Zygmunt Bauman and the Task of theTranslator

Abstract

The author presents the figure of Zygmunt Bauman as a public intellectualand a translator. Following Walter Benjamin and his essay“The Task of the Translator” and Jacques Derrida and his text“What Is a ‘Relevant’ Translation,” the author concludes that a publicintellectual as a translator is persistently confrontedwith the taskof translatingstatements and postulates from the “language of politics”into “language of practice” and “individual experience”, fromthe “language of science” into the “language of collective action”, andfrom the “language of sociology” into the “language of the media.”The author claims that the key category in Bauman’s thinking wasneither “liquidity” nor “modernity”, but “socialism as active utopia”.For Bauman, socialism is impossible without a socialist culture, butculture is a practice, i.e. it is anattempt to attune our collective goalsaimed at improving the social world. This alignment comes withoutresorting to the idea of a collective conductor (a program), but bymeans of resorting to the idea of a translator.