Chantal Wright
Wed 27 Jan 2016, 16:30 - 18:00
Mary Burton Building G20, Heriot-Watt University

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All Welcome

French translation theorist Antoine Berman (1942-1991) gave a lecture series – a performative commentary – on Walter Benjamin’s seminal essay “The Task of the Translator” at the Collège international de philosophie in Paris in the winter of 1984-5. Theses lectures, edited by Berman’s wife Isabelle in collaboration with Valentina Sommella, were published posthumously in 2008 as the commentary L’Âge de la traduction, and are derived from the notebooks that Berman kept at the time and from tape-recordings. L’Âge de la traduction is a unique artefact: a line-by-line commentary on Benjamin’s seminal text written by one of the most eminent translation theorists of the Francophone world, whose work has only belatedly and gradually made its entrance into Anglophone Translation Studies. As Berman’s interpretation of Benjamin’s text and analysis of Maurice de Gandillac’s French translation thereof is translated into English, how will the play between the three languages involved affect our understanding of ‘The Task of the Translator’? And why do we continue to be fascinated by Benjamin’s esoteric text?