Description
This is a book-length commentary on Walter Benjamin's 1923 essay Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers, best known in English under the title The Task of the Translator. Benjamin's essay is at once an immensely attractive work for top-flight theorists of translation and comparative literature and a frustratingly cryptic work that cries out for commentary. Almost every one of the claims he makes in it seems wildly counterintuitive, because he articulates none of the background support that would help readers place it in larger literary-historical contexts: Jewish mystical traditions from Philo Judaeus's Logos-based Neoplatonism to thirteenth-century Lurianic Kabbalah; Romantic and post-Romantic esotericisms from Novalis and the Schlegels to Hölderlin and Goethe; modernist avant-garde foreclosures on the public and generally the communicative contexts of literature.
The book is divided into 78 passages, from one to a few sentences in length. Each of the passages becomes its own commentari
