Translating the Untranslatable: Walter Benjamin and Homi Bhabha

Abstract

Since Homi Bhabha introduced the notion of “cultural translation” in the penultimate chapter of his Location of Culture, translation no longer implies the overcoming of existing differences between cultures. In his peculiar interpretation, it becomes a process that initiates cultural differences in the same way as life, for instance, incessantly diversifies its creatures. As these differences follow from translation, rather than precede it, cultures are conceived as hybrid and in-between rather than pure and autonomous entities. It is this characteristics of cultures that, in Bhabha’s understanding, renders them untranslatable. A culture cannot assimilate into another culture without maintaining its internal difference and it cannot liberate itself from another culture without having embodied this culture’s trace. In the final analysis, his idea of “cultural translation desacralizes the … assumptions of cultural supremacy” by undoing the asymmetry between languages that for long centuries accompanied the Western practice of translation. The thesis that I want to propose is that, in this context, Bhabha’s engagement of the notion of untranslatability, introduced by Walter Benjamin in his 1923 essay “The Task of the Translator,” acquires a special significance. It establishes a clandestine “elective affinity” between the two thinkers who, doomed to cope with the traumatic constellations of their respectively post-imperial and postcolonial age, attempt to disengage these ages’ political asymmetries.