I RECENTLY discussed how Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) believed that it was possible to use criticism of art as a unique cognitive medium in the wider search for truth. This is achieved by a reflective process that relates each artistic work to matters such as history, religion, education and even art itself. I concluded that Benjamin’s theory both transforms and renews art in the way that alchemy is used to transmute chemical substances and went on to compare this exposure of truth to the Greek idea of the Golden Thread.

Interestingly, Benjamin’s approach to the function of linguistic translation – an outgrowth of his developing ideas on criticism – has other perennialist ramifications. Our usual interpretation of the work performed by a translator relates to one’s ability to communicate what something in a foreign language actually tells us in a language of one’s own. However, Benjamin insisted that translation was not simply a question of conveying the exact meaning of an original piece of text. Whilst this may sound highly questionable, perhaps even wildly eccentric, Benjamin explained that translation can actually reveal something about the text that was not apparent in the original at all and that “a specific significance inherent in the original manifests itself in its translatability.”

In other words, and the example is my own, the role of the Benjaminian translator is rather similar to that of the holy man who meditates between God and the people to whom he ministers. During the Tridentine mass, for example, a Catholic priest is able to convey the liturgy to non-Latin speakers by way of the universally recognised symbolism that surrounds the transubstantive ritual, but for Benjamin the translator can perform such a transformation by using nothing more than the domain of the written word to create something altogether new. Not a textual falsehood, that seeks to distort in the way that a contemporary preface might warn us about the dangers of a politically-incorrect work, but through the creation of something which actually supersedes the original and conveys that which had previously lain undetected.

This may seem like a form of linguistic embellishment, but as far as Benjamin was concerned through the skill of translation “the life of the original attains its latest, continually renewed, and most complete unfolding.” This stripping-away can lead to what he further described as the “language of truth, a tensionless and even silent depository of the ultimate secrets for which all thought strives.” Past truths live on in the present and, for Benjamin, can be expressed through a pure language.

The inspiration for this idea arose from his familiarity with the work of the Romantic poet and philosopher, Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843), who so diligently translated a series of Ancient Greek texts into his native German. So diligent were Hölderlin’s efforts, mark you, that the translations themselves were literal in the extreme and his refusal to dismiss the original Greek syntax and morphology meant that he actually disfigured his own language in the process.

As a result of Benjamin’s own penchant for Lurianic Kabbalah, he compared this activity to the repair of the broken vessels that one finds in Jewish mysticism. The important thing, he contends, is not to make them identical but to nonetheless piece them back together and, as a result, create the fragments of a greater language that is unquantifiable and yet centred on linguistic truth. When this revealed truth outweighs the purely material content of a text, since destroyed in the search for meaning, the “fallen language” that was previously hidden from view achieves redemption.

In a sense, therefore, by using translation to change the nature of language in the quest for the authentic he allows something more transcendent to break through the surface of reality. Ironically, it is almost as though constructivism was being used in the service of a more sacred Tradition.