HeyJ XLIII (2002), pp.

185–198

DIFFERENT FRAGMENTS,
DIFFERENT VASES: A NEOPLATONIC
COMMENTARY ON BENJAMIN’S
‘THE TASK OF THE TRANSLATOR’
IAN ALMOND
Bosphorus University (Bogazici Üniversitesi), Istanbul

The hidden God, En-Sof, manifests himself to the Kabbalists under ten different
aspects, which in turn comprise an endless variety of shades and gradations. Every
grade has its own symbolical name, in strict accordance with its peculiar manifesta-
tions. Their sum total constitutes a highly complex symbolical structure, in which
almost every biblical word corresponds to one of the Sefiroth.1

Walter Benjamin’s essay on translation, it has been pointed out often

enough, confounds as much as it conjectures. The twelve pages of cryst-
alline German constitute a shimmering waterfall of images, metaphors,
analogies, not always cascading from a common source. For such a brief
stretch of prose, the flow of images and motifs borders on the bewilder-
ing – translation as the flower of the original, the ghost/echo/afterthought
of the original, translation as a process of ripening, or a garment wrapped
around an unspeakable nakedness, or a window peering into the original,
or a corresponding fragment of a long-shattered vase … the images rain
down upon us with a speed and density Benjamin was surely aware of.
It would be unfair to see in this rush of images some superficial
desire, on Benjamin’s part, to disguise a perceived hastiness and latent
dissymmetry amongst these metaphors. There is something too calcu-
lated about the compact destiny of Benjamin’s images, the shameless
contiguity with which he follows one metaphor with another completely
different one, something too well-crafted to be dismissed as a strategy to
distract – which, after all, is the first suspicion we nurture whenever we
encounter poetic eloquence in criticism. In what amounts to placing a
different metaphor on each of twelve pages, Benjamin seems to have
something subtler than mere image-bombardment in mind.
In a sense, to begin any study of Benjamin with such a reference to
the Zohar sends out a misleading message – for it is certainly not the
intention of this article to move, page by page, through the Aufgabe and
try to show how each of Benjamin’s analogies is actually one of the ten

© The Editor/Blackwell Publishers Ltd, Oxford, UK and Boston, USA.

186 IAN ALMOND

Sefiroth (Hokhmah, Binah, Hesed, etc.). Partly because Kabbalist studies

of Benjamin already abound – and the present author’s own fairly rudi-
mentary knowledge of writers such as Luria and the author of the Zohar
certainly has nothing to contribute to these; and partly because, unlike
Scholem’s description of the Kabbalah, Benjamin’s analogies form no
‘highly complex symbolical structure’ one can think of. They appear
one after another, like surprise guests in a strange film, each of whom
seems to change the direction of the plot irreversibly, until one no longer
understands how any of them belong to the story at all.
‘No one’, said Meister Eckhart, ‘can really say what God is’.2 The aim
of this article is to show how, in a dozen pages and eight analogies,
Benjamin cannot say what translation really is; and, more importantly,
that this is exactly what Benjamin wants to say. In ‘The Task of the
Translator’, the writer hovers about the word ‘translation’ in the same
way the medievals hovered about the word ‘God’ – supplying one analogy
after another in an attempt to say what translation actually is, analogies
which neither complement nor contradict one another, but merely suc-
ceed each time in suggesting something peculiarly individual of their
own. Does translation grow from an original? Does it kill it? Replace it?
Clothe it? Is anything recognizable from the original left in a translation?
Or does the translation wander off on its own, freed from the spell of its
parent text? Benjamin, in supplying a profusion of metaphors for that
which precedes all metaphors, ends up with something which cannot be
described by any of them.
‘Perhaps the history of thought’, Borges has written, ‘is nothing but
the history of a handful of metaphors.’3 Benjamin’s essay reflects this
in a subtly non-academic way – no footnotes mark the genealogies of
his motifs, no pedantic endnotes list the precedents of his analogies, no
scholarly references chart the sources of his imagery. And yet Benjamin’s
metaphors are old – as old as translation itself. They lie sprinkled
throughout the essay like museum exhibits, but with no dates or labels
attached. One skips over them unknowingly, unaware of their immense
antiquity. And when one finally recognizes the hidden lineage of these
metaphors – perhaps from a passage in the Enneads, or a chance remark
in the Divine Names, or a stray analogy from the Fusus al-Hikam – the
whole essay begins to shimmer and change. Benjamin’s isolated and
somewhat esoteric text becomes, through this selection of metaphors,
reconnected to a much older tradition of thought, one which initially only
seems to reside in the occasional allusion to ‘Holy Writ’ (82)4 or the
rather Neoplatonic ‘tensionless and even silent depository’ of ultimate
truth (77).
Although Eagleton has remarked on the curious appeal of a ‘produc-
tion aesthetics’ somehow combined with ‘the entrancing esotericism
of the Kabbala’,5 it is no secret that Benjamin’s more esoteric moments
are often overlooked or dismissed as eccentric tangents by critics more
 DIFFERENT FRAGMENTS, DIFFERENT VASES 187

interested in the socio-political ramifications of Benjamin’s cultural

theory. In listing the plurality of Benjamins that exist (‘Benjamin the
Critic, Benjamin the Marxist, Benjamin the Modernist, Benjamin the
Jew’),6 Osborne makes no mention of Benjamin the Mystic, Benjamin
the close friend of Scholem, Benjamin the reader of Marsilius Ficinus
and Abû Maras.
What I am suggesting, in fact, is not that Benjamin is a ‘Neoplatonist’,
but rather that ‘The Task of the Translator’ represents the most Neoplatonic
essay in his work. Benjamin approaches his subject as only a Neo-
platonist might. The fallen, transient, fragmentary world of the multiple,
only reflecting in sporadic glimmers the faint, distant radiance of the
ineffable One, informs the world of Benjamin’s translator, in whose task
‘the great motif of integrating many tongues into one true language is at
work’ (77). The task of the translator, one might suggest, is to return to
the One via the multiple. Of course, this linking of Neoplationism with
Benjamin should come as no real surprise. Various Neoplatonic motifs
of unity, oneness and ineffable, ever-receding origins can be found inter-
spersed throughout his work:
Origin is an eddy in the stream of becoming, and in its current it swallows the
material involved in the process of genesis. That which is original is never revealed
in the naked and manifest existence of the factual … (Origin of German Tragic
Drama).7

… the materials of memory no longer appear singly, as images, but tell us about
a whole, amorphously and formlessly … in the same way the weight of his net tells
a fisherman about his catch. (‘The Image of Proust’)8

Dates, place names, formats, previous owners, bindings, and the like: all these
details must tell [the book collector] something – not as dry, isolated facts, but as a
harmonious whole; from the quality and intensity of this harmony he must be able
to recognize whether a book is for him or not. (‘Unpacking My Library’)9

The vocabulary of Neoplatonism, from Plotinus to Ficino, is a wide one,

certainly wide enough to pull apart any attempt at a definition. Its com-
mon store of motifs, however – multiplicity and oneness, divine over-
flowing, the fragment, the source, the return – all permeate Benjamin’s
work and underlie it, manifesting themselves even in the most un-
transcendental applications. One sees in the Moscow journals, for
example, how Benjamin analyses the all-encompassing oneness of the
Soviet state:
To endure this existence in idleness becomes impossible because, in each smallest
detail, it becomes beautiful and comprehensible only through work. The integration
of personal thoughts with a preexisting force-field; … organized, guaranteed
contact with comrades – to all this, life here is so tightly bound that anyone who
abstains … degenerates intellectually as if through years of solitary confinement …
(‘Moscow’)10
188 IAN ALMOND

Or in examining the relationship of children and their toys to the larger

community, Benjamin’s familiar evocation of Something bigger and
‘other’ than oneself seems to manifest itself once more:
After all, a child is no Robinson Crusoe; children do not constitute a community
cut off from everything else. They belong to the nation and the class they come
from. This means that their toys cannot bear witness to any autonomous, separate
existence, but rather are a silent, signifying dialogue between them and their nation.
(‘The Cultural History of Toys’)11

Rather like Kafka’s philosopher, who is convinced the knowledge of the

bigger things in life lies in the study of the smallest, Benjamin sees
the smaller parts of society – its toys, its side-dishes, its kitsch, its street
corners – as leading him to a knowledge of the whole. This perception
of a hidden unity amongst such fragments, somewhere behind/beyond
the world of things, has its obvious Neoplatonic parallels. In ‘The Task
of the Translator’, however, no vision of the whole is obtained. The
analogies Benjamin offers us for the act of translation lie scattered like
fragments throughout the essay, but their cumulative effect produces
no recognizable vessel of any kind. To understand better how and why
this happens, we need to look a little closer at the analogies – and some
of their possible precedents.

BENJAMIN’S ANALOGIES: DIFFERENT FRAGMENTS, DIFFERENT VASES

The first two of Benjamin’s analogies we are going to examine lie close
to one another in spirit, and are worth examining together for their
respective emphasis on an element of ‘growth’ in the movement from
original to translation:
… translations do not so much serve the work as owe their existence to it. The life
of the originals attains in them to its ever-renewed latest and most abundant
flowering (72).

Indirectly, however, the growth of religions ripens the hidden seed into a higher
development of language … In translation the original rises into a higher and purer
linguistic air, as it were (75).

Translations ‘flower’ from the seed of their originals, they are the ‘riper’
versions of their less mature Urtexte. Exactly how literally Benjamin
intends these organic analogies – how much of the original constituent
is retained, recognizably, in the blossoming – is difficult to say. Does the
flower of the translation forever stay in the family of its species? Does
the organic link between Übersetzung and Ursprung explicit in these
two analogies remain unbroken? Or does the translation gradually grow
into something other than its original? A version of this analogy in the
 DIFFERENT FRAGMENTS, DIFFERENT VASES 189

thirteenth-century Dominican Meister Eckhart, whilst not quite clarify-

ing the problem, does at least suggest a direction:
I have often said that there is a power in the soul which is untouched by either time
or flesh … Now God is green and flowering [grüenende und blüejende] in this
power in all the joy and all the honour which he is in himself.12

Eckhart, like most thinkers influenced by Neoplatonic ideas, makes a

distinction between a ‘God’ we can talk about – loving, kind, good, etc.
– and a nameless, imageless, primordial Divinity (in Eckhart the ‘God-
head’) which is the source of what we call ‘God’. In other words, the
‘God’ we know is a manifestation – in the above analogy, a ‘flowering’
– of the dark, hidden, unspeakable Godhead, which Eckhart often portrays
in strikingly desolate terms – ‘wilderness’ (wuste), ‘nothingness’ (nihte),
‘abyss’ (abgrunt). Reiner Schürmann puts it best: ‘The seeds of God lie
in the Godhead, but they do not sprout there.’13 This line drawn between
the Godhead and God is the same line Benjamin draws between the
original and its translation. The seed of the original can only fully blossom
in its translation – the alterity of the Übersetzung is the precondition of
such ‘maturity’.
Another analogy Benjamin uses for translation is the ‘echo’. It appears
towards the middle of the essay, in a passage where he appears keen to
differentiate between the poet and the translator:
Unlike a work of literature, translation does not find itself in the centre of the
language forest but on the outside facing the wooded ridge; it calls into it without
entering, aiming at that single spot where the echo is able to give, in its own
language, the reverberation of the work in the alien one.14

Before commenting on this, it will be interesting to keep in mind a

passage from Plotinus’s Enneads:
As speech is the echo of the thought in the soul, so thought in the soul is an echo
from elsewhere: that is to say, as the uttered thought is an image of the soul-thought,
so the soul-thought images a thought above itself and is the interpreter of the higher
sphere.15

Plotinus’s words bring out a number of points in Benjamin’s passage:

firstly, that the translator is an entity situated outside something he is
desperately trying to replicate. Outside a secret, as it were, the secret of
the original’s identity – a secret which, in this analogy at least, appears
to have a precise location. A step forwards or backwards, a wrong verb
or excessive adjective, and the echo is lost. Secondly, the comparison
with the Enneads reminds us of how Benjamin’s analogy is both similar
to, and different from, the familiar Neoplatonic doctrine of similarity
with the One. The One can admit no differences – if the errant soul is to
return to It, it must become similar. However, if we follow Benjamin’s
190 IAN ALMOND

analogy carefully, we discover that what Benjamin initially calls ‘the

echo of the original’ is actually the voice of the translator. The translator,
not the original, is the source of the echo. The translator has to change
position, of course, before he can perceive the perfect reverberation of
his own voice; nevertheless, his efforts are not guided towards imitating
an external Something, but rather towards using this Something to repro-
duce what he already is. The original, far from possessing any contents
which have to be ‘imitated’, simply becomes an ineffable engine that
returns a voice to its owner, a hidden power which appears to create and
replicate without ever participating in the process of creation.
The metaphor of the translation as a garment covering the naked
content of the original reinforces, once more, the apophatic, uncrossable
gulf between Urtext and Übersetzung which Benjamin, at various moments,
seems to be describing. The metaphor comes after some meditation on
the ‘element’ in an original ‘that does not lend itself to translation’:

… the relationship between content and language is quite different in the original
and the translation. While content and language form a certain unity in the original,
like a fruit and its skin, the language of the translation envelops its content like a
royal robe [wie ein Königsmantel] with ample folds. For it signifies a more exalted
language than its own and thus remains unsuited to its content, overpowering and
alien.16

One could seize with deconstructive glee upon a notion of innocence

here in Benjamin’s essay – the pristine, Edenic unity of the original,
whose magical language supersedes both form and content, falls into the
multiple world of the translator, where signifiers have been sinfully
sundered from their signifieds, where speech is no longer instantaneous
with meaning.17 If Benjamin does see the original as a lost paradise,
however, it is not always clear whether the task of the translator is to
recover this innocence, or whether the memory of this loss is enough
in itself to allow the translation to work, independently of the original.
Or whether, indeed, the dream of the original only leads to the creation
of new paradises, cryptically separate yet somehow still connected to
their ancient predecessor. The metaphor Benjamin uses in this instance
does not seem so optimistic. It is a metaphor one could find in many
places (in Eckhart, for instance: ‘The will apprehends God under the
garment of goodness. The intellect apprehends God naked, as He is divested
of goodness and being.’),18 although the most appropriate parallel occurs
in the work of the Sufi Neoplatonist, Ibn Al’Arabi (1165–1240):

For the benefit of the many, the prophets express on this matter in an outer fashion,
limited as they are by the understanding of the hearer … Thus … one who has no depth
of understanding may go no further than the outward forms [of the message] …
On the other hand, one of refined understanding … says [of the text], ‘This is
the outer garment of a King.’ Thus he examines the quality of the garment and the
 DIFFERENT FRAGMENTS, DIFFERENT VASES 191

fineness of its cloth and thereby learns the worth of the one whom it causes, so
acquiring knowledge denied to the other, who understands nothing of this.19

Although Ibn Al’Arabi here is not talking directly about translations nor
knowledge of the divine, but how to approach the holy scriptures of the
prophets, the question he raises about interpretation is still analogous to
that of translation. For the medieval exegete, interpretation was translation
– not simply Arabic into Persian or Greek into Latin, but the translation
of the hidden, divine language (batin, ‘inner meaning’) into the compre-
hensible language of men (zahir, ‘outward meaning’). It is in this sense
that both Benjamin and Ibn Al’Arabi see the translation/zahir as the
outer garment of an inner truth (batin). This is where the two metaphors
part company, however – in the Sufi version, the outer garment can still
give some meaningful information about its owner. The richness of the
cloth offers some positive link with the royalty it is intended to signify.
In Benjamin’s analogy, this does not appear to be the case: a more prob-
lematic disparity, ‘overpowering and alien’, appears to separate Benjamin’s
zahir from his batin, the translation from the original. If the grasp of Ibn
‘Arabi’s royal robe allows the promise of knowledge, the poor ‘unsuit-
ability’ of the Königsmantel seems to narrow down the possibilities of
ever understanding the original through its translation – of ever reaching
the One through the multiple.
The analogies Benjamin offers for translation, however, are not always
metaphoric, but occasionally geometric. As long as translations are
blossoms or echoes, some promise of continuity can at least be nurtured.
When the translation becomes the line of a tangent, striking the circle
of the original, the cold linearity of the analogy seems to emphasize the
absolute autonomy of both parties:

Just as a tangent touches a circle slightly but at one point, with this touch rather than
with the point setting the law according to which it is to continue on its straight path
to infinity, a translation touches the original lightly and only at the infinitely small
point [unendlich kleinen Punkte] of the sense, thereupon pursuing its own course
according to the laws of fidelity in the freedom of linguistic flux.20

The slow growth of original into translation becomes, here, the moment-
ary collision of two separate entities. Hölderlin’s translations of Pindar,
far from being the flowering of Greek lyric poetry on German soil,
are now rather the consequence of an ‘infinitely small point’ of contact
(unendlich kleinen Punkte), the brief, significant correction of a certain
trajectory. Benjamin’s point, in one sense, is obvious: translations should
allow themselves to be cursorily (but lastingly) warped by the original.
His subsequent approval of Pannwitz, who laments how German trans-
lations insist on turning ‘Hindi, Greek and English into German’ instead
of vice versa, underlines this aversion towards the excessive presence of
the translator. What distinguishes this analogy from practically all the
192 IAN ALMOND

others we will examine is the casual and almost random nature of the
encounter. The relationship between a text and its original is reduced to
one momentous, unrepeatable instant, before drifting irreparably apart.
Echoes of a semantic deus ex machina here – the original appearing
momentarily to alter the course of the translation – should not be ignored,
particularly since the analogy of the tangent as a meeting-point between
the finite and the infinite has been used before in a much more theological
context.
In 1440 the Renaissance Neoplatonist Nicholas of Cusa spent the
central chapters of his De docta ignorantia trying to illustrate how ‘the
potentialities of the finite are actualized in the infinite’.21 Cusa’s com-
plex and at times bewildering approach presupposes the existence of
an ‘absolute infinite line’ (linea maxima et infinita), one which would
comprise all geometric shapes – circles, triangles and spheres. He illus-
trates this by providing the diagram of a series of tangents, each showing
how the larger the circumference of the circle, the straighter its curve
will be. Therefore

the circumference of the absolutely greatest possible circle will be the smallest
possible curve; it will, therefore, be absolutely straight. The maximum and the
minimum are, therefore, so identified that we most clearly perceive that in the
infinite there is the absolute maximum of straightness with the absolute minimum
of curve …
B D

E
A C

… in such a line [therefore] straightness and curve are not mutually exclusive but
are one and the same thing.22

Having dismantled the distinction between straightness and curvature

and re-described all circles as essentially incomplete (unfulfilled) mani-
festations of the infinite line, Cusa moves on to wrest the kind of mean-
ing out of a tangent which only a Neoplatonist could extract. Quoting
Pseudo-Dionysius (Dionysius Areopagites) throughout, he deduces from
the ‘infinite straightness of the infinite curve’ that God ‘of all essences
is the one infinitely simple essence’.23 Just as all circles ultimately
 DIFFERENT FRAGMENTS, DIFFERENT VASES 193

belong to this infinite line, so all things belong to and reflect the infinite
magnanimity of their Creator.
Although Cusa uses the same analogy of the tangent as Benjamin, the
meanings are reversed. In Benjamin it is the line (the translation) which
is subordinate and somehow subsequent to the circle (the original); in
Cusa it is the circle which is in someway obliged to the line for its actual-
ization. Nevertheless, in both cases the line of the tangent represents the
infinite (ihre gerade Bahn … ins Unendliche), even if in Benjamin’s case
this is the translation’s ‘infinite’ freedom of interpretative possibilities
as it moves on, from reader to reader, further and further away from the
original. Another common feature of the two similes is the idea of the
actual tangent (that ‘infinitely small point’) as an enigmatic transition
point between finitude and infinity, origin and translation, idea and form.
In Cusa, the tangent is the attempt of the finite to grasp the infinite, of
the arc to embrace the linear – the extent of its curvature is a measure of
its own inadequacy. For Benjamin, the moment of the tangent is the
collision between text and translation, when it is the finite circle which
‘corrects’ the infinite trajectory of the translation. Here, at least, if Cusa’s
version of the analogy is Neoplatonic, then Benjamin’s is Aristotelian.
The sixth analogy we are going to examine is probably among the
oldest Benjamin presents us with – that of translation as a wind or breath
(spiritus, pneuma, nefes) which passes through the harp of the original.
We find it on the very last page of the essay:

In them [Hölderlin’s translations of Sophocles] the harmony of the language is so

profound that sense is touched by language only the way an aeolian harp is touched
by the wind.24

As with the analogy of the echo, the original here supplies no substance to
the translation, but simply an obstacle – an obstacle which enables meaning
to take place; it transfers no content to the translation, but simply a rever-
beration. Unlike Benjamin’s more organic metaphors of the flower and the
seed, the original here merely ‘enables’ the translation without ever actually
constituting it. It brings to mind a fairly commonplace idea amongst
Semitic languages – found in this instance in Ibn Al’Arabi once more –
that the cosmos constitutes a collection of letters which lie lifeless and
unenunciated until God supplies their vowels, breathing life into them.

God described Himself as having a Breath. This is His emergence from the Unseen
and the manifestation of the letters as the Visible. The letters are containers [zarf ]
for meanings, while the meanings are the spirits of the letters. (III.95.19)
The breath of the breather is none other than the nonmanifest [batin] of the breather.
Then the breath becomes manifest [zahir] as the entities of letters and words.25

In this sense, the letters in Semitic alphabets are like the strings of
Benjamin’s harp, which remain silent until a breath passes through them;
194 IAN ALMOND

the word MHMD means nothing until we pronounce it, MuHaMmeD,

and bring the name of the Prophet into being. This concurs with Benjamin’s
idea that originals find in their translations a renewal of life – that is, an
original only truly comes into being when the breath of the translator
passes through it. When this happens, the original manifests itself
(zahir) in a new and unexpected way. Translation, as the Sufi says, is an
emergence from the Unseen.
It is interesting to note how the relationship between original and trans-
lation changes as we move through each analogy. With the flower and
the seed, the original is the life source of the translation, the font of all
its energy. With the metaphor of the harp, the situation is reversed – the
translator now gives life to the original; the beginning of a much more
symbiotic relationship between Urtext and Übersetzung is suggested. In
our seventh metaphor, that of the translation understood as the ‘after-
life’, Benjamin is keen to examine ‘a natural … or, more specifically, a
vital connection’ between the translation and the original’ (72):

Just as the manifestations of life are intimately connected with the phenomenon of
life without being of importance to it, a translation issues from the original – not so
much from its life as from its afterlife.26

Once more, the original is the generative life source of the translation. The
translation, however, enjoys no reciprocal relationship with its origin – it is
an effect of the original, rather than a development. The Übersetzung is, quite
literally, an afterthought of the Urtext; it can make no claim on its source.
The ‘vitality’ in the connection Benjamin refers to is issued, not trans-
ferred. A well-known passage from Plotinus best illustrates the ineffable,
utterly autonomous source of effects which is Benjamin’s original:

It is precisely because there is nothing within the One that all things are from it: in
order that Being may be brought about, the source must be no Being but Being’s
generator, in what is to be thought of as the primal act of generation. Seeking noth-
ing, possessing nothing, lacking nothing, the One is perfect and, in our metaphor,
has overflowed, and in its exuberance has produced the new …27

It would be an interesting exercise to substitute, in this passage, ‘original’

for ‘One’ and ‘translation’ for ‘Being/generation/new’, and see how
closely Plotinus’s modified phrases follow the drift of Benjamin’s thought.
Certainly, the One and the original share a common set of characteristics
– impenetrability, self-sufficiency, creativity. The difficulty in comparing
these two metaphors, however, lies in understanding exactly what Benjamin
intends by Überleben. By describing the translation as issuing from an
afterlife, is the ‘death’ of the original implicit here, in the same way the
blossoming of the flower can only come about with the demise of the
bud? Plotinus’s One forever generates without ever changing – although
its primary effects repeat this act of generation in a slightly different
 DIFFERENT FRAGMENTS, DIFFERENT VASES 195

way, producing secondary and in turn tertiary entities only when they
themselves are fully developed (an important principle in Plotinus: ‘…
all that is fully achieved engenders’).28
This idea finds an interesting parallel in Benjamin’s analogy: ‘Trans-
lations … come into being when in the course of its survival a work has
reached the age of its fame’ (72). Benjamin’s originals, like Plotinus’s
effects, only engender their translations when they are fully mature –
that is, when their movements become so strong that their ripples begin
to stretch out further than anyone might have imagined. However, there
is no hierarchy of entities here, unlike Plotinus, where the effects of the
First Principle gradually radiate outwards and downwards; texts may
beget other texts, but translations do not beget translations. The original
returns, again and again, continually effecting new translations, new
manifestations of its ineffable possibilities. If there is to be any talk of
death at all in this analogy of Benjamin’s, it will be found here, in the
death of uncertainty which all translation necessitates. Translation actual-
izes only one of the various possibilities of an Urtext. As soon as
the translator chooses a word from his own language, the alternatives
he might have chosen die a natural death as the translator’s collection
of choices – which is what a translation is, effectively – live on in the
Überleben of the original.
The final analogy we are going to examine is also one of Benjamin’s
most famous – that of the original and the translation as unbroken frag-
ments of a larger object. It is significant not simply because it is the most
obviously Neoplatonic of the analogies Benjamin uses, but also because
it is an analogy which, in a way, says as much about Benjamin’s own
essay as it does about translation:

Fragments of a vessel which are to be glued together must match one another in
the smallest detail, although they need not be like one another. In the same way 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, just as fragments
are part of a vessel.29

DeMan’s own corrections of Zorn’s fairly loose translation of this passage

– proposing ‘articulated together’ for ‘glued’ (sich zusammenfügen zu
lassen) and ‘follow one another’ for ‘match’ (einander zu folgen) – are
well-placed.30 They suggest that Benjamin’s analogy of a broken vessel
is not quite as literal as one might think. The idea of the unbroken Unity
of the One scattering itself into the fallen world of multiplicity is a com-
mon enough motif in Neoplatonic writings – in this instance we shall
look at an example from the sixth-century Dionysius’s Divine Names:

The Good returns all things to Itself and gathers together whatever may be scattered,
for it is the divine Source and unifier of the sum total of things. Each being looks to
196 IAN ALMOND

it as a source, as the agent of cohesion, and as an objective. The Good, as scripture

testifies, produced everything and it is the ultimately Perfect Cause. In it ‘all things
hold together’ and are maintained and preserved as if in some almighty receptacle.31

What a reading of the Dionysian passage brings out most clearly in

Benjamin is how different the analogy of the two fragments is from
all the other analogies he has used. The original no longer seems to
enjoy the same position of priority/centrality which his other metaphors
concede to it (seed, harp, circle, forest clearing …). Rather, both original
and translation are coexistent fragments of a shattered whole. The original
no longer precedes the translation, neither temporally nor spatially; nor
does it ‘own’ the translation in any sense. Both Urtext and Übersetzung
belong to something bigger than themselves, a larger, as yet unperceived
pattern of which they form only a minute part. The implications of this
for the relationship between original and translation are important. Of
all Benjamin’s analogies, this is the only one where the presence of a
third element, outside the original and its translation, is explicitly sug-
gested. The only analogy where the distinction between original and
translation is almost called into question. Like Dionysius’s fragments of
the Good, the idea of reconstruction, of return, is implicit. In this analogy,
the translation becomes an attempt to replace the missing piece of a
shattered vase. They must not match, but rather follow one another in
pursuit of a final, ineffable Design – in the same way the fragments of
the One differ from one another, and yet contain within them the same
common element, springing from a common source.
An idea which implies, in turn, that all texts contain within them this
as-yet unarticulated potentiality for coherence, to be expressed at some
unspecified time. All analogies, however apparently incongruous and
divergent, will ultimately bring us to the same place. How is this possible?
How can the array of metaphors for translation Benjamin presents us
with in his essay – each one standing neither in complete contradiction
to one another nor in complete consistency with the others – be fragments
of a ‘greater language’? How can a dozen different images describe the
same activity – unless the activity itself is ineffable?
The same Dionysius we have just quoted probably offered the most
famous example of how different constructions concerning God, once
dismantled, can actually convey a better sense of God’s ineffability. In
certain moments of The Mystical Theology and The Celestial Hierarchy,
he makes the remarkable assertion that to call God ‘drunk’ and ‘hung-
over’ is more suitable than calling God good or wise, for ‘incongruous
dissimilarities’ make us more aware of God’s metaphysically unreach-
able otherness than equally finite adjectives such as ‘almighty’ and ‘all-
knowing’.32 For the Areopagite, to call God at the same time ‘almighty’
and ‘a worm’, ‘wise’ and ‘drunk’, is more accurately to address what
one critic has called ‘the language-defeating reality of God’.33 Dionysius
 DIFFERENT FRAGMENTS, DIFFERENT VASES 197

self-consciously employs contradictory constructions of the divine Other

to convey a more realistic sense of God’s utter unthinkability.
In a similar fashion, ‘The Task of the Translator’ reveals to us the
meeting-place which has always existed between Neoplatonism and
negative theology. Only towards the end of the essay – as we encounter
the last of Benjamin’s metaphors – do we realize that Benjamin has
not been trying to tell us what translation is, but rather what it is not.
Like Dionysius’s divine images of worms and drunks, their purpose is
to convey the ‘foreigness’ (75) of the subject, rather than the subject
itself. It is no exaggeration to say that, in many ways, Benjamin’s
idea of translation is like the God of negative theology – it takes place
everywhere and all the time, but we cannot say precisely what it is or
how it happens. Its effects can never be verified, or measured, or corrob-
orated: we can never really know whether the right word has been used,
the correct verb chosen, the appropriate mood selected. If to make a
translation is an act of faith, then to read one is a display of trust.

Notes
1 Gershom Scholem, Kabbalah (New York: Schocken Books, 1974), p. 209.
2 Taken from Meister Eckhart’s sermon Homo quidam fecit, to be found in James M. Clark,
Meister Eckhart (London: Nelson & Sons, 1957), p. 158.
3 To be found in Borges’s essay ‘The Fearful Sphere of Pascal’ in Labyrinths (London: Penguin,
1994), p. 224.
4 All references in English will be to Harry Zorn’s translation in Hannah Arendt (ed.),
Illuminations (London: Pimlico, 1999). The German text referred to is taken from Illuminationen
(Suhrkamp Verlag, 1968).
5 Terry Eagleton, Walter Benjamin: Or Towards A Revolutionary Criticism (London: Verso,
1981), p. 3.
6 Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne (eds.), Walter Benjamin’s Philosophy (Routledge,
1994), p. x.
7 The Origin Of German Tragic Drama (trans. John Osborne, London: Verso, 1998), p. 45.
8 Illuminations, p. 210.
9 Ibid., p. 65.
10 To be found in Michael W. Jennings (ed.), Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings Volume 2
(London: Belknap Press, 1999), p. 30.
11 Ibid., p. 116.
12 ‘Ich hân ouch mê gesprochen, daz ein kraft in der sêle ist, diu berüeret niht zît noch vleisch;
… in dirre kraft ist got alzemâle grüenende und blüejende in aller der vröude und in aller der êre,
daz er in im selber ist.’ Oliver Davies (ed.), Meister Eckhart (London: Penguin, 1994), p. 161 –
taken from Sermon 2 Intravit Jesus in quoddam castellum.
13 Reiner Schürmann, Meister Eckhart (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), p. 115.
14 Illuminations, p. 77. ‘Die Übersetzung aber sieht sich nicht wie die Dichtung gleichsam im
innern Bergwald der Sprache selbst, sondern ausserhalb desselben, ihm gegenüber, und ohne ihn zu
betreten, ruft sie das Original hinein, an denjenigen einzigen Orte hinein, wo jeweils das Echo in der
eigenen den Widerhall eines Werkes der fremden Sprache zu geben vermag.’ Illuminationen, p. 64.
15 Stephen Mackenna (ed.), Plotinus: The Enneads (London: Penguin, 1991), p. 19 – section I.2.
16 Illuminations, p. 76. ‘… das Verhältnis des Gehalts zur Sprache völlig verschieden ist in
Original und Übersetzung. Bilden nämlich diese im ersten eine gewisse Einheit wie Frucht und
Schale, so umgibt die Sprache der Übersetzung ihren Gehalt wie ine Königsmantel in weiten
Falten. Denn sie bedeutet eine höhere Sprache als sie ist und bleibt dadurch ihrem eigenen Gehalt
gegenüber unangemessen, gewaltig und fremd.’ Illuminationen, p. 62.
17 For more on this, see the first Chapter of Kevin Hart’s The Trespass of the Sign (London:
Cambridge University Press, 1989).
198 IAN ALMOND

18 Taken from Eckhart’s sermon Quasi stella matutina.

19 P. 258 – Chapter 25 of the Fusus al-Hikam (trans. Ralph Austin, New Jersey: Paulist Press,
1980). The Arabic edition used is A. E. Affifi’s edition Fusus al-Hikem (Beirut: Dar al-kutub
al-‘Arabi, 1946), pp. 204–5.
20 Illuminations, pp. 80–1. ‘Wie die Tangente den Kreis flüchtig und nur in einem Punkte
berührt und wie ihr wohl diese Berührung, nicht aber der Punkt, das Gesetzt vorschreibt, nach dem
sie weiter ins Unendliche ihre gerade Bahn zieht, so berührt die Übersetzung flüchtig und nur
in dem unendlich kleinen Punkte des Sinnes das Original, um nach dem Gesetze der Treue in der
Freiheit der Sprachbewegung ihre eigenste Bahn zu verfolgen’, p. 67.
21 Of Learned Ignorance, p. 30.
22 Of Learned Ignorance, pp. 28–9. ‘… igitur circumferentia maximi circuli, quae maior esse
non potest, est minime curva, quare maxime recta; coincidit igitur cum maximo minimum, ita ut ad
oculum videatur necessarium esse quod maxima linea sit recta maxime et minime curva. … Ita
videtur quomodo maxima et infinita linea necessario est rectissima, cui curvitas non opponitur,
immo curvitas ipsa maximae lineae est rectitudo …’
23 Ibid., p. 35.
24 Illuminations, p. 82. ‘In ihnen ist die Harmonie der Sprachen so tief, dass der Sinn nur noch
wie eine Äolsharfe vom Winde von der Sprache berührt wird’, p. 68.
25 To be found in Ibn ‘Arabi’s Futuhat al-makkiyah – translated by William G. Chittick in The
Sufi Path of Knowledge (Albany: SUNY Press, 1989), p. 129.
26 Illuminations, p. 72. ‘So wie die Äusserungen des Lebens innigst mit dem Lebendigen
zusammenhängen, ohne ihm etwas zu bedeuten, geht die Übersetzung aus dem Original hervor.
Zwar nicht aus seinem Leben so sehr denn aus seinem “Überleben” ’, p. 58.
27 Enneads, p. 361 – section V.1.
28 Ibid., p. 354.
29 Illuminations, p. 79. ‘Wie nämlich Scherben eines Gefässes, um sich zusammenfügen zu
lassen, in den kleinsten Einzelheiten einander zu folgen, doch nicht so zu gleichen haben, so muss,
anstatt dem Sinn des Originals sich ähnlich zu machen, die Übersetzung liebend vielmehr und bis
ins einzelne hinein dessen Art des Meinens in der eigenen Sprache sich anbilden, um so beide wie
Scherben als Bruchstück eines Gefässes, als Bruchstück einer grösseren Sprache erkennbar zu
machen’, p. 65.
30 Paul DeMan, The Resistance to Theory (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986),
p. 91.
31 From Colm Luibheid (ed.), Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works (New Jersey: Paulist
Press, 1987), 700:B, p. 75.
32 Ibid., p. 58.
33 Denys Turner, The Darkness of God (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 278.