Introduction: Unlikening Translation—Benjaminian Explorations

Abstract: The Introduction to this special issue of Digital Philology has a double purpose: to provide an overview of the issue's contents and to demonstrate how Walter Benjamin's provocative ideas about translation, which run through all the individual essays, can illuminate medieval practices of translation. The provocation of Benjamin's essay "Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers" ("The Task of the Translator") lies in its central contention that the success of a translation—here understood as translation from a foreign language—should be measured not by its degree of likeness to the original but rather by its productive dispatching of the original into an afterlife of unlikeness . Benjamin's notion of an unlikening translation affords a unifying perspective from which to explore a spectrum of western medieval cultural practices, linguistic as well as nonlinguistic, that went under the name translatio , literally a "carrying across" or "transference." Whether the objects to be transferred were texts in a foreign language or words within the speaker's own language, sounds or images, events or things, the result was invariably a displacement into unlikeness. The essays in this issue analyze the unlikening effects of translatio in domains as various as literary translation, metaphor, astronomy, seals and charters, visual representations, and melody. Collectively, they show how these signifying practices and mechanisms of cultural, social, and political reproduction were successful works of translation in Benjamin's sense of perpetuation through difference and displacement.