“Es gibt nur eine Sprache”: The ‘Task of the Translator’ in Rosenzweig’s Idea of Language and Redemption. Its Conceptual Homologies and Expansions

Massimiliano De Villa

doi:10.1515/naha-2019-0018

Abstract

Abstract The concurrence of different languages is one of the tenets of Rosenzweig Sprachdenken and of his translation activity which finds its main theoretical explication in the afterword to his ‘Zweiundneunzig Hymnen und Gedichte des Yehuda Halevi’ (Konstanz, Wöhrle, 1924). In the afterword to the translation of ha-Levi’s lyrical corpus, Rosenzweig outlines a translation model which, trying to convey all the morphological, syntactic and lexical traits of the source language into the target language, gives way to a real linguistic fusion which defies the limits and boundaries of expression and opens onto a redemptive perspective. On the basis of this concluding note and of some passages from ‘The Star of Redemption’, the article tries to analyse Rosenzweig’s idea of language and of its nexus with the idea of redemption with reference to Walter Benjamin’s famous essay ‘The Task of the Translator’ and, as a point of convergence, with Paul Celan’s conception of poetic language.

Highlights

The concurrence of different languages is one of the tenets of Rosenzweig Sprachdenken and of his translation activity which finds its main theoretical explication in the afterword to his ‘Zweiundneunzig Hymnen und Gedichte des Yehuda Halevi’ (Konstanz, Wöhrle, 1924)
Rosenzweig maintains that the constitutive possibility of translation is guaranteed by the fact that every language contains the same germ or embryo, shared by all languages that have ever been, and will ever be, spoken
For Rosenzweig, the outcome of the translation process is that the target language, in an attempt to approximate the source language and to reproduce its structures as closely as possible, tends to upset the syntax so as to result in a new language, in an attempt to plough a new linguistic ground, to break the discursive linearity, to dissolve logical links

Summary

Introduction

The concurrence of different languages is one of the tenets of Rosenzweig Sprachdenken and of his translation activity which finds its main theoretical explication in the afterword to his ‘Zweiundneunzig Hymnen und Gedichte des Yehuda Halevi’ (Konstanz, Wöhrle, 1924).

Results

Conclusion