“In the last case it is clear that state censorship played its part, but the distortion of dreams should also be understood as psychic protection from the messages they carry. When the energies of the night are wrenched into the day through the process of linguistic representation, repressed desires and wishes can no longer evaporate through a process of forgetting. Benjamin, in One Way Street, equates such writing-up with betrayal, for it is in the moment of transcription that latent desires have to be confronted. Just as the person who wakes up after dreaming betrays the night with food, so too does the writer who reaches for a pen. Censorship operates to protect dreamers from their dreams. Elaboration operates to capture the intensity of the dream-experience against the inadequacies of memory and language.” WritingLanguageDreamsProtectionUnconsciousCensorshipRepressed Desires Book:The Storyteller: Tales out of Loneliness Source: The Storyteller: Tales out of Loneliness
“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.” IfsDoeLightLanguagePureOriginalsShiningMediumsObscureTranslationsTransparent Author:Walter Benjamin
“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.” MenGivingNamesSpeakLanguageLordCreationPureCommunicateGod's Creation Author:Walter Benjamin
“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.” LanguageCreationPureTasksReleaseSpellsTranslators Book:Illuminations Source: Illuminations
“Any translation which intends to perform a transmitting function cannot transmit anything but information-hence, something inessential. This is the hallmark of bad translations.” LanguageInformationFunctionTranslationsTransmitHallmark Book:Illuminations Source: Illuminations
