TRANSLATING: WRITING BETWEEN LANGUAGES

Abstract

This article investigates to what extent the metaphysical ideas concerning language and its powers, present in the archaic Greek tradition of Homer and Hesiod as well as in the biblical book of Genesis, and discussed and reevaluated by authors such as Walter Benjamin and Bruno Schulz in the 20th. Century, can contribute for the discussion about the nature of literary translation. These ideas, whose origin is in Antiquity, are associated, on the one hand, to a vision of language as an original and autonomous dynamis, as a sense = generating power which precedes reality to become the real itself, and are thus diametrically opposed to the linguistic concepts established by Ferdinand de Saussure and Émile Benveniste, which are based on a practical approach to language, and which take the arbitrary character of words for granted. In the essentialist concept of language, typical of the archaic world, as well as in Goethe’s idea of Verwandtschaft (affinity) some valuable contributions for the praxis of literary translation might be found.