This essay is included in Forrest Gander's collection, A Faithful Existence: Reading, Memory, and Transcendence (Shoemaker and Hoard, 2005).
If translation were the apparatus allowing us to approach--
If translation were always taking place as part of a politics concerned with the flow of power--
If Billie Holiday's late signature song “Strange Fruit” had been written by Able Meeropol, aka Lewis Allan, a Jewish poet from the Bronx--
If repetition were a form of translation--
If symmetry were understood as translation plus reflection--
Walter Benjamin famously wrote that a translation should have an awkwardness about it that shows off “the original's mode of signification, thus making both the original and the translation recognizable as fragments of a greater language.” He argued that translations should not attempt to ameliorate syntactical variance between two languages, but instead should celebrate the host language's instructive difference.
Curiously, Benjamin's radical claim about translation did not markedly influence his own translations of Baudelaire's Tableaux Parisian.
When I read a poem, I hear it in my thorax.