The Karmic Text: A Buddhist Reading of Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man Reading Walter Benjamin's `The Task of the Translator'

Abstract

Walter Benjamin's `The Task of the Translator' has become perhaps the one most frequently cited essay on the practice of translation. In so far as translation is itself an exemplary, in many ways hyperbolic, case of textuality, this makes it a key text in contemporary debates about literature. All many readers manage to do is point out the ways in which Benjamin's text remains a conundrum, despite the efforts of readers as gifted as Paul de Man to make sense of it. `The more specifically one presses these analogies,' Willis Barnstone writes, `the less certain the correct referents are, and the less lucid and more ambivalent becomes the fragmentary analogy that Benjamin offers us' (250). In this essay, I would like to juxtapose Benjamin's essay, and several deconstructionist readings of it—principally one by Jacques Derrida—with a Buddhist theory of textuality and translation. It appears that the Buddhist theory may afford a way out of Benjamin's conundrum that is also a way into it, which has up to now escaped even Derrida.