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The Tower of Babel. AI image What Is Babel? The Tower of Babel is one of the best-known stories in the Hebrew Bible. It is commonly understood as an explanation for why humanity speaks many languages. According to Genesis, people once shared a single tongue and sought to build a city with a tower reaching toward heaven. God interrupted their project by confusing their speech and scattering them across the earth. Jacques Derrida begins somewhere unexpected. Before asking what Babel means, he asks a simpler question: What is Babel? His answer immediately unsettles the reader. "Babel: today we take it as a proper name. Indeed, but the proper name of what and of whom?" (Derrida, 1985, p. 223). At first, the question seems almost unnecessary. Surely Babel is the name of a tower. Yet as Derrida follows the biblical narrative, that certainty begins to dissolve. Is Babel the tower? Or the city? Does the name designate a place, an event, or the confusion of languages itself? T...

Des Tours de Babel. AI image  The "tower of Babel" does not merely figure the irreducible multiplicity of tongues; it exhibits an incompletion, the impossibility of finishing, of totalizing, of saturating, of completing something on the order of edification, architectural construction, system and architectonics. What the multiplicity of idioms actually limits is not only a "true" translation, a transparent and adequate interexpression, it is also a structural order, a coherence of construct. There is then (let us translate) something like an internal limit to formalization, an incompleteness of the constructure. — JACQUES DERRIDA, Des Tours de Babel Thesis Derrida does not read the Tower of Babel as a symbol of linguistic diversity alone. Rather, the unfinished tower exhibits the structural impossibility of completion. Its interrupted construction provides a concrete way of understanding some of Derrida's central philosophical concepts—especially différanc...

Yet any translation which intends to perform a transmitting function cannot transmit anything but information — hence, something inessential. This is the hallmark of bad translations. But do we not generally regard as the essential substance of a literary work what it contains in addition to information — as even a poor translator will admit — the unfathomable, the mysterious, the "poetic”, something that a translator can reproduce only if he is also a poet ?  —Walter Benjamin, The task of the translator Introduction: Translation and the Life of Language Walter Benjamin's The Task of the Translator contains a remark that is easy to overlook but difficult to explain. Discussing literary translation, he writes that an ordinary translator can reproduce only information, whereas "the unfathomable, the mysterious" can be reproduced "only if he is also a poet." At first glance, the statement seems almost self-evident. Poets possess a refined sensitivity to...

The Tower of Babel, Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Source: Wikipedia Translation is a mode. To comprehend it as mode one must go back to the original, for that contains the law governing the translation: its translatability. Translatability is an essential quality of certain works, which is not to say that it is essential that they be translated; it means rather that a specific significance inherent in the original manifests itself in its translatability. It is plausible that no translation, however good it may be, can have any significance as regards the original. Yet, by virtue of its translatability the original is closely connected with the translation; in fact, this connection is all the closer since it is no longer of importance to the original. — Walter Benjamin, The task of the translator Thesis Walter Benjamin's The Task of the Translator argues that translatability (Übersetzbarkeit) is not an external property added to literary works but an essential characteristic of...