LAUSR

Theories of translation that rely on Walter Benjamin's famous essay ‘The Task of the Translator’ have tended to view the specific direction of translation as one that only reaches forward, according to a gesture of ‘prolepsis’ (‘Vorgriff’, as Benjamin says). As Jacques Derrida and others have pointed out, Benjamin explicitly disqualifies other kinds of direction, including a translation ‘backward’, from the realm of translation proper. This essay argues for a renewed understanding of translation's directionality and offers a fresh take on Benjamin's essay by juxtaposing it with the poetics of Austrian writer Ernst Jandl. Jandl's poem ‘chanson’, for instance, recognizes translatability as its inventive principle, and it performs the process of translation as one that both proleptically reaches forward and periodically flows back.