Walter Benjamin Quotes About Language

Quotes about: Language

• Any translation which intends to perform a transmitting function cannot transmit anything but information-hence, something inessential. This is the hallmark of bad translations.

  Walter Benjamin

  Information, Language, Hallmark

  Walter Benjamin (1968). “Illuminations”, p.79, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• It is the task of the translator to release in his own language that pure language that is under the spell of another, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his re-creation of that work.

  Walter Benjamin

  Tasks, Language, Creation

  Walter Benjamin (1968). “Illuminations”, p.90, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• True translation is transparent: it does not obscure the original, does not stand in its light, but rather allows pure language, as if strengthened by its own medium, to shine even more fully on the original.

  Walter Benjamin

  Light, Shining, Doe

• Man is the namer; by this we recognize that through him pure language speaks. All nature, insofar as it communicates itself, communicates itself in language, and so finally in man. Hence, he is the lord of nature and can give names to things. Only through the linguistic being of things can he get beyond himself and attain knowledge of them-in the name. God's creation is completed when things receive their names from man, from whom in name language alone speaks.

  Walter Benjamin

  Men, Names, Giving

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