Variations on the task of the translator: on translation as catastrophe and as equivocation

ABSTRACT Walter Benjamin’s philosophical statement on the task of the translator, as voiced in his celebrated 1923 homonymous essay, finds echoes in two vibrant and otherwise very diverse contemporary responses to the question of translation. The first is that developed by Canadian writer, essayist, and translator Anne Carson, in her renderings of classical literature, as well as in essays and paratexts dedicated to the issue of translation. The second is to be found in Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s account of what he construes as an Amerindian theory of translation. I shall consider how Benjamin’s reflections are modulated in each case, with emphasis on the ways Carson and Viveiros de Castro associate the circumstance of translation with the emergence of what they term, respectively, catastrophe and equivocation. Acts of translation extracted from their writings are then examined and shown to give rise to perplexities that are comparable to the baffled reactions Hölderlin’s translations have sparked among his contemporaries, long before Benjamin set them up as a prototype for the task of the translator. The comparative effort is taken as an occasion to reflect on the moving edges of translation – the shifting nature of the criteria that define its identity.