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Language of Things or Warmness on the Thing: Walter Benjamin’s Translation Theory

This thesis is to examine Benjamin’s concept of translation and at the same time how it is connected with his criticism on language. Benjamin argues that language is the realization of the communicability of language: that is, language is not just a medium as means to communicate as commonly believed since Enlightenment, but a medium to communicate the mental entity immediately. This argument is to refute both bourgeois linguistic theory and mystic linguistic theory. Likewise, for Benjamin, translatability is an essential feature of certain works. Thus, both language and translation present themselves as the medium of immediacy; this lays groundwork against seeing translation as secondary representation to the original. Moreover, the immediacy of translation also makes it possible that he defines translation as a form or mode. ‘Translation as a form’ means that translation also has its own way not just resembling the original, but complementing its intentions. Translation should approach it focusing on its afterlife and intends language as a whole, ‘pure language.’ The notion of pure language is more clarified when we investigate the origin of language. We, then, can find the close relationship between language and the sense of similarity and mimesis that Benjamin uses. Language of mimetic faculty invokes us that present human beings have forgot original language function and too much depend on systemized and generalized language. ‘Pure language’ is one that has memory of mimetic function of the original language: it leads us to the world in which everything has language and warmness. ‘Warmness on the thing’ is a condition that we can feel and translate the language of things.