’s work; 3) the explanations and analyses of the idea in detail; 4) the possible causes or origins of the formation of the idea, probably coming from religious field, philosophical field, or earlier scholars; 5) the further explanations and analyses of some theological and philosophical terminologies involved in the idea; 6) the enlightenments, supported by examples sometimes.Structurally speaking, this thesis consists of five parts. The introduction gives a brief review of Walter Benjamin’s major educated experiences, his major translation works, existing studies about him at home and abroad, and the main ideas and innovation of the thesis. Then the chapter one explores the basis of Benjamin’s ideas, three properties of translation, that is, art, creation and limitation in translation. Later the thesis focuses on the detailed explanations of the three kinds of relationships between the target text and the source text, which are tangent, complement, and afterlife relationships. And the next chapter is about aura in translation, starting with aura’s definition, and developing into comparison with Chinese similar related theories, the transmission of aura and the loss of aura. At last, the conclusion sums up the main ideas mentioned in this thesis, talks about my guesses about Benjamin’s writing reasons and purposes, and then points out some shortcomings of his ideas.The purposes of the thesis lie in to point out the possibility of systematically studying Walter Benjamin’s ideas about literature translation for translation theory researchers, and to help translators and readers appreciate and judge translated works from a new angle, through the analyses, derivation and classification of Walter Benjamin’s ideas about literary translation.